➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 3
So I made dinner and my mom brought home pizza. The communication skills in this house are unparalleled.
➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 3
For quickpixie, The Social Network, Cameron/Tyler, post-graduation.
Warnings for: blatant winklevoss sympathies, institutional misogyny, and incest of the twincest kind.
I haven't even looked this over, so I am incredibly sorry for any and all typos.
If you read this in the light format, it will be so much easier on your eyeballs, I promise. (edit: now edited to include actual light-format link. sorry about that.)
by any other definition
The Social Network, Cameron/Tyler, PG-13, 3680 words
read @ AO3]
Here's a riddle for you.
What's the sound of one hand clapping?
Nothing, right? Because one hand cannot clap. The very definition of clapping itself (according to the Marriem-Webster dictionary, citation not needed, thank you very much) involves the striking of two palms together, therefore two palms are needed. One hand clapping is a fallacy.
Here's another one.
What do you call a man with two ears, two eyes, two arms, and two legs?
You've heard this one before, haven't you?
That's right. Nothing. Because man was not made to just have two ears, two eyes, two arms, and two legs. If you believe the Greeks, men were originally created with four of all these things, and then the gods were frightened by their strength and cut them in half, forever dooming them to wander around, looking for their compliment. Pretty sad, isn't it?
So what, then, is a twin?
You got it. A perfect man, cleaved along the mirror line. One and two. A single heart in two separate ribcages.
-
During their last semester as undergrads, Tyler takes bullshit classes to pass the time. He's done with all his requirements, so technically he could have walked in the fall, but Cameron still needed to take Applied Thermodynamics, Seminar in Environmental Engineering, and some random ass social science, so Tyler opts to stay for one more semester.
He retakes Contemporary Native American Issues to try and get the B he got the first time off his transcript, and he takes this women studies course with Natalie and Rhonda, which is super nice because it's got that one girl in it, the one with the great rack who's always handing out coupons for the Halloween specialty shop in the square, dressed in a black bunny costume with these fantastic garter belts, even in, like, the middle of March. So Women in Russian Society and Culture quickly becomes "Accidental Cleavage 101" to Tyler.
He also takes Number Cryptography with Divya, because Tyler only had to take a lower-division calculus course for his undergrad requirements and he wants to see what all the fuss is about, after four years of listening to Cameron and Divya bitch about, like, differential equations or whatever.
(Tyler's an anthropology major, with a concentration in minority and ethnic studies, so he gets to laugh as Cameron flounders his way through mechanical engineering, and this is after changing his major twice. He's glad Cam didn't stay with international business, Tyler might have wasted away from sheer boredom having to live with that.)
(Cameron changes his mind a lot. Tyler could have told you that was coming.)
-
They graduate magna cum laude in May, side-by-side, Winklevoss-by-Winklevoss, Cameron then Tyler, because C comes before T and that's how it's always been, one brother then the other with nothing and nobody in between.
They go up and they shake hands with Summers, Tyler smirking and Cameron not, and receive their diplomas in return with Summers' most diplomatic poker face, like he doesn't know that both Tyler and Cameron fantasized about slashing his tires for two months straight. Out in the stands, the strategically-located Porc guys blow foghorns in congratulations and whoop like they're at a homecoming game. Each final club has their own commencement tradition, which the faculty and staff just smile at, indulgent, like because it's Harvard, the shit doesn't stink.
When it's over, they ceremoniously flip their tassels to the left, and that's the full culmination of five years' back-breaking hard work.
Congratulations.
"You know what I'm going to do after this?" Divya says when they're filing out, and the Ns pass close enough to the Ws to bring them within whispering range.
"Catch up on twenty-two years of unconsolidated sleep debt?" Cameron offers.
"Got it in one, brother," and then they're outside, throwing their caps into the grey Boston sky. Cameron and Tyler immediately lose which one is theirs, or which one goes higher, but it doesn't matter, because everyone expects the Winklevoss twins to be competitive with everybody but each other.
Their parents and Ben find them afterwards, standing outside the main mall with Divya, Natalie, and Rhonda. Mr. Winklevoss's cheeks are red with the force of his smiling, and their mother's wearing a wide-brim hat, which is the softest baby pink and currently being held against her head with a white-gloved hand.
"With the hat, really. We're not at the Kentucky Derby, Mother," Cameron tells her, crossing the last few steps to her and bending to kiss her cheek.
"We might as well be," goes Tyler, the devil's advocate, and does the same, selectively choosing to ignore that their mother's eyes are red, like she's been wiping them vigorously throughout the ceremony. "With that commencement address, I feel more like a thoroughbred right now than a new Harvard alumni."
