Letters to Robin

Prologue

“What do you think I should do?” Robin whispers as we sit on the floor of our dorm room. It's dim inside, the only light coming from the street sign outside the window and the turtle nightlight Dad gave me when I was six and wanted to be a Marine biologist. Robin has her knees to her chest with one hand wrapped around her legs and the other around a pregnancy test. The surrounding skin on her left wrist is bruised, a deep maroon but If I ask her what happened, she won't tell me. We told each other everything before she met him. Once we were Roe and Ray, the Sinclair twins. We were one word, one unit. Never one without the other. But it doesn't feel like we're on equal footing anymore. Now we're just Robin and Reagan Sinclair. The clock on my phone says two thirty AM, and It's too early for me to feel the usual irritation that comes with the thought.

I should still be sleeping, I have a Latin class in seven hours. I sigh, mimicking her position and bringing my knees to my chest. She woke me up an hour ago with tears streaming down her face, making a mess of the carefully applied makeup she did earlier this morning. "Reagan? Wake up, Reagan,"  she whispered, her voice quivering "Ray, I think I'm pregnant,"

I look out the open window to the vast expanse of jet black, feeling helpless. The light pollution in New York makes it close to impossible to see the stars, and for a second my mind goes back to that trip we took to The Atacama Desert in Chile when we were twelve. The last trip we took as a family. I remember standing there looking up at the sky and feeling so small. The stars were everywhere, scattered like moon dust in the sky as they sparkled and shimmered silver and yellow. The memory is bittersweet because when we got back to Arizona, our parents sat us down and told us about the divorce.

“Reagan? If it's positive, what do you think I should do?”

“I don't feel like my opinion matters,” I don't tell her that she hasn't asked for my opinion in a very long time. I don't tell her that I have no idea what she should do.

“Of course, it matters. Why would you say that?” her voice shakes, and I turn away from the window to look at her again. Her hazel eyes are wide and scared and I wish I had the right words to make her feel better, to somehow fix this for her. This person who's supposed to be the other half of me but I feel like I don't know anymore. Robin and I are the perfect mix of our parents, inheriting our brown skin and curly hair from our father and almost everything else from our mother—elfin features, tall height, petite build— the patch of vitiligo that stains the left side of our forehead and turns piece of our hair white. We're the best thing that came out of their marriage, or so they like to tell us.

Robin and I are perfectly identical. The mirror images of each other, but I've always thought that she wears her beauty better. She's confident in her skin, in her beauty, and the opportunitys that it can bring her and unlike me she never shies away from the attention. She was barely a teenager when she had men wrapped around her fingers and fast forward to seventeen and she's already making a name for herself in the modeling industry.

Robin's always been the more outgoing twin. The one that stands out in a room full of people. A bright light in the darkness. But right now, it looks like all that light has been siphoned out. She's frailer than usual, fragile. He drains her and it's like she's oblivious to it, or worse, she doesn't care. I crawl over to her side of the room and lay my head on her shoulders.

“If it's positive, I'll support you. No matter what decision you make,”