Four Months after the Accident
JULY 1983
Yet another night she has beaten Kat home, which is a relief. Jude drops her bucket, gets a beer, and looks out the window, watching the darkness seep into the sky, the shouts and hollers, the boom boxes on shoulders, the corners filling with movement and sound. She has been working so hard to construct and protect their invented life, while Violet—lovely, wretched Violet—has been working just as hard to tear it down.
She replays their reunion at the Monkey Bar, not long after Kat had come home from the hospital. Violet had poked and prodded their old connections until she discovered where Jude and Kat lived. She stalked Kat and introduced herself as someone else, a volunteer named Nancy who was canvassing for a charity she’d invented on the spot. She had stalked and lied to Kat in the hope of finding Jude. She had sent Jude a photograph of her nameplate necklace and a letter promising blackmail. She had told Jude YOU OWE ME in capital letters, pressing so hard with her pencil that Jude could see where the point had broken. She had demanded a meeting, the first of several, and she did not come in peace.
Jude had not seen Violet in six years, since that last night on the Island, when they tried to burn it all down and Jude was forced to choose. She could not bring herself to ask Violet what happened when King Bash, her own uncle, sent her to the Big House, but Violet wouldn’t have answered anyway. She was interested only in how Jude might atone for betraying her without a second thought. Betraying her and then leaving her in the Big House, waiting for a rescue that never came.
Violet looks the same, maybe just a bit sharper, as though a lens had brought her into focus. She still possesses an inky cloak of black hair and a pointed elfin chin and a compact body made of exquisite bony knobs. She still has a matching scar along her wrist, always hidden with a Slinky’s worth of bangles. Her damaged left leg still moves like an afterthought. She hasn’t lost her slippery smile, those tiny front teeth serrated like knives.
At every meeting, Jude tries to watch Violet as if she were prey, a thing Jude might have to disappear or put down. She imagines her arms locked around Violet’s delicate vase of a throat. The heel of her hand could explode Violet’s perfect nose. How easy it would be to make a hammer with her fist and find the sweet spot in the back of her gorgeous head. She tries to convince herself that Violet is not, even after all this time, the most stunning vision she has ever seen.
Jude loves her so much. She hates that she loves her. She hates that she’ll never know if Violet loved her, too.
Violet’s words are curt and laced with pain. She delights in making Jude hustle and scramble, working toward a goal that can never be reached. She had spent her entire childhood taking orders, and now it’s her turn to issue them. Give her money, give her jewelry, give her time and forced attention, give her the satisfaction of watching Jude panic and flail. At their last meeting, Violet described her encounters with Kat—the phony canvassing, the pilgrimage to a fake psychic, the surprise confrontation at the Monkey Bar, right after Jude had left. And then another surprise: Sab, Kat’s sweet, gullible boyfriend, had offered to pay off part of Jude’s mounting debt.
“I don’t like anyone interfering in our business,” Violet had said. “Make her break up with him.”
“I can’t. Leave Kat out of this. What did she ever do to you?”
She knew the answer without Violet having to say it: Kat, through no fault of her own, was and always would be the most important person in Jude’s life.
“You can and you will,” Violet said, patting Jude’s hand. “You’re so good at betrayal, and even better at collateral damage.”
Do it, Violet said, or else she will unravel the final strands of Jude’s elaborate lie, and Kat would never speak to her again.
Jude finishes the last of her beer, closes the window against the city’s raucous intrusion. She did not have much time. Wen had called her during work to report on Kat’s unexpected visit, her questions and unspoken suspicions, and now Kat was on her way home. How Jude missed her sister, her old sister, Before Kat, keeper of her most potent fears and dangerous secrets. She loved After Kat just the same, but her sister had changed. With the loss of her memory came the loss of her identity, their shared identity, the dog-eared tally of the things that made them them. Jude could not be sure that Kat would understand the events from their recent past, or events that might yet come.
In order to betray Kat, she has to become Kat. She begins the work of transforming herself into her sister: changing the part of her hair; relaxing her expression; pushing her shoulders back and chest forward, as though eager to explore the world. Curious, friendly, trusting—too trusting. Someone who can never be allowed to discover what she is.
