But what Molly showed me — after we had gone down about thirty feet into the bushes and she had knelt near the arrow-shaped gravestone of our English sheepdog, Gulliver, and after she dug briefly in the dry dirt — was a dagger. It was about a foot long, and ornate, encrusted with what looked like real emeralds and rubies, with a great blue stone set in the pommel, and a rose etched in relief on the upper part of the blade.
“Do you like it?” she asked me. “My father gave it to me. It used to belong to a medieval princess.” I did like it. I reached out for it, but she drew it back to her chest and said, “No! You may not touch it.” She ran off down the ravine, toward the river; I didn’t follow. I sat on Gulliver’s stone and thought about all the little dead animals, and I knew—even a little mind could make the connection — that Molly had been murdering them. But I didn’t give much thought to it, besides a brief reflection on how sharp the blade must be to make such clean wounds. I walked back to my house and went down to the basement to watch The Bionic Woman, my new favorite.
After Colm’s death I got into the habit of staring, sometimes for hours at a time, at my image in the mirror. My parents thought it was just another of my new autistic tendencies, and they both discouraged it, even going so far as to remove the mirror from my bedroom. What they didn’t know was that the image I was looking at was not really my own; it was Colm’s. When I looked in the mirror I saw the face we had shared. We were mirror twins, our faces perfectly symmetrical, the gold flecks in my left eye mirrored in Colm’s right, a small flaw at the right edge of his lips mirrored by one at the left edge of mine. So when I looked in the mirror, even the small things that made my face my own made my face into his, and if I waited long enough he would speak to me. He would tell me about heaven, about all sorts of little details, like that nobody ever had to go to the bathroom there. We had both considered that necessity to be a great inconvenience and a bore. He said he was watching me all the time.
There was a connection between us, he often said, even when he was alive, that the surgeons had not broken when we were separated. It was something unseen. We did not have quite two souls between us; it was more that we had one and a half. Sometimes he would hide from me, somewhere in our great big house, and insist that I find him. Usually I couldn’t, but he always found me; I couldn’t hide from him anywhere in the house, or, I suspected, anywhere on earth.
After he died I found him, not just in mirrors but in every reflective surface. Ponds and puddles or the backs of spoons, anything would do. And invariably the last thing he would say to me was “When are you going to come and be with me again?”
Molly appeared that night at my window. I was still awake when she came. At first I thought she was Colm, until a flash of heat lightning illuminated her and I saw who she was. Glimpsing the dagger flashing in her hand, I was certain she had come to kill me, but when she came over to my bed, she said only, “Do you want to come out with me?” Another flash of lightning lit up the room. The lightning was the reason I had been awake — on hot summer nights Colm and I would stay up for hours watching it flash over the river. Sometimes our parents would let us sleep on the porch, where the view was even better.
She sat down on my bed. “I like your room,” she said, looking around. There was light from the hall, enough to make out the general lay of the room. Our father had built it up to look like a ship for Colm and me, complete with sea-blue carpeting and a raised wooden deck with railings and a ship’s wheel. Above one bed was an authentic-looking sign that read captain’s bunk; the other bed belonged to the first mate. While he lived we had switched beds every night, in the interest of absolute equality, unless one of us was feeling afraid, in which case we shared the same bed. The last time he slept in the room he had been in the captain’s bed, and because the cycle could not go on any longer I had been in the first mates bed ever since.
Molly pulled my sheets back, and while I dressed she looked around the room for my shoes. When she found them she brought them to me and said, “Come on.”
I followed her — out the window, over the roof, and down the blue spruce that grew close to my house. She walked along our road, to the golf course around which part of our community was built. The site, once a Baptist girls’ camp, had in the century since its founding turned into a place where well-to-do white people lived in rustic pseudo-isolation. It was called Severna Forest. You couldn’t live there if you were Jewish or Italian, and in the summer they made you lock up your dog in a communal kennel. The golf course had only nine holes. It was a very hilly course, bordered by ravines in some places and in others by the Severn River. Molly took me to a wide piece of rough on the fourth hole, only about half a mile from our houses. Though the moon was down, I could see under the starlight that rabbits had gathered in the tall grass and the dandelions. I bent at my knees and picked a stalk. I was about to puff on it and scatter the seeds when Molly held my arm and said, “Don’t, you’ll frighten them.”
For a little while we stood there, she with one hand on my arm and the other on her knife, and we watched the rabbits sitting placidly in the grass, and we waited for them to get used to us. “Aren’t they lovely?” she said, letting go of my arm. She began to move, very slowly, toward the nearest one. She moved as slowly as the moon does across the sky. I couldn’t tell she was getting any closer to the rabbit unless I looked away for a few minutes; when I looked back she was closer, and the rabbit had not moved. When she was about five feet away she turned and looked at me. It was too dark for me to see her face. I couldn’t tell if she smiled. Then she leapt, knife first, at the little creature, and I saw her pierce its body. It thrashed once and was suddenly dead. I realized I was holding my breath, and still holding the dandelion in front of my lips. I blew into it and watched the seeds float toward her, to where she was stabbing the body again and again and again.
In school the next Monday, Molly studiously ignored me. The whole morning long I stared at her, thinking she must give some sign that a special thing had taken place between us, but she never did. I didn’t really care if she never spoke to me again; I was used to people experimenting with me as a friend. I let them come and go.
After lunch, when we were all settling down again into our desks, in the silence after Mrs. Wallaby, our teacher, had offered up a post-luncheon prayer for the pope, Molly passed me a note. I opened it up, thinking for some reason that it might say, “I love you,” because once a popular girl named Iris had passed me such a note, and when I blushed she and her friends had laughed cruelly. But Molly’s note said simply, “You’d better not tell.” I supposed she meant I had better not write a letter to the police. She did not really know me at all.