The Goddess Twins Read online

  “You’re doing a really excellent thing, saving the show. It must go on, and I’m sure it’s going to be great.” I held Mom’s hand from across the table. “And we’ll be okay on our own. Don’t worry.”

  She nodded but looked back upstairs with a heavy sigh.

  Before I left for school, I made sure to hug her long and tight, so much so that her mermaid pendant left a dent in my cheek. Aurora, on the other hand, kept her arms crossed against a hug. Her headphones on, she just stared at the bags on the floor then left the house in a huff.

  “Please ignore the fact that one of your daughters has the emotional intelligence of a two-year-old,” I said to Mom as we watched Aurora head out.

  Mom chuckled and cradled my face in her hands, stroking my cheek with her thumb. “Can you promise me to look after your sister? To stay together while I’m gone, please?”

  “Of course,” I said way too quickly. Because it’s actually nearly impossible to look after Aurora when she’s determined to be a nightmare.

  I thought about my family all day. When we returned from school, I confronted Aurora about her pissy attitude. Someone had to tell her about herself, and as usual, that someone would be me. When I knocked on her bedroom door, I was semi-confident I could get Aurora to see Mom’s side of things. But when my sister finally appeared, she rolled her eyes heavily at me with her phone plastered to her ear.

  “Do you mind?” she hissed and turned away. “Oh, it’s no one, just my annoying twin,” she said into the phone.

  Ouch, I am no one? Just an annoying twin?

  “Aurora, can we talk, please?” I asked, my frustration simmering. “This is important.” She continued talking on her phone, so I tried again. “Leo won’t be checking in on us till the morning. Mom is gone, and I know you’re upset. Can we just talk about what’s going on?” She ignored me. Again. But I plowed forward. “You barely said goodbye to Mom this morning. How could you be so rude to her? You know she loves us more than anything.”

  Aurora snorted and finally walked towards me. “You are such a tragedy,” she said, pulling the phone away with a smirk. “News flash, Ar,” she continued, her neck snapping with attitude as she stood me down. “Mom couldn’t care less about the fact that she has again abandoned us for her need for attention. And you make me sick just feeding into her whole diva persona, like it’s okay for her to up and leave, like she has no responsibility to be with her children days before their most important birthday yet? It’s so easy for her to ditch us, like we’re annoying accessories to her life. Now get out of my room. And do me the huge favor of staying away from me for the next four days.”

  “So, you’ve decided to be horrible to me, too? What did I do to you?” I demand.

  “Steal my face!” she yells. “I’m sick of you spreading your patheticness all over these parts. Look, I’m throwing a party tonight, and I just can’t have you embarrassing me, so consider yourself officially not invited.”

  She slammed the door on my foot, but not before howling, “Ruby Bridges,” at my khaki skirted overalls and light pink Peter Pan-collared shirt. But as far as I’m concerned, no insult was made. “Sticks and stones,” I muttered, limping away.

  SO, TO BE clear, I’m not upset about the disinvite thing. And I’m not begrudging people who like parties—just people who launch all-night ragers out of spite, like my sister. Doesn’t she know that teen house parties never ever end well? Why does she always feel the need to learn a lesson the hard way?

  Some partier jiggles the handle of my door, startling me. I breathe a sigh of relief when they find it locked, but when I hear knocking, my heart jumps.

  “Hey. Hey, you in there?” a deep voice asks. I freeze, hoping he’ll go away, but the knocking continues. “Hello? Bueller?”

  I slide away from my desk and slowly approach the door. “What do you want?” I yell through the wood.

  “You are in there!” the voice responds, excited.

  Who is this person? “Yeah, it’s my house and my room.”

  “Right, okay. So, I’m not sure if you know this, but there’s a giant ass party going on in your house right now. Like, right downstairs even. You should come out.”

  “I’m aware,” I yell back. “But I wasn’t invited.”

  “Woah, that’s shady. Or is this, like, some reverse VIP room type shit?”

  “What? No.” I shake my head with a chuckle. Okay, so he’s a comedian, huh?

  “You sure about that? Does the reverse VIP room come with champagne? Or is it only overflowing with shame?”