"You boys --" Mr. Winklevoss starts, stops, and then has to start again, keeping his voice low so it doesn't shake. "You have to know just how very, very proud of you I am right now."
"Dad," goes Tyler softly.
Their father hugs them both, pounding them both hard on the back like it's the only way he can show just how deep that pride goes, and then turns to Divya and the girls, congratulating them as well and shaking their hands, while Ben repeats the hugging process on the twins. It's a very emotional moment for everyone involved, which is embarrassing and heartwarming in turns.
And then Ben, true to form, says to Natalie and Rhonda, "What's this I hear about you guys dumping my baby brothers?"
"Ben!" goes Cam, aghast, and Divya's face does something spectacular in its attempt to display several forms of what the fuck at once.
To their credit, the girls just exchange looks. Natalie and Rhonda are easier to tell apart than Cameron and Tyler are -- Natalie has a distinct mole to the left of her mouth; even she'll forget it's there sometimes and try to wipe it away when she's checking herself in her pocket mirror. She's been dating Tyler since he finished initiation into the Porc, almost as long as Cameron's been dating Rhonda. Sometimes, when hanging out with their friends, they would swap, just to see if anybody would notice the wrong twin with their arm around the wrong twin.
"It was very amicable," says Rhonda to Ben after a beat. "We're all going different ways now, is all."
This, at least, is true. Tyler never thought to ask Natalie if Facemash upset or insulted her, because she was more than capable of kicking ass without the help of a 6'5", 220lb future Olympian athlete. The two of them dated the Winklevosses because it was easy -- a pair of twins dating a pair of twins had a certain symmetry to it, a solid foursquare foundation, and nobody had to explain the order of preference that comes with having an identical sibling; it's something they all intrinsically just understood. Secondly, Harvard was (by virtue of being a traditional institution and the absolute elite of the American Ivy League) a deeply, irrevocably sexist and racist school, so for lack of a final club of their own, Natalie and Rhonda joined their names up with Tyler and Cameron's early on to enjoy the benefits of being the hot, identical girlfriends of hot, identical Porcellian members.
You guys will probably get everything handed to you, Rhonda had said by way of explanation, unapologetically straightforward. Whereas we have to use you as a stepladder and claw our way up from there. Or come in on the fuck bus, which was our other option.
And now that their usefulness has run out, they're parting ways.
Eventually, a representative from the NAACP scholarship committee comes to steal them away for a photo op, so they say their good-byes. Tyler kisses Natalie's cheek and doesn't actually feel that bad -- he really does wish the best for her.
Maybe he'll go work for her when his Olympian career is over.
-
Almost immediately after that, there's the summer Olympics in Athens, which they didn't qualify to race in, but they play it almost constantly in the Winklevoss residence -- Ben on one end of the sofa, running continual commentary on this uniform or that person's name, and Cameron and Tyler on the other, bent over a scoring spreadsheet on their laptops, which Mr. Winklevoss will occasionally check over their shoulders.
It doesn't matter that they didn't make it this time -- they're practically are the short list for the 2008 run, thanks to the near-win at Henley.
Divya calls them at the end of the month, breathless with excitement. "It's official," he goes, his voice bursting out of the earpiece. Tyler holds it away from his ear. "It's official, I just saw it on the CNN site."
"What's official?" he asks, but then he hears Cameron whoop from the next room -- an excited, unintelligible noise.
"Beijing is officially confirmed as the location for the 2008 summer Olympics," Divya says into Tyler's ear, warm and excited and close, and Cameron bursts into the room to throw his arms around Tyler's neck, shaking him and repeating that exact information.
They've known Divya since they were fourteen -- freshmen in high school who thought they were so clever, cornering the skinny Indian kid in the computer lab to make fun of his name ("Divya, what is that, a girl's name?") and his hobby ("an Indian on a computer, oh god, alert the news! This is brand new information!") and then Divya stood up and said in a perfectly flat, Midwestern accent, "I'm Pakistani, you fucker," before laying Tyler out flat with a solid hook to the jaw.
In detention, they recruited him as their new best friend, and over the course of the next four years, persuaded him to give up the artsy notion of applying to Brown and go to Harvard with them instead. They all got their acceptance letters on the same day.
"Beijing," echoes Tyler, quiet, and he doesn't even try to sort out what he's feeling.
-
Here's a riddle for you.
A twin needs another twin when they're rowing for their school, when their sports careers are on the line, but when you take that away and shelve it for four years and provide no school as distraction, then what does that leave you with?
That's right.
