I smoothed my hand over my blouse, feeling the bandage underneath. “You’re not the one seeing a dead girl.”
“Power of suggestion. Think about it.” Rhys slathered his hands in antibacterial gel. “If I’d been told since birth I was seeing a pink elephant, I’d see a pink elephant. It’s basic psychology. Mom’s paranoid. She always gets spooked around the summer solstice. June twenty-first will come and go, and everything will be normal again.” As the light from the approaching train came into view, the crowd pressed forward. “Well, you know, our normal.”
The train screeched to a stop; I elbowed my way onto the already packed car. Rhys stood on the platform, letting everyone and their pet rat on before him. Classic. The doors started closing. He gave me that pathetic look, and I lunged forward, pushing a businessman out of the way and jamming my body between the heavy doors.
“Come on, sweetheart,” someone bellowed from the other side of the car. “You’ll see your boyfriend at school.”
I grabbed Rhys and pulled him into the car.
“You didn’t need to do that,” Rhys said, his cheeks ruddy. “I would’ve been fine.”
“You would’ve been late.”
Rhys closed his eyes in resignation.
He hated it when I got all alpha, but I couldn’t help it. Maybe it was a birth order thing. I was born four minutes before him, weighed a full pound more at birth. He claimed I tried to eat him in the womb.
My brother was way too polite for this city. He was quiet, too, which created the perfect blank canvas for girls to project whatever they wanted onto him. I’d always felt that he belonged to a different era, a gentler time, like a character from a Jane Austen novel.
As we got off the train, our paths merged with that of another girl who wore our school uniform. She tucked her shiny black bob behind her ear and smiled up at my brother with a shy, kittenish gaze. “Hey, Rhys,” she practically whispered.
My brother pretended he didn’t see her, his eyes glued to the erectile dysfunction ads plastered on the walls.
I watched her shrink back into the crowd.
“What’s wrong with you?” I nudged him as we made our way up the steps toward the sunlight. “She’s cute.”
He shook his head. “She got a sixty-four on her biochem final.”
“So?” I steered him across the street to avoid a pack of stroller Nazis.
Rhys bit the inside of his right cheek like he always did when he was trying to stifle a smile, and then a huge grin engulfed his face.
My brother and I might have been polar opposites, but our love lives looked exactly the same: arctic.
While Rhys was just incredibly picky, my aversion went well beyond that. I was interested in boys, very interested, but my body had a different idea. Every time I got close to a guy, in a romantic way, this overwhelming revulsion bubbled up inside of me. It wasn’t a boys-are-immature-and-sweaty kind of thing. It was more like an I’m-going-to-puke-all-over-your-shoes kind of thing.
My mother said physical attraction and mate selection all came down to scent. I’d never smelled anything remotely appealing on any of the guys in my school. Every now and then, a nice cologne caught my attention, but as soon as the top note burned off, all I could smell was clogged pores and desperation. I used to think I just hadn’t met the right guy, but I was losing hope.
As we got closer to school, I yanked my blazer out of my bag, brushing unnaturally orange crumbs from the lapel.
Rhys shook his head in disgust. “I can’t believe we’re related, let alone twins.”
A jet-black bird jutted between his ankles to get at the crumbs. Rhys leapt out of the way, nearly crashing into a group of hipsters.
“It’s just a bird,” I said, putting on the jacket.
“Do you know how many diseases birds carry?” he said as he darted in front of me to enter the school gates. “Over sixty.”
I glanced up at him, ready to dish out something snarky when I stopped dead in my tracks.
Blood.
A pool of crimson, followed by a wide swath leading from the gates, through the open courtyard, as if someone had been dragged.
People jostled me from behind, maneuvering around me to get inside.
“What’s your problem?” Rhys asked.
“Don’t look down,” I warned.
“Did I step in something?” He groaned and looked at the bottoms of his shoes.
He didn’t see it.
I watched a group of girls trudge through the blood, kicking up tiny drops of spatter, which dotted their crisp white ankle socks.
A shudder ran through me like cold acid in my veins. Was it the dead girl?
“Ash! Are you even listening to me?”
“Go to class,” I murmured as first bell rang.
“I’m going in the same direction as—”
“Just go,” I said a little too forcefully, and then took a deep breath. “I have to stop by the admin building first—they gave me the wrong size cap and gown.”