Our helicopter was early, but the jet is late.

Father paces the dusty landing strip and places increasingly irritated business calls, glowering and rubbing his left nostril as he rattles instructions into the phone. He rolls a plastic baggie of cocaine between his knuckles absently, like a half-hearted magic trick.

From a grassy vista near where the jet should be, Chloe catches my eye and smiles serenely. She didn’t see the coke, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have known what it was. Her blowout is bouncy, her skin still tanned from Saint-Tropez. She doesn’t realize it, but the cashmere sweater draped over her shoulders belongs to her ex-boyfriend. On her left wrist, a diamond tennis bracelet identical to the one dangling from mine glints in the sunlight as she beckons to me.

She asks if I’m going to wear a shawl to the White House, and I tell her I hadn’t planned to.

We squint into the sky then, parsing the clouds for contrails, but I can’t shake her question. Now that she’s mentioned it, exposed shoulder blades at dinner seem fraught with political undertones. A shudder passes through me as I glance back at Father, still pacing. 

“Why? Do you think he’ll be angry if I don’t?”

“Of course not! He’ll love whatever you wear. I just want to match. You know people like when we match.”

As if to prove a point, she raises her diamonded wrist. A gift from our late mother, but she doesn’t realize that either.

#

On our flight to Washington, Chloe is gassy from drinking champagne too fast.

She belches primly, out of the corner of her mouth. Presses her flushed face against the jet’s window. The oily crescent her forehead leaves on the glass reminds me of a frown.

She got like this at her ex’s spring formal last year, just after her overdose. He and his buddy combined their efforts by asking us out in the same letter, addressed to Chloe and sealed with two elaborate family crests. Would you and your twin do us the honor? We’d always been homeschooled, but Father’s assistants surprised us by agreeing it was important for Chloe to experience things like prom. They sent us to Prague with a light security detail of two women, both former Mossad and still passable as students, who regarded us dispassionately as we chugged Czech liqueur that stained our teeth plum.

I remember Chloe flapping her arms and wiggling to Europop on the dance floor. The intense, almost painful, wave of gratitude as I realized her moves were designed to make me laugh, never mind what her boyfriend thought. Feeling silly and greedy, more like a normal teenage girl than a kidnapping target. The clip-clop of our high heels on the stone floor, the pungent blend of sweat and cologne as my date pulled me in to tell me that I was nothing like he’d imagined; I was fun.

These memories are among my most precious, even though they occasionally blur together with what came before (Chloe and the empty bottles, amid sour puddles of vomit). I’m not sure how I still have them.

Abruptly, Chloe taps my arm.

She’s spotted a dying fly on the narrow lip of her window.

“Not for this,” I whisper.

It’s lying on its back, miniscule legs bicycling the air slowly and gossamer wings crumpled.

Parroting our biology tutor, I tell her flies only live a few weeks anyway, and it is time. But hearing this only makes her tapping more urgent, so I produce a pill and press it into the soft flesh of her palm.

“He must have flown in before takeoff,” she tells me. “He got trapped. He was dying.”

I brush the fly’s body onto the velvet floor of the jet, out of sight, as she closes her eyes and pops the pill.

When she finally opens them, she’s grinning broadly again. She gulps back the rest of her champagne, and I feel Father’s approving eyes on us from the front of the cabin.

#

At dinner, I regret not wearing a shawl. My stylist packed a black sheath dress—plain, so as not to overpower Chloe, who is resplendent in a gold evening gown as the guest of honor—but didn’t predict the White House staff blasting the air conditioning quite so excessively.

Shivering, I pick around the scallops on my antique china, wondering if they’re ethical to eat, while Chloe happily skewers four at once.

Father is barely eating and keeps referring to our host as Mr. President, which tells me that despite his bravado in the limo, he’s nervous about the pitch. “I could buy him,” he’d announced as we coasted down Pennsylvania Avenue, and after—because I must have looked skeptical—he made a show of leaning across the armrest and pretending to slip a pill into my drink, to remind me who was in charge.

Thanks to that ride, I’m a nervous wreck now. Distrustful of my own mind, too frightened of what he might have plundered to drink anything or look at anyone’s face but Chloe’s, which doesn’t count because it’s just a rosier reflection of my own.

To distract myself, I focus on the president’s voice. It’s better suited for stadiums than dinner parties. I hear him tell Chloe she may not be the youngest billionaire he’s met, but she’s the prettiest.

His hands carve a lamb medallion roughly. His cufflinks are red, like blood clots, and he’s not wearing his wedding band.

The First Lady says, “She’s a marvel.”

“She is,” Father agrees. “But Chloe, you have something in your teeth. Why don’t you run to the bathroom and freshen up.”

When she’s gone, another voice—the president’s chief of staff, I assume—asks Father to talk them through it again.

“It’s fast acting. Blocks protein synthesis in the brain. And targeted to a level you wouldn’t believe, Mr. President. That was the hardest part to figure out.”

