Page 54 of Twice as Twisted

I haven’t been out on the deck since the first day, when I swept the place for cameras, and I’m surprised to see a collection of beer bottles gathered around one of the deck chairs, and a lone bottle sitting on the arm of another.

“Who was out here with you?” I ask, joining Duke at the railing.

“Jane,” he says. “We had a beer after dinner and watched the sunset. Wasn’t much on this side of the house, but the sky was pretty.”

I turn and lean back next to him, counting the beer bottles. I decide he hasn’t had enough that I need to worry about him sitting on the railing like that. The drop isn’t high enough to kill a man, unless he fell at a particularly unfortunate angle, but there are small, twisted evergreens around the deck, and he’d get beaten up pretty badly on the way down.

“Did she get drunk?” I ask, watching him from the corner of my eye.

“A little,” he says, grinning. “She’s so scrawny all it took was one beer.”

“Did she say anything interesting?”

“Nah,” he says, tapping his cigarette. “She doesn’t say much. She just stumbled around on the way inside.”

“Where is she now?”

He takes a drag on his cigarette and blows smoke out into the darkness. “She’s in my room.”

I should have seen that coming, and it pisses me off that I didn’t. At least, I think that’s why I’m pissed.

“Did you fuck her?” I demand.

“No,” he says, giving me look. “Stop asking me that. I told you. I’m not fucking anyone but Mabel.”

“I’ll go put her up,” I say, pushing off the railing. “And get a vape. Those things stink.”

“I wanted to be Robin,” he says, so quietly I almost miss it over my footsteps on the wood.

I stop, my hand on the door.

“Because you were Batman,” he says. “And even when we were… How old? Eight?”

He takes a drag, waiting.

“Seven.”

“Even then I knew I was your sidekick,” he says. “Everyone knew. That’s why no one told me I could be Batman too. We’re twins. We could have worn the same costume.”

“You didn’t want to be Batman.”

“I didn’t even think to ask,” he says. “I knew. Even if no one would have stopped me, I would have known I was a fraud.”

“That’s why you were the Joker.”

“I was the Joker because Dad said Robin was a fag.”

“That’s not true.”

“Trust me, I remember.”

“That’s not why you changed your mind. You were pissed after he said that, and you went and hid in the closet, and I found you. Do you remember what I said?”

He pauses a minute, then uses his middle finger to flick his cigarette butt into the night. It flips end over end, the tip glowing bright before it’s swallowed by the fog. “You said Batman would be fine without Robin,” he says. “But he needed the Joker.”

I cross the deck, wrap my arms around his middle, and pull him backwards off the railing. He twists to throw an arm around my neck and lets me, dropping his feet to the wooden planks.

I steady him on his feet. “Let’s go get our Harley Quinn.”

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