Kai Lee is sixteen. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she arrives at nine o’clock for her job at the Read-On Paper Bookstore. The morning mall walkers pass her, usually on their last loop or two. Sometimes they’ve finished and are heading into the food court. Wherever they are, they say, “Good morning, Kai,” in cheerful unison.

It’s always the same four women, and over the summer she’s learned their names. Unimaginative ones from the 1940s. The smallest woman is Sandra. She reminds Kai of her grandmother. Perky, but with the sunny disposition her grandmother lost the last years of her life. Mary is twice her size. Catholic, Kai assumes, because whether she wears a dress or a T-shirt, it’s oversized and lets her display a crucifix that falls large and ostentatious on her ample breasts.

Where Sandra is small and Mary is large, Barbara and Dottie both look like they could be hiking a mountain trail instead of pretending to speed walk through the mall. Except, Barbara wears a brace around her left knee and limps. She once pointed to it and said, “Ski injury.” Kai wonders how many years ago Barbara last skied.

Dottie looks pretty good for an old lady. No dowager’s hump, gray hair with no rinse that makes it look blue, no wattles beneath her chin or on her arms. Kai imagines her as elegant in the days she wore designer blouses instead of ones she buttons lopsidedly or that are stained with coffee or ketchup. Sandra or Mary or Barbara always walk next to her as if without their protection she’d wander off in a dementia fog.

This morning, Kai passes the mall walkers when they’re at the food court. She smiles and says each of their names in the alphabetical order she uses to remember them. “Barbara, Dottie, Mary, Sandra. You’re all lookin’ good today.” She pronounces “looking” the way her uncle used to, without the “g,” the sound hidden like the name she’d use on her Friday night shift. Lee.

 

On Friday when her nametag says Lee, she sees a book that looks interesting. Chimera. She doesn’t know how to pronounce the word, so she looks it up on her phone and runs the pronunciation app. Kai-mer-a. The first syllable like her name. The book’s title is embedded into an image of two whirls, a larger whirl in pink and a barely visible one in blue. She runs the book through the scanner so it will look like she purchased it, puts it into her canvas Read-On Paper bag, and brings it home.

She goes to bed early so she can read Chimera. It’s dense with information on genetics she doesn’t fully understand. Someone who carries the DNA of an embryo that fused with another. A vanishing twin. It explains why she can’t decide on her pronoun––he, she, they.  But it explains her different colored eyes. One blue, one brown. Heterochromia, sometimes a sign of a chimera. The book convinces her that she’s a chimera. A daytime self named Kai, who speaks kindly to the morning mall walkers and whoever comes into the bookstore. Lee dominates at night. When she’s not at home surrounded by the soft pink walls of her bedroom. The male hidden like the blue image of the embryo on the book’s cover.

She closes the book, turns off the light, and imagines devouring her twin.

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At breakfast, she tells her mother about chimeras. “Do you think I’m a chimera?” She fires off two more questions. “Is that why my eyes are different colors? Did you feel two of us when you were pregnant?”

Her mother sticks her fork into the yoke of her egg and says, “One egg. Like this. You have a blue eye from your father and a brown one from me. It’s a sign of wisdom.”

“And of sorcery.” Kai had looked it up a year ago when she had begun to feel like Kai and Lee were as distinct as her blue and brown eyes. A she and a he. Not a they.

Her mother stands up, throws her unfinished breakfast into the trash, then returns to the table. She bends to whisper into Kai’s ear. “You’re not a sorcerer or a chimera. You’re my beautiful daughter Kai.” She straightens and says, “Want to come to the mall with me? I have to find a birthday present for your dad.”

Kai pushes back her chair. As she goes to the sink with her half-eaten breakfast, she says, “Why would I go to the mall? I’m there three days a week.” She suppresses her Lee voice and says, “Sorry, Mum. A mother-daughter day together would be nice. But I can’t face the mall again. Look in the new outdoor store. I found a shirt for Dad there that says, “Forget work. Take a hike.” She didn’t buy the shirt. Lee stole it.

“What color? I’ll find something to match.”

“Blue with brown lettering. Like my eyes.”

“They’re what makes you so special.” Her mother cradles Kai’s face and kisses her between the eyebrows that arch in the same color brown as her hair. “I won’t be long. Maybe we can do something later.”

“I plan on going to the lake. With Stella,” she lies.

“When you get back, then. I love you, Kai.” Her mother leaves her standing at the sink. Through the window she can see the summer blossoms. White daisies, multi-colored snapdragons, the green of the creeping phlox that lost its blooms weeks ago, the iris that needs to be deadheaded. Deadheaded like her fetal twin.

