Tandem Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the blink of an eye. Gina and I gave ourselves blisters walking up and down Michigan Avenue before finding the perfect thing for me to wear, a short, strapless navy dress with a sweetheart neckline and a sparkly tulle overlay that was on clearance for $99.99. The dress wasn’t exactly my style—I was definitely more of a T-shirt and jeans kind of girl—but when I looked in the mirror, I had to admit, I felt beautiful in it. I hoped Grant would like it on me just as much as I did.
    Before I knew it, it was Saturday evening, and Gina, Jeff, and I were gathered in the parlor of the Victorian, waiting for Grant to arrive.
    “He’s late,” Gina said. She was sitting in Granddad’s armchair, wiggling with impatience, while her boyfriend loomed over her, taking nips off a flask he kept in his inside jacket pocket. Gina had met Jeff, a freshman at Northwestern, at a concert a few months earlier. Personally, I thought he was a little morose and weird, but he was really into Gina, so who was I to judge? Jeff was tall and lanky, and usually his clothes and his hair looked like they’d never been washed. Gina had managed to wrestle him into her brother’s old tux, even though it was a bit too short in the arms and legs and a bit too big everywhere else.
    “He’ll be here,” I insisted. I paced the floor in front of the fireplace. My nerves were out of control. It was one thing to imagine this moment, to look forward to it, and quite another to find myself on the precipice of experiencing it. Plus, what if Granddad didn’t like Grant? I kept telling myself it was a silly thing to worry about—after all, I wasn’t marrying Grant, I was just going with him to one dance—but it was hard to banish it from my thoughts.
    My eyes rested on the framed photographs that sat upon the mantle. Most of them were school photos that charted my evolution from a thick-haired, gawky child to a relatively pretty teenager, all things considered. There were also a few of me and Granddad together in various places, my favorite being one of us standing on a pier at Lake Okobogee, hoisting a ten-pound largemouth bass between us. I smiled at the memory. If it was possible for my parents’ deaths to have a silver lining, it was that I’d gotten a chance to know my grandfather. Even though he could be gruff, I knew that he loved me, and that I was lucky to have found a home with him when mine had been ripped from me.
    There was only one picture of my parents. It was from our last trip to Disney World; we were standing in front of Cinderella’s castle, grinning into the sun. It’d been taken only a few months before the accident, and we looked so happy in it, oblivious to the disaster looming on the horizon of our lives. The sadness that always accompanied thoughts of my parents clanged like a bell in my heart, but my smile didn’t fade. The clearest memories of my childhood were from that vacation. I’d been deep in my fairy-tale phase, demanding that everyone call me Princess Juliana, a name that bewildered Mom and Dad. I’d dragged them to the castle more than a dozen times and pranced around inside it, ordering them around like servants. I still had the princess hat they’d bought me, a cardboard cone covered in synthetic pink fabric with Juliana stitched on the brim and a filmy purple ribbon trailing from the top. When Mom asked me why I was called Juliana, I told her I’d heard the name in a dream.
    Other than my parents, I’d never told anyone about the Juliana dreams, but I’d had them ever since I could remember. When I was young, they came often, three or four times a week, but as I grew up they were fewer and farther between, though more vivid. Like most dreams, however, they faded almost immediately after I woke up.
    In the dreams, I was never myself, but a girl named Juliana who looked exactly like me. They had a linear, realistic quality to them, as if I was literally living Juliana’s life. But things were different in her