Pisces

Devon is two years older than me but our birthdays are three days apart, so she tells people we’re twins. She paid a guy online exactly $333 to read our birth charts and said twins are represented by the sun and moon, and ours just happened to be in the same signs despite the age difference. “Me and you, respectively,” she said and wouldn’t answer my question about how we were going to pay the electric bill. “That’s just like you, Virgo Moon. Always worried about something.”

Devon's violent when she’s angry. I read in an online forum that kids who grow up without fathers become promiscuous, and those who grow up without mothers become angry and resentful. We grew up with neither, so what does that make us? She stands a foot shorter than me, her bob blunt and sharp like her jaw, like her Cupid’s bow, like her nails, like her words. My hair feathers at the ends and curtain my eyes in a way she says is too effeminate for a man even though she said I looked handsome the year before. We share a bank account and she takes more than she needs, more than we have, and comes back to our grandfather’s place with new tattoos or a fresh hair dye. I took only enough for a train ticket to New York and she jammed a fork beneath my ribs.

We wrestled in the kitchen for my duffle bag. I could’ve yanked it easily from her white-knuckled grip, but I didn’t want to hurt her. She clawed at my throat, and when I shoved her, the back of her head smacked against the doorframe that connected the kitchen to the living room. Our grandfather never looked up from the TV until then, told me to be nicer to my sister, then sunk back into his technicolor and cataract trance. Her hair became slick like oil, like the blood that soaked my shirt, and she threw a lamp toward me as I rode down the street on my skateboard, glass shattering at my heels.

It’ll be an hour before the train arrives. A switch issue, the voice says over the intercom. A man that sits next to me yells before the announcement can finish, his voice echoing throughout the barren platform. He spends the next thirty minutes mashing the buttons on his yellow GameBoy and scratching a splotchy patch of skin behind his calf with his big toe. I stare at the sky, the signs, the litter between the tracks, so he’s no longer in my peripheral. But eventually, I stand and trail further down the platform and find another bench to relax in, alone. 

I stood at the beach earlier, staring down at the text message from my sister, ‘I love you Casey’ in black digits and its filmy green background kaleidoscoped behind my tears. Water lapped against the soles of my boots and reading it made my pulsing ribs sting more. Angry and hot and red. My eyes puffy. I tossed my phone into the Atlantic before I could second guess and watched the seafoam swallow it whole, consumed in the brewing storm. I changed my bloodied gauze in the grimy, red neon-lit bathroom of a seafood bar on the boardwalk and refused to look at myself in the shattered mirror, fearing I’d see her eyes in my own. Saltwater still smothers my sinuses.

“May I?”

Pointing to the seat left of me is a woman. She looks like an art teacher or a former disco queen. Or the kind of person who says they love animals and you’d have to discern if they’re vegan or if their kitchen’s painted venison red. I sit up in an attempt to make myself look more presentable or welcoming despite the fading yellow bruise that halos the orbit of my eye. She doesn’t seem phased by my appearance though. She has a grin pulled across her thin violet lips, the smile so faint it might give the Mona Lisa a run for her money.

“Sure,” I say, my voice flat.

She slings a North Face backpack and a tote from over her shoulder and sets it between us. They’re both emerald green like the array of rings that clutter her thin fingers and the beads in the strands of mousey brown hair that frame her face. When she sits, a sudoku workbook enters her lap and she teethes on the pen cap before writing a number down.

I slouch again after a minute or two, hiding my groan as pain rushes up my side. The air’s crisp, mineraled with salt like it might rain soon, and my fingertips have gone numb. My eyes shut and suddenly I’m drifting, somewhere in that liminal space between reality and dreaming, hyperaware of every sound. The rushing waves, the rustling trees, the echo of laughter and music from the boardwalk. I don’t know how much time has passed when my eyes open, but when I glance toward the information board behind me and see the train’s still delayed, it seems like not much. I sigh, my breath pluming in front of me. Then, the woman speaks.

“So, which one is it – your mom or pop?”

I almost don’t say anything. “What?”

“My pops used to toss me around, too. No shame in saying it. He lost in the end when I left.”

Her perfume’s powdery like her voice and you’d never think she’d confess something so visceral. Another number is written down. The pen taps against the tip of her nose, against the plastic frame of her eyeglasses. Its chain is looped around her neck, and beaded, too – amazonite, black onyx, aquamarine. That’s what she tells me when she catches me staring and her voice fades back into hearing.

“They’re for creativity and protection,” she says, holding them up toward me, under the buzzing yellow light of the platform ceiling and the last bits of sun that hue the sky and everything else blue. Blue like her crystals. They don’t glisten like I thought they would. My sister would’ve fawned over them if she were here. Maybe would’ve pitched a conversation about spring equinox rituals or planetary rectification. “You look like you can use some onyx. Or tourmaline. Yeah.”

She rummages through her bag and I peer over my shoulder to scan the rest of the empty platform. I could find another bench to huddle in, cocooned in my vinyl jacket that traps no warmth, rigor mortis the entire time until the train showed up so the pain doesn’t snap through my side like lightning. The woman holds a bracelet out to me, each rattling bead black like tar.

“Here. I’ll put it on for you.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“You’re funny, kid.”

The woman looks at me from over the rims of her glasses, one iris brown, the other green, narrow like minnows. She could be an older Devon, but the woman didn’t smell like cigarettes masked under metallic drugstore cologne. She could be Devon from a different timeline then, one where I was never born and she learned how to be a whole person instead of one-fourth. She could be from one where mom never bailed so Devon had someone else to cling onto. Someone else to stabilize the maelstrom inside her mind.