Strangers.
-
Their coach doesn't care where they go or what they do now that they've graduated, so long as they're in the tank every morning, 4am, which is absolutely no hardship at all, because Tyler and Cameron cannot remember a time when they weren't doing low-rate rows at a time so obscenely early that the parties from the night before hadn't even slowed down yet. It's as natural to them now as needing to piss when they first wake up.
The thing is, though, is that Cameron and Tyler have always been told what they can and cannot do, should and should not do, by their coaches, by their parents, by Ben, by their lawyers and college advisors and President Summers and Mark Fucker-berg, and now that they're left with nobody to answer to but each other, there's almost an echo in that empty space where other people's demands used to be.
It begs the question -- Cameron, Tyler, have you really thought about what you're going to do after this?
You've always done these things together, we know. As a combined unit, you are unstoppable, but ... isn't it time to grow apart? Tyler majored in anthropology and Cameron in mechanical engineering, after all: isn't that a sign that you're intending your lives to go very different ways?
What's next?
What's out there, and are you prepared to try it alone?
-
To be honest, they don't even know what that word means.
Here's a hint:
alone | adj, adv
having no one else present, without others, isolated and lonely.
And that's not something Cameron or Tyler have ever been.
-
"You know you boys can stay with your mother and I for as long as you need to," their father tells them, leaning on the kitchen island with his newspaper folded over to the sports page and watching Cameron and Tyler pass a half-gallon of Gatorade back and forth between them.
They both look at him for a beat, so he comes around the island to clasp them by the shoulders. Compared to them, he's relatively short, so it stretches the line of his suit, reaching up that high.
Cameron slides a hand around his back and holds on, saying with feeling, "Thank you, sir."
"But we're not Ben," finishes Tyler. Their big brother, despite being a rude little shit, did a double-major in business and economics at BU and is set to inherit their father's company someday. "We're not going to freeload off of you when we have alternate options."
He looks away. The window over the sink is cluttered with accumulated odds and ends; wishbones and "wish you were here!" engraved cacao nuts from Brazil and the drain stopper for the sink. Beyond that, through the window, the fog haloes around the street lamps, burning spots of pale orange into the scenery.
The next morning, he leaves several apartment listings open in Firefox tabs for Cameron to find.
-
"We could get apartments next to each other," Cameron says, pointing. "Here, look, these two are open."
"What would the point of that be?"
He blinks. "Well, I don't know, I thought -- you're going to think it's stupid."
"You were born stupid. Please, continue to amaze me."
"I just thought you'd maybe appreciate having a space of your own. We can afford it, after all, and we've never lived apart before."
Tyler pretend to think about it. "I suppose, once we win gold in Beijing, we'll come home to start new careers?"
"I guess."
"And find different girlfriends, maybe marry them and move out to find a house to raise children in?"
"That seems to be the generally accepted plan."
Ty looks at him. "And then we'll just become those siblings who only see each other at family get-togethers and awkward holidays, and we'll get so used to being alone that nobody will believe us when we tell them we're actually a twin, because we've forgotten how to act like it." His voice is climbing without his realizing it. "Is that part of the generally accepted plan, Cam?"
"Ty ..."
"No. Let's just get the one apartment, come on."
-
Autumn falls into winter, a slow sickly slide of Canadian weather down into the States, and 2004 becomes 2005. Spring comes without warning, and the twins celebrate their brithday. Around the time summer comes back again with the slap in the face of humidity to match, Facebook hits 1,500,000 members and officially ceases to be college exclusive. It's still invite-only, of course, but now anyone willing to bully a member into giving them an invite can join.
Ty hears about it from one of the water polo guys in the locker room, who's already scheming on how to pick up chicks by promising them an invite e-mail.
Never before has Tyler Winklevoss been tempted to buy a postal worker uniform and a .9mm. Mass-murdering homicidal rage feels a lot like cotton fuzz inside his head.
The ConnectU debacle sticks close like a cloud over everything; an onerous, angry cloud that he'll sometimes forget for short periods of time, until he looks up and finds it hovering there, just in time for a new wave of this kind of bullshit to hit him.
"We're not going to win, are we?" he asks when they get home, collapsing face-first into the couch and stretching his ankles out so that the tabletop fan blows directly onto his feet.
He says it quietly, through lips that feel numb and beestung, but Cam looks over all the same; Tyler can see the movement in his peripheral, knows it as well as he knows the backs of his own hands.
Cam doesn't ask what he means. "Don't you dare --" he starts, teeth gritted.