  “Wow, ouch!” I giggle. “Thanks for that. You can go now.”

  “Wait, where’s the bathroom up here?”

  “The guest bathroom is downstairs.”

  “Yes, but see, the beautiful party host is currently destroying it with more puke than I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  I cringe. Great, Aurora’s a wasted mess-opotamia. Just like a few years ago in Prague when she nearly drank herself into a coma after arguing with Mom that she was done living like a wealthy vagabond. “I should go help my sister,” I say, to both myself and the voice. I open my door.

  On the other side, I find a tall and well-built, deep brown skinned guy, so magnetically good looking I feel dizzy taking him in. A fitted black tee stretches across his broad chest. A goatee perfectly frames his mouth. His short dreads are tight, neat, and very sexy. But it’s when his eyes lock with mine for the first time something weird happens. Everything dims around me. My sight is consumed by a vision of this guy and me locked together, kissing passionately in the back row of a nearly empty theater. In the scene, he pauses a moment, pulls away from me. He holds my face and kisses my cheeks, whispering, “I love you so much, Arden.” I answer, “I love you too, Devin.”

  I shake my head and snap back to the present. My heart thumps loudly. I bite my lip and step backward into my room, looking away from the man standing in front of me. What the absolute hell was that? It’s like I stepped into one of those VR games Aurora loves, the kind that suck you out of your world and place you in another. But I’m not wearing a headset. Was I transported somewhere? Watching a memory I’ve never lived? Where did that vision come from?

  “Do you mind if I come in?” the stranger asks, stepping into my room. “Your spot is awesome. Nice poster,” he says, nodding at my Florence and the Machine concert banner. “She’s unreal live.”

  “Yeah, she’s a family friend,” I mumble to the mermaids woven into my teal colored rug, my breathing returning to normal.

  Okay, it may sound babyish, a mermaid carpet, but there’s something about mermaids that has always calmed me. Mom is obsessed with them, too.

  “Oh, so my name is Devin by the way,” the stranger says over his shoulder.

  My head whips up and I watch him as he inspect the walls of my room. I blink several times, struggling to process his presence. It’s so intense, I can feel the body heat emanating from him affecting me from all the way over there. Okay, there’s a young man in my room. My eyes drink in his body, noting that his jeans fit very, very well. I bite my lip, catching myself. Hormones, please chill. I need to think, not want. I inhale deeply, bringing my cognitive responses back online.

  Thinking. Yeah. Why is this guy making himself comfortable in my room? What is he doing in here? I clear my throat. I’ve got to get him out of here. “I’m Arden. But look, there’s no party up here. Just boringness. You should probably make a U-turn.” My words sound convincing, but I can’t keep my eyes from grazing his body. Slowly. “I’m sure they’re all missing you downstairs.” Or at least the girls definitely are.

  “No, I doubt they even know I’m gone,” Devin cocks his head to the side to take in the blue and purple papiermâché moon mask I made when I was nine. I watch his back rippling underneath his black shirt as he shrugs. “I doubt anyone down there even knows my name. That’s the thing about house parties, right? They’re made up of a bunch of people who barely matter to each other. Like a temporary an
t hive—the mass is more important than one individual.” He chuckles. “Or at least it feels like that.” He brushes light fingertips along the lips of the moon mask. “I’m not all that interested in parties, to be honest. They just feel so repetitive—like, it’s just the same scenes of meaninglessness over and over. I’m more into one-on-one connections,” he says, turning toward me.

  I make the mistake of looking up into his eyes. Like that, I’m sucked into another otherworldly vision. This time we’re laughing and holding hands, sitting in the grass, watching fireworks going off in a backyard. The experience is so real, I can hear the booms echoing and smell the burned sulfur in the air around me.

  I tear my gaze away from Devin’s and find myself back in my room, holding my desk chair for balance. Am I on drugs? No, I assure myself after careful thought, I have not ingested anything out of the ordinary. I’ve been in my room, avoiding my sister and her party, trying to write. Is Devin doing this to me? Am I doing this to me? Every time we lock eyes, I see, what? His thoughts? A scene from the future? Could I be reading his mind?