I can’t tell if I’m hesitant or reluctant, or if I should feel that way to begin with, but I give her my hand anyway. I flinch when her skin grazes over my own. She doesn’t jitter when I do. She slides the bracelet on. Her nimble fingers are cool like the glass beads snug against my wrist and the breeze that rushes through from the coast. Her skin’s soft, her touch gentle, yet my heart’s racing. I know she notices the blood under my nails from when I changed my bandages and got thrown out for not paying. At least the blood’s my own, even if she is vegan. She turns over my hand so my palm’s face up and traces over a scar with the pad of her thumb.

“How old are you?” she says.

“Twenty-one.”

She hums and follows the curve of my life line, I think. My sister said we had the same fate when she read my palms and told me we were meant to stay together. That she’d die if I abandoned her. “I left my father at an older age, too.”

“I didn’t leave my parents,” I say, but to think of it, there wouldn’t be much of a difference between a parent and my sister. She liked that role. The woman frees my hand and I hide it beneath my jacket again, palm pressed against the warmth of my wound. She places her bags behind her and turns her body so she’s facing me. I glance over my shoulder again, contemplating an exit, and when I look back, something’s rattling in between her hands.

“Care for a reading?” she asks and I don’t have time to answer before her hands part and three dice clatter against the wooden bench seat between us. Each die is twelve-sided, harboring sigils I barely recognize and don’t understand, aside from the numbers that hold a different meaning than what I know. They’re each bright primary colors – red, yellow, blue. “Mars, fallen in Cancer. In the third house. Sibling?”

I don’t speak. She scoops the dice in her hands again and shakes them. “My brothers were cruel, too,” she says. “Beau, especially. He used to set my hair on fire and staple my arms. He’s still surprised I never showed up to his wedding – that poor girl.”

She laughs and I almost expect it to sound like Devon’s – twenty-three yet her voice’s wheezy and raspy, usually when she smoked a lot that day. But the woman’s voice is the opposite – clear as day, soft like wind chimes.

“My sister believes in all… this,” I say. “It never made much sense to me.”

“What’s she like, your sister?”

I could feel her now, a shadow looming over me, examining my every word and every move. She’d want me to affirm every highlight, deny every fault, remind her who she was: my protector. “Boys were afraid of her,” I say. “She used to chase them with a metal baseball bat. I never got bullied, even after she’d graduated. ‘Cause she’d always be there.”

I wish I would’ve said something different. There’s a part of it that feels too clean. Too disingenuous. Like I’m still trying to justify her. With Devon, what you saw was what you got, and she’s neither clean nor disingenuous. Sometimes.

“I think she thinks she’s telepathic. Sometimes I believe it. I can’t think when she’s around. It’s like she’s always in my head.”

The woman stares at me as if she’s waiting for something. Something from me, from her. Like she can hear me, or sense my hesitation. My mouth feels so dry.

The dice tumble again. “Jupiter, at home in Sagittarius. Ninth house. You made the good choice of leaving her. Wherever you’re headed, it’s good for you. More school wouldn’t hurt either. Ever thought about going to college?”

I nod.

“For what?"

I blink away, towards the tracks, towards nothing in particular. "I never thought that far ahead. She'd never let me."

The woman doesn't say anything as she plucks the dice up into her hands. "I thought maybe medicine,” I say. “Sports medicine. I skate and – I dunno. Might be good to know in case I never get sponsored."

She grins. "My oldest is studying medicine. I knew you reminded me of him."

"Is that why you're helping me? With your dice?"

“He won’t stick with it forever, I know that for sure. He smokes like a chimney,” she continues. “Maybe you reminded me more of me.”

There’s a rumbling in the distance, the shriek of a whistle, the echo of a bell. I sit up more, clutching the strap of my backpack sat between my legs, the toe of my shoe rolling one of my skateboard’s wheels, just to have something to do. Our train zips by, chrome and lights fading into each other like watercolor until it starts to slow down toward the end of the platform stretch. I stand and help her to her feet, one hand on my tricep while the other gathers her bags.

“Where’re you headed in New York?” she asks.

“Brooklyn,” I say. “I met a guy on CraigsList. Said he could let me crash on his couch for a few nights. After that, I dunno. Hopefully, I’ll have a job by then so I can pay him to let me stay longer or something.”

“Did your sister do that to you?”

Her eyes are diverted down to my torso, toward my hand shielding the wound and the blood that seeped into my shirt. I move my hand to make sure the blood isn’t new. I nod.

“This stranger on the internet. Have you met them?”

“No. Not yet.”

She gives my arm a squeeze. “My sons had friends like you. I’d wake up to even more boys in my house than what I’d fallen asleep remembering. They’d get thrown out by their parents or run away from their fosters. I say they were better under my roof than no roof.”

“Shit,” I whisper and feel my cheeks prickle with heat, flushed red. “Sorry… I, I can’t do that, ma’am. I’ll be okay.”

“Don’t be so humble. Remind me to call my oldest, Quinn. He’ll patch you up.”

The train doors open and we find a booth together, her across from me, me across from her, mirroring each other. She slides on her glasses again and insists I rest. I press my head to the cold window glass. I watch the rain. For the first time in a long time, my migraine beings to ease.