"More commonly won by a boat-length or two, Cam, I know, but don't pretend you aren't thinking the same thing." He props himself up on his elbows, because this is something he needs to say to his brother face-to-face. "No matter how hard we go at this guy, it's never going to be enough. Someone's always going to point the finger at us and somehow make it our fault that Fuckerberg --" who doesn't even deserve the honor of a real name anymore, just an expletive. "-- stole our idea."
Cam shifts his weight back and forth, the old wood creaking familiarly under his feet. His arms are folded across his chest, making the muscles bunch up.
He doesn't say anything, so Tyler continues, "It'll be our fault. We didn't file something right, or we did it in the wrong order. You chased him that one time, so obviously the shame is on you for that, we did something wrong, we -- we --" he feels his lips quirk, wry. "We were wearing the wrong thing, so we must have been asking for it."
Cam straightens up immediately.
"Don't ever use a rape analogy where other people can hear you, Ty," he says, turning his back. "Or ever, actually."
Tyler just shrugs, settling back down into the sofa cushions and turning his face away from the light with the full intention of catching a cat-nap, but it's too hard. He's too angry, his skin buzzing with it. This has gone on for too long, and he just wants it to be over. They're going to win at the Olympics, but they're going to lose this, and the irony of the boat-length or two metaphor isn't lost on him.
Let your imaginations carry you away with a new project, President Summers had told them, and while it seemed impossible at the time, that's exactly what they've done.
Cameron is going to design boats, both racing boats and recreational, and Tyler is looking at internships in Peru -- a six-week excavation project of a site just a few kilometers south of Macchu Pichu -- but it doesn't feel real, not really, because ConnectU was theirs, their idea, theirs, something they made together, Cameron and Tyler and Divya, and it could have kept them comfortable when their racing careers came to an end, and now every alternative just seems ... just seems like sloppy seconds.
-
The thing is -- Cameron and Tyler will always have to care about how it looks. They're future Olympian athletes, okay, they're going to represent their country on every possible level, so this is important.
They grew up bearing people's expectations and their support in equal measure, and all of that is still there, it's just their shoulders have grown into it and were built to bear the brunt of that weight. Tyler thinks of the future that Cameron outlined for them -- growing apart, living apart, marrying and raising families apart and forever being mistaken for the other at family get togethers -- and he wants to get into that little rowboat of theirs and take off down the channel, never come back.
It's more frightening than the reality that they will compete for a gold medal in the Olympics.
He knows Cameron must be feeling some of it, too, but Cam is ten times more stubborn than Tyler is. It's how you tell the brothers apart, the Winklevoss beauty mark -- Natalie has that mole by the side of her mouth, and Cameron is part donkey.
They're in the kitchen. It's the first really cold day of September, so Tyler's at the sink, washing out the tea kettle while Cameron goes rummaging through the overhead cabinets, looking for their herbal teas, when suddenly, he closes the cabinet door and holds onto the handle.
Then he says, "fuck it," in that way he does when he's about to change everything -- a "international business to mechanical engineering" everything, a "let's gut the friggin' nerd" everything.
He turns around and grabs Tyler by the flat of his ribs, pulling him away from the sink in order to back him up against the counter.
"Let's just stay like this," he goes, his voice as fervent as running water. "Forever, let's just be like this for the rest of our lives. Fuck corporate jobs, fuck Fuckerberg, fuck marriage and living on opposite ends of the country just because it's the gentlemanly thing to do, I want them to bury us together. I want to pull the plug on your heart machine when you pull the plug on mine. I want to know that there's always going to be two of me and there's always going to be two of you. I want that, don't you?"
And Tyler says, "oh thank god," and then, because it's that kind of moment, he grabs his brother's face and falls into him for a kiss.
The counters might be at a nice height for someone average size, but they're fairly low to the ground for Cameron and Tyler's tastes, so it's almost no trouble at all, hiking himself up to sit on the counter and pull Cameron into his space, wanting to suck at his mouth and breathe his air, because it goes C then T, just like it always has, and the Winklevosses are competitive creatures, even with each other.
Tyler wraps his arms around Cameron's neck, and the two of them kiss so deep it's like they're trying to swallows each other's hearts whole, sucking them down to keep them safe within their own ribcages.
Outside, down in the apartment courtyard, a black cat weaves its way amongst the legs of the bench, its tail twitching.
The sun is starting to set.
-
Here's a riddle for you.
Does a twin need a twin like a heart needs blood to beat with? Does a twin need a twin like lungs need air to breathe with? Does a twin need a twin like the Greek man needs his remaining eyes and ears and limbs?
Well.
Sorry, fellas, I don't know.
