Page 34 of Lucy
“It’s not that. I could feel you were in need. How else would I be able to do that without being your twin?” Emotions danced in my eyes. Lucy needled under my skin but it was only because I wanted better for her. I wanted her to be as great as I knew she could be.
“You hate me because I’m not like you.” Warm, salty tears dripped from her lashes on to my cheeks.
“No, I don’t. You don’t have to be like me,” I sniffled.
“Nora, you want me to be exactly like you. We didn’t speak for a week after I picked an art major and you picked business.” She was right. I was so mad at her. It meant we would have different classes. It hurt me more than it should have.
“It wasn’t because I wanted you to be like me, Lucy,” I laughed through the tears. “It was because we wouldn’t have the same classes. It was because I realized we wouldn’t have the same careers or anything else anymore. I realized in college that we were going in different directions.
You wanted to be free and I wanted a safety net. You wanted to do things that scared me. I had to protect myself from the reality that you wouldn’t always be by my side.”
Truth spewed out of me uncontrollably. A part of me wanted to suck it all back in but what good would that do? I’d been at odds with my sister for a long time and we hadn’t spoken in a year. It was time to crush the misconceptions we had about each other.
“Are you serious, Nora? I just wanted an A. I didn’t give a fuck about art and you should have known that. I didn’t want to take business and be bored out of my skull. You were thinking about the future. I was thinking about Mom and Dad yelling at me every time I brought home an F.”
Leave it up to Lucy to simplify something that plagued me for years. I laughed a little and shook my head. “You can’t say you didn’t realize we were growing apart then. It was in the air, Luce. It was all around us. We grasped at straws trying to keep it together but it fell apart once we graduated.” I pushed my fingers through her soft hair and kissed her cheek. “I’ve missed you ever since. I hate that you’re such a fuck up because it means you’ll never have time for me. Forus.” My words trembled with tears.
“How? How is my being a fuck up contingent on how much time I have for you, Nora?”
“Because if you’re busy putting your life back together, where do I fit in? The only way for me to fit in is if I help you.”
“That’s why you want to fix me so bad? You think it’s the only way for us to be close?” We hit an epiphany. It stunned us both silent. Finally, Luce broke the hush that fell over us and shook her head at my logic.
“No, Nora. That’s not the case. I know I’m a wreck of a woman, okay? You ever think that maybe I like it like that? It’s my organized chaos. I like to live life not knowing what’s coming next all the time. If I stuff everything into nice, pretty boxes I’ll have nothing left to play with.
I like my mess in front of me where I can see it. Not stuffed into closets and locked away in my recesses. You can have that kind of shit. I just want to be me. I’ll get the hang of everything eventually.”
I had to let Lucy be Lucy but I didn’t want her to get so caught up in cleaning up her messes that she forgot I existed. I needed my twin. She was the other half of me and without her, I was lost.
“Lucy, don’t forget I’m here for you though. You can get lost in that head of yours.”
“I know. I promise not to forget.” She held my face in her hands and we shared a soft kiss. “Nora?” She called.
“Yeah, Luce?”
“Your not-husband is an asshole and you shouldn’t marry him.” The words rushed out of her mouth so quickly, it took me a minute to understand them. She didn’t like Eric. I couldn’t tell if it was because he was going to be my husband or if she picked up on something about him that I didn’t. Lucy was like that. She could read people.
She possessed a chunk of the universe in her heart and she read everyone’s soul like a book. It was creepy but she was never wrong. It gave me pause to hear her tell me Eric was an asshole.
“This isn’t just one of your I-don’t-like-him-because-he’s-yours moments, is it?”
“No. He’s an asshole. Remember the pact we made when we were teenagers?” She asked while her fingers loosened the hair tie around my ponytail.
I remembered sitting in our room after I broke up with a boy Lucy tried to tell me he was no good. She made me promise her that in the future if she told me one of my boyfriends was trash that I had to believe her. I refused because I couldn’t give up power like that. What if Lucy just didn’t like a guy?
I told her that if she could prove it…I’d believe her. She could use whatever tactics she wanted and I’d believe her if she could show me my man was no good.
“How are you going to prove he’s an asshole, Lucy?”
“He slipped me a hundred dollar bill at the bar.” I opened my mouth to brush it off but she continued. “He slipped it right between my tits. He could have put it in my hand or left it on the bar but he put it in my bra.” My face grew warm all of a sudden. I pictured Eric’s smile when he slid the money in Lucy’s bra and shuddered. Maybe she was right. I didn’t want her to be right though. It was the guy from high school all over again. I wanted Eric to work.
“I believe you about the money but…Luce, I love him. I want this to be it for me. You have to prove it.”
“Don’t get mad at me when I prove it, Nora.”
“I won’t.” I held my hands up and she grinned. It was crooked and drunk but I saw the glint in her eyes. She already had something in mind.
“Go along with it, okay? I want to eliminate some things off my list before I go in for the kill.”
