The Midnight Twins Read Online Free PDF

Meredith slowly got up and began to blow out her twin’s thick black thatch of hair, so that the ends flipped under and lay against Mallory’s cheeks. Mally continued, “I should hate your guts. You didn’t even ask me about my dream. . . .”
    I didn’t want to, Merry thought. It wasn’t just that she didn’t have the time. There was a foreboding for her in hearing this, like seeing ambulance lights revolve in the distance. Merry was trying hard not to absorb her sister’s misery.
    “Just try to let go of it,” Merry advised. “You’re overreacting.”
    They could hear the doorbell pealing. The party was set up in the garage, which Tim Brynn built with heat pipes when he added it on to the three-story saltbox where Brynn relatives had lived for four generations—mostly so he could use his workshop year-round. Before they moved to their ranch, Tim’s parents had lived in the house, raising their children there. His grandfather, Walker, lived there before then, and his great-grandfather before that. Now, every bike and sled, as well as the library ladder that Adam and Tim hadn’t quite finished in time for Campbell’s Christmas present, was stacked outside and placed under a tarp against the dim possibility of snow. Tim had stocked his pride and joy, a fifties soda machine, with Cokes and Orange Crush, and a long table wobbled under the weight of hot dogs, salsa, chips, dip, and a cake that was half white, half chocolate (Mallory hated chocolate). Tim’s iPod, in its dock of tiny, powerful speakers, was secured on a makeshift shelf far out of anyone’s reach. Campbell was elated. She had earlier called their efforts a “winter wonderland.”
    But that was only in the Brynns’ garage.
    To the disgust of everyone in Ridgeline, there hadn’t been even a halfhearted flake of snow since Halloween. The winter was open and dry, after a bitter and prolonged fall. But tinsel and banners draped the walls, and Campbell had raided both fabric stores at the mall for all the white and silver tulle she could scrounge, to make it as festive inside as it was dreary outside.
    And now, Meredith could hear David’s voice downstairs. He was dropping Kim off, but how long would he stay? David had to see her in her melon skirt!
    “Come on, Ster,” she said softly, hugging Mally, using their baby name for each other, the one Adam still used for both of them. “It was a bad dream, but it was just a dream.”
    “I’m not going to talk about it all night, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Mallory said. Merry jumped. She had been worrying—about just that very thing.
    “I don’t want you to think about it all night,” Merry answered. Since she could feel Mallory’s thoughts, that would be just as awful. “Why worry about something that didn’t happen? Forget it.”
    “That’s your answer to everything,” Mally griped.
    “It works for me!”
    “You didn’t feel it!” Mally paused and asked, “Hey, why didn’t you feel it?”
    Why hadn’t she? Merry set down the blow-dryer.
    When Mallory was knocked flat by an overzealous opponent on the soccer field, Merry, miles away at the mall, had to catch her breath. When Merry started to sweat from nerves before a math quiz, Mally’s palms got sticky. There was nothing eerie about this. They expected it. It was as ordinary to them as Mallory thinking about the right answer to the story problem and Merry writing it down, or Merry defining “cacophony” in her head so that Mally could pass her vocab test. It was like their twin language—so elaborate it included past tenses and the names of everyone in the family, in translation. Their brother Adam was “Liba,” which the twins supposed was a toddler term for “little baby.” They could figure out the toddler derivation of “siow,” which meant “I’m hurt.” But they had no memory of beginning to speak their language. It was as if they’d received it, fully formed, like a book of poems they were