You're going to have to answer this one on your own.
-
fin
➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 3
For quickpixie, The Social Network, Cameron/Tyler, post-graduation.
Warnings for: blatant winklevoss sympathies, institutional misogyny, and incest of the twincest kind.
I haven't even looked this over, so I am incredibly sorry for any and all typos.
If you read this in the light format, it will be so much easier on your eyeballs, I promise. (edit: now edited to include actual light-format link. sorry about that.)
by any other definition
The Social Network, Cameron/Tyler, PG-13, 3680 words
read @ AO3]
Here's a riddle for you.
What's the sound of one hand clapping?
Nothing, right? Because one hand cannot clap. The very definition of clapping itself (according to the Marriem-Webster dictionary, citation not needed, thank you very much) involves the striking of two palms together, therefore two palms are needed. One hand clapping is a fallacy.
Here's another one.
What do you call a man with two ears, two eyes, two arms, and two legs?
You've heard this one before, haven't you?
That's right. Nothing. Because man was not made to just have two ears, two eyes, two arms, and two legs. If you believe the Greeks, men were originally created with four of all these things, and then the gods were frightened by their strength and cut them in half, forever dooming them to wander around, looking for their compliment. Pretty sad, isn't it?
So what, then, is a twin?
You got it. A perfect man, cleaved along the mirror line. One and two. A single heart in two separate ribcages.
-
During their last semester as undergrads, Tyler takes bullshit classes to pass the time. He's done with all his requirements, so technically he could have walked in the fall, but Cameron still needed to take Applied Thermodynamics, Seminar in Environmental Engineering, and some random ass social science, so Tyler opts to stay for one more semester.
He retakes Contemporary Native American Issues to try and get the B he got the first time off his transcript, and he takes this women studies course with Natalie and Rhonda, which is super nice because it's got that one girl in it, the one with the great rack who's always handing out coupons for the Halloween specialty shop in the square, dressed in a black bunny costume with these fantastic garter belts, even in, like, the middle of March. So Women in Russian Society and Culture quickly becomes "Accidental Cleavage 101" to Tyler.
He also takes Number Cryptography with Divya, because Tyler only had to take a lower-division calculus course for his undergrad requirements and he wants to see what all the fuss is about, after four years of listening to Cameron and Divya bitch about, like, differential equations or whatever.
(Tyler's an anthropology major, with a concentration in minority and ethnic studies, so he gets to laugh as Cameron flounders his way through mechanical engineering, and this is after changing his major twice. He's glad Cam didn't stay with international business, Tyler might have wasted away from sheer boredom having to live with that.)
(Cameron changes his mind a lot. Tyler could have told you that was coming.)
-
They graduate magna cum laude in May, side-by-side, Winklevoss-by-Winklevoss, Cameron then Tyler, because C comes before T and that's how it's always been, one brother then the other with nothing and nobody in between.
They go up and they shake hands with Summers, Tyler smirking and Cameron not, and receive their diplomas in return with Summers' most diplomatic poker face, like he doesn't know that both Tyler and Cameron fantasized about slashing his tires for two months straight. Out in the stands, the strategically-located Porc guys blow foghorns in congratulations and whoop like they're at a homecoming game. Each final club has their own commencement tradition, which the faculty and staff just smile at, indulgent, like because it's Harvard, the shit doesn't stink.
When it's over, they ceremoniously flip their tassels to the left, and that's the full culmination of five years' back-breaking hard work.
Congratulations.
"You know what I'm going to do after this?" Divya says when they're filing out, and the Ns pass close enough to the Ws to bring them within whispering range.
"Catch up on twenty-two years of unconsolidated sleep debt?" Cameron offers.
"Got it in one, brother," and then they're outside, throwing their caps into the grey Boston sky. Cameron and Tyler immediately lose which one is theirs, or which one goes higher, but it doesn't matter, because everyone expects the Winklevoss twins to be competitive with everybody but each other.
Their parents and Ben find them afterwards, standing outside the main mall with Divya, Natalie, and Rhonda. Mr. Winklevoss's cheeks are red with the force of his smiling, and their mother's wearing a wide-brim hat, which is the softest baby pink and currently being held against her head with a white-gloved hand.
"With the hat, really. We're not at the Kentucky Derby, Mother," Cameron tells her, crossing the last few steps to her and bending to kiss her cheek.
"We might as well be," goes Tyler, the devil's advocate, and does the same, selectively choosing to ignore that their mother's eyes are red, like she's been wiping them vigorously throughout the ceremony. "With that commencement address, I feel more like a thoroughbred right now than a new Harvard alumni."
