I cut a perfect four-inch-by-six-inch rectangle out of the cereal box which I can do without measuring but I measure anyway, and then I cut a perfect four-inch-by-six-inch piece of paper and glue it on top. If I ever went anywhere, I would buy postcards. In movies, you see people on vacation look at a tower of postcards and choose just one, but I would buy them all. Since it is more accurate to say I will never go anywhere though, I make my own.
On this one, I draw trees because that is one of the best things to draw on days when it is raining and therefore green. You could also choose frogs or grass, but frogs’ tongues are pink like most tongues, and grass is boring, both, like the saying, to watch grow and also to draw. But enough shades of green will make a whole forest of trees if you choose the right season （summer） or the right part of the country （the part with evergreens）， and olive and forest layered on top of each other make a green-brown that works fine for trunks, branches, and green days. So that is what I draw on the front of her postcard: oaks, firs, maples, pine trees, pear trees, and one eucalyptus. I am not stupid—this will be an important point to remember—I know there are no real forests where those trees grow together. But it is not a real postcard so it does not matter if it is true.
On the back I write:
Dear One,
Wish you were here.
Which is true.
With two to four minutes to spare until Mama gets home, I leave the closet and slide the postcard, picture side up, under Mab’s bedroom door. It is more accurate to say it is also my bedroom door and also Mirabel’s bedroom door, and it is even more accurate to say it is no one’s bedroom but rather the dining room, which it used to be except now we sleep there. But I am certain that even though it is faceup, Mab will know who it is for.
And I am right because when we go to bed three point seven five hours later, I see it tacked up among the two hundred forty-six other handmade postcards I have sent her already.
Three
When you’re a triplet, every night’s a sleepover. Maybe it’s not like this if you’re rich. Maybe it’s only true if you’re a poor triplet. There’s only one bedroom in our house and it’s Nora’s, not because she wouldn’t gladly surrender it to her daughters but it’s upstairs. And I cannot go up stairs.
Every day after school for a whole week of fifth grade, Mab went into our room and cut roll after roll of gold foil into stars. Soon they covered the beds and the floor and accumulated like snowflakes into piles which grew into dunes. Nora stood in the doorway and frowned at her eldest daughter—was she depressed? was she mad? was this unrealized artistic talent or latent obsession?—but didn’t say anything.
Monday never stops saying anything, everything, whatever’s niggling the inside of her head. Why are star shapes pointy but sky stars round and movie stars skinny, when “pointy,” “round,” and “skinny” are opposites? Why does “foil” mean a sharp metal sword but also a flat metal sheet when “sharp” and “flat” are also opposites? How can “round” be the opposite of both “pointy” and “skinny” when “pointy” and “skinny” do not mean the same thing?
At the end of the week, Mab swapped her scissors for a staple gun and made our ceiling into a sky full of stars. They’ve faded over the years, as if it’s perpetually dawning now, but we sleep beneath them still.
I didn’t say anything that week because it was not a good week for me, and this was before my Voice came. Out there in the rest of the world, the brazen, ignorant, nosy, rude, and clueless come right up to people who use wheelchairs and say things like “What’s wrong with you?” In Bourne, no one says things like that, not because we’re not sometimes brazen, ignorant, nosy, rude, and clueless, but because, at least on this front, we know it’s not that simple. “Nothing” would be a true answer. So would “Many things.” But it would never be a single fill-in-the-blank response. My muscles are spastic except for the ones that are hypotonic. My body is often too rigid though my neck will only sometimes support my head. I have no control over my limbs except for my right arm and hand which are as finely honed as something NASA built.
Plus idioglossia. It comes from the Greek—idio, meaning personal, yours alone in all the world; glossa, meaning tongue. If you’re a doctor, “idioglossia” means speech so unformed or distorted it’s unintelligible. I can’t articulate much more than a single, wide syllable, and even that you probably couldn’t understand. But if you’re a linguist, “idioglossia” means a private language, one developed and understood exclusively by a tiny number of very close speakers. The secret language of twins. It is raised, in our case, to the power of three.