LAUREL WINTER

PERMANENT NATURAL BOY

Nine years old. Brother and sister. More than that. Somehow, on an atomic or
subatomic level, unaffected by the differences in hair color (his was ruddy,
hers streaky blonde) and size (she had two inches and five pounds on him) and
sex, they were identical twins.

At least that's what they felt, and that's what they told everyone. Young
children and dumber adults -- those who didn't understand the difference between
mono- and dizygotic twinning -- even believed them. They certainly acted alike,
thought alike, talked alike.

They didn't have to consult one another, or rely on a psychic bond, to dress
alike. lust dip into the shirt drawer and drag out one of eight identical --
except for distinguishing stains -- red-and-white striped shirts. Faded ieans--
not stonewashed so much as gravel-scraped-- in the appropriate size. Or not. He
sometimes wore hers, belt cinched, dragging at the back of black canvas Keds.
Whatever. Whenever.

Their mother [classic single parent with delinquent ex-spouse) had neither time
nor money to defeat their identical decisions. She'd given up years before. Even
grandparents, faced with the waste of unworn choices, bowed to them with
red-and-white striped shirts, Wrangler jeans. Or, more frequently, small gifts
of money.

They'd heard (overheard) many discussions on the possible causes of their bond.
Their names? Madeleine and Matthew, Maddy and Matt for short. The fact that
their mother used to dress them alike and call them "the twins"? The tiny
apartment that insisted even at the advanced age of nine they share a room? Bunk
beds, one dresser, hardly enough room to spin around.

They were identical twins, all right. An unsplittable atom, an uncuttable
string, alike in every way that mattered.

Such as curiosity.

When the old woman across the street came out feet first -- slowly, no hurry --
on a stretcher, they were hiding in the hedge along her driveway. They saw the
dead hand flop out from under the sheet when the paramedics bumped their load
down the steps. They tried the door after the ambulance putted away, just in
case. If one of them had the idea, the other reached for the doorknob, blended,
tangled together. Years later, neither of them would ever be able to remember an
individual part in the event. They opened the door. They entered the dead
woman's house.

They found the stacks of Harlequin romances, the empty boxes from Domino's
pizza, the dead cat.

It had been arranged on a filthy silk pillow near the fireplace, eyes open a
slit, ribs defined through the tabby fur, legs like sticks. "Poor things" they
said, in the same breath, kneeling down near -- but not touching m the
desiccated corpse. "Poor little thing."

They decided, eyes brimming over, that such a thing would not be allowed to
happen again. They would see to that, looking through windows, spying on the new
occupants of the house, alert for hints of insanity, cruelty, or imminent death.
And then, just to be sure they could get in and remedy any future problems, they
swiped the key to the back garage door from a keyring in the kitchen. Just one
key, not the whole bunch, nothing anyone would notice.

Just one key. Not two halves, not something that could be divided so the two
parts that made them could each carry some. One key. Maddy stuck it in her
pocket. Then they were gone, running through "their" door in the garage. Except
Maddy had to stop and lock it behind her. Matt squeezed through the hedge first,
waited on the other side, hissing for her to hurry.

For a while, they took turns carrying the key. After all, identical pockets,
right ? A professional cleaning crew spent a couple days in the house. The two
of them, watching from the hedge again, wondered which of the many garbage bags
held the cat. Somewhere in there, they got mixed up, each thinking the other had
the key. It went through the wash in Matt's jean pocket.

Actually in Maddy's, for that was one of the days he had worn her ieans. The
next time she put them on, poking her hands down into the pockets to flatten and
smooth them out, the key scraped her skin. That was it, she decided, closing her
fingers around the bit of metal. She was going to be in charge of the key from
now on. It could have fallen out in the wash. Their mother could have found it.

Matt didn't care. As long as one of them had it, he told her, it didn't matter
which one did. By that time, a "For Sale" sign stood in the front yard of the
house across the street. People toured the house under the gushing attention of
a woman in a pukey gold jacket -- and the watchful eyes of two hidden children
in red-and-white shirts.