"You boys --" Mr. Winklevoss starts, stops, and then has to start again, keeping his voice low so it doesn't shake. "You have to know just how very, very proud of you I am right now."
"Dad," goes Tyler softly.
Their father hugs them both, pounding them both hard on the back like it's the only way he can show just how deep that pride goes, and then turns to Divya and the girls, congratulating them as well and shaking their hands, while Ben repeats the hugging process on the twins. It's a very emotional moment for everyone involved, which is embarrassing and heartwarming in turns.
And then Ben, true to form, says to Natalie and Rhonda, "What's this I hear about you guys dumping my baby brothers?"
"Ben!" goes Cam, aghast, and Divya's face does something spectacular in its attempt to display several forms of what the fuck at once.
To their credit, the girls just exchange looks. Natalie and Rhonda are easier to tell apart than Cameron and Tyler are -- Natalie has a distinct mole to the left of her mouth; even she'll forget it's there sometimes and try to wipe it away when she's checking herself in her pocket mirror. She's been dating Tyler since he finished initiation into the Porc, almost as long as Cameron's been dating Rhonda. Sometimes, when hanging out with their friends, they would swap, just to see if anybody would notice the wrong twin with their arm around the wrong twin.
"It was very amicable," says Rhonda to Ben after a beat. "We're all going different ways now, is all."
This, at least, is true. Tyler never thought to ask Natalie if Facemash upset or insulted her, because she was more than capable of kicking ass without the help of a 6'5", 220lb future Olympian athlete. The two of them dated the Winklevosses because it was easy -- a pair of twins dating a pair of twins had a certain symmetry to it, a solid foursquare foundation, and nobody had to explain the order of preference that comes with having an identical sibling; it's something they all intrinsically just understood. Secondly, Harvard was (by virtue of being a traditional institution and the absolute elite of the American Ivy League) a deeply, irrevocably sexist and racist school, so for lack of a final club of their own, Natalie and Rhonda joined their names up with Tyler and Cameron's early on to enjoy the benefits of being the hot, identical girlfriends of hot, identical Porcellian members.
You guys will probably get everything handed to you, Rhonda had said by way of explanation, unapologetically straightforward. Whereas we have to use you as a stepladder and claw our way up from there. Or come in on the fuck bus, which was our other option.
And now that their usefulness has run out, they're parting ways.
Eventually, a representative from the NAACP scholarship committee comes to steal them away for a photo op, so they say their good-byes. Tyler kisses Natalie's cheek and doesn't actually feel that bad -- he really does wish the best for her.
Maybe he'll go work for her when his Olympian career is over.
-
Almost immediately after that, there's the summer Olympics in Athens, which they didn't qualify to race in, but they play it almost constantly in the Winklevoss residence -- Ben on one end of the sofa, running continual commentary on this uniform or that person's name, and Cameron and Tyler on the other, bent over a scoring spreadsheet on their laptops, which Mr. Winklevoss will occasionally check over their shoulders.
It doesn't matter that they didn't make it this time -- they're practically are the short list for the 2008 run, thanks to the near-win at Henley.
Divya calls them at the end of the month, breathless with excitement. "It's official," he goes, his voice bursting out of the earpiece. Tyler holds it away from his ear. "It's official, I just saw it on the CNN site."
"What's official?" he asks, but then he hears Cameron whoop from the next room -- an excited, unintelligible noise.
"Beijing is officially confirmed as the location for the 2008 summer Olympics," Divya says into Tyler's ear, warm and excited and close, and Cameron bursts into the room to throw his arms around Tyler's neck, shaking him and repeating that exact information.
They've known Divya since they were fourteen -- freshmen in high school who thought they were so clever, cornering the skinny Indian kid in the computer lab to make fun of his name ("Divya, what is that, a girl's name?") and his hobby ("an Indian on a computer, oh god, alert the news! This is brand new information!") and then Divya stood up and said in a perfectly flat, Midwestern accent, "I'm Pakistani, you fucker," before laying Tyler out flat with a solid hook to the jaw.
In detention, they recruited him as their new best friend, and over the course of the next four years, persuaded him to give up the artsy notion of applying to Brown and go to Harvard with them instead. They all got their acceptance letters on the same day.
"Beijing," echoes Tyler, quiet, and he doesn't even try to sort out what he's feeling.
-
Here's a riddle for you.
A twin needs another twin when they're rowing for their school, when their sports careers are on the line, but when you take that away and shelve it for four years and provide no school as distraction, then what does that leave you with?
That's right.
Strangers.