She pushes away the creep of her imagination. She really will go to the lake. By herself. Let the cold water cleanse her of Lee. She wants to be Kai only.

She goes to her room and finds her bathing suit tucked into the back of her underwear drawer. A tankini. Tight enough to flatten her small breasts. When she pulls on the top, she can tell that they’ve grown since last season. They remind her that she’s Kai, female, not intersex. After she hears the car pull out of the driveway, she goes into the bathroom with the tankini bottoms. She brushes her teeth. When she uses the toilet, she sees her brown pubic hair and is reassured that she’s Kai. Lee is just a name, not some twin she devoured. She needs to swim. Wash away her divided feelings.

She grabs a towel from the linen closet and carries it into her bedroom. The shorts and T-shirt she wore yesterday before she went to work and stole the book about chimeras are mounded like a dreadful beast on the floor where she dropped them. She puts them on over her bathing suit. Outside her bedroom window, she can see the rock garden. She’ll take the path that opens beside it. The woods, not the road to the lake. She puts on her sneakers, grabs the towel, and goes softly down the stairs. She opens the back door that she doesn’t bother to lock.

She passes the pile of boulders that woodchucks live under and remembers how her dad started a fire when he tried to gas them. It would have burned through the woods if he hadn’t dragged two lengths of hose to the holes. For a while after that, he’d get up at dawn and sit at the edge of the garden with his .22. Last fall when one managed to eat the head of broccoli just ready to pick, he gave up and hired someone to build a fence.

“Good fences make good neighbors,” Kai thinks. She likes the Frost poem about woods better. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” The lines echo through her as she moves deeper along the path. The woods aren’t dark this morning. Sunlight dapples on what’s left of the dead blossoms on the mountain laurel. The path is squishy from last week’s rain. Everything smells of pine and mossy soil. Except for a woodpecker she hears at the top of a half-dead pine, the woods are quiet. She bends to pick a vine of teaberries. The red berries taste of wintergreen. Her mouth feels clean as if she’s been chewing teaberry gum.

When she reaches the road, a passing car shocks her into paying attention to where she’s going. She walks along the road for a half mile then crosses to the lake. The beach isn’t open yet, so she goes to the edge and walks around the fence. On week days, the water teems with children taking swimming lessons. But this Saturday morning it’s empty. She drops her towel, kicks off her shoes, and strips to her bathing suit.

The water feels cold as she walks into it. When it’s to her hips, she dives and lets it wash over her. Cold, clear, pure. She moves though the water with a strong crawl. She swims in one direction. She’s Kai, promising that she’ll return Chimera to the bookstore. No one will know she’d taken it. She turns to swim in the opposite direction. She’s Lee, thinking about when to steal a pack of teaberry gum.

Back and forth, Kai or Lee until she feels healed. She steps out of the water and sees that a mother has come onto the beach with a child who looks to be a four year old. Boy or girl, she can’t tell.

“Is the water cold?” the child asks.

“It is, but it feels good.”

“Mummy says it’s too early to swim.” The child sets a pail and shovel on the sand. “I’m Stephanie.” So, she’s a girl. “What’s your name?

“Kai Lee. Maybe you can swim later.”

Stephanie elides the name. “Kailey. It sounds nice.”

Kai dries off and pulls on her shorts and T-shirt. When she sits on the towel to put on her sneakers, the girl and her mother have walked to the fence where another mother and child are joining them. Kai waits until they’re settled in the sand. When she crosses the fence, she renames herself. Kailey. A name with no boundary. A they.

 

It’s a good day. Kailey spends the afternoon silently trying the new pronoun. They’re with Georgia, not Stella who they haven’t spoken to in weeks. Not since the end of the school year when they overheard Stella in the girl’s bathroom calling them a wannabe athlete. Kailey’s sporty, but not a competitive athlete. Today, they stay with Georgia and bike—slowly—to the ice cream stand then stop at the lake on their way home. They join a group of friends who are playing sand volleyball. The little girl from the morning—Stephanie—has been crawling through the shallow water, pretending to swim. When she gets out, she sees Kailey in the volleyball game and yells, “Hi, Kailey.”

“Kailey?” says Georgia as she misses the volleyball that she should have easily returned. “What’s that about?”

Kailey picks up the ball and throws it to the other team. “I saw her this morning. She misheard my name.”