Sometimes, they didn't hide. They pretended to play jacks or hopscotch
(detestable games) on the sidewalk in front of their apartment building, making
random moves while they scanned the potential purchasers.

"Yuck," they breathed to one another. [Two men wearing business attire and
carrying their own personal copies of The Wall Street Journal.)

"Gross." (A couple with a new baby in a reeking diaper-- by the time they left
the house, a rim of brown was oozing out one leghole.)

"All right." (A family with a kid about their age.)

But none of those people bought the house. Three different sets of potential
buyers had inspected the house land been inspected by them) the day the gold
jacket woman put "Sold" on the sign, so Maddy and Matt didn't know who the buyer
was until the woman started moving in.

She hadn't been anywhere near their first choice, but she was far from the most
hideous of the potential buyers. One woman, no family, no pets that they could
see. "Drat," Maddy whispered. "Now who are we going to protect?" The key felt
dull and heavy in her pocket.

The woman wore bright colors that didn't necessarily go together, but somehow
seemed right. Or almost right. "Maybe she's kind of crazy," Matt said, a hopeful
note in his voice. "Maybe we'll have to keep an eye on her. She looks kind of
weird."

Maddy shrugged. In green sweatpants, a brilliant purple shirt, and yellow
socks-- even glittery shoelaces in her black running shoes-- the woman did look
strange. But not crazy.

They were using the jump-rope disguise that day, standing side by side on their
sidewalk, jumping in tandem, facing in the direction of the house and the woman
and the moving van. The movers were talking about them, they could tell from the
way the men looked over their shoulders and laughed. The woman smiled at them a
few times, in a distracted sort of way, in between directing men with boxes and
chairs and other pieces of furniture.

They had decided, earlier that morning, not to be too friendly right away. So
they didn't smile back, although Maddy felt as if she might like to. She thought
the woman looked interesting, even if you ignored her clothes. For one thing,
her hair was the exact color of butterscotch pudding, pulled into a skinny braid
that dribbled down the back of her purple shirt. For another, she had a really
wide mouth that seemed to naturally fall into at least half a smile. Was her
hair really that color, Maddy wondered, or did she dye it? It would be
interesting to meet a grownup who wanted to have hair that looked like
butterscotch. It was such a delicious color.

She was so intent on the woman that she didn't notice Matt had stopped jumping
until he grabbed her rope and made her trip. "Ow," she said. "Quit it."

"I'm bored," he said. "Let's do something else."

Maddy let him talk her into the park, with the promise that they'd watch again
in the afternoon.

For several weeks, they conducted surveillance. They noticed when the woman rode
her bike off in the mornings -- for work, they assumed -- and when she returned.
They looked in every window of the house. Particularly the window in the back of
the garage.

Through it, they Could see that the woman had no car, that the garage looked
messy but not dirty, that there was a flashlight on the workbench near the door.

The first night they' had planned on inspecting the garage, nothing seemed to go
right. First, their mother stayed up late watching some movie. Maddy fell asleep
waiting for the TV sounds to stop. She was dreaming that they were approaching
the garage when Matt shook her awake. She socked him blindly. "Sorry," she
muttered, when she realized what and when and who. "You scared me."

There was another scare, too, as they eased the front door of the apartment
building open. Someone was crouched in the middle of the street, in spite of the
hour. Matt pulled the door closed again, holding the knob and turning it to
avoid even a click. Then they ran back upstairs, only semi-quietly, back into
their own apartment. They made their way to the living room window on hands and
knees and peered over the sill at the street below.

Although the butterscotch hair was bleached into a neutral color by the street
lights, they recognized the woman. She held a paint brash and a shiny can, and
she was going over the faded yellow lines in the center of the street with a
smooth motion, covering them with new, slick yellow. Crouch, paint, step to the
next line. They watched her until she was out of their view, still painting, and
then they went back to bed.

The next day, they argued about when to try again. Maddy thought they should do
it right away; Matt wanted to wait, to spy some more first, to see what else she
was up to. "She's done painting," Maddy pointed out. "And anyway, she's probably
tired from staying up so late last night. She'll go to bed early tonight."

"Yeah, maybe," said Matt. He looked a little tired himself.

