Chapter One: The Bloody Coaster

Paige shivered. She had been in such a rush that morning, so worried that she was going to miss her flight that she had run out of her dorm room at Stanford without grabbing a jacket. Maybe it was fine to run around without a jacket in California, but now she was sitting in Chicago's Union Station, shivering and thinking longingly of the jacket draped on the back of her desk chair.

She had flown into Midway around 11 am and taken a cab from there to Union Station. Her parents were paying for the trip and they were fairly well off. Still, Paige would rather have saved some money and figured out the L. But once she realized how cold she was going to be and admitted to herself how tired she was, she bit the bullet and hailed a cab.

Tuck would make fun of her when (if) she told him. He had always been better at navigation. When they went on road trips together he held the map and she drove. She pumped the gas and he bought the snacks. She picked out the music and he sang. Sometimes, and their mother agreed, it seemed like all the traits of a well adjusted human being had been divided between them in the womb. They had always been the most confident and successful when they were together. There was a quiet reassurance that seemed to pass between the two of them like a slipstream. Paige knew she would always have someone on her side. There were definitely downsides to have a twin (the matching outfits when they were kids, for one) but for the most part Paige liked being a twin and she loved her brother.

She smiled when she realized she would be seeing Tuck in just over four hours. Then she frowned again because she knew Tuck would make fun of her for forgetting her jacket. He wouldn't have forgotten his jacket. And he would have reminded her to grab her's as well. It was times like this that affirmed for Paige that they'd made the right decision when they chose to go to different schools for college. They weren't kids anymore. They needed to learn to live less co-dependently.

Paige mentally shook herself as she caught herself thinking in plural again.

"'I', not 'we,'" she muttered under her breath.

That was another downside of being a twin— figuring out who you were without the other one around. She knew not all twins were like this. She'd met some who were fiercely independent. But that wasn't the case with her and Tuck. They had adored each other from the start and it never stopped. She felt more at ease, more fun and confident when she was with him. Paige was pretty sure that other people even liked her more when she was with Tuck.

She shook herself again, trying to get rid of her insecurities. Her entire first year at Stanford she had avoided telling anyone that she had a twin. Her friends knew about Tuck, of course, but she just said "brother" when she talked about him. Some people had figured it out, seeing photos of she and Tuck together, but by that time "twin" was not the first thing they associated Paige with, which had been her aim.

At Stanford she had successfully become Paige, who just happened to have a twin brother, and not one half of the McCullers twins. Some of the kids in high school had actually called them McTwins or just PT. They were not worth nicknaming individually, apparently.

None of this had ever seemed to bother Tuck. He missed Paige, of course, but he didn't rely on her the way she relied on him. He had always been more sure of himself than Paige and he transitioned into singular living much easier than she had.

Still, they had their "twin things." He always seemed to call just when Paige was picking up her cell phone to call him. They could sort of feel how the other had done on a test without having to tell each other their results out loud. And earlier that month, Tuck had talked their parents into getting Paige the plane tickets to visit him for the 20th birthday, which was what she was planning on asking her parents for.

Paige suspected that part of the reason it had been easier for Tuck to set out on his own was that he was gay.

It was not a memory that Paige was proud of and she frowned as she picked up her bag and made her way out to the train tracks, stopping briefly to show a conductor her ticket and climb up the stairs and into the train to find her seat (still shivering).

Four years ago, Tuck had called a family meeting, which was, in and of itself, weird. They weren't a "family meeting" type of family. Paige felt terrified sitting with her parents on the living room couch while Tuck had paced in front of them all, sweating and cracking his knuckles (both tell-tale nervous Tuck behavior). She was on the wrong side of the equation. She and Tuck always told each other things before they told their parents.

Five minutes later, she had been on the verge of throwing a coaster at him just to get him to say something when their father had finally cleared his throat and said, "What's this all about, son?"

Tuck had stopped mid-pace, still in profile to them all, and with out turning, dropped his tensed up shoulders in a defeated sort of gesture, exhaled and said, quite clearly, "I'm gay."

The chaos that had followed this pronouncement was still a bit of a blur to Paige. Their father had started to yell things like, "This isn't how we raised you" and "I will not allow this" and their mother had sat in a stunned silence until she had to jump up from the couch to stop Tuck from leaving, after which, she focused on trying to calm their father down.

Paige, on the other hand, had felt the edges of herself going black with anger. Her eyes were slipping into some sort of tunnel vision and she was very aware of her heart, which felt like it was burning and pumping lava into her limbs instead of blood. Maybe she had done it because she had felt like doing it only a few moments before, but, Paige watched, a bystander to her own anger, as her hand reached out and grabbed one of the white and grey marble coasters her mother had gotten from her sister for Christmas, and threw it directly at Tuck.

Maybe if Tuck had been the one of them to get the athletic genes, he would have had a chance at dodging the thin rock Paige had just sent flying at him. But he hadn't. Which meant that Paige had. Which also meant that Paige was very athletic and good at throwing things. Both of things these facts came together quite literally, as the coaster connected with the side of Tuck's head.

The shouting had stopped immediately. Tuck had grabbed the side of his head and blood had begun to trickle out from between his fingers. Paige had stood up without meaning to when she'd thrown the coaster and now the twins were staring at each other eye to eye across the room. For the first time in either of their lives, they had looked into each other's faces and seen nothing but betrayal staring back at them.

