Lucy Driscoll had moved the teacher perilously close to that point now, in Susan’s estimation, and the look on Ms. Clives’s face said it would be Max who pushed her over.
Max did not see the warning in the teacher’s stiff posture and tapping fingers. He just shrugged and repeated what he’d said, along with a few other things of interest, while Susan withered in her seat and Lucy gulped air and shuddered. Susan sometimes thought that she and Max must be about the two least alike people in the world, especially for a set of twins. Make that the universe, since that was the scale on which Max tended to put things. He liked to argue over principles like Justice, and Rights, and Progress. Max’s principles were always introduced in capital letters. At home, Susan argued right back. But despite the fact that her favorite books were all about spunky, outspoken girls who played as hard as the boys did, Susan abhorred having everyone look at her. The only trouble she ever got into was for reading under her desk, and that, along with slightly exasperated notes home — “If Susan only applied herself, she could be a real star in school. . . .” — was enough to manage. Max, on the other hand, had a habit of making a splash. He’d been doing it since they were both little: breaking things, playing too rough, having trouble sitting still. Lately, his splashes had to do with being taken seriously, a difficult thing for a bulky thirteen-year-old boy with a soft face, hair that sat like a dark, rumpled mountain range on top of his head, and theories that came out of reading The Giant Book of Why.
Susan wasn’t interested in making other people see what they didn’t want to, or couldn’t. She only wanted to do her work and go home. She’d try, often, to make this point to Max after one school disaster or another, but he refused to get it. And he wasn’t getting it now, despite the expression on Ms. Clives’s face and the fact that Susan repeated his name three times in a low, urgent, you-will-pay-for-this-later-if-you-don’t-stop-right-now type of voice.
Finally she had no choice but to speak up.
“Max, it’s okay!” she said firmly. “I don’t mind. Really, I don’t!”
Ms. Clives’s purple nails had been doing a drum solo on the desk.
“Max, your sister doesn’t mind, and Lucy will do a wonderful job, too. The discussion is over.”
This time there was steel in her voice, and he subsided, grumbling. Lucy, tears all gone, made her way shakily to her seat. When she got there, she beamed at the teacher. “Thank you, Ms. C. I’ll work really hard — I promise.” She turned Susan’s way and flashed a sudden, wicked grin. “And thank you, Susan.”
“There, that’s nice,” Ms. Clives said, her voice tight with irritation. “I’m proud of both of you.”
Susan closed her eyes. When she’d been little, younger even than Jean, she’d thought that if you closed your eyes, no one could see you. She wished it were true now. Either way, she wanted to block out the sight of Lucy’s smug face, and Max’s outraged one, too.
But she couldn’t settle. She had the strangest feeling someone was waiting to ask her a question.
She opened her eyes and frowned at her brother.
“What?”
He frowned right back. “Now you talk? I didn’t say anything.”
“Well, stop looking at me, then.”
“I wasn’t looking. And you’re not in charge of my eyes, now, are you?”
Ms. Clives shot a warning look their way, and Susan didn’t answer.
Susan was still smarting as she and Max got off at the bus stop and started walking home. She trudged along the street in a coat that had once fallen to her knees but now was at least two inches short. It would swallow Nell, though, so she’d kept it for one more year. Beneath it, her skirt blew against her legs, which had gone red with the cold. She was on her way to getting tall, and lately her body had begun to stretch into unfamiliar angles and lines. She wasn’t used to it and so preferred to focus on what was the same: same slightly messy, loose brown curls; same pointy chin; same blue eyes. They were her secret favorite, sky blue and just the shade of her grandfather’s. Her eyes made her feel like she belonged somewhere, and she liked that.
Right now she felt like she belonged nowhere at all. Even the street seemed unfamiliar, changed with the first snowfall. The remains of it had begun to turn brown at the curb, and when the wind blew, a grimy mist rose from it before settling back across her boots. Overhead, an oak tree full of stubborn, dead leaves chafed in the wind.
Susan glanced at Max, who usually had something meteorological to say as they walked home. This time, he only shook his head at her.
“You should have said something.”
She rolled her eyes. “Like you always stand up for yourself? I saw Ivan and Mo in the hall after class. I heard what they called you.”
He wouldn’t meet her eye.
“That’s different. Ms. Clives doesn’t threaten to kick the smart out of you if you stand up for yourself. She can be reasonable, not like those two idiots.”
Susan shook her head. “You could tell someone. You don’t have to put up with it all the time.”
Max sighed. “I’m not a girl, Susan.”
She was about to say that no, girls were more reasonable, when Nell rounded the corner to prove her wrong. Max and Nell swore up and down that the two of them were opposites, and it was true they looked nothing alike. Nell was small for eleven years old, with intense blue eyes a shade darker than Susan’s and the round, freckled face of a pixie, though only the stupidest people had the nerve to tell her that. But looks were deceiving, because inside, Nell was just as full