"Scared?" teased Maddy.

He flashed her a dirty look, but he didn't argue anymore.

They pretended they were asleep when their mother came in to kiss them that
night. Maddy heard her whisper, "Good night, love," to Matt, up on the top bunk.
She waited, eyes lightly closed, in the cave created by Matt's bed. Feathery
touch of her mother's fingers on her cheek. "Good night, sweetie." Light kiss.
Blanket adjusted under her chin. Maddy had to fight to keep a smile from
escaping, to stifle a nervous giggle. Then the door closed. They were alone.

Scritch of springs above her as Matt changed positions. "Good night, sweetie,"
he whispered, in a mock falsetto. "Good night, love," she returned, almost
reluctantly. It wasn't really a joke, after all, that their mother loved them.

Matt's legs -- still in jeans -- appeared over the edge of the bunk. He quietly
twisted around and lowered himself to the floor, avoiding the creaky ladder.
Maddy sat up, letting the blanket fall away from her striped shirt. "We'd better
wait a little while," she murmured.

They sat, side by side, on Maddy's bed, listening to the sounds of water running
in the bathroom, the toilet flushing, the muffled tones of the newscaster from
their mother's bedside clock/radio. Then silence.

They waited still, as the silence in their apartment grew until it had
encompassed the building, the street. Nodding to one another in the darkness,
they crept to the door with the silence peculiar to kids in black canvas Keds,
each step quieter than the last, their black shoes invisible, inaudible in the
night.

Maddy stopped in the doorway and slid one hand into a pocket, even though she
knew the key would be there. Then she went on, one step behind her twin, past
furniture that revealed its weariness even to the curtain-muffled street lights.

Outside, they dashed across the street and melted into the hedge. They had never
been in the hedge during the night before. Blackened twigs caught at their
shirts, the skin of their arms, their hair. The woman's house was dark. "Let's
go in now," said Matt, in a voice no louder than a branch reaching for its
neighbor.

Maddy nodded and broke from the hedge, dashing for the deep shadow at the side
of the garage. When Matt joined her, breathing more deeply than the short
distance warranted, they sidled along the garage.

When Maddy reached the end of the wall, she half expected someone to be waiting
for them around the comer, the woman or a psycho killer or something not even
human, made of darkness. "Go on," hissed Matt, poking her in the back. She
stumbled forward, into the empty back yard. "Unlock the door," he said.

She pulled the key from her pocket and inserted it into the dark slit in the
knob.

The key didn't make a sound, and neither did the doorknob. Maddy felt the door
give to her slight pressure. She let the knob move back to its original position
and pushed the door slowly open.

The threshold was the worst part, with the shadowy yard behind them and the dark
garage, open like a mouth, before. They both stood for a moment. Then Matt
reached past her, clutching her arm with his other hand, and grabbed the
flashlight from the workbench.

The pale circle of light made the decision for them. "Someone might see us,"
Maddy gasped, closing the door behind them.

Matt swept the light slowly around, keeping it below the level of the window.
Objects came into existence, disappeared. A bicycle helmet, a muddy garden
trowel, a half-empty bag of potting soil, shiny cans with dribbles of color.
"Stop," said Maddy, when the light traveled past the cans, and illuminated a
pair of snow shoes. "That must be what she was painting the street with."

Matt swung the light back to the cans, then played it on the garage floor,
creating a path to the shelves that held the cans. They stepped over patches of
ancient oil, splotches of brilliant paint.

The cans had hand-lettered labels. Permanent Day-Glow Pink. Permanent White.
Permanent Highway Department Yellow. And a larger can, dented and scratched,
with dried trickles of a clear substance down its sides. That one bore just one
word on its label: Base. "It's just paint," said Matt.

"Then why was she out in the middle of the night ?" asked Maddy. "Let's open one
of them up." She picked up Permanent Day-Glow Pink and gave it a shake.

Matt positioned the flashlight so its beam illuminated a triangle of shelf. He
took a screwdriver from an empty chili can and started prying the lid off the
can Maddy had chosen.

