Lauren and I were born so late in Gemini season—me on the 20th and her on the 21st—we were cusping on Cancer. But I liked being a Gemini, knowing my best friend was one, too. I would rather be a twin than a bull or a scorpion. Or a Libra, which is just a set of scales trying to balance itself out. Even though we didn’t look similar, sometimes I told people Lauren and I were twins.

We hung out every day the summer we turned fifteen. Lauren’s parents were fighting nonstop. Lauren would recount what her mom had said, what her dad had said, what her mom had said. Their fights were a badminton game, their angry words the shuttlecock, Lauren the only spectator in the crowd.

If we couldn’t hang out, we talked on the phone. Most afternoons, when I wasn’t babysitting for the Fosters down the street and Lauren wasn’t helping at Vacation Bible School, were spent like this: me lying flat on my back in bed, the cordless phone from the kitchen pressed hotly to my face, the sound of Lauren’s voice in my ear. I called her often from the Fosters’ place after I put Graham down for his nap, and sometimes when he seemed entertained enough by his blocks. I lied to the Fosters and to my parents about how often I called Lauren. I couldn’t help it. I’d see a telephone and my fingers would begin to pantomime her number.

The day it started, Lauren’s dad took us to the planetarium at the public museum. At first, I’d pushed for the mall: I wanted a frozen coffee and to walk around with Lauren, maybe hit the bookstore. But it was her father’s call. He wanted to spend time with her, even though he’d acquiesced to bring me along. She told me we could look for the Gemini constellation: our own special arrangement of stars.

That’s when I’d said sure.

The show didn’t start until 2 p.m., so we had some time to kill. Lauren’s dad had already taken us to lunch, and I sensed he’d used all his good talking points as we ate our Big Macs.

Taken alongside Lauren’s mother, I didn’t mind Mr. Greely all that much. But without Mrs. Greely, he was a bit of a misfit toy, a stiff, nervous guy whose smile only took root at the corners of his mouth.

At the museum, Mr. Greely made the three of us take our time through the hall of fossils. We stopped often as we shuffled along to admire the pockmarked rocks on display under thick squares of glass, each rock older than the last.

I kept trying to get Lauren out of his earshot so she could tell me what was really going on the way she did on the phone when we talked so long, I had to switch ears.

To make her laugh, to distract her, to change the subject, I said out of nowhere, “That guy in the black pants? He’s going to die falling down an elevator shaft chasing a butterfly.”

I watched her face for a reaction. When Lauren burst open with laughter, I felt a curtain of relief wash over me.

“That woman over there,” Lauren whispered, pointing to a woman in a white dress with a plus size physique and a toddler holding her hand. “One day her husband finds out she spent all his money on jigsaw puzzles, and he’s so mad he poisons her dinner!”

I laughed harder and louder than I needed to. But I needed Lauren to hear me laugh. I needed to hear her laugh, too. I needed to be the one to make her laugh.

“That woman,” I whispered between giggles, “she gets run over by a racehorse at the Kentucky Derby! The horse even runs over her hat!”

I thought that was funny because the woman had sort of a horsey face: long in the nose, not very attractive. And she was wearing a hat—not the oversized Derby-style hat of my fantasy, but a hat nonetheless.

“That man,” Lauren snorted, “he drowns in the tub! While taking a bubble bath. And listening to Enya.”

The Enya detail pushed me over the edge. So clearly could I picture the rotund man with straggly brown hair crying into a glass of wine over lost love. It felt so good to be so mean to people who were none the wiser. I laughed until I couldn’t breathe, trying my best to cover my mouth with my hands.

“That woman,” I countered, “buys a lottery ticket but then gives herself a papercut with it and bleeds to death driving home. She wins a million and never sees a dime.”

Lauren doubled over, grabbed my shoulder to prevent herself from falling all the way down. I thought for a second she might pee her pants like she did when we were in 4th grade on the trampoline.

If the strangers around us heard our whispers, they would never have been able to guess we were fortune telling their demises. Who would suspect the two teen girls trailing behind Lauren’s humorless father could be the imaginators of such terrible prophesies?

