‘Nice to meet you too.’
Anna hesitated. She didn’t know how you were supposed to address injured people. She ventured, ‘I hope you feel better.’
Runner beamed. Anna backed out of the room, nearly tripping over Neil, and then was gone.
In a moment, Runner was sulking, taking pills she hated. Moments she enjoyed went by far too fleetingly, she thought, wishing she could find some way to stop time, instead of gulping pills like she was doing now.
Neil sat quietly for a while, distracting himself by folding a sheet of paper. Finally he spoke up. ‘You scared her.’
‘No I didn’t,’ said Runner, who felt like maybe she had, but it was okay. ‘Not really.’
‘You want her to be a twin too. Why?’
‘No I don’t, Neil! We were just talking.’
Neil crumpled up the half-formed origami. He was in a bad mood now. And jealous. ‘How did you get osteoporosis and, and accident-proneness all of a sudden, anyway? You were the healthy one.’
That was true. Though Ruby had been plagued all her life by brittle bones and an overactive thyroid, Runner was athletic. It was often said that she chose the solo pursuit of track and field in order to spare Ruby the sight of her on the field as part of a close-knit scrum of girls. Later, the Lacuna Cabal was a team they could join together.
And Runner loved to swim, even as Ruby hated to put one single toe in the water. Runner had a swimmer’s milky complexion – both healthy and ethereal – whereas Ruby’s was merely ethereal. Of course, to say ‘merely ethereal’ is akin to saying ‘merely angelic’ or ‘merely brilliant’. It is ‘merely’ the condition one aspires to before all others. That’s what Runner must have believed. She must have idealised her sister’s condition. Not ‘healthy body/healthy mind’, but ‘brittle body/aerial mind’.
It had been impressed upon Runner from an early age that, for her, a healthy lifestyle and diet would easily keep bone brittleness and other thyroid-related problems at bay. The only way she could ever develop such problems as plagued her twin would be by becoming full-blown self-destructive.
Which brings us back to Neil’s persistent questioning.
‘How come you fell through that floor?’
‘You’ll have to take that up with the floor.’
Neil paused to consider the option of becoming a structural engineer, rejecting it. He wasn’t about to spend the rest of his life trying to protect Runner from harming herself. He might as well go in for mass-producing throw pillows; he might as well start telling jokes.
‘We shouldn’t call you Runner any more – we should call you Hobbler or Limper or something.’
‘Don’t make fun of a cripple.’
‘A fake cripple.’
To which her response was disappointingly mild. ‘How dare you.’
‘You were the healthy one.’ Pleading a little.
Runner closed her eyes, which was, for Neil, the worst. Like a city blacking out. Like a fin whale heading for the beach. But he had to bear it. As she spoke, a familiar-sounding fatigue crept into her voice. But hadn’t she slept for ten hours last night? This was not fair.
‘Don’t worry, Neil, it’s nothing. It’s just hard for twins to be separated, that’s all.’
Here he was concerned for her very survival and she was bringing up the ineffable.
‘I know,’ a cappella. ‘I know, I know, I know.’ And then, after a brief pause: ‘I know.’
‘But don’t worry. We’re doing the book now. It’s going to be fun and it has a happy ending.’
‘But it’s just a book.’
The desired effect. Runner’s eyes snapped open. The room filled again with light, though Neil was going to have to pay a whopping bill.
‘It is not just a book and you know it. How can you even say that? Anyway, people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, don’t you think maybe it’s time to drop the bookish-kid act?’
‘What?’
‘The act. It’s limiting for you. I mean, you know, Harry Potter is just a boy in a book. You’re a real person. You should be Neil Coghill the Real McCoghill.’
He didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. If she wasn’t aware that he had repudiated the entire genre of nine-to-twelve literature, then he wasn’t about to tell her now. He’d let her figure it out on her own.
‘Who gives a shit about Harry Potter?’
There was a brief pause.
‘Well, why do you wear those empty frames?’
Oh. The empty frames. Did Harry Potter wear empty frames? Surely Harry Potter didn’t have the imagination for that. Surely Harry Potter’s glasses would be regular prescription glasses. But Runner suddenly lacked the discernment to credit such a distinction. Oh, she was sick all right.
‘I’ve been wearing these since before Harry Potter.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ As witheringly as could be conveyed in a single syllable.
‘Oh.’
Runner abruptly changed the subject. She decided to affect putting on makeup, something that annoyed Neil. Digging around inside the chaos of her shapeless purse: ‘Well, anyway, we can talk about it tomorrow. You should get home.’
‘I want to stay here.’ This despite everything, despite the inevitability of Runner’s closed eyes, despite the necessity for him to hide and sleep underneath her bed in order to escape the notice of the night nurses. But Runner would know it was cold under that bed without a blanket, since she desperately needed hers. And she would have thought that lying on hard floors under hospital beds for hours on end, even if he’d already done it hundreds of times before, would cause him to develop the weaknesses that had so disappointed Ruby (and her) as they grew. This could not happen to Neil. So she pulled out the next tools of alienation: mascara, blush.
‘You can’t stay here, it’s a hospital; you should go home.’
‘I want to stay here.’
(It’s true, the mascara was difficult to endure, but ‘Go home because it’s a hospital’? How lame.)
What she really needed, if she was going to make up like she meant it, was a hand mirror. She dove into her purse again.
‘No, you can’t stay here. Really. You should go home.’
‘I want to stay here.’
She found the hand mirror.
‘No, you’ve got to go home.’
‘I want to stay here.’
She looked into the hand mirror.
‘You’ve got to go home, Neil.’
And then she saw Ruby. Her face. In the hand mirror. So close to her own. Pale. Lonely. Like she was at the bottom of a crevice, or in a bungalow on the other side of the city, forever. Like she had been left in a room somewhere hanging from a nail, where nobody would ever find her, her mouth open, dry, cracked. Ruby. She looked very weak. And her pupils moved strangely, like flies crawling on the surface of the mirror. How Runner had longed to see her again and now here she was and it was scary. Runner wondered what might be below the edge of the mirror’s frame, whether Ruby was holding a book, whether