I made myself cry. I walked up to him with my face full of tears and he said, “What’s the matter?”
“My watermelon!” I bawled. “It’s lost. I can’t find it!”
He shrugged. “It’ll show up.” He walked away.
Another time I pretended I hurt my knee. I fell to the floor. “Owww!” I screamed.
Jake came running. “What’s wrong?”
“I smashed my knee!” I rolled onto my back. “It hurts!”
He helped me to the sofa. He looked at it. “I don’t see no bump or bruise or nothing.”
“It hurrrrrts!”
He rubbed it a little. “Don’t be a baby. Walk it off.” He went away.
Another time I got the story of Babar the elephant. Even now it makes me cry. I took it to Jake. I showed him the saddest page of all, the one where the hunter shoots Babar’s mother. Jake looked at the picture. He looked at me. “So?” he said, and walked away.
It was hopeless. I couldn’t make him cry. Maybe he was right.
Then I thought of something. Actually, two somethings.
“Mom,” I said, “is mad a feeling?”
“Sure,” she said. “There are lots of feelings.”
“How about scared?” I said. “Is that a feeling too?”
“Absolutely.”
Ha—I had him. He had feelings twice. And they happened the two times Mr. No Trouble got in trouble.
Jake
I don’t believe you’re going to bring that stuff up.
Lily
Watch me.
Trouble & Feeling #1: mad. Jake got in trouble in third grade. The teacher, Miss Ottinger, got fed up with our messy cubbies—except Jake’s, of course, which was always perfect. So she told us to straighten them up and she would inspect them. Anybody with a messy cubby would get a detention. So we all cleaned up our cubbies—except for Jake, because he didn’t need to—and Miss Ottinger inspected them. Imagine our shock when she told us that everybody’s cubby was neat except for one—Jake’s!
To this day nobody knows how it happened. Maybe somebody was mad at Jake and messed up his cubby. Whatever, Jake blew a fuse. “That’s a lie!” he shouted. “My cubby is neat!”
I don’t know what was more shocking, that Jake had a messy cubby or that he blew a fuse. The teacher’s eyes boggled. Jake was her little angel. “I’m sorry, Jake,” she said (and she looked it), “but fair is fair. You know what I said. You’ll stay after school today.”
Jake screamed, “No! No! I’m being framed! I didn’t do it!”
I already knew some things that Jake couldn’t stand, like strawberry ice cream and mushrooms and me putting my finger in his ear. But now I was finding out the thing he hated most of all: getting accused of something he didn’t do. For the rest of the afternoon he sat there wagging his head and mumbling, “I didn’t do it…I didn’t do it….”
Late bus for Jake. When the bell rang and everybody else got up to go home, Jake stayed put. So did I. I didn’t have any big reason or anything. I just did it. I guess I figured if Jake got detention, so did I. We would both get the late bus.
Jake looked over and growled, “What’re you doing here?”
“I’m waiting with you,” I said.
“You don’t have detention. I do.”
“I know,” I said.
He practically shoved me off my seat. “So go!” He was screaming again. “It’s not you! It’s me! I don’t want you here!”
I ran from the class. I didn’t even get my coat from the cubby. My face was burning.
Trouble & Feeling #2: scared. Jake broke something. One of those tulip-shaped wineglasses. He was snooping in the cupboard where Mom keeps the good dishes and stuff. He decided it would be cool and grown-up to drink water out of a wineglass. So he did. “You better wash it and dry it and put it back so Mom won’t know,” I warned him. He was washing it when it fell in the sink and broke. Jake went into shock. A funny, squeaky sound was coming out of him.
“Clean it up,” I said, “and just don’t say anything.” For once Jake obeyed me. He knew that when it came to dealing with trouble, I was the expert.
He cleaned it up and that was that—for a while. And then one day at dinner Mom said, “I’m missing a wineglass. Do either of you know about it?”
I’ve heard of people freezing with fright. That’s what Jake did. He froze. He stared at his mashed potatoes. I’m pretty sure Mom noticed and figured it out, but right then I piped up: “I did it.”
