the second girl

My grandmother told me I came into this world eating.
She meant I had a twin. Had — past tense. The kind that happens before you're born, before you're even complete. They called it Vanishing Twin Syndrome. She called it something else.
She said: she's still in there. Living small. Waiting.
For sixteen years I thought Grandma Estelle was being poetic.
Then I woke up at 2 a.m. the night before my seventeenth birthday and heard a voice that wasn't mine say: finally.
Her name is Rue. She's been with me the whole time.
And she has things to say.