-
Their coach doesn't care where they go or what they do now that they've graduated, so long as they're in the tank every morning, 4am, which is absolutely no hardship at all, because Tyler and Cameron cannot remember a time when they weren't doing low-rate rows at a time so obscenely early that the parties from the night before hadn't even slowed down yet. It's as natural to them now as needing to piss when they first wake up.
The thing is, though, is that Cameron and Tyler have always been told what they can and cannot do, should and should not do, by their coaches, by their parents, by Ben, by their lawyers and college advisors and President Summers and Mark Fucker-berg, and now that they're left with nobody to answer to but each other, there's almost an echo in that empty space where other people's demands used to be.
It begs the question -- Cameron, Tyler, have you really thought about what you're going to do after this?
You've always done these things together, we know. As a combined unit, you are unstoppable, but ... isn't it time to grow apart? Tyler majored in anthropology and Cameron in mechanical engineering, after all: isn't that a sign that you're intending your lives to go very different ways?
What's next?
What's out there, and are you prepared to try it alone?
-
To be honest, they don't even know what that word means.
Here's a hint:
alone | adj, adv
having no one else present, without others, isolated and lonely.
And that's not something Cameron or Tyler have ever been.
-
"You know you boys can stay with your mother and I for as long as you need to," their father tells them, leaning on the kitchen island with his newspaper folded over to the sports page and watching Cameron and Tyler pass a half-gallon of Gatorade back and forth between them.
They both look at him for a beat, so he comes around the island to clasp them by the shoulders. Compared to them, he's relatively short, so it stretches the line of his suit, reaching up that high.
Cameron slides a hand around his back and holds on, saying with feeling, "Thank you, sir."
"But we're not Ben," finishes Tyler. Their big brother, despite being a rude little shit, did a double-major in business and economics at BU and is set to inherit their father's company someday. "We're not going to freeload off of you when we have alternate options."
He looks away. The window over the sink is cluttered with accumulated odds and ends; wishbones and "wish you were here!" engraved cacao nuts from Brazil and the drain stopper for the sink. Beyond that, through the window, the fog haloes around the street lamps, burning spots of pale orange into the scenery.
The next morning, he leaves several apartment listings open in Firefox tabs for Cameron to find.
-
"We could get apartments next to each other," Cameron says, pointing. "Here, look, these two are open."
"What would the point of that be?"
He blinks. "Well, I don't know, I thought -- you're going to think it's stupid."
"You were born stupid. Please, continue to amaze me."
"I just thought you'd maybe appreciate having a space of your own. We can afford it, after all, and we've never lived apart before."
Tyler pretend to think about it. "I suppose, once we win gold in Beijing, we'll come home to start new careers?"
"I guess."
"And find different girlfriends, maybe marry them and move out to find a house to raise children in?"
"That seems to be the generally accepted plan."
Ty looks at him. "And then we'll just become those siblings who only see each other at family get-togethers and awkward holidays, and we'll get so used to being alone that nobody will believe us when we tell them we're actually a twin, because we've forgotten how to act like it." His voice is climbing without his realizing it. "Is that part of the generally accepted plan, Cam?"
"Ty ..."
"No. Let's just get the one apartment, come on."
-
Autumn falls into winter, a slow sickly slide of Canadian weather down into the States, and 2004 becomes 2005. Spring comes without warning, and the twins celebrate their brithday. Around the time summer comes back again with the slap in the face of humidity to match, Facebook hits 1,500,000 members and officially ceases to be college exclusive. It's still invite-only, of course, but now anyone willing to bully a member into giving them an invite can join.
Ty hears about it from one of the water polo guys in the locker room, who's already scheming on how to pick up chicks by promising them an invite e-mail.
Never before has Tyler Winklevoss been tempted to buy a postal worker uniform and a .9mm. Mass-murdering homicidal rage feels a lot like cotton fuzz inside his head.
The ConnectU debacle sticks close like a cloud over everything; an onerous, angry cloud that he'll sometimes forget for short periods of time, until he looks up and finds it hovering there, just in time for a new wave of this kind of bullshit to hit him.
"We're not going to win, are we?" he asks when they get home, collapsing face-first into the couch and stretching his ankles out so that the tabletop fan blows directly onto his feet.
He says it quietly, through lips that feel numb and beestung, but Cam looks over all the same; Tyler can see the movement in his peripheral, knows it as well as he knows the backs of his own hands.
Cam doesn't ask what he means. "Don't you dare --" he starts, teeth gritted.
