Hidden

Hidden 4

“You both are twins.”

Bianca and I looked at each other.

                “No way. We never noticed. You know, we look alike, we have the same birthday. Who would have thought that we were twins?”

                Mom sat there, apparently surprised at how we didn’t seem to understand.

                “You know the laws,” she said slowly. I blinked. Then I began to rattle off all the laws that came to my mind.

“Of course we do. The children of the house have to split the given food evenly, parents must work from 7 AM to 7 PM, everyone has to get up by 8-“

Our mother looked dumbstruck. She looked at dad. They exchanged a look that I could understand, one that I thought said, I thought we told them. Mom burst into tears, so I turned to dad, whose face was grim, but set.

“Each couple,” he said slowly, “is allowed one child. You both are twins. There are two of you.”

The shock apparently didn’t register in my face, because my father felt the need to repeat himself. 

“One of you,” he paused, looking at our faces to see how worried we were, “is supposed to be dead.”

Bianca and I took one look at each other, and began laughing. Not nervous laughter, but actual, genuine laughter, because surely, we could pretend to be one another? We had practiced for all these years, switching places when we wanted to trick our parents (although they never noticed). We could trick a few government officials, that was not a problem. There was a solution, and it was simple. We would just pretend to be one person.

Mom and dad exchanged exasperated glances, as if they could read our thoughts. But frankly, I couldn’t see a flaw in the plan; in fact, I looked at it as a challenge.

                “We’ll pretend to be one person. That way, the government thinks that only one of us is alive,” Bianca offered.

                “Wait, do they know we’re twins?”  I asked, troubled. If they knew we were twins and hadn’t seen the dead body of one of us for themselves, they would see right through our plan.

                “No, we kept it a secret from the day you were born,” Mom answered, wiping tears from her eyes.

                “Okay, then it’s settled. Besides, what’s the problem? We only need to do it for one day, if we have an inspection.”

                For the zillionth time, our parents exchanged glances that suggested they knew much, much more than we knew, but didn’t want to scare us.

                “Well, we got a letter the other day,” Dad started nervously, “and the Committee of Education wants you to go to school. Actually, they ordered you to go to school. You start tomorrow.”

                Whatever dad was expecting us to do, it wasn’t this.

                We began happy dancing around the room because for the first time, we were actually going to experience the real world.

*****

Hm, I actually liked this part. It actually moved on with the plot. XD

So yeah, I'm back...there's another chapter of Oarers up as well, if you haven't read that yet. (:

So? Vote? Comment? Throw a rotten egg at me because it was terrible? Fan?

Whadya think? :D