The serve is out of bounds. Before she returns it for a second serve, Georgia says, “Remember when Emily Sweet decided to become Emma Lee? It’s confusing when you have to write a first and a middle name. I like Kailey. You should keep it. Integrate your two names.”

“Stop talking. This is a game,” Connie yells from the other side of the court. She’s waiting to serve.

Georgia throws the ball over the net. Connie serves and Kailey slams it back for the win. Two teams. Two names. She’ll forget integration and the awkward pronoun. She’ll stay Kai Lee.

 

Kai stayed at the lake too long for a mother-daughter afternoon. Her parents have gone to dinner with friends, and Georgia is planning to hang out at the mall with Stella and Emily. She’s still not talking to Stella, and she doesn’t want to be near someone who renamed herself Emma Lee. She can’t face her Lee personality or a Saturday night at the mall.

She nukes a packet of popcorn, pours it into a bowl, and tops it with butter that she melted on the stove. She carries it into the living room and positions herself on the sofa in front of the television. When she presses the remote, Jeopardy comes on. Two of tonight’s contestants are evenly matched. A woman who wears a sleeveless top that shows off a fern tattoo on muscular arms. She’s aggressive but strategic. She’s barely ahead of a man with a beard and gray hair pulled into a ponytail. He looks like an aging hippie. He’s a risk-taker, not strategic, ready to buzz in even if he doesn’t know the answer. The third contestant is in negative territory. She’s small and wears a flowered dress with a Peter Pan collar that makes her look more like a child than the elderly woman her face announces. She comes alive when she buzzes in on a literature question about a novel that begins, “Call me Ishmael.”

“What is Moby-Dick?” she says, so she’s out of the hole.

Kai smiles when she remembers a cartoon that reads “Call me, Ishmael.” The comma prompts the cartoon figure to pick up a telephone. She takes a handful of popcorn and chews as she tries to beat the contestants’ buzzers. No one is listening so she doesn’t phrase her answers as a question. Doesn’t even interrupt her eating to say them out loud. Sylvia Plath. The Red Six. French and English for a question about Montreal’s languages.

Hippie Man gets the last Double Jeopardy question. He risks half his score so he’ll be unbeatable in Final Jeopardy. Kai feels Lee emerge at a question about the conjoined twins Chang and Eng. There was a brief section about them in Chimera. They were called Siamese twins because they were from Siam. Hippie Man guesses China. Siam is not China, it’s Thailand.

It’s dark outside, so Kai accepts Lee. He stands for Final Jeopardy. The question is about a telescope named Leviathan. Leviathans. A whale and a telescope. Is Jeopardy being playful? Lee has no idea who owned the telescope. Neither do the contestants. Muscular Woman and Hippie Man bet too much. The elderly woman, who bet nothing, is the surprise winner and Lee learns that William Parsons of Birr, Ireland, owned the nineteenth-century’s largest telescope.

He turns off the television and searches the bookcase to find something to read. When he takes out a copy of something called Never Let Me Go, he notices Kai’s baby book resting next to it. Pink. Did their parents know their baby would be a girl or did they buy the book after Kai was born? Or was it a gift?

He puts down Never Let Me Go and carries the baby book to the sofa. It’s a record of Kai’s milestones. First steps. First words. First day of school. Something is tucked into its cover. An ultrasound photo. It looks like the cover of Chimera but without added color. He studies the blur of what should have been him. There’s no clear fetus, but something’s there. Two misshapen spots, one larger than the other. Kai didn’t destroy him. He rises, puts on sneakers, and goes out the door.

Outside, the moon is full, the stars populating the night sky like a million zygotes. Lit by the moon, Lee enters the path that Kai took to the lake. He picks up a stick on the side of the path and strikes at trees as he walks. With every strike, he calls a name. Barbara. Dottie. Mary. Sandra. The morning mall walkers Kai always smiles at. Georgia and Connie, her friends. The friendly little girl Stephanie. Emily who should have kept Emma Lee. Stella who Kai hates.

Who will he start with? Not the old ladies or the little girl. Emily or Stella. He stops to pick up two small stones. Whichever one hits a tree. He looks at the sky. Stars, Stella. He cocks his arm and aims at a pine tree that rises behind the woodchuck cave. It misses. He takes the second rock. As he throws, he says, “You should have kept Emma Lee. Been like me.”

The rock hits. He’s satisfied. Almost. He steps off the path to the woodchuck cave, wishing he had one of his father’s gas bombs. Kai is gone. She tried to devour him, to excrete him into the dark womb. But now he’s risen. He’ll start with the woodchucks. See how it feels to kill them.