  “So, what do you like to do, Arden?” he asks.

  I shiver hearing the way he says my name. Like it’s a precious, magical word. This is intense.

  “I like to read and write,” I say softly, looking at my hands. “I’m pretty uncool, as my sister loves to remind me. She’s the social butterfly of us two. You know, I should actually go check on her,” I move to the left but Devin steps in the same direction, swallowing the gap between us. Now we are nearly touching. Our chests move in sync. I am consumed by the heat radiating from his body, the scent of fresh laundry and rain. He smells so good. This is so bad.

  “There’s nothing uncool about you, Arden,” he says in a tone of deep prayer.

  I take a tiny step backward and see his eyes focusing right on my lips. I hear his voice like a chant, “I’m going to kiss her. I’ve found her. I’m going to kiss her,” but his lips are unmoving. I’m hearing his thoughts. Oh, shit! This is actually happening.

  My gaze falls to the rug, the familiar mermaid shapes somehow grounding me as my mind darts wildly. Reading minds? What is this ridiculousness? Okay, I’ve always been able to get a sense of people, to gauge their feelings from body language or tone. But this sensation? This is completely different. I am reading his mind. I am feeling his feelings. When I look in his eyes I am seeing—what? A premonition of us?

  I have never felt something this intense in my life. Why am I able to connect with him like this? What is going on with me? Backing away from Devin, I nearly trip over my desk chair. Mermaids. Think of mermaids.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Yes!” I lie, staring at the carpet. “No, actually, I’m not feeling okay,” my voice wavers. “I think you should leave.” I follow the waves that circle the rug, and I catch Devin in my peripheral, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  “I’ll leave you, I promise. It’s just … Please don’t freak out, okay?” He draws a deep breath. “I knew we were going to meet tonight. I’ve been dreaming of you for weeks.”

  “What?” I glance at Devin’s face and hear him think, “I have to get her to believe me.” I look down again as he holds out his hands.

  “Look. This is a pretty wild story, but it’s the absolute truth. I know we don’t even know each other, like at all. I know we just met for the first time tonight. But …” He drops his hands and turns his face toward the ceiling. “Ugh! This is going to sound so weird! Probably because it is so weird. But the absolute truth is that I have been seeing you in my mind, seeing these scenes of us together, constantly, for weeks. I thought I was losing it. Like seriously, I went to the doctor for a CAT scan. But then I met your sister at the mall today. I nearly had a heart attack seeing her face in real life.”

  I watch him flex his hands, the muscles swelling and falling. I have to remind myself to breathe as he turns toward me. “She told me I should come to her party and I thought, okay, I’m finally getting to meet my dream girl. I had no clue you two were twins when she invited me. She didn’t even tell me her name!” He steps closer, “But when I got here, it was clear she wasn’t the girl from my dreams. But still, I could feel that you were here, in this house somewhere. I followed that feeling to this room, and I knocked, and I found you. It is you I am destined to meet, Arden.”

  “What?” I whisper, my mouth dropping. Devin’s story is absolutely bananas, but … maybe some of this make sense? Who sent him these future visions in the first place? Is there some psychic cupid at play? He felt me in the house? How the heck does that work? I run my hands through my curly hair and breathe out heavily.

  I look up into Devin’s dark brown eyes again and I know he’s completely sincere in what he’s seen and what he feels. I absorb his excitement and nervousness. His want for me travels from his body into my own like waves in an ocean. “This is so intense!” his thoughts whisper loudly. “I didn’t think she was real, but she is, and she’s incredible.”

  He’s thrilled to finally be with me. Me!

  “God, I have to kiss this girl.” The words travel through his mind just before it happens. His arms grip my waist; my arms slide around his shoulders. I feel like I might melt into a puddle. His lips come closer.

  “Arden?!” Aurora bursts through the door, barefoot, wobbling, her face struggling at the intersection of anger and drunken abandon.

  I nearly laugh at the state of her. Her black, one-shouldered mini-dress is half soaked against her body. Her hair looks electrified, shocked out of a loosely-held bun. But her eyes are blazingly alert as she takes in the room.