"More commonly won by a boat-length or two, Cam, I know, but don't pretend you aren't thinking the same thing." He props himself up on his elbows, because this is something he needs to say to his brother face-to-face. "No matter how hard we go at this guy, it's never going to be enough. Someone's always going to point the finger at us and somehow make it our fault that Fuckerberg --" who doesn't even deserve the honor of a real name anymore, just an expletive. "-- stole our idea."
Cam shifts his weight back and forth, the old wood creaking familiarly under his feet. His arms are folded across his chest, making the muscles bunch up.
He doesn't say anything, so Tyler continues, "It'll be our fault. We didn't file something right, or we did it in the wrong order. You chased him that one time, so obviously the shame is on you for that, we did something wrong, we -- we --" he feels his lips quirk, wry. "We were wearing the wrong thing, so we must have been asking for it."
Cam straightens up immediately.
"Don't ever use a rape analogy where other people can hear you, Ty," he says, turning his back. "Or ever, actually."
Tyler just shrugs, settling back down into the sofa cushions and turning his face away from the light with the full intention of catching a cat-nap, but it's too hard. He's too angry, his skin buzzing with it. This has gone on for too long, and he just wants it to be over. They're going to win at the Olympics, but they're going to lose this, and the irony of the boat-length or two metaphor isn't lost on him.
Let your imaginations carry you away with a new project, President Summers had told them, and while it seemed impossible at the time, that's exactly what they've done.
Cameron is going to design boats, both racing boats and recreational, and Tyler is looking at internships in Peru -- a six-week excavation project of a site just a few kilometers south of Macchu Pichu -- but it doesn't feel real, not really, because ConnectU was theirs, their idea, theirs, something they made together, Cameron and Tyler and Divya, and it could have kept them comfortable when their racing careers came to an end, and now every alternative just seems ... just seems like sloppy seconds.
-
The thing is -- Cameron and Tyler will always have to care about how it looks. They're future Olympian athletes, okay, they're going to represent their country on every possible level, so this is important.
They grew up bearing people's expectations and their support in equal measure, and all of that is still there, it's just their shoulders have grown into it and were built to bear the brunt of that weight. Tyler thinks of the future that Cameron outlined for them -- growing apart, living apart, marrying and raising families apart and forever being mistaken for the other at family get togethers -- and he wants to get into that little rowboat of theirs and take off down the channel, never come back.
It's more frightening than the reality that they will compete for a gold medal in the Olympics.
He knows Cameron must be feeling some of it, too, but Cam is ten times more stubborn than Tyler is. It's how you tell the brothers apart, the Winklevoss beauty mark -- Natalie has that mole by the side of her mouth, and Cameron is part donkey.
They're in the kitchen. It's the first really cold day of September, so Tyler's at the sink, washing out the tea kettle while Cameron goes rummaging through the overhead cabinets, looking for their herbal teas, when suddenly, he closes the cabinet door and holds onto the handle.
Then he says, "fuck it," in that way he does when he's about to change everything -- a "international business to mechanical engineering" everything, a "let's gut the friggin' nerd" everything.
He turns around and grabs Tyler by the flat of his ribs, pulling him away from the sink in order to back him up against the counter.
"Let's just stay like this," he goes, his voice as fervent as running water. "Forever, let's just be like this for the rest of our lives. Fuck corporate jobs, fuck Fuckerberg, fuck marriage and living on opposite ends of the country just because it's the gentlemanly thing to do, I want them to bury us together. I want to pull the plug on your heart machine when you pull the plug on mine. I want to know that there's always going to be two of me and there's always going to be two of you. I want that, don't you?"
And Tyler says, "oh thank god," and then, because it's that kind of moment, he grabs his brother's face and falls into him for a kiss.
The counters might be at a nice height for someone average size, but they're fairly low to the ground for Cameron and Tyler's tastes, so it's almost no trouble at all, hiking himself up to sit on the counter and pull Cameron into his space, wanting to suck at his mouth and breathe his air, because it goes C then T, just like it always has, and the Winklevosses are competitive creatures, even with each other.
Tyler wraps his arms around Cameron's neck, and the two of them kiss so deep it's like they're trying to swallows each other's hearts whole, sucking them down to keep them safe within their own ribcages.
Outside, down in the apartment courtyard, a black cat weaves its way amongst the legs of the bench, its tail twitching.
The sun is starting to set.
-
Here's a riddle for you.
Does a twin need a twin like a heart needs blood to beat with? Does a twin need a twin like lungs need air to breathe with? Does a twin need a twin like the Greek man needs his remaining eyes and ears and limbs?
Well.
Sorry, fellas, I don't know.
You're going to have to answer this one on your own.
-
fin