Split Ends

I’d been counting down the days till our first gymnastics class for a month. On the morning of, I got up extra early and asked Mom to put my hair in a bun. She even used hair spray to tame the frizz and wrapped the perfect bun in a red velvet scrunchy she dug out of a drawer in her bathroom. I felt more beautiful than I ever had, and the smell of Mom’s amber perfume lingered in my hair all day. But by the time Mom’s car pulled up outside the school that afternoon, I was distraught; my hair had come loose, the frizzy ends were back, and unruly strands were popping out of the tightly woven bun. 

“I told you you should have waited till we got there to do your hair,” my sister, Gwen, said. I turned my back toward her and stared out the car window.

When we got to the gym, a long line of daughters and parents registering for the gymnastics class snaked through the hallway. Mom started filling out our waivers and equipment order forms, and we were shepherded to the leotard measuring station. Behind us, rows of bleachers stood in front of big glass windows overlooking the gym below. Even stretching up on my tiptoes, I could only see the high ceilings and a few banners that hung on the wall. The girl in front of us must have seen me struggling.

“Want to watch while we wait? Come here,” she said. 

I shrugged at Gwen and we followed the girl. She walked along the bleachers, trailing her hand on the metal bars, till she came to a break in the rows covered by a white curtain. She pushed the curtain aside to reveal a tunnel padded with blue mats. She ducked in, dropped to her hands and knees, and crawled to a dim hole in the mats. She turned around to make sure we were keeping up, then reached out with her hands stretched over her head, swung onto a bar, and dangled over the hole. Suddenly, she dropped without a sound.

“Don’t you think we should tell Mom—” Gwen said nervously.

“Oh, don’t be a baby!” I replied. Secretly, I was nervous about dropping into this dark, silent hole, but I wasn’t about to let Gwen know that. “Come on!”

I reached for the bar, closed my eyes, and swung for a second, relishing the feel of the cold metal in my sweaty palms. At school, I was known as the best monkey bar swinger because I could dangle and twirl and climb and jump long after other kids’ arms started to tire and peeling blisters burned on their palms. “It’ll be fun!” I said, as much to reassure myself as to make sure my sister would follow. Then I let go.

“See? It’s easy!” the girl said when I plopped down beside her. We were sitting in a giant pit of yellow foam cubes in front of more tall viewing windows, this time on the lower level. To our left, a cargo net and dangling rings hung from the ceiling, and to the right I could see a slide and a trampoline. A teacher stood by the trampoline as another girl practiced. 

“My name’s Anna,” the girl told me. “My brother’s in level five already,” she said proudly, pointing out the window at a muscular boy in a red leotard and black gym shorts swinging on the rings. I moved closer to the window just as Gwen dropped into the pit behind me. 

“Do you want me to fix your hair?” Anna asked. “My coach taught me last year.” 

It was a strangely forward question coming from a stranger, but it also surprised me that Anna had immediately picked up on exactly what I wanted. I was a little intimidated, but also drawn to her, like she had a Lily-magnet that pulled only me. Gwen, distracted by this place hidden under our feet, seemed to have forgotten about the girl we followed here. Anna pulled herself up till she was sitting on the edge of the pit and motioned for me to come sit in front of her.

Anna pulled the scrunchy off without yanking any of my hair and stored it around her wrist. Threading the bobby pins out one by one, she held them in her mouth. Even though I was facing forward, I could hear them clicking on her teeth and the soft whistle of her breath filtering through them. Anna gently smoothed my hair back, pulled it into a tighter ponytail, and said, “We don’t have any hairspray, but this will be better than nothing.” 

In seconds, she had crafted a more secure bun than my mom had that morning. I felt the skin on my forehead and around my eyes pulling back, but it wasn’t painful. It made me feel strong. Anna added the scrunchy as a finishing touch, then startled me by grabbing the bun and shaking it—hard. “That's how you test if it will stay,” she explained. “If it moves, you have to do it all over.”

“Thanks!” I said. I turned around and looked at Anna awkwardly, in awe of her ability to be comfortable so easily here.

“What's your name?” Anna asked.