Jude tries to justify what she is about to do. She remembers the poem that their mother, Verona, taught them twelve years ago, on their eleventh birthday: two sisters who lived near the Goblin Market, under threat by wicked strangers, one risking her life to protect the other. She has protected Kat all their lives, and now it is Kat’s turn to do the same for her. She betrayed Violet to save Kat, and now Kat must betray Sab to save Jude. Ultimately, this is fair. This is even. This is what needs to be done in order to preserve what they have, their mirror twin bond, so strange and so rare.
She picks up the phone and dials Sab’s number. She remembers to coat her voice in After Kat’s earnest tone.
One ring, two, and then he answers.
“Sab, it’s Kat,” Jude says.
“Hey! Did you make it back safe? How was the trip upstate? Learn anything interesting?”
His voice is equally earnest. They are made for each other. Jude presses her part down, securing it in place, and continues: “I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t see you anymore.”
“What?” Sab says. “Is this a joke? A twin thing? Jude, is this you?”
Jude reinforces her Kat costume. She allows a tear to fall, creates a crack in her voice.
“No, it’s me. I’m sorry, but you came between me and my sister. You went behind my back to the loan shark and now Jude is in danger.”
“What are you talking about?” he asks. Jude can sense his pacing around his room, his yanking on the phone cord, his desire to curse in Spanish. “I just wanted to pay off some of the debt. I gave that girl three hundred bucks.”
“The money isn’t the point,” Jude says. “The point is that you inserted yourself into our business.” She is openly sobbing now, channeling all the times she’s heard her sister cry, the sound that still gives her nightmares she is unable to describe.
“Prove it,” Sab says. “Prove this is you and not Jude.”
Jude did not expect this. A cold panic tightens her chest. If she fails this test, Sab will tell Kat about this phone call. She dials down her sobbing just enough to ask, “How?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “What’s my name for my thing?”
The panic twists and coils, trapping her breath. She knows exactly what he means but she needs to buy time. “Your thing?”
“C’mon, Kat,” he says, emphasizing the name. “You know what I am asking. My thing. My dick.”
Jude halts the sobbing entirely; she needs that energy to concentrate. She knows the answer. During one of Kat’s rambling soliloquies about her new self and her new life and all the miraculous ways the world is conspiring to fix her, she spun off on a tangent about Sab and how he made her feel and how it felt to feel him—physically feel him, his muscles and lips and on and on until Jude tuned her out, slipped a barrier between her ears and Kat’s words. She had been happy for her sister, of course, but that happiness was tainted by pain and a seething envy; it seemed to Jude that nothing in the world would ever feel so extraordinary to her again. She hated herself for it, but sometimes she wished it was her own memory that had been erased.
“Butkus,” she says. “After Rocky’s dog. You named it right after the movie came out, and you thought ‘the Italian Stallion’ was too clichéd.”
A bull’s-eye. Total silence on the other end. She realizes that her answer is devastating either way. If he perceives her to be Kat, then the breakup is real. If he perceives her to be Jude, then he knows that nothing is sacred between him and Kat, that he will always be in a relationship with both Kat and her twin, that he will never have a true claim to Kat’s heart, that his most private self is always at risk of being shared with the world.
“Okay, then,” he says. His voice sounds low and sunken. “I’ve forgiven all your crazy shit and you’re going to dump me just because I tried to help?”
Jude dials up the sobbing again and cracks her voice: “Coming between me and my sister is the one thing I can’t forgive.”
She senses that his pacing has stopped. He’s standing still, looking in the mirror, asking himself how many times he is going to do this, this whirling routine of distancing and reconciliation, mental and even physical pain, around and around again for some psycho girl with a busted brain.
“I know you’ve been through a lot,” he says finally. “But I can’t do this anymore. No fourth chances, not even for you. Good luck with everything, your memory, your life. I hope you figure it all out.”
The hum of the dial tone.
Jude keeps crying, even though she’s turned back into herself.