The Midnight Twins by Jacquelyn Mitchard Read Free Book Online

little early,” Merry told them. It was barely eight o’clock.
    “Let’s eat first.” She’d made the little kids macaroni and cheese with hot dogs sliced into it.
    All the kids ate dutifully and put their dishes in the dishwasher. Aunt Kate even had a magnet on it that read CLEAN ME or I’M CLEAN that she turned over when she started a new load.
    Then Hannah asked, “Can we bang pans outside? Mom always lets us.” The last sentence was a dead giveaway that this was a total lie.
    “I don’t know,” Meredith said slyly. “Do you think you’re old enough?”
    “I do. I’m not afraid of the dark!” Hannah said stoutly, even though she’d been crying loud enough for people in Manhattan to hear her just an hour earlier.
    “Well, then, let’s see what we can find!”
    “Aunt Kate probably doesn’t want people banging on her French cookware!” Mally said with a hint of vinegar in her voice.
    “Mal, don’t be a butt pain.”
    “Well, she probably doesn’t. . . .”
    “Just take it easy.” Meredith got out four of Aunt Kate’s forty-five or so saucepans. She pulled out a big boiler and a frying pan and another wooden spoon when Alex suddenly confessed that he’d like to bang in the New Year as well. “What about you, Adam Ant?”
    Adam simply sneered.
    “Not everything fun is babyish,” Merry told her brother. “And not everything babyish is bad.”
    They flipped on a news channel that promised festivities from around the world: There was already a rap group so new that even the twins didn’t recognize them dancing around a big stage crisscrossed with racing lights.
    Mallory would remember that she felt something not new, but unaccustomed as a conscious thought, in those final minutes.
    She felt an intense and magnetic upsurge of love toward Merry. She smiled at her twin’s funny, pretend-adult domestic ways—wiping up every drop of the children’s dribbled chocolate from their hands, scooting Hannah and Heather into their footie pajamas and setting their parkas nearby, so that they could rush outside to bang on the pans and then be whisked into bed. To Mally, who lay on the couch the whole time, all this seemed impossibly dear. It was as if Mally was seeing Merry the way Merry would look when she was grown and a mother. But under the tide of affection was a kind of dismay—as if she, Mallory, might not actually be there with her twin when Merry was grown up.
    She realized that she never thought of Meredith in terms of “love.” Love was what she felt for family, best friends, even Kim’s adorable dog, Tofu, or a song, a sport, a season like summer. How could she love Meredith? How could she love the sharp point of her own chin, the sound of her own voice spoken the way other people said they heard their own voices on a recording? She was Meredith.
    “Giggy,” she said to Mally, who looked up with a full-blown smile. It was one of the oldest of their twin words, and neither had any idea what it had once meant. Perhaps it simply meant love.
    “Happy birthday, Ster,” Mally said. Adam jumped up and took the cue, pulling from each pocket a plastic bag tied with a ribbon. He handed one to each of the girls. Inside was a charm: a megaphone for Merry, a soccer ball for Mally.
    “You can pin them on your sweater with diaper pins, like Kim,” he said. “Happy birthday, Ster.” There was a moment of quiet among the three of them before Mallory reached out and gave Adam’s hair a soft tug.
    The charms would later be found in the yard, under a frosting of broken glass.
    They hauled Adam across both their laps and started tickle-torturing him in gratitude.
    Then all three were all but knocked backward by a sudden uprush of air from the half-open double doors at the front of the house.
    The plastic covering Uncle Kevin had put in place of the screen flew off with a whickering sound.
    And then, the very windows shook in their frames with the force of the explosion.
    “What the hell is that?”