The can had obviously not been opened in a while. "Here," said Maddy. "Let me
try." She grabbed the screwdriver from Matt's hand. With all her strength, she
levered the tip at the edge of the can.

The lid flew off amid a spatter of pink droplets. It hit Matt's cheek with a
liquid plop, clung for a second, and slid down onto his shirt.

Matt let out half a shriek, which he quickly stifled. Maddy caught the lid in
mid-air, before it could clatter to the concrete floor. "Ssshhh," she said,
slapping the lid down on the can, covering the pool of pink.

They stood there, holding their breaths and listening. Silence. Silence. But
then, just as they released the trapped air and let their shoulders drop,
footsteps.

Maddy reached out one finger and hit the button on the flashlight. Her last
sight before the world disappeared was Matt's face, not comic in spite of the
circle of bright pink covering one cheek.

Step. Silence. Step. They reached out to each other and sank into a crouch, not
daring to move in the darkness. Before their eyes had a chance to adjust, the
door from the house opened, letting a rectangle of light spill into the garage.
Maddy saw a hand reach into the garage and flick a switch upward.

Afterward, she could never remember if she, or Matt-- or both of them --had
screamed or if there had been only a dreadful silence as the woman discovered
them.

"What are you doing here?" demanded the woman. "How did you get in?"

The children crouched down further. Matt looked over his shoulder at the woman,
and the woman let out a shriek that could have been the unvoiced half of his
own. "Shit! What have you done?"

She ran toward them on bare feet and grabbed Matt's chin, pulling him into a
standing position. Maddy followed him up. "Shit, shit, shit," said the woman.
"You little idiots."

Tears leaked out of her light brown eyes. She gave Matt's chin a shake and
released it, swiping her arm across her own face.

The tears scared Maddy more than anything. Paint wasn't a tragedy--was it? Matt
looked as if he were about to start crying. He would hate that, she knew. "We
can wash it off," she said, voice wobbling.

"No."

"We'll do it at home then," she said, angry now. "Come on, Matt." She took his
arm and started for the door.

"No," said the woman again, grabbing Matt's other arm, stopping their progress.
"I didn't mean 'no, you can't use my sink.'" She glared at them. "I meant 'no,
it is not possible for you to physically remove that paint.' It's permanent. As
in forever." She dropped Matt's arm.

They just stood there. Matt reached two fingers up to his cheek -slowly. "Hey,"
he said, "it feels okay."

Maddy touched the painted skin of her brother's cheek and felt normal skin.
"What's going on?" she whispered.

The woman gulped in some air. "It's permanent paint," she said. "Doesn't wash
off, no solvent-- it just becomes part of whatever it touches." She, too,
reached out to Matt's cheek.

Matt whipped his head away. "Leave me alone," he said. He and Maddy gave her
their meanest look, the one they'd practiced in the bathroom mirror until they
had the identical furl of eyebrow, clench of jaw.

The woman backed up a step. "Fine," she said. "Did I ask you to break into my
garage and mess with something you had no business with?" She spun around and
headed back toward the door.

Maddy's bravado faltered. What if they couldn't get it off themselves. "Please,"
she said. "You have to help."

For a moment, she wasn't sure if the woman was going to stop. Then she did, her
back stiff beneath its straggle of butterscotch hair. "Please," Matt said.

Washing -- as predicted -- accomplished nothing. Maddy, snooping through an open
cabinet in the bathroom, said, "What about this?" She held out an old jar of
foundation.

"I'm not wearing makeup," Matt said, from his perch on the closed toilet lid.
"No way."

"You'd rather look like a clown?" Maddy asked.

The woman grabbed the jar from her and swabbed a dab on Matt's cheek while they
were arguing. "Hold still or I'll get some in your eye," she told him. She
smeared it around on the pink circle. "Better," she said, sighing, "but still
not good." The pink glowed from beneath the coating of tan. "Besides, I kind of
doubt that makeup would last more than a couple minutes on a boy. You'd need
something a little more. . . ." Her voice trailed off.

Maddy and Matt looked up at her, waiting for the sentence to finish. Instead,
she stood up and ran from the bathroom. "Come on," she yelled from the kitchen.
The door into the garage banged.