The more we did, the meaner they got.
That man chokes on a Twinkie.
That woman gets shot in the head with a slingshot—her kid gets her right on the temple.
I said that one because the kid orbiting the woman seemed obnoxious.
That woman falls off her roof and breaks all the bones in her body. Every. Single. One.

Our laughter echoed through the brick-lined halls of the museum. If Mr. Greely overheard what we were whispering about as he led on determinedly past the exhibit on fish species invasive to the Great Lakes, he gave no indication. We played until the lights dimmed inside the Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium and Mr. Greely shushed us and ushered us into our seats right as the star show opened.

* * *

Lauren spent the night at my house a lot that July, sleeping on the floor of my bedroom in her polka-dot sleeping bag. Mom worried it was uncomfortable—the floor of my room, even with the thick carpet—so she laid a sleeping bag under Lauren’s sleeping bag for added softness. Sleepovers were usually only for weekends, but since it was summer, and since my parents knew the Greelys were having problems, they let Lauren stay over whenever she wanted. My dad even joked about making her a spare key.

We’d stay up late quietly watching television in the den, carefully painting our fingernails on the coffee table. Every actor or actress on the television was subjected to our game.

Brad Pitt, with his rugged face—he was going to go skydiving and his parachute wasn’t going to open. My sister Tracy and I were allowed to watch Legends of the Fall even though it was rated R. My mom didn’t think the sex scene was that bad. Or we would watch Far and Away, but that was my second choice because it was kind of boring.

Tom Cruise was going to get decapitated by an elevator when it breaks down and he’s stuck between floors. The door opens and he pokes his head out to call for help, and the elevator slices his melon off like a guillotine.

Nicole Kidman, who got to kiss Tom Cruise in that movie—she was going to ski into a tree. But the collision wasn’t what was going to kill her. It would be the avalanche of snow falling from the branches that would do her in.

This made Lauren scrunch her nose. “You’re so twisted, Becky.”

I grinned. Then I told her to go back to talking about what she was talking about before we started the boring movie, and she took a big sip of the root beer my dad said she could have, and she did. Her dad had been sleeping in the spare room for weeks. He’d moved his clothes in there, too.

I kept spending as much time with Lauren as possible. I ignored other friends’ invitations to go to the movies. I skipped Maddie’s birthday party at the roller arena—not on purpose, but the Saturday it happened was the night Lauren’s parents sat her down and told her they were officially done working on the marriage. Her mom was not backing down. Her dad was moving out. There was nothing he could say, and nothing he could do to fix it.

Without a second thought about the party or the book I’d picked up for Maddie earlier that week, wrapped in white paper that said Happy Birthday! in five languages, I rode my ten-speed to Lauren’s, and then she and I rode to the middle school where we sat on the bleachers for hours. Lauren cried, and I sat next to her, and I only played the Death Game once with a woman who was walking on the track holding small purple hand weights.

I made a joke about how a plane was going to land on this lady while she was exercising in the middle of an open field. Lauren stopped crying and chuckled. She told me I was crazy, but then she said she was lucky to have a friend like me.

“We’re twins,” I said. “You and me.”
“Mmm.”
* * *
“What about Mrs. Pardee?” I asked.

By some miracle, Lauren and I had been assigned the same homeroom teacher. Although we’d rotate through our core subjects the rest of the day, we’d begin together.

“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “I think she might die when she tries to run the Iditarod.”

I laughed into the phone. “Why would anyone do that?”

I knew Lauren’s body language so well I could imagine I heard her shrug. “I’m sure there’s a prize.”

“You mean she has a team of dogs?”

Lauren giggled. “Yeah! Sled dogs! Like a dozen of them. Huskies. Or Alaskan Malamutes. My cousin has one of those.”

“Those are really pretty dogs.”

“He tried to teach his how to hunt once, Travis did. Didn’t go so well.” It was great to hear her laugh.

“So you think she freezes to death?” Mrs. Pardee was a petite woman. She’d freeze quickly, maybe.

Lauren considered. “Or, like, she doesn’t pack enough food and the dogs eat her.”

