“I probably should stay,” she twinkled. “I haven’t even met Nick yet!”
Nick’s absence was the only failure of her trip, it seemed, and as her departure neared, Lacey fixated on it. And while I understood her disappointment, I caught myself feeling a little defensive of him: Nick was my friend, not an animal at the zoo who was refusing to come out of his cave. It’s the first time I ever empathized with Lady Bollocks.
Near the end of Lacey’s stay was our birthday, the fifth of November, which coincides with Guy Fawkes Day—so named for the mustachioed ex-soldier who, in the early seventeenth century, got busted guarding explosives that were supposed to blow up Parliament. Much of England observes it with fireworks and bonfires, commemorating the big bang that wasn’t. But when Gaz had found out Lacey and I like celebrating our birthday with a costume party, because we’re so close to Halloween, he—as Pembroke’s social chair—had a brainwave.
“Fawkesoween!” he’d proclaimed. “Two parties for the price of one.”
Lacey and I got ready for the party in my room, just like we had our entire lives. (On prom night, she’d spent an hour on my hair, leaving her only five minutes for her own, and voted for me for prom queen; she won unanimously but for that one vote.) Gossiping with her while we primped, and snacked on British cheeses and crackers I’d bought as a surprise, felt like old times. Like home. If I had looked out my window to see our parents’ backyard instead of the quad, I would not have blinked.
“Do you think Nick will finally show up?” Lacey asked. “I didn’t fly all this way just to walk past his closed bedroom door.”
“I have no idea,” I said. “No one’s heard from him.”
“I find it very suspicious that you two are in here all night watching Devour and nothing has ever happened,” Lacey said. “Are you holding out on me? Or are you not interested? Do I get to be interested?”
“He’s got a girlfriend!” I said, though to my own ears I said it a little too fast and a little too protectively. “Actually, she kind of looks like you.”
“So does that Ceres chick,” Lacey said blithely. “Although I only saw her twice before she dropped out to go work for that party planner. I can’t believe she thought Cornell was in Manhattan.” She gazed out the window as church bells rang peacefully in the distance. “I sort of sympathize with her, though. It’ll suck going back to Ithaca. It’s so alive here.”
“I told you to apply with me.”
“I couldn’t, you know that. Med school beckons,” Lacey said, although she sounded less convinced of that here in my room, staring out at the light dusting of snow that had turned the quad into something from the pages of those old boarding-school stories we read by flashlight. She shook her head quickly, and then came over and threw her arms around me from behind.
“I miss you,” she said, her voice tight. “I keep worrying that you’re going to forget me now that you have this whole other life.”
This was an impossibility; even the suggestion made me sad. As she squeezed me, I had a vivid flashback to our first year at Cornell, at the café in Balch Hall. I’d spied her on my way in and shuffled over to say hi, still sweaty and disheveled from morning practice with the intramural flag football team, only to discover Lacey was being figuratively wined and dined by some power players at a sorority. I wasn’t much interested in pledging, myself—which was convenient given that none of them were particularly interested in me, either—but as usual, Lacey went after whatever looked the most prestigious on her resume, and she’d made sure her reputation preceded her.
“This table is full,” one of the girls had said, giving me an extremely hairy eyeball. “Consider taking your sweat elsewhere.”
I had been prepared to leave quietly, but Lacey grabbed my arm and stood, calmly picking up the rest of her toast. “Maybe you should consider not being such a bitch,” she’d said, to their obvious shock. “I’ll let you bus my tray. Bex and I have better places to be.”
She never did end up joining a sorority. “How could I find any better sisters than the one I already have?” she’d said, with a hug much like the one she was giving me right there in my room at Pembroke.
I rubbed her forearm affectionately. “I could never forget you,” I promised. “It’s in our genetic contract.”
She sniffled. “That better be true.”
“It is,” I said. “And you’re here now, and my friends love you, and there’s a party full of guys down there who’d like a crack at the blond twin.”
Lacey grinned. “In that case, I’d better do my hair,” she said. “No, wait. I need to fix yours first. You’re a danger to yourself with a curling iron.”
In an hour, Lacey had transformed my head of fine hair into springy, innocent curls, and straightened her own plentiful waves. We were reusing a costume we’d worn last Halloween to great acclaim: I would be an angelic Little White Lie, and she—winking at being the better-behaved twin in real life—would be a Dirty Little Secret. This involved snug-fitting white (for me) and black (for her) V-neck T-shirts—Lacey is all about Just Enough Cleavage, although she has more of it than I do, and so the V on mine fell almost low enough to be indecent—and silver Sharpies tied to our belt loops, so that people could jot down on our bodies their various anonymous fibs and close-held truths. In other words, we would look good, Lacey’s main requirement, while everyone else did the real work.