Whitefern (Audrina 2)

Thou shalt not call Haylee “Kaylee,” or vice versa.

Thou shalt not buy one a gift that you do not buy the other.

Thou shalt not take one somewhere and not the other.

Thou shalt not kiss one without kissing the other.

Thou shalt not hug or hold the hand of one without hugging or holding the hand of the other.

Thou shalt not say good morning or good night to one without saying it to the other.

Thou shalt not ask one a question you do not ask the other.

Thou shalt not introduce one to someone without introducing the other.

Thou shalt not tell one a story without telling it to the other.

Thou shalt not smile at one without smiling at the other.

Because of all the rules, I often thought our house was more of a laboratory than a home. I think Daddy did, too. Even Haylee admitted to feeling as if we were under observation in a glass bubble while strange and new experimentation on bringing up identical twins was being conducted. Many of Mother and Daddy’s friends often looked as if they believed that, too. I once heard someone whisper that maybe Mother was giving reports to a special government agency. I know that, like me, Haylee felt this all made us seem strange to anyone who witnessed our upbringing. There were other twins in our community, even on our street, but they were not identical, and they seemed no different from kids who had no twins. They were permitted to wear different clothes and do different things, and their mothers weren’t so uptight about potentially devastating personality complexes.

But our mother would point or nod at them and say, “Look. Look how competitive their parents have made them. They enjoy making each other feel bad. You’ll never do that,” she would add with a confident smile. “You will always consider each other’s feelings first.”

She had no idea about what was coming, crawling along on the tails of shadows toward our home and our family as we grew older.