Being a twin sister isn't all it's cracked up to be.
It's not easy having a twin. Someone who looks like you, thinks like you. Someone who can get inside your head, sticky little fingers poking around even though you ask her nicely to stop.
Jean and I are identical but there's something different about Jean. You know it right away. Jean is quiet. She doesn't like to talk to other people. She only talks to me — talks with her eyes, with her mind. I want to talk to other people but Jean won't let me.
Jean wants me to be just like her. Or Jean wants to be just like me. Does it matter? How can it matter when we look exactly the same, the mirror image of a girl, essentially the same effect as if your vision had doubled and one wasn't even there at all?
When we were younger everyone thought it was cute, how alike we looked. Mommy and Daddy smiled at us in our matching dresses, holding hands like tiny porcelain dolls, sweet and inseparable. But it's only cute when you're little. Get a bit older, keep wearing the matching dresses and holding hands, well — people can't help but think of those girls from The Shining.
Jean likes the matching dresses. I don't.
But what I like doesn't matter because Jean always gets her way. When she doesn't, or even thinks she might not, Jean throws tantrums. Not the normal kind of tantrums where you kick and cry and demand whatever thing it is you desire. Jean's tantrums are worse.
They tried to make us normal, though that maybe separating us in school would be a good idea. I could tell from the screams ripping through my skull that it wasn't, but it still took the first week of third grade for the counselors to retrieve us from our different classrooms and send us home to Mommy.
Jean had just...stopped. Stopped everything — eating, drinking, almost blinking — in a form of catatonic protest. She wanted me to do the same. She called out to me from across the school, telling me it was what needed to be done. I covered my ears. I didn't want to hear her, but how can you silence something that's in your head?
I liked my new class. I wanted to make new friends. I tried to keep this hidden from her, cradled it in my mind like something made of delicate glass, but I should've known by then there was no keeping a secret from my sister.
Jean had been furious when the teacher led her down the hall away from me but that was nothing compared to when she looked inside and saw my blossoming hope to become my own person, someone Jean couldn't touch. In my head she screamed and cried and threw tantrums and gripped my throat with her sticky invisible fingers until I gave in and stopped eating too.
It's like being in an echo chamber with your own voice shrieking at you. You know it's not you and yet, somehow, it is.
Mean, vicious little fingers, always digging and poking where they didn't belong. In a place that should've been my own but never had been. Always there, ready at a moment's notice to seize my tongue should I try to speak against her. I grew up learning not to fight. Jean's the stronger twin, she always has been from the moment we slipped out of Mommy, two infants in perfect replica – one screaming, one silent.
You're supposed to love your sister. Aren't you? When I search my heart for that feeling I always come up empty, and yet there's still that phantom cord running between the two of us, a kind of passageway from my mind to hers like the tunnels that ran under ancient asylums.
It hurts to see other girls together, laughing and having fun, talking with more than just the murmur of their minds. The sound reminds me of dry cornstalks in autumn, whispery and somehow ominous.
When we were 13 we began to bleed on the same day, at the same time. I was excited but Jean hated it, hated the thick liquid coming out of us like dark red afterbirth, refused to even acknowledge the fact that we'd become women and so we sat together on the couch in dead silence, Jean stewing in her impotent rage against something she couldn't control.