Why? Who knows? Maybe just out of habit. Maybe I confessed because I took pity on Jake. I knew how he hated getting in trouble.
Or maybe I was just being selfish. Maybe I didn’t want to pass up a chance to get sent to the Cool-It Room and work on my burping.
Anyway, they were Jake’s two big troubles: The Detention and The Broken Wineglass. So one day I reminded him about them. Of course he denied everything. He said he never got mad about the unfair detention and was never scared about breaking the glass. And anyway, he said, even if it was true, it just shows how different we are, because I would not have blown a fuse if I had gotten a detention. And about the broken glass, he said he let me take the punishment because “I knew you love the Cool-It Room so much.”
And so the silly argument went on and on—
“We’re different.”
“No we’re not!”
I emailed Poppy from our family computer: “Jake says we’re different. He says we’re different about everything except we came from twin eggs. Tell him he’s wrong, Poppy!!!!!”
Poppy BlackBerried back: “Cool it. It’s just a phase. He’ll get over it.”
Everybody was telling me to cool it. How was I supposed to cool it when I had an aggravating moronic brother?
“We’re different.”
“No we’re not!”
On and on…
until…
One Day at the Beach….
Jake
We were on vacation in Ocean City. Mom and Dad let us go down to wade, but we weren’t allowed to go in deeper than our knees. “If there’s an under-tow it can sweep you out to sea before you know it,” said Dad.
The water was cold at first, but then it felt warm. The surf flopped at our legs. We splashed each other and splashed strangers and ran through the water. Kids were screaming. Seagulls were screaming. Even the sun seemed to be screaming.
When I was finally ready to go back to the blanket, I looked around for Lily. She wasn’t there. I came out of the water and stood on the smooth, wet sand. I saw zillions of people, but no Lily. I called, but her name got swallowed up in the noise. I looked out at the endless ocean. I didn’t see anybody getting swept out to sea.
I figured she went back to the blanket. I headed onto the dry, soft sand. There were blankets and umbrellas everywhere, but not ours. So I started wandering, looking. And after a while I just wandered. I liked walking through all those people, everybody having fun and laughing and running and shrieking. I knew Lily hadn’t found the blanket either. I knew. She was out there just like me, wandering, enjoying it all. We were doing it together. I mean, I couldn’t reach out and touch her and I couldn’t see her. But I knew we were together. She was with me.
So I walked up and down the beach, watching the people. I came to a little kid who was crying. He was lost. I took him to the lifeguard.
I never did find Mom and Dad, but they must have found Lily because I heard her yell, “There he is!” and they were running and screaming, “Jake! Jake!” Then they were hugging the breath out of me and Mom was crying. But not for long. She shook me by the shoulders. She shook Lily. “What’s the matter with you two? You had us worried sick!”
“We were okay, Mom,” I said.
She wasn’t listening. “You never go off wandering like that again! How did we know the under-tow didn’t get you?”
“Mom, we did just like you said. We only went in up to our knees.”
“Why didn’t you go to the lifeguard? You know yo
u’re supposed to go to the lifeguard if you’re lost!”
It was hard to look up at her because of the sun. I had to close my eyes. “Mom,” I said, “cool it. We weren’t lost.”
Lily poked Mom. “See? That’s what I told you.”
I think that’s the closest we ever came to telling our parents about goombla. But even if we wanted to, what would we say? Mom. Dad. We weren’t lost because we were with each other. We can be with each other even when we can’t see each other. Even if we’re miles apart.
Who’s going to believe that, or understand it?
So I just said, “Mom, we’re okay. We’ll go to the lifeguard next time. Promise.”
Lily was grinning. I looked at her hand. Her fingers were crossed.
I have to admit it was pretty neato. I forgot all about being different.
Lily
When we got home from vacation, we talked about it in our bunks that night.
“Were you ever lost at the beach today?”
“No. You?”
“No.”
“Ever feel lost?”
