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For the first few years of her life, Kerry was an Observer. She saw things, she felt things, she thought things, but she wasn’t sure she ever actually did things. Sure, she played and ran and built things out of whatever was around to build out of, she cuddled with Mama and visited relatives and met other kids at daycare, but she didn’t seem to have input into it. That all had something to do with Him. He was the one people seemed to see when they looked at them. People called them a boy, and Kerry was fairly sure she was a girl, but He went along with it as if it made perfect sense…and that was, maybe, her first clue.
When Mama taught them the alphabet, He couldn’t seem to stop staring at those symbols as if they were unlocking the deepest secrets of the universe in front of them. But she just saw symbols, swimming together on the page. It seemed to be a complete waste of time that they could have been spending running around with the other kids, and she wondered why He insisted on sitting here staring instead. She felt…antsy. And that was probably her second clue.
One terrible day, a couple of bigger boys loomed up behind them while they studied a sack of gypsy-moth caterpillars emerging on a stump in the schoolyard. “That your lunch, Powdered-milk?” one of the bigger boys said, and they tried to ignore him, but his friend knelt on the other side, plucked a few of the caterpillars from the stump, and threw them at their face. “Eat up! Yum, yum!” They scooped the poor caterpillars up and tried to put them back on the egg sack, but the bigger boys—was it one or both of them? They felt completely overwhelmed— grabbed their arm and forced it toward their mouth. Kerry wanted to fight it, but He…He just let it happen. And when one of the boys said “Open wide!” He did. And that’s when she was sure: she and He definitely had different ideas about what they should be doing with their body. She was not driving it at all.
The bigger boys laughed, shoved them to the ground, and sauntered away. For a few minutes, they lay against the stump, gagging and crying, and it kept getting harder and harder to breathe, and it suddenly occurred to Kerry that they were having an asthma attack, but He just kept lying there, not moving for their inhaler or anything, why wasn’t He trying to stop it, CARY, THE INHALER! she screamed. He jumped, fumbled in their pocket, and then…then they could breathe again. Still crying, but breathing. And that’s when she realized He’d heard her. She did have some say in what they did, after all.
Now she wasn’t sure if the trembling she felt was from lack of oxygen or plain old rage. Why did you do what they said, anyway?! she burst out.
“They, they were…bigger,” He choked out. “They…would’ve…hurt me!”
They DID hurt us! They made us hurt ourself!
“Yeah, I, I guess…they did.”
You should have shoved those worms right in their faces instead.
“That…that would have been…unnecessarily cruel to…to the caterpillars. They had worse…b-breath than me.”
Kerry tried to say That is a horrible excuse! but she couldn’t quite get it out for giggling. Then He, very shakily, started to giggle, too. Soon they had calmed down enough to stand up and go see the nurse.
She didn’t wait for an emergency to talk after that. She spoke up whenever He seemed to need her opinion. Which He frequently did, judging by how often He started to do what she didn’t want to do.
Then came the night she couldn’t stop thinking about the new train set they’d gotten for Christmas. It was just sitting there, across the room, doing nothing, and they were just lying here, in bed, doing just as much nothing, when they could have been over there making that train light up and move. But He was fast asleep. Finally she couldn’t take it anymore. She sat up. She crossed the room. She took the tracks out of the box and laid them into an oval and plugged in the control box and switched on the train. And once it started buzzing and ch-ch-chigging around the loop, that’s when He finally woke up.
That’s funny. What was He doing still in bed when she was all the way across the room?
He sat up and squinted at her. Then he grabbed the glasses from the bedside table and pushed them onto his face. Oh right, Kerry thought. That’s what they always did when they first got up. It hadn’t occurred to her tonight. She could see just fine.
“Who-who are you?” he whispered.
What a strange question. “I’m Kerry,” she said.
“I’M Cary,” he said, getting out of bed now and crossing over to her.
She shrugged. “So am I.” Then she thought about it some more and added, “You spell it like a boy, though. I spell it K-E-R-R-Y because I’m a girl.” She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but it felt right.
“You’re the one who talks to me, aren’t you?” He sat beside her on the floor. “I thought I was talking to myself, but it was really you, wasn’t it?”
“Of course you were talking to me. Who else would you be talking to?” She giggled. She never knew how funny their face could be. She’d seen it in the mirror all the time, but in the mirror it never made faces quite like these, with the eyes all wide and the mouth crunched up all crooked.
It always seemed surprised when they spread out like this. He always seemed surprised. He was the one making the faces. “Oh, it’s you!” he’d say, as if she hadn’t always been here. And the surprised face always made her laugh. So she tried it more often, this way of playing in two different places at once, where she could watch him make funny faces and they had twice as many hands to move things.
The only problem was, everything seemed more when they were spread out like this. Sounds were louder, air was colder. She constantly felt on alert. It made her tired. So she was always relieved to snap back in place after awhile.
It wasn’t until she first saw herself in the mirror, standing next to Cary instead of looking through his eyes, that it really started to sink in, that she was a person herself. She was a person, with long dark hair like Mama’s, with a nose that turned up more than Cary’s did, with brown eyes that could see clearly without their glasses…his glasses.
“The way I figure it, Mama was supposed to have you,” Cary was saying, starting to pace around the tiny bathroom as much as it was possible to pace. “She thought she was having you, she said. But I must have grown up around you, hiding you, like, except you were still there inside me all this time!”