“Ew,” I said, even though I was delighted.

“Not much meat on those bones. She probably tastes like… marshmallows,” I added. I wanted Lauren to laugh again, and I wanted to think of the funniest thing the fleshy parts—what few there were on Mrs. Pardee’s wiry body—would taste like.

Lauren giggled. “Toasted marshmallows?”
“Maybe. Burned ones.”

“Ew,” Lauren echoed. “Well anyway, I hope she lets us pick seats.”

“Tracy says she doesn’t.”

I switched the phone to my other ear and repositioned my feet on the wall. We’d been talking for half an hour, and I’d been working up the courage to get to the thing I wanted to know. I read her the Gemini horoscope from the newspaper and after we talked about its prediction, I asked, “Your dad’s really moving out this weekend?”

“Yeah. He started paying rent the first of August. He’s already got boxes there. But he said he needs help with the bigger stuff.”

“What’s the bigger stuff?”

“The bed from the spare bedroom. His desk. I don’t know what else.”

I nodded, and then said, “mmm” since Lauren couldn’t see me over the phone.

“Where’s his new apartment?”

“On Fulton. He says there’s a pool.”

“That’ll be fun.” I wasn’t sure what to say, but I thought I sounded upbeat.

“Maybe for a few more weeks, but soon it’ll be too cold.”

“Oh. It’s an outdoor pool?”

“Duh,” she said. I shouldn’t have mentioned her dad moving out. But she’d brought it up last week and we’d gone out for soft-serve, and she’d cried quietly in the backseat of Tracy’s jeep as my sister drove us home from the mall. For her part, Tracy had pretended not to notice.

“Thought maybe it was an indoor pool.”

“Hey Becks? I gotta go. Talk to you later.”

But I heard the dial tone on Lauren’s end before I could say goodbye.

* * *

After school started, I played the Death Game by myself a lot. It made the days pass faster, but without her as an audience, it wasn’t as good. I would choose a seat in the back of the class whenever I could. I’d stare at the back of everyone’s head, like I could tell their fate from their hair follicles.

Cecily was going to become a Trapeze artist and fall from the highest wire. That fit. She was a gymnast.

Morgan was going to get bitten by a spider and not even notice until the growth overtook her whole face and a million spider babies came spilling out and into her mouth and down her throat to make her choke. I’d read that in a book somewhere.

Sometimes, I’d write predictions down in my notebook, although I was careful to start at the back, far from the practice homework sets. My worst nightmare would have entailed my math teacher catching sight of a list of twenty-nine of his pupils and how they were going to die.

Once, I asked Lauren if she ever wrote any of hers down. She’d scrunched her nose and looked at me like I was bananas, and I hadn’t been able to shake that expression for days. That look of hers had begged the question, why on Earth would I do that?

I got paranoid someone would find my list. I began replacing names with initials, and I started drawing icons to remind myself of my idea. I would write “H.P.” and I’d draw a tractor with furiously spinning blades. If someone were to see my list written that way, they’d just think I was a weird doodler. I wasn’t much of an artist, although I did like to draw constellations. Our constellation. The twins outlined in bright, shining stars, holding hands in the sky.

Once, I showed Lauren one of my Gemini sketches, but she didn’t know what it was. It hurt that she didn’t remember it from the star show at the planetarium. But I reminded myself she was going through a hard time, and I kept capturing Death Game predictions because it was my mission to be the reason Lauren smiled at least one time a day. Sometimes at lunch I would take out my notebook and recount a few, but often there were too many people at our table, and everyone seemed annoyed when I cupped Lauren’s ears with my palms and whispered into them.

Maddie even asked if we had crushes on each other, we were whispering so much. It was a joke, but Lauren told me on the phone that night that we should probably cool it—at least while at school.

In a way it was a bit of a relief: I could keep writing them down and storing them up, like a squirrel storing nuts for winter. But in another way, it made me feel strange about the game we had created together—that maybe she thought there was something wrong with it, something odd about it, and by extension, something wrong or odd about me. Inside my head, I had arguments with Lauren about the Death Game that never happened in real life. I tossed heated justifications and accusations about how she was just as much a part of the Death Game as I was, that it was just as much her brainchild as it had been mine. I wanted to tell her that she used to find it even funnier than I did. I wanted to ask her why she didn’t find it as funny anymore.