“No.”
Hey, we weren’t stupid. We knew what the word lost meant, at least if it had to do with something we owned. I lost my flip-flop. I lost my dollar. But we didn’t really know what it meant when it came to ourselves. We always felt as if we were together. As I was wandering around the beach that day, in and out of all those people and blankets, it felt as if Jake was walking right beside me. As if he was poking me in the ribs and saying, “Look at that!…Look at that!”
I guess it had been that way all our life, but the beach day brought it to our attention. And suddenly we had this cool new goombla thing to share, like birthday nights at the train station. We were…The Neverlost Twins. So I didn’t hear any more of that slop about how different we were for a while.
And then, by fall, I started to hear the D-word again.
“We’re different.”
“No we’re not.”
Until The Great Snow-Fort War.
Jake
It was the first big snow of the year. We had a snow day from school. Lily and I decided to make a snow fort. We went up the street to the vacant lot where we often played. Of course, first we had to have a snowball fight. Then we thought, Let’s make two forts and we can bomb each other. So that’s what we did.
Just when I finished my fort, I had to run back home to go to the bathroom. I was in the bathroom when I felt something on my arm. I rolled up my sleeve. There was a bruise. I touched it. It hurt. But that wasn’t all. When I touched the bruise, it was like pressing a button. It spoke to me, one word. Lily! When I say it spoke to me, I don’t mean in the usual way. I didn’t hear the word. I felt it. But I felt that word as loud and clear as I had ever heard a word. And somehow just that—Lily!—told me she was in trouble.
I didn’t even roll down my sleeve or put my winter coat back on. I raced down the stairs and up the street. Before I got there I heard the screams. But they weren’t Lily’s. Then what I saw were two things: the roof of Lily’s fort was caved in, and Lily was sitting on top of somebody, mashing the kid’s face into the snow. The kid was screaming and flailing his arms and Lily was mashing away and riding the body like a bucking bronco. I didn’t have to be a genius to figure out the kid had to be Bump Stubbins.
So Bump finally manages to flail and scream his way loose, and he runs off a ways and turns and wipes his snowy face and splutters at Lily, “You’ll pay for this! Yer dead meat! Yer lucky I don’t hit girls. Yer lucky yer brother showed up! Yer luck—” Lily took a step toward him and he hightailed it outta there.
Lily had to stop laughing to tell me about it. She was inside her fort when suddenly she heard somebody yell, “Geronimo!” and the roof came crashing in on her, followed by Bump Stubbins. Bump seemed surprised to find somebody inside the fort he had just body-bombed, but he didn’t seem especially bothered. In fact, when he saw it was Lily, he smirked and said, “That’s for choking me.”
Big mistake.
Before Bump knew what happened, Lily was scrubbing the snow, and his face was the mop.
When we finished laughing, we squeezed into my fort for a while, but that was boring. So we had another snowball fight and headed home. Along the way I remembered my arm. I told her what happened in the bathroom, how I felt something and touched the bruise and sort of heard her name. “See,” I said. I showed her my arm. I boggled—the bruise was gone. She looked at me, like, Yeah, right. And then her eyes got wide at me. She yanked off her coat and rolled up her sleeve and there it was—same bruise, same spot—only now it was on her arm. She wonder-said, “That’s where he landed on me.”
We rolled down our sleeves and stared at each other and walked on.
“Look,” she said as we came to our porch. A pair of sandals was sitting by the front door. Sandals? In the snow?
“Who’s here?” I said.
We went inside. Lily saw him first. She screamed: “Poppy!”
Lily
I jumped into him so hard he went, “Ouff!” and fell back on the sofa. We swarmed over him, first with ourselves, then with questions.
“Poppy! Aren’t your feet cold?”
“Poppy! Did you find yourself?”
“Poppy! How long are you staying?”
I think the answers were “Freezing,” “Yep,” and “Till you kick me out.”
Poppy’s hair was still long but now it was white and tied in a ponytail. Dad brought him a pair of socks for his bare feet. “I guess I’ve been to too many warm places lately,” he said. “I forgot about snow.”
