One Two Three: Chapter Sampler by Laurie Frankel

Author:Laurie Frankel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Three

When you’re a triplet, every night’s a sleepover. Maybe it’s not like this if you’re rich. Maybe it’s only true if you’re a poor triplet. There’s only one bedroom in our house and it’s Nora’s, not because she wouldn’t gladly surrender it to her daughters but it’s upstairs. And I cannot go up stairs.

Every day after school for a whole week of fifth grade, Mab went into our room and cut roll after roll of gold foil into stars. Soon they covered the beds and the floor and accumulated like snowflakes into piles which grew into dunes. Nora stood in the doorway and frowned at her eldest daughter—was she depressed? was she mad? was this unrealized artistic talent or latent obsession?—but didn’t say anything.

Monday never stops saying anything, everything, whatever’s niggling the inside of her head. Why are star shapes pointy but sky stars round and movie stars skinny, when “pointy,” “round,” and “skinny” are opposites? Why does “foil” mean a sharp metal sword but also a flat metal sheet when “sharp” and “flat” are also opposites? How can “round” be the opposite of both “pointy” and “skinny” when “pointy” and “skinny” do not mean the same thing?

At the end of the week, Mab swapped her scissors for a staple gun and made our ceiling into a sky full of stars. They’ve faded over the years, as if it’s perpetually dawning now, but we sleep beneath them still.

I didn’t say anything that week because it was not a good week for me, and this was before my Voice came. Out there in the rest of the world, the brazen, ignorant, nosy, rude, and clueless come right up to people who use wheelchairs and say things like “What’s wrong with you?” In Bourne, no one says things like that, not because we’re not sometimes brazen, ignorant, nosy, rude, and clueless, but because, at least on this front, we know it’s not that simple. “Nothing” would be a true answer. So would “Many things.” But it would never be a single fill-in-the-blank response. My muscles are spastic except for the ones that are hypotonic. My body is often too rigid though my neck will only sometimes support my head. I have no control over my limbs except for my right arm and hand which are as finely honed as something NASA built.

Plus idioglossia. It comes from the Greek—idio, meaning personal, yours alone in all the world; glossa, meaning tongue. If you’re a doctor, “idioglossia” means speech so unformed or distorted it’s unintelligible. I can’t articulate much more than a single, wide syllable, and even that you probably couldn’t understand. But if you’re a linguist, “idioglossia” means a private language, one developed and understood exclusively by a tiny number of very close speakers. The secret language of twins. It is raised, in our case, to the power of three.

My sisters can usually understand my speech. They get my grunts and expressions and hand signals nearly as well as I get theirs. They share my finger taps.

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