Kerry just kept staring at her reflection. The girl in the mirror was smiling. That’s because I’M smiling, she realized. She ran her fingers—her fingers—through that long dark hair—her hair. It was pretty.
“And somehow,” Cary was still talking and attempting to pace, “you managed to grow your own body inside mine. Did you know there’s space inside atoms? Maybe all your molecules were just hanging out in the spaces between my molecules. Whoa.” He sat on the edge of the toilet with his hands pressed against the sides of his glasses, as if to keep his brain from breaking out. “Remind me to get a book of quantum physics out tomorrow at the library.”
“Does this mean,” Kerry finally managed to speak, “That I won’t have to read it with you?”
Cary blinked at her. “Wh-why wouldn’t you w—”
Kerry was never going to get over those faces he made. She cracked up. Then she noticed the girl in the mirror laughing, and it made her laugh even harder. Cary sort of sputtered into laughing, which was even funnier, so soon they had slid into a pile on the floor of the bathroom, giggling hysterically.
“Wh-wha-whatever happened, I’m glad it happened,” Cary eventually stuttered out. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re my, my sister.”
Sister?
It sounded so…separate. Mama had sisters. They lived in different houses. Some even lived in different towns. Cary was slouched right beside her there on the floor, their arms were touching, but he suddenly seemed so far away, and for a second she panicked. She tossed herself toward him and back into place. There. Their molecules were hanging out together again, or whatever it was he’d said. They still fit.
“You just came back inside me. How did you do that? Can you describe it?”
I just…did? This is how we GO. I don’t know. Why do you always have to know how everything works?
“For… science?”
It sounded like he was making another funny face. She couldn’t help it, she had to see. He was. She giggled again, then thought of the girl in the mirror giggling, and had to see that. Yep. Same girl, with the hair like Mama’s. “Is this what you always see when we spread out?” she asked Cary.
He pulled himself off the floor to look in the mirror beside her. “Yes. That’s you,” he pointed to the girl in the mirror, “that’s me.”
“And us.” She popped back into place, watched the girl in the mirror disappear. Then away again, and she was back. “Huh.”
“You…didn’t know?”
She kept trying it, watching the girl in the mirror disappear and reappear. Cary stood still, the same bemused expression unchanging. “I’m—” how would he say it “—testing the hyperstatus.”
“Hypothesis?” he said. “The hypothesis that you’ve been hiding inside me all this time?”
She scowled. “HIDING is for chickens.” Back together, more stubbornly. I just like it here, that’s all. But after a second or two, she slid back out, and grabbed his hand— with her, actual, hand— on the way. “Come on, let’s go show Mama.”
It wouldn’t be fair to say that Mama didn’t believe them. She just had a difficult time believing them. Sometimes she’d pretend that Kerry was an Imaginary Friend they all just played along with. Sometimes she’d listen to Kerry and respond to her, and then she’d act like she’d been talking to Cary all along. Sometimes she’d act like she couldn’t see or hear Kerry at all.
But Kerry didn’t mind. She had an almost-perfect childhood now, regardless. Cary did all the boring stuff, the schoolwork and the mealtimes and the being polite to annoying elders. But now, whenever she wanted to, she could split off for awhile and play her way. Her way involved moving—running and kicking and catching and throwing. There was a big field where all the neighborhood kids would go to play. Cary would usually get distracted from whatever game was happening so he could watch a spider build a web or attempt to predict wind patterns by the clouds, if he didn’t arrive prepared with a book and sit on the sidelines from the start. But Kerry got to play kickball and Red Rover and flag football and no one ever questioned it—when kids showed up to play in the field, who cared if they didn’t go to school with everyone else? If anyone happened to ask, word was she was Cary’s cousin from out of town, and everyone knew Cary's cousin was up for anything. When she was in motion, the more-ness, the sensory overload she felt apart from Cary, became merely heightened awareness, lightning-fast reflexes. She was good at moving!
There was just one problem. Bullies.
Bullies particularly liked messing with Cary. Usually it wasn’t as bad as the Caterpillar Incident had been, mostly taunting or shoving or mean laughter in passing, but even that built up over time. They thought he was too smart, and so they’d tear him down whenever he said something they didn’t understand. (Kerry often didn’t understand him, either, but she was proud of how smart he was). They thought it was scandalous that he looked like a white boy even though Mama was Lakota, and so they made sure the whole family never forgot their “sin.” (Kerry was incensed that anyone could think Mama was anything less than lovely —even if she didn’t always believe in Kerry—or that their family was anything other than whole just the way it was). They thought he talked to himself too much (well, that, that was probably her fault. No, that was Cary’s fault, he didn’t have to talk back). But most appallingly, they liked to pick on Cary simply because he was little and weak, and that was just unfair. Why would anyone fight somebody they knew couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fight back?
And he never did fight back. He’d just freeze up and take it.
But Kerry wasn’t just an Observer anymore. She wasn’t just a voice in Cary’s head. And maybe she was little, too, but she would not be weak. She would not just take it. She would fight back for both of them.
And that’s when Kerry thought she finally knew who she was. She was Cary’s Protector.
The idea that maybe she was even more than that was still a long time coming.