We talked and talked till my tongue got tired. We had pizza and chicken wings delivered, and we could hardly eat we were talking so much. Relatives came over and we ordered more pizza and wings. Jake and I put on our sombreros and said si instead of yes whenever we got a chance.
When the visitors left, Poppy reached behind the sofa and pulled out a little green sack. There were two things in it, identical as usual. “They’re castanets,” he said. They reminded me of clamshells. He showed us how to hold them and make them clack. “Now you can sing and dance too.”
Poppy slept in the spare room. We sat on his blankets in our pj’s till after midnight. Mom had to kick us out.
We prayed for another snow day but when morning came, no luck. Poppy wanted to sleep in but we wouldn’t let him. We dragged him down to breakfast. Mom made waffles, a dead giveaway that these were special times.
Poppy walked us to school. He wore Dad’s socks under his sandals. We wanted him to come in. “You can talk about geography!” I said. “They’ll bring you a grown-up-sized chair,” Jake said. He laughed and said no thanks. He was waiting for us when school got out.
Poppy hates malls so we stayed away from them. In fact we didn’t go places much at all. He just wanted to stay home and play Monopoly and poker, and talk. “Good grief,” Mom said to me and Jake on the second night, “don’t you two ever run out of questions? Give your poor Poppy a break.”
“Poppy, did you ever get attacked by pirates?” (No.)
“Poppy, did you ever eat eels?” (Yes. And snakes and grasshoppers.)
“Poppy, were you a hippie?” (Definitely.)
After lights-out the second night I asked Jake if he thought it was okay to ask Poppy about Grandma. Up until then we were afraid to, like it was taboo. But I was getting itchy.
“No,” said Jake flat out.
“Why not?” I said.
“Because,” he said.
“That’s not a reason,” I said.
“Go to sleep,” he said.
So next night at dinner I said, “Poppy, was Grandma a hippie too?”
Mom and Dad stopped chewing. Jake glared at me. The only one who didn’t seem bothered was Poppy. Not just his mouth but his whole face smiled, and he said, “I thought you’d never ask.” And we were off to the races.
“Let’s see…,” he said. “Grandma danced on the beach and she did sit-ins for civil rights
and she marched against the war and she said stuff like ‘Far out’ and ‘Groovy’ and she wore bell-bottom pants and she drank carrot juice and her feet were always dirty…so…yeah, Grandma was a hippie too, just like me. In fact, now that I think about it, that’s pretty much how hippies came—in pairs.”
We didn’t have to ask more questions. Poppy just went on and on about his life with Grandma in California. They had lots of jobs, from waiting on tables to picking oranges. They were living over a garage when Mom was born. Mom laughed: “I was a hippie baby!” They named her Dovey, as a sign of peace.
It must have been a nice garage, because a year later they had another baby, Uncle Peaceboy. They lived over the garage till the kids were in high school. Poppy and Grandma got regular jobs and started to look more like regular people. They started wearing shoes and they didn’t dance on the beach much anymore. “One thing I wouldn’t give up,” said Poppy, “my long hair.” He laughed. “Barbers hated me.”
When Mom and Uncle Peaceboy grew up and moved away, Grandma and Poppy junked all their shoes but their sandals. Poppy burned his one necktie and they went back to being big-time hippies. “Except nobody called us that anymore,” said Poppy, looking a little sad. “The war was over and so was the age of the hippies. We sort of discovered the earth. Everything from fish to snails was in danger. The air stank and the water was disappearing. I think we might have been the first of the greenies. That’s when your grandma started climbing trees.”
Jake
In the dark that night Lily hung upside down from her top bunk. “We gotta tell Poppy.”
I knew what she was talking about, but I pretended I didn’t. “Tell him what?”
“You know. About us. Us. Goombla.”
“It’s a secret,” I said. “We don’t even tell our parents.”
“Poppy’s different. You can tell a grandparent anything.”