Father pauses, slurps his wine loudly, beginning to relax.

“But it turns out, the answer was beautifully simple. When the subject recalls the memory, the relevant neural circuit lights right up. Like a big neon sign pointing to it. The inhibitor latches onto those cells. All Chloe has to do is describe what happened, and voila. Like it never formed. We delete every bad memory in real time. She only has happy ones. She only knows America to be a safe, beautiful place.”

Someone says, “Hear, hear!”

“Imagine,” Father continues, “every schoolkid learning their history the right way. With the right memories. Voters who remember the right parts of your legacy and none of the fake coverage.”

“And what about her?” the First Lady asks. I catch the glint of a silver knife she’s pointing in my direction.

“Ah!” Father bares his teeth at me, an attempt at a paternal smile. “This is the sad twin. We thought Chloe should have someone to describe her bad memories to. Someone inside the family, to avoid the legal hassle. Plus, it’s a fascinating study in nature versus nurture, as they’re so similar genetically. And she’s great at administering it.”

The president tells his wife that, basically, I’m a nurse. It’s clear he wants to get back to talking about his voting base.

“Not quite.” Gaining momentum in his pitch, Father doesn’t bother with honorifics now. “With Chloe, getting rid of all the painful memories has turned her into this beautiful, trusting girl. So much like her mother in spirit. A living testament to Abigail’s legacy, really, because she remembers the best parts of her, unadulterated. But that trusting nature also makes her vulnerable. You know how it is with boys their age. Her twin looks out for her.”

My hands start shaking. The face of the man from the absinthe bar in Manhattan, when we were fourteen, flashes through my mind unprompted.

“Plus,” Father says, “We’ve wiped positive core memories that would’ve made this one more trusting. You can’t overdo it, or she goes catatonic. We keep just enough good memories to avoid that, but otherwise, you can think of her brain as an external hard drive for storing all the painful ones Chloe forgets. Which makes her hypervigilant on Chloe’s behalf. Always on edge, senses danger a mile away.”

“How fabulous!”

“Like a bodyguard!”

“Can it be militarized?”

I excuse myself from the table.

#

When I enter the restroom, Chloe is examining her gums in the Florentine mirror above the sink. Next to it, a presidential portrait sparkles in its gilded frame. I can see currents of gold leaf running through the brushstrokes of the president’s blonde hair. Despite the glitz, the artist has managed to capture a dreaminess in his expression, like he’s gazing into the country’s future and pleased with how we fit into it.

Chloe flashes me her toothy grin and tells me she’s thinking of adding Georgetown to our college list.

“Imagine taking political science classes there. Wouldn’t it be chic?”

I nod, but the thought of attending college secretly terrifies me. The crowded lecture halls, the lack of anonymity, the campus sexual assault statistics. I don’t understand why we can’t just continue with private tutors and pursue online degrees from the safety of our bedrooms. I tell myself Chloe would agree, if only she could remember that news story about the fraternity hazing ritual gone wrong.

“Maybe we can do a tour tomorrow,” she says. “And shopping after!”

I run warm water over my hands to try to stop their shaking.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Chlo,” I say over the water, “do you ever think our personalities aren’t what they were supposed to be?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, what if I wasn’t supposed to be so anxious? And you weren’t supposed to be so cheerful?”

“What else would we be?”

I’m not sure.

Chloe helps me turn the faucet’s gold-flaked crystal knob to the left, gently. She plucks a hand towel from its mounted ring and offers it to me.

“It’s like I’ve said before,” she says. “I think all personalities are made of the things we remember happening to us. Mixed in with a little of whatever’s underneath.”

She fluffs her hair, does a spin, and says it doesn’t matter what I’m supposed to be. She loves me the way I am.

#

In the hall outside, Father’s head of security greets us with a once-over and a clenched jaw. His name is George. From the way he squints at the door, I sense he is suspicious of our activities behind it. Restrooms are one of the few private spaces in our lives, which makes them a blind spot in Father’s experiment and the setting for some of our most pivotal shared memories. Dissecting tabloid articles about our rumored half siblings from neighboring stalls. Fashioning makeshift pads after we started our first periods. The night of the overdose, sticking my fingers down Chloe’s throat and whispering prayers to the bathroom skylight.

George asks if everything is okay, and we give him simultaneous thumbs up.

Sometimes I like to pretend he doesn’t know about the forgetting pill. In the early days after Father developed it, when he was still just a bodyguard, he was charged with bringing Chloe and me to the marathon “therapy” sessions where we spent weeks recounting our life stories in excruciating detail, pausing only when the man pretending to be our therapist ordered us to take a dose. After, we’d stagger out of the room with hoarse throats and eyes like wounds. “Have I been crying?” Chloe would ask, mystified, and George would say that he didn’t know, that he used to cry without realizing it after his second tour in the Middle East, that maybe this was the same, and that grief was a funny thing.