  “Don’t people knock in this country anymore?” Devin asks as I push away from him.

  “What are you doing in here with my sister?” she demands, her words slurring around a thick tongue.

  “Aurora, just calm down,” I say, shaking my head at the vomit between her toes. “You’re a mess.”

  “Yeah, take it easy. It’s not like there’s anything illegal going on here,” Devin shrugs.

  “Oh really?” Aurora steps to him. “We’re not eighteen yet. I’ve been asking around, and you’re nearly twenty-two, right Devin?”

  “You’re twenty-two?” I definitely didn’t see that in his mind.

  “Yes, well, I’m twenty-one, actually,” he says.

  I guess it’s not too much of an age difference, but Aurora seems intent to kill this scene, one way or another.

  “You did realize this was a party for our eighteenth birthday, right?” Aurora digs. “Freaking pedo.”

  “Look,” Devin says, “I realized this party is for your eighteenth birthday after I was already here. I’m not … I wasn’t trying anything other than to meet the girl I keep dreaming about. Arden, I should have told you my age earlier. This has all messed with my head, but this … this thing between us … I’m willing to wait for you. I don’t want anything but a chance to show you that you can trust me.”

  I’m transported through his eyes in the next moment, and I see his dreams of us—laughing at a movie, playing in the snow, having a picnic, adopting a spotted pit bull at the pound. In a moment, the vision clears. “We get a dog?” I whisper.

  Devin laughs. “You can see the visions, too? This is what I’ve been telling you!” He pulls me into an embrace but Aurora flies between us.

  “No, no, no! You can’t come in here acting all hot and heavy with me at my own party, and then just walk upstairs and move on to my sister, spouting some PhD-level creepster crap about your destiny.”

  Ah! Now I get it! Aurora wanted him first.

  Aurora stamps her foot. “I say no!” Her voice cracks as she lunges for a final wild shove but misses, nearly falling on her butt.

  “Aurora, nothing happened,” I say, but she turns her face away from me. I decide to focus on her mind. Aurora, we were only talking, I plead. I try flipping the mind reading in reverse, transmitting my thoughts to her. I was just coming to get you, I pulse with my mind, my heart, my body. B
ut as her eyes blaze between me and Devin, I feel the message getting rejected, bouncing backwards as if there is a fire wall between the two of us. I grunt at the magical rebuffing. Aurora has been blocking me out all day, so it figures I can’t transmit my thoughts with her now. “I didn’t even know you were interested in him!” I say aloud. “I’m sorry!”

  “Forget it!” Aurora stomps her feet. “There is no need to lie, dear sister.” Her eyes turn coldly on me. “Honestly, I’m impressed with your newfound interest in men. Let’s give Arden a round of applause! She finally managed to look up from a book!” She slow claps and walks in a circle around Devin and me, taunting us. “And you had him in here all to yourself without any assistance? For like, what, a whole hour? Well done, sister. I couldn’t be prouder of how you’ve grown. Maybe you’re not such a bore after all. Maybe you’re just a whore in disguise, is that it?”

  So, I have never had a rage blackout in my life. But my hand is already back to me when I realize what the sensation of my stinging palm plus the shocked look on Rora’s face indicate: I just slapped her. I just slapped my sister!

  “Oh my god, Aurora!” I screech. “I’m so sorry! I don’t know what happened!”

  “Aaaah, I’m going to murder you!” Aurora screams, launching herself at me. She charges me to the ground, knocking the wind out of me. Devin reaches in to lift her off of me, but not before she gets a clean shot to slap my face. Hard. Devin pulls her arms back, but she leans in close to my ear and spits out, “I know you’re not sorry, bitch.” Then she bites my ear. I scream, pushing her shoulders away, digging my nails into her arms. But she’s frantic and relentless. The moment I’m about to shove her off of me, she rebounds again with more energy. In a struggle to help, Devin winds up on the ground as well, his body half on top of me as a human shield from Aurora’s wailing arms and legs. And at just that moment, we all hear a heavy stomp at the door.

  “What is going on in here? Young ladies!”

  I turn and see our godfather, Leo. What is he doing here? And whoa, is he mad. For good reason.