Lucia is fourteen now and both of her want different things.
This is not a metaphor. She has been two people since she was nine and the other one has opinions. The other one wants to go to the party. The one writing this — the one who holds the pen, who does the homework, who faces forward — does not.
"You never let me," says the other one.
"I let you swim."
"Swimming is not a party."
"Swimming is better than a party. At a party you have to talk to Mateus Ferreira."
"Mateus Ferreira is fifteen now and has a different haircut."
"Mateus Ferreira's haircut is not the point."
From the outside, the argument looks like a girl on her bed staring at a dress she has laid out as if it were a chess opponent.
The blue dress with the white planets. She hasn't worn it since the day she found herself on the sofa. The other one loves it. The one writing this finds it too much — too visible, too planetary, too much like a sky worn as clothing.
"If we go," the one writing this says, "we go as both of us. No pretending."
"Agreed."
"And if it's terrible, we leave."
"Agreed."
"That," says the other one, "is exactly the kind of thing a person who is afraid of being two people would say."
Lucia puts on the dress. Both of her look in the mirror. One girl. Not two.
She goes to the party. The music is loud — loud enough to feel in the sternum, the bass arriving before the melody — a Turkish pop song remixed into something that sounds like it's being played in two time signatures simultaneously, which no one else notices and which Lucia finds, for obvious reasons, perfect. She dances, badly, with both sets of feet, which gives her a rhythm no one else in the room has — a syncopation, a stutter-step that the other kids mistake for a style and try to copy and fail, because you cannot copy what you cannot count.
At eleven o'clock, Mateus Ferreira approaches her.
"You dance weird," he says. Not an insult. He says it the way you say the sky is a weird color tonight.
"I know," both of her say, in perfect unison, which sounds to Mateus like one voice with unusual conviction.
But then the other one reaches — reaches for his hand without consulting, without the negotiation they'd agreed on — and the one writing this yanks the hand back so hard that Lucia stumbles, catches herself on a table, and for one visible second the two of them are fighting, the body jerking in two directions like a marionette with disagreeing operators. Mateus stares. Lucia steadies herself.
"Cramp," she says.
The other one says nothing. But Lucia can feel her smiling inside the shared ribs, the way someone is felt grinning in the dark.
She walks home at midnight. The other one is quiet. Not asleep — satisfied, which is different and rarer. The streets of Lisbon are wet. The reflections in the puddles show one girl walking, and then — for one step, in one puddle — two.
She doesn't look down. She has learned not to look.
But halfway home, the other one laughs. Not Lucia's laugh. This laugh is lower. Slower. It starts in the belly and takes its time arriving, and when it reaches the air it sounds like someone who has never once asked permission for anything. It sounds like a woman, not a girl. It sounds like the person Lucia will become if she lets her.
Lucia stops walking. The laugh fades. The street is quiet. But the sound stays in her ribs, vibrating, like a tuning fork struck against a future she has not yet agreed to.