“Oh. I’m Lily, and that’s my sister Gwen.” I automatically added my twin into the conversation with a waving gesture. Gwen’s eyes were glued to a gymnast practicing a fast-paced floor routine on the other side of the balance beams, but when I looked back at Anna, I saw that she was still looking at me. 

Every time my sister and I meet someone new--teachers, neighborhood kids, their friends’ parents--they always point out the fact that we are twins, as if we didn’t already know that. Most people also ask stupid questions about whether we have cute matching outfits or if our parents have trouble telling us apart. But Anna looked at me differently. I could actually see my own face reflected in her brown eyes, and I felt like an individual, not one of two twins, for the first time in my life. Anna was the first person I had ever met who didn’t say a thing about my sister and me looking alike, and who seemed unfazed by the whole novelty of being in the presence of twins. I was smitten.

Anna and her family lived exactly seven minutes away from our house. I discovered this the same day we thought we had performed magic. After months of doing gymnastics together, learning how to do back handsprings and perfecting our splits, Anna and I had become best friends. Gwen, who had always been my constant companion, also made a new friend, and for the first time we went to separate play dates. I think it made our parents a bit nervous, or at least nostalgic, but for me, it was liberating.

At our school, Ms. Lisa was famous for being the most fun bus driver. On special occasions, after all the kids were on her bus but before she pulled away from the school, she would lift the dispatch radio from its Velcro hook near her steering wheel, press the button, and say in a deep, serious voice: “Dispatch, this is Ms. Lisa. Bus 214 has an important message for you.”

“Go ahead, Bus 214,” the dispatch man would say. The laughter simmering under his mock-serious voice bubbled through the crackling radio connection.

Then Ms. Lisa would press the button again, look at her bus full of children in the rear view mirror, swipe her hands dramatically in the air like a conductor counting the beat, and we would sing. It was a silly song, with nonsensical words and hardly any tune. I usually struggled to let loose. Before I knew Anna, I would sing along with the other kids, but quietly, afraid of letting them hear my poor singing voice, even though no one else sounded good either. But that day, with Anna next to me belting out the lines with vigor, I couldn’t help but giggle. She raised her eyebrows at me, encouraging me to sing along at the top of my lungs. It was the same look she gave me when I was scared to do a trick she’d just done in gymnastics.

On that day, when the singing and applause from the other end of the radio had died down, Anna reached into her backpack and pulled out her bright pink giga-pet. It was small and round, with a tiny digital screen and three white buttons. When she pressed them in a certain combination, the smiley-face shaped pet came to life, doing a little dance around the screen and emitting a series of melodic beeps. Like a real pet, it required feeding and exercise in order to grow. These were supplied by different combinations of buttons.

“No fair,” I whined. “Our parents never let us bring ours to school. Yours must be so big by now if you can feed it and walk it all day.”

“Today he’s going swimming,” Anna said. “See?” I sighed. I didn’t even know you could advance past the walking stage and take your giga-pet swimming. “Our house has a neighborhood pool,” Anna continued, dropping the plastic pink pet back into her backpack. “There’s even a diving board. My mom said we could maybe have a play date this weekend.”

“I wish we could go swimming today!” I said. I knew that “maybe” was what your parents said when they didn’t want to say no and were hoping you would forget about whatever you asked for. Anna looked at me for a second, and her eyes got big. 

“What?” I asked.

“Maybe we can! You know how your mom said to never get off the bus if she wasn’t there, just to keep riding and get off at my stop?” 

My mother, very protective and a perpetual worrier, was not the type of parent who would let her daughters walk home alone from the bus stop, even though it was only a block and all of the other kids walked alone. I nodded. 

“I bet, if we double cross our fingers AND cross our arms, it might come true!” Twisting the two first fingers on each hand and folding her arms into an X in front of her chest, Anna closed her eyes. She looked so goofy that I laughed again, but she elbowed me till I did it too.

“How will we know if she’s there or not if we keep our eyes closed the whole way?” I asked. Anna didn’t answer. She probably hadn’t thought of that, but was pretending to have a plan. 