But George is shrewd. As he escorts us down the hall, listening to Chloe chatter about the White House decor, his eyes are restless. I imagine his mind as a room-spanning, medieval tapestry of floor plans, exit routes, and shooting stances. His job requires him to notice details others overlook, and Father pays him so well for it that I suspect he doesn’t mind setting aside moral qualms about the details he notices.

Ultimately, I don’t have anyone besides Chloe. We are the only ones who can save ourselves from the curated labyrinth of our existence. Yet this feels impossible when I am desperate to find an exit, any exit, while she is conditioned to blithely skip ahead straight into the maze’s monstrous heart.

#

When Chloe and I return to the dining room, everyone is talking over themselves about the prospect of turning us into spies. They barely notice as we take our seats at the table.

“If the mission was compromised, they could just take a pill et voilà!”

“You couldn’t torture it out of them!”

“We actually developed it with espionage applications in mind,” Father says, which is a lie. He doesn’t know the first thing about espionage, but as the second richest man on the planet, he’s used to being treated as an authority on all matters. Sure enough, the other guests fall into an awed silence as he launches into a speech about how this could revolutionize covert operations.

I try to catch Chloe’s eye during this speech, but she is too busy thanking the waiters as they clear our plates for dessert. I wish I could tell what she was thinking.

#

In the Rose Garden after dinner, the men stroll with hands clasped seriously behind their backs. Their conversation turns to arms embargoes and the value of the Indian rupee. Chloe and the president’s wife float around in their gowns with arms linked, deep in some other discussion.

The sun has sunk below the horizon. In the twilight, I can’t make out the thorns on the rosebushes.

Eventually, Chloe drifts to my side. We stand together for a long time, surveying the lamplit flowers in silence, which is unlike her. She is hovering dangerously close to the rosebushes. I worry she might prick herself and am about to suggest we head inside when she breaks the silence.

“The First Lady was asking about Mom’s legacy.”

“Why?”

“I guess they’re wanting to craft this, like, perfect image for the elections. She said they’ve hired these analyst guys from Harvard to separate everything their administration has done into good memories or bad ones. And she wanted to make sure it worked for me.”

“What did you say?”

She shrugs. “I told her the truth.”

“You—what? Not about the overdose, though. Right?”

That night in the bathroom, after her ragged breathing finally leveled and her eyes fluttered open, I cried with happiness. Then, Chloe and I told each other everything we knew about the forgetting pill. Filling in the blanks, like that parable about blind men encountering an elephant: To one man, it’s an innocuous wall. To the other, a snake.

“It’s the best feeling in the world,” she’d said. “Nothing else comes close. Why wouldn’t you want him to cure people with it?”

“But it doesn’t work,” I’d whispered back. “Clearly. You almost just died. A happy person wouldn’t do that.”

“It was an accident. I can explain it to him.”

“No! He can’t know about this. If he finds out, what if he cancels the experiment? What would he do with me then? He already hurts me, remember?”

Our conversation descended into a frustrating orbit, each revolution landing us in the same place we’d begun. As much as she trusted me, Chloe couldn’t comprehend the abuse I’d been subject to, and right under her nose. She clucked sympathetically as I spoke, but at the same time, her head shook violently, as if the part of her mind she’d just flooded with the pill was railing against the tattered vestiges from before the experiment.

“I’m sorry,” she says now, but breezily, as if apologizing for something minor and totally beyond her control. Gum stuck to the sole of a shoe, ants invading a picnic basket. “I just didn’t want to lie. But I made her promise not to tell Father, obviously. Don’t worry!”

“What did you say, exactly?”

“It’s not a big deal, she isn’t—”

“Chloe,” I say, and I’m begging now. “Please. Please tell me.”

“I just said, even my good memories of Mom hurt too much after she passed. And I went overboard trying to make myself forget. And now I don’t have any at all. I just copy the nice things other people say about her.”

Across the gardens, the First Lady is whispering something in the president’s ear.

We fall into silence again, and I know Chloe is thinking hard, casting about for any recollection of our mother. The perennial optimist, I know she thinks she’ll find a trace of her someday, stowed in a crevasse of some overlooked neural circuit. I squeeze her hand. Think to myself, it’s over now. I can’t hate Chloe for confessing about the overdose, for not stopping to consider the consequences of it. Like me, she didn’t choose to be this way.

Fireflies blink in and out of sight against the darkness.

I reflect that this is a special evening for them too. They’re only adults for two months, tops, so each evening is precious. “They’ll all be gone soon.”

I didn’t mean to say the last part aloud, and impulsively, I apologize and reach for the pills in my clutch.

Chloe catches my wrist midair.

“Let’s not,” she says, and for a moment, I think I detect a shadow of melancholy pass over her smile, deepening it. A flicker, and then it’s gone. “Just this once. It’s kind of beautiful.”