When they got out there, she was pouring base into a new shiny can. "Come here,"
she commanded Matt. "Sit in the light." She grabbed his face between her hands
and stared closely at it, paying particular attention to the unpainted cheek.
Then she started dripping colors from vials into the base, stirring with a
dowel. Every once in a while, she held the dowel up next to Matt's cheek,
comparing the glistening painted wood to the color of his skin.

The first few times she did this, she said nothing, just grunted and added some
more color to the mixture. Maddy could hardly breathe. It had to work. Anything
was better than that pink. Finally, the woman judged the match and said,
"Almost."

Maddy jumped up to look. She narrowed her eyes. "Maybe," she said doubtfully.

"Well," snapped the woman, "it's not going to be exact. And it's hard to tell
when the paint is wet and shiny. It won't dry like this."

"It just looks more like a doll's skin," said Maddy, defending her doubts. "Not
like a real person."

The woman tilted her head, considering. "You're right," she said. "What we have
here is Permanent Doll Face. What we need is Permanent Natural Boy. So what
makes a boy different from a doll?"

"Dirt," said Maddy. Matt kicked her. "Sweat."

"Dirt I can manage," said the woman, sending a shower of dust from the edge of a
shelf into the paint. "Sweat you'll have to add yourself." She held up the dowel
near Matt's face again.

It was still slick and shiny, but somehow Maddy could tell it was the right
color -- or as close to right as anyone was going to get. "Yes," she said.

"Close your eyes," the woman told Matt, picking up a small paintbrush. He drew
back a little. "You'd rather go around like you are now?"

"No," he said. He squinched his eyes shut, as much, Maddy guessed, to control a
suspicious glimmer of tears, as because he'd been told to.

The woman dipped the brush into the paint and swirled it around. The paint
glimmered. Maddy felt her insides compress into tight balls. It had to work. It
just had to. The woman stroked the brush over Matt's painted cheek, covering the
Permanent Day-Glow Pink with Permanent Natural Boy. A few tears squeezed out of
Matt's eyes and mingled with the paint. "Quit crying -- I don't know what effect
it will have on the paint."

He stopped, his jaw quivering. The woman finished covering the splotch and stood
back. "You know," she said, "it's not going to match the other cheek perfectly."
And before Matt could say anything, she reached out with the brush and began
painting his other cheek.

Maddy yelped. Matt didn't move. And it did look better when she was done. Except
then the nose didn't match. . . .

In the end, she painted his whole face, even the eyelids. Maddy held his hair
back while his forehead dried. Her face felt numb, as if it had been painted.
Would their mother notice? Would they get in trouble?

When she could let his hair fall against his forehead and look at him from a
little distance, she knew that their mother would not notice. No one would,
except her. Matt ran into the house to look in the bathroom mirror. Maddy
brushed one hand against her eyes.

The woman grabbed her wrist, turned the hand palm upward. "Look," she said.

Bright pink smudged the tips of three fingers. From when she'd caught the lid,
Maddy guessed.

"So what do you want ?" the woman asked, cocking her head toward the cans.
"Day-Glow Pink or Permanent Natural Boy?"

Maddy pointed one of the offended fingers at the newest can of permanent paint.
With the edge of the brush, the woman touched up her fingers, covering the pink
and then stroking down and painting the palm of Maddy's right hand so it would
be uniform. "Do you want me to do the other hand?" she asked. "It's probably not
that big of a deal. Your hands won't always be side by side, not like your
brother's cheeks."

"Can you do my face?" Maddy asked.

The woman hesitated, shook her head. "I don't think that would be a good idea,"
she said. "Your skin color isn't quite the same as your brother's."

Maddy wanted to say, "but we're identical twins," but the words glued themselves
to the roof of her mouth.

Matt bounded into the garage. "Hey, thanks," he said.

The woman nodded soberly. "You're welcome. Now, please --" her voice tightened
"-- stay out of my garage and my paints."

"But where did you get the paints?" Maddy asked. "And how can they last forever?
Who makes them?" Now that the crisis was taken care of, she was consumed with
curiosity.