I didn’t tell Lauren, but more than once I had created ideas for how my own parents were going to die, how my sister was going to die.

And although I didn’t tell Lauren, more than once—and beginning one of the nights that summer Lauren slept over at my house, on the floor next to me in her sleeping bag—I had at times thought of but never wrote down and certainly never shared with her ideas for how she might die.
* * *

By the time October rolled around, I was playing the Death Game constantly. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t see faces anymore; I saw knives sticking out of skulls. I saw corpses hanging from gallows. When teachers called on me, I would picture their arms and legs dismembered. I pictured their hands with no fingers when they pointed to something on the blackboard.

Whoever we were learning about in class, I became preoccupied with how they died. If a historical figure died in an interesting way, I’d lock it into my memory, use it later for the lunch lady who handed me a greasy piece of pepperoni pizza on a droopy cardboard plate.

King Alexander the I of Greece got attacked by his pet monkey, which bit him and led to a deadly infection.

Attila the Hun, despite being an incredible warrior, was said to have died of a severe nosebleed.

Adolf Frederick, the King of Sweden, ate himself to death. So it was said.

It was satisfying to read about fascinating and fantastical ways to die.

I thought about the assistant principal getting attacked by a monkey—one with colorful patches on his body. I pictured my art teacher, whom I had always liked, surrounded in a room with towers of sheet cakes and cheese pizzas and two liters of soda.

In gym, Cameron got hit in the face with a stray red volleyball, and when he was sent to the bathroom to take care of his nosebleed, I imagined the janitor finding the corpse later, after everyone had gone home for the day.

I didn’t share these with Lauren often anymore. Maybe just once a week. When I did, she would mostly change the subject.

I did share that we should dress as twins for Halloween—the Gemini girls. I would wear a wig. I’d already bought one at the mall that I thought matched her hair pretty well. I thought we could both wear our stone-wash jeans and black hoodies. We could wear our red Sketchers. We could do our makeup the same way. Every day that passed where she didn’t make plans to go trick-or-treating with me increased the tight feeling in my chest that she was never going to.

I also kept asking to see her dad’s apartment, which was small with only one bathroom, but did have a second bedroom for her. She stayed with him Monday through Wednesday, and then she stayed with him every other weekend. I asked Lauren if it was hard to live out of a duffel bag. She’d frowned the way she had my assertion that her crush Jonathan might die in a plane expedition to the Bermuda Triangle as his crew tried to uncover the unsolved mystery of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. She hadn’t found that funny.

I’d also tried not to read anything into the fact that it had taken her three whole weeks to give me the number of the landline that rang at her dad’s apartment, which she said he was taking his time to set up, and it wasn’t as easy as all that, and she was going through something I wasn’t going through, and even though she knew I thought I understood, my parents were still in love and my family was still perfect, and could I give her some space?

* * *

So I did. I stopped calling for a few days. My fingers ached with the old itch to dial her number. It was awful, made worse when my dad asked Friday over pizza why my twin wasn’t spending the night. He’d stocked the fridge with Mug for her. I stared at the Fosters’ phone Saturday night as I babysat Graham. I’d given Lauren their number in case I was babysitting and she needed to talk. It was foolish to think she’d call me there that night, since she didn’t even know that’s where I was, but I held out that hope till I heard the Fosters’ car pull in their driveway just after 10:00 anyway.

I didn’t hear from Lauren at all for five days. I didn’t see her for five days. She wasn’t in school—at least I was pretty sure. At first, I thought maybe she was skipping Mrs. Pardee’s class to avoid me, going off campus for lunch to avoid me, but Maddie said she hadn’t seen her, either. Finally, I broke down and called her house Tuesday, but no one was home. I called her dad’s line that night, too, but the phone just rang and rang.

