Isaac Hanson
Everyone was present, all eleven of us. And all of us were silent. You could almost hear the nervousness as everyone searched their minds, at a loss for ideas and hoping that no one said anything before they did because they might not like the suggestion. Then again, there was also a sense among all of us that we weren't going to like whatever we ended up doing, no matter what it was.
"The tour...," Taylor said quietly from his perch on the edge of the bed. I noted, with more than a hint of jealousy, that he was sitting next to Parker. For some reason, it felt wrong to me that he should be sitting next to someone besides one of us.
"Post-poned. Maybe even cancelled," my father said.
"But..."
"No but's," he said, already knowing what the question was going to be before it was even asked.
"How are you going to explain?" I asked cautiously, knowing that our publicists were not exactly the type of people who encouraged the sharing of such private things as this with the public, nor were we.
"We'll say that Taylor got sick," my father said simply.
"The fans will freak," Jessica pointed out.
"We'll just say that it's nothing too serious. Just something to keep him laid up for a while. Appendicitis or something like that. I'm sure they'll understand," he said.
"Yeah if they don't already know that Taylor had his appendix removed five years ago," I said somewhat sarcastically.
"They don't. They're still stuck on that story of how I flipped over the handles of my bike and broke my arm and all the stuff that goes along with that," Taylor reassured me.
"I bet they don't know the part of it where you turned beet red when Laura Dickenson signed your cast," I said teasingly.
"Let's just not talk about that," he said, turning slightly red at the memory of how the rest of the story went. Parker didn't have that kind of memory with Taylor.
"But how are we going to do this?" my father interrupted. "I mean, I don't know if you guys want to be separated or not. We haven't even asked you yet about what you want to do."
"I don't want to separate," they both said simultaneously.
"Not yet," Parker added, looking as if he was trying to reassure himself that what had just happened wasn't weird while Taylor shuddered at the coincidence.
I wondered what made Taylor want to stay with Parker. Again, I felt a slight jealousy, but I quickly choked it down. After all, they had been in that room together for the whole time my parents had talked to us about what was going on. Maybe they had...bonded. The thought scared me.
"All right. Then that leaves us two options," my father went on. "Oklahoma or New York?"
Both of them looked uneasy about the question. It was plain to see that neither of them wanted to leave his home or his family behind so quickly.
Parker sighed.
"Why don't we try this," he began. "My friend's parents are divorced. They have joint custody, so one parent gets six months out of the year with the kids, the other gets them the other six months. Maybe what we could do is have Taylor stay up here with us until I finish the school year and then I go down there with him in the summer. Then in September or...you, know, whenever, we officially pick where we want to go."
I felt a wave of disagreement wash through my body, and I could see it in the faces of all of my siblings, even Taylor. If Parker and Gina(or was it Tina?) took Taylor until June...That was three months. Three months separated from him. Three months without being a whole family.
With a quiet, horrified fear, I saw my parents glance at each other and start nodding at the idea. Thousands of protest passed through my mind. Things like "we don't even know these people" and "we can't live three whole months without being a whole family" and "we don't even know these people." I must have opened my mouth to say all of them, but I never did say anything. I didn't have the courage. I didn't have the heart.
"Sounds like a plan," my father said, obviously wondering if Parker had just pulled that out of a hat the way he was trying to act like he had, or if he had actually been planning it for as long as he'd known about his twin sibling.
"What do you think, Taylor?"
He cleared his throat. I knew that he only did that when he wasn't sure of himself. Parker didn't know that.
"I think...," his voice wavered slightly, "I think that it...there's not really another choice, is there." It was a statment, not a question.
"If you don't want to...," Parker began sympathetically but looking a little hurt at Taylor's reluctance.
"It's not that," he said, his eyes glimmering the way they do when he lies.
"There are other ways," Parker said, though it was plain to see that he couldn't think of any of them.
"No, it's okay," Taylor said.
"How do all of you feel about this?"
Gina was first to speak, though the question hadn't really been directed toward her.
"It's fine with me," she said.
We all basically shrugged as my mother's glance went from one of us to another. What could we say? Would anything we did say make any difference? It was Taylor's choice, not ours.
Reluctant now, my mother said, "All right then. I guess we're all agreed."
I don't get much e-mail...Humor me :-)
Index
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Three