"It's none of your business," the woman said flatly.

"It is too," said Maddy. She pointed at Matt's face. "How do we know what that
will do to him?"

Matt turned pale beneath his coat of paint. "This won't hurt me, will it?"

The woman hissed something that was probably a swear word. "Okay. It's a special
type of paint. It won't hurt you. You can't buy it in stores. It--"

"Then where do you get it?" Maddy asked again.

"Don't interrupt me," the woman snapped. "I have a friend, an...inventor. He
makes it."

"Why doesn't he sell it in the stores?" Matt asked. "He'd get rich."

"It's complicated," the woman said. "You couldn't make the paints in factories.
And even if you could, would you want just anybody to have access to them?
Vandals? Gang members? Little kids?" She looked pointedly at them.

Maddy flushed. "We're sorry," she muttered. "We didn't know."

"Fine. You didn't know and you still got into trouble. What if you h.ad known?
What if you were the type of people who painted swastikas and swear words on the
windows of a Jewish family? Horrible things that couldn't be scraped off."

Matt opened his mouth again. "Yeah, but --"

"Enough," the woman said. "Just get out of here."

The two of them headed for the door. "Is your hair really that color?" Maddy
blurted out, stopping for a second. "Or did you paint it?"

"I painted it," said the woman. She gave Maddy half a smile.

Matt was gone by now, into the darkness. "I thought so," said Maddy. She walked
through the door, closing it behind her. The key protruded from the knob; Maddy
slipped it into her pocket.

"Hey, Maddy," her brother called quietly from around the comer, "did you get the
key?"

She rested her painted hand over her pocket for a moment. "No," she whispered
back, "she must have taken it."

"Rats. Race you to the house."

They plunged off through the shadows along the hedge, darted across the street.
Maddy touched the door first, with her right hand. Then she opened it, and they
sneaked to their room.

The woman's brief, incomplete explanation was not enough. They still spent time
in the hedges and trees, using secret hand signals and flashing mirror codes.
They still cased the house, peering through the windows, even taking an
occasional instant picture if their morn left the Polaroid camera lying around.

They saw her bike away with an empty backpack and return with one that looked
bulgy and heavy. They saw her painting in the midnight street again. They went
through her garbage and found letters from a man who informed her he was
improving the base and had developed a color called "Permanent Concrete Gray"
that seemed to repel graffiti. There was no return address on the envelopes. At
times, Maddy was tempted to confess that she still had the key, but to do that
she would have had to admit that she'd lied about it before. So they stayed on
the outside, doing plenty of looking in.

She did go back to the garage once, a year later, when Matt had been invited to
a birthday party and she hadn't. That had happened before, but they'd always
wangled an invitation for the other. This time, Matt had informed her, shuffling
his Keds, it was just going to be guys.

The garage looked different in the afternoon, with dusty light filtering through
the window. The woman's bike and helmet were gone. Maddy headed straight for the
paint cans and picked up Permanent Natural Boy. She tilted it back and forth,
guessing how much was left. Quite a bit, she thought.

She set the can on the shelf and compared the palms of her hands. Different, but
not much. Her right hand was no dirtier than her left, but the dirt looked more
integral, more a part of the hand, more that it was supposed to be that way.
Some of the dirt was from her bike, she knew, or from climbing the fence in back
of the apartment, but some of it was painted on. Never-come-offable. Permanent.

She touched the lid of the can with one finger. Then she left it on the shelf,
not exactly where she had found it. She almost left the key, too, but in the end
she put it back in her pocket. That was around the time they stopped wearing the
red-and-white shirts. One of the last seamless, shared decisions.

When they grew up, people never mistook them for identical twins-- or for twins
at all. They always assumed Matt was younger by a year or three. One of his
women friends confided to Maddy that he looked like a little boy who'd forgotten
to wash his face-- or maybe he had, but he hadn't done a very good job. A little
boy who still knew how to cry when he got hurt.

Maddy gave a neutral smile, one she'd practiced alone in the mirror. She rubbed
the palms of her hands together, feeling the sameness beneath the difference.
"Yeah, he's just a big kid," she said. "Aren't we all."