“Shhhh!” she scolded. “It won’t work if you’re not thinking about the wish!” We sat that way for a few minutes, eyes closed, cocooned in the jolting rhythm of the lumbering bus and the soft din of the other kids trading snacks and secrets.

“Li,” Gwen said, poking me from across the aisle. “Mom's not there!” The bus had pulled up to the bend in the road where our mom usually stood, leaning on a broken wood fence that sagged on the corner. Anna slowly opened one eye, then the other, and her lightning smile sparked mine.

“It worked! It worked!” Anna screeched, as the other kids getting off at our stop slung their backpacks over their shoulders and hopped down the dirty steps. Gwen, being the responsible one, explained to Ms. Lisa mom's instructions for us to stay on the bus till Anna’s stop.

“Well I guess you’ll have to put up with me for seven more minutes then!” Ms. Lisa joked.

I was so caught up in thinking we had invented a new magic spell, and in the excitement of getting to play at Anna’s house for the first time, that it never occurred to me to wonder why our mom wasn’t at the bus stop. The thought that something might be wrong never entered my mind, but later, thinking back on that afternoon, I shivered when I thought about that silly cross we made with our arms and twisted fingers, feeling like it had been a bad luck charm.

Or maybe it was really a good luck charm. What if we hadn’t followed mom's instructions and had gotten off the bus and walked home alone? What if we would have been there when it happened? What if I hadn’t even met Anna that summer? My life changed that day, but I can’t help but think that it might have been derailed completely if I hadn’t known Anna. From the moment we’d met, Anna was the confident, calming anchor I needed, even before I realized I was battling through a raging storm. 

What I remember most about the worst moment of my life is that I was standing in the front hallway of Anna’s house, and Dad was kneeling in front of me, his knees pressing into their flowery green rug. I don’t remember the exact words he said, but I remember how he grabbed Gwen’s and my hands and squeezed them, hard, to keep his own from shaking. I don’t remember much about the days and weeks after that, either. In my memory, those days exist as if everything was draped in the black, gauzy veil our Aunt Marcia wore over her face at the funeral. You could tell it was her, but the veil cast a blurry shadow that made it hard to see the details. I remember that Anna was the only one who seemed to be able to pierce through this dark haze and see me, the only one who didn’t treat me like a fragile doll who might shatter at any moment, but also the only one who didn’t get uncomfortable when my protective shell cracked and I cried. 

When someone you love dies, you gain a new bittersweet holiday every year. It’s not a day you want to celebrate, but it becomes a more powerful point on the calendar than any other day. After a while, birthdays all become the same and even New Year's Day starts to lose its charm, but the anniversary of a death is always a break: there’s your life before, and there’s your life after, measured in the number of years since that person has been gone. Ten years after my mom died, it occurred to me that she had been gone for half my life. I was scared of moving past that halfway point. How was I supposed to grow up without her? And how was I supposed to carry her with me when the time I’d gotten with her was going to become a progressively smaller portion of my life as I got older? I couldn’t help but see my life as divided in two: one with my mom and one without. 

I was trying to explain this to Anna as we sat on the beach, with our toes in the frothing surf. A hundred yards away, my family was gathered among the remnants of our celebration of my mom: a table covered in plates that held the crumbs of her favorite desserts, which we had devoured, a pile of seashells gathered by my cousins, whose laughter crashed with the waves, and a colorful canvas propped on an easel, its paint drying in the breeze coming off the ocean. My mom had been a painter, so today we each painted a section in honor of her, making a messy, abstract whole full of woven together words and images that looked like it had been painted by a first grader. She would have loved it. 

Just as a tear slid down my cheek, Anna moved behind me, gathering my hair, which had been tangling angrily in the wind. I had successfully avoided crying all day, and as always, she knew what I needed even before I did. By standing behind me, she was letting me cry alone, but still showing me that she was there. 

“I don’t think the things that happen to us as kids get lost when we become adults,” she said, tucking my fly-aways and split ends into a neat braid. 

Just then, Gwen appeared next to me. She sat down, threading her fingers through mine. Sitting together, the three of us felt like the strands in my braid, three pasts and futures untangled and woven together to make a stronger whole, a story twisting back to our roots and sending infinite possibilities into the wind.