Wednesday, I was doodling stars in a line while the principal rattled on with his daily announcements on the loudspeaker when I saw Lauren walk in. If I were going to die right then, it would have been of a heart attack. I could picture my own heart exploding in my chest like a bomb in the silence between us as she settled into her seat.

“Hey,” I said.

Lauren had already opened a graphic novel, but she wasn’t looking at its dark pages. Her blonde hair was hanging down as a curtain around her face.

“Hey,” I said, louder this time. “Are you mad at me, or something?”

It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested in playing the Death Game anymore. It wasn’t that she’d asked for space and ignored me for five days, or that she hadn’t returned my calls at all, or that she obviously didn’t like my Halloween idea. It was all of it together. It was the fact that my notebook was overrun with different ways to die, and it didn’t feel as funny as it did before, and it felt like her fault. I’d worked so hard to craft laughter into every humid day that summer. I’d worked endlessly to let her know I was there for her, that I was her twin, and somehow, none of that mattered to her at all.

She turned her face toward me, and I could see her bottom lip was quivering. Twin red blotches bloomed on her cheeks, and I knew this meant she was working hard not to cry. “I want you to stay away from me,” she hissed. “You caused this. You and your stupid game. You’re a freak and I want you to stay away from me.”

I blinked. I was sure I’d misheard somehow. She’d asked for space, and I’d left her alone. For nearly a week. I felt a bit like a fish with his lips on a hook, and I was opening my mouth to argue when I noticed Cecily had stood from her desk and was giving Lauren a hug. Which Lauren was returning. Mrs. Pardee looked up, but then I saw Mrs. Pardee give Cecily a little smile and the smallest possible nod.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I heard Cecily say. To Lauren.

“What—what loss?” I whispered to Lauren. “What’s going on?”

She didn’t answer, so I whispered it again. Cecily leveled me with her eyes, and I tried to listen, even as in my mind, I was picturing her falling from a fire-lit hoop high in the air.

“Her cousin Travis died, Becky. Where have you been?”

Cecily let go of Lauren and sat back down at her desk, and I sat dumbfounded for a second as Mr. Hammond rattled on about the upcoming Fall Fundraiser.

I just stared at the tent of Lauren’s blonde hair, waiting for her to turn to me so I could say something else, but she never did. The entire homeroom period passed and Lauren never looked my way, and when the bell rang she was up like a shot and out the door.

Walking out of the classroom, I tapped Cecily on the shoulder, and I didn’t care that I sounded like I was about to cry, too.

“What happened to Travis? Will you tell me, please? She won’t talk to me, for some reason.” I pretended there was nothing the matter between Lauren and me. I remembered meeting Travis once, at one of Lauren’s family reunions. Her dad’s side. He had a nice smile. He’d offered me a soda.

Cecily rolled her eyes. She sighed dramatically and moved out of the way of the flow of traffic. “He was hunting Saturday, up north. Deer. With Lauren’s uncles. There was an accident. He got shot. He didn’t make it. That’s all I know.”

“Oh my God,” was all I could say. “I had no idea.” My eyes welled up with tears.

Which finally seemed to make Cecily soften. She started to walk again, looking back at me to make sure I was following. “Yeah. She didn’t, like, really tell anyone. She found out Saturday, and just, you know, took a few days off school. Maddie heard it through Mrs. Dalinger. Anyway, I think the memorial is this week, but then the funeral isn’t till this weekend. I forget. But anyway, Lauren didn’t want to just, like, keep missing school.”

“Oh my God,” I said again. I was crushed for two reasons: that this had happened. That I hadn’t been there for Lauren. And then a third reason knocked the wind out of me: Lauren hadn’t wanted me to be.

Cecily and I had reached the hallway with her locker. I watched her put in the combination and pull the metal door open with a squeak. Part of me knew I also needed to get my stuff from my own locker and head to Social Studies, but I felt glued to Cecily and her words as way off in the distance, right at the end of the hallway, I caught the last sight of Lauren’s blonde hair whipping around the corner.

“Yeah,” she said, sighing. “It’s sad. He was so young. And what a terrible way to die.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is. That’s horrible. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. Tell Lauren. Tell Lauren I’m sorry.”