Paige had run out of the house and then out to the tree house she and Tuck had built with their father the summer they were ten. From there she had watched as her parents and Tuck, with a towel pressed against his head, all got in the car and drove away, Paige had assumed, to the hospital.

Sometime later, Paige was never sure how long it had been, she'd gone back into the house, grabbed a sleeping bag, her pillow, and the bloody coaster from where it had been left on the living room floor, and returned to the tree house.

Paige didn't like to remember this, but she forced herself to sometimes. Her mother had called Paige her "little glutton," as in a glutton for punishment, because as a kid, when she had broken a rule or lied to her parents, she would often confess by way of informing her parents that she had grounded herself for a month. Maybe it was the fact that her father was a pastor, but Paige had always had the strongest moral compass of any of her peers. She had an inherent sense of justice, too, and never shied away from doling it out, even to herself, if need be. She had the sort of terrifying qualities that one imagines a martyr must possess in the moments just before death.

Paige was happy to find that she'd gotten a backward facing seat on the Amtrak train that was about to start its southwestern journey down through Illinois. In the midst of that terrible memory, it reminded her of riding in the hatchback of her family's old station wagon. Sitting in the back, facing the wrong way, had always given Tuck carsickness, but Paige loved it. Much like the coaster incident, Paige experienced her own life like it was a rerun on TV. Things happened to her and then she reviewed the contents sometime later.

It hadn't been until the next day, when Tuck, with ten stitches on the left side of his head, had come out to talk to her that she really understood why she had thrown a coaster at her brother's head.

Tuck had slowly climbed up the ladder that was nailed to the tree trunk until just his head was poking up through the hole in the tree house floor.

"We need to talk, Paige," he'd said.

"No shit," had been Paige's tactful reply. Still, Tuck knew his sister and he knew that when she was like this, it was as good a response as he could hope for. He took this curt response as a pleasant invitation to join her and climbed all the way into the tree house.

He'd sat down across from Paige so that the entrance hole was between them.

"Good thinking," she'd quipped, slowly spinning the coaster in her fingers and not looking up at her brother. "If I lunge at you, I'll probably just fall out."

"You never think, do you?" He'd wasted no time getting to the point. He was madder than Paige had ever seen him.

"Just because I'm impulsive that doesn't mean I don't think," Paige replied defensively. "At least I'm not as selfish as you are. All you ever think about is yourself!"

"What the hell, Paige?! I expected this from Mom and Dad, but not you. I mean, I knew Dad would flip a shit about me being gay, but you? I guess we know who got the bigot genes between us now don't we?"

As he'd said this, he'd moved to crawl back over to the entrance, to leave, but had stopped when he saw Paige's face. She'd gone white as a sheet. Her eyes were wide and rapidly filling with tears.

"What?" she had whispered. "No. I don't care that you're gay."

Tuck had looked at Paige for a long moment, looking at the truth of this statement, feeling it, with the same look on his face, Paige had realized, as when he jumped into the cold water of a swimming pool. And then he had laughed, the most relieved laugh Paige had ever heard; one trumpet-like blast and the walls between them fell. Tuck had rolled onto his back beside the hole and tears had begun to slide down the sides of his face.

"Then what?" he had asked.

"How could you not tell me?" Paige choked out, anger in evident in every word. "I felt like a chump sitting there with Mom and Dad. How could you keep something like this from me?"

Paige was crying by that time, too. He'd moved next to her then, sat right beside her. That alone had been enough for Paige to know that, despite how angry they both were at each other, they would be alright again, eventually. Then he'd turned his head and looked at her.

"I'm sorry," he'd said, his voice sinking like a wet grave on the second word. "But this isn't something we can share."

Paige had felt like she had when her Mom had told them their beagle, Duke, had died at the vet's when they were on vacation and she'd been unable to remember if she had said goodbye to him before they'd left.

"Shit. We have to go talk to Mom and Dad," Tuck had interrupted the desperate search that was going on in her mind. "Dad is about to call the police to have you arrested for a hate crime and Mom seems to think you've exiled yourself for good this time. I forgive you, by the way." Tuck had always been the bigger person.

"I am sorry," Paige had said solemnly, "but really, a hate crime? Nice to know you all think so highly of me." Paige had been dreading the conversation she would have to have with her parents. She was going to have to ground herself for a long time for this one.

"It looked pretty bad. Mom made up a story in the ER about it being some sort of Frisbee accident."

They'd both laughed at this, but it was a dry, hollow laugh.

"I am going to have to call you Paige Hate Crime McCullers from now on, though."

"That's really not funny," Paige had said seriously.

"It's not supposed to be," Tuck had replied.

Then scenery quickly turned from city to the slow roll of the Midwest prairie, the train moved toward Solomon, as Paige remembered all of this. Tuck had been true to his word, sort of. He did call her H.C. sometimes, but never jokingly. It was only when that blinding rage was threatening to take hold of her that Tuck called her this, when her body was about to betray her.

The day after they'd had that conversation in the tree house, Paige had joined the swim team. She wanted to prove to Tuck and her self that she could live her own life, too, and do something that he couldn't be a part of. But Paige kept the coaster. She put it into the box under her bed with the other holy relics of her life and she'd sworn that she would never let herself be that monster again.