She was awake when he came home, sitting in the armchair in the dark, like a wife waiting up for her cheating husband. It was raining by that time, and Ivan came through the door dripping. He shook his hair like a dog. Iris could smell him, but he didn’t smell like her brother. He smelled like sweat and grass and mostly like betrayal.
When Ivan saw her, he froze. “Mom?”
Their mom had passed out an hour earlier, luckily in her own bed, which was not always the case. Most of the time she never made it farther than the couch or the kitchen table.
“It’s me,” Iris said.
“Iris?” He sounded confused. “What…what are you doing?”
Outside, lightning flashed again, so close it was blinding. Iris could feel the electricity in the air, especially along the scar on her hip and thigh. The skin there tingled with hundreds of tiny shocks. The scar had always been the most sensitive part of her body.
Iris shot to her feet and brandished the equipment bill at him the way their mother had brandished it at her. “You keep secrets from me now?”
He didn’t take the paper, only glanced down at it and then away, obviously ashamed.
As he should be, Iris thought.
“How could you do this to me?” she demanded.
“What?” Ivan brought his gaze to hers, and she was startled to see that his shame had already disappeared, and in its place was only fire and defiance. “What did I do to you? Huh? Did I get in the way of you having a life of your own? No, that was you! Did I try to hold you back from something you wanted to do because of my own selfishness? Nope, that was you, too! Tell me, twin, what did I do to you? Tell me!”
He was shouting into her face now. Ivan had never shouted at her. He’d always been so calm and thoughtful and composed. Now he was a jock. Worse, a jock with a temper.
Iris realized suddenly that tears were pouring down her face. She wiped at them furiously. She didn’t know whom she was angrier with, Ivan or herself. He was right, she’d tried to hold him back from what he wanted. But only because she assumed he thought like she did…that there was no one else in the world with whom he could share the kind of bond he had with her. So why bother? Why bother with other people at all?
Iris’s scar buzzed like a doorbell. She pressed her palm against it to try to calm its insistent tingling. She spoke softly. “Do you ever feel your scar humming…or, or begging, like you took something away from it, and it wants you to give it back?”
When she dared look at Ivan, she wished she didn’t. He backed away from her, holding up his hands, as though in surrender. Or fear. That was the answer.
No.
He was afraid of her.
Her twin did not feel the same connection to her that she did to him. Maybe when the doctors separated them, they took more out of her and gave it to Ivan. Or maybe it was all in her head, this undying twin-bond she’d only imagined.
Ivan’s look of apprehension turned to pity, and he reached for her. “Sis,” he said, but Iris slapped his hand away. She bolted for the door, and was through before he could stop her. She ran from the house, out into the rain. Her scar—that huge scar that spanned from her hip to her knee, an irregular, pinkish landscape as wide as her hand that looked so rough but felt, to her fingertips, like velvet—burned like it had been doused in acid.
Iris didn’t even get to the sidewalk before a crooked arm of white light stabbed straight through the top of her head and stopped her in her tracks.
For a moment, Iris’s entire body was on fire the way her scar had been a moment before.
Then the burning consumed her, and it was all that she was.
“Iris! Iris, wake up! Please be okay. Please be okay. I’m sorry for what I said. Please be okay!”
She knew the voice better than any other. It was Ivan, calling to her from far away. But when she opened her eyes, he wasn’t far away. His face was above hers. Her gaze was drawn past him, though. Something loomed above him. Above them both. A black mass of what she first mistook to be smoke. But then she felt the raindrops on her face, raindrops that were not coming from the sky, because the clouds far above had cleared. Only this black cloud remained, hovering no more than ten feet off the ground.
Iris sat up, and then immediately wished she hadn’t. Her head felt like it had been removed from her neck, dropped on the cement from twenty stories up, and then returned to her body. Even the raindrops falling from the low black cloud, light as they were, felt like hammer blows when they tapped her skull. She wished the strange little cloud would stop spitting on her, hurting her.
As soon as she thought it, the rain stopped.
“Oh my god…Iris, your hair.”
Iris raised a shaking hand to touch her hair, and found that there wasn’t much to touch. What was left on her scalp was brittle and smelled like smoke.
“Can you stand?” Ivan asked. “No, that’s a bad idea. I should call an ambulance.”
“Don’t,” Iris snapped. “We can’t afford an ambulance. Anyway, I’m fine.”
“How can you be fine? You’ve been struck by lightning. I saw it happen.”