Mother smiled at her. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t sell one to me.”
“I know it’s cute to dress them alike, but don’t they each want something different?” she pursued.
“I think you should concentrate on serving your customers and not on giving advice about things you wouldn’t know about,” Mother told her, with those sharply pronounced consonants and vowels that could feel like tiny razors in your ears.
It looked as if the poor woman was going to lose her face. It seemed to ripple and drop as she turned and quickly packed up the two matching dresses.
If there was any doubt about whether we’d attract attention with our identical faces and bodies, our identical colorful outfits put that to rest. No other student at Betsy Ross looked as dolled up as we were. In fact, even though it was expensive to attend the private school, some of the older students we saw entering the building were wearing ordinary, everyday, inexpensive clothes. Mother thought they looked a bit sloppy and muttered that she would say something about it.
“Maybe if I get on the school’s board, I’ll make a point of it,” she said. “It wouldn’t hurt them to have a decent dress code.”
Haylee looked at me, obviously realizing that it was going to be more difficult than she had thought for her to choose our clothes after today.
Actually, I wondered why Mother couldn’t clearly see the difference between Haylee and me when she brought us to school that day. I wasn’t going to cry like Daddy had done in kindergarten, but I was certainly very nervous and, at the least, timid about everything I did, whereas Haylee was eager to attract attention, parading a little in front of me, acting like she was some child star.
When our teacher, Mrs. Elliot, greeted us and told us what desks to take, Haylee practically leaped into hers. I lowered myself into my chair the way I would into a hot bath. I was trembling, secretly longing for the security of our own desks back home, the ones with the initials BB carved into them. Right now, it felt more like putting on someone else’s clothes, someone else’s shoes. I looked at Haylee. She was obviously not suffering a moment of anxiety. She looked as pleased as what Mother called “a bee drowning in pollen.” Mother stood in the doorway of our classroom for a few moments, watching us.
Other students took their seats with the assurance that comes from doing something often. I envied how far ahead of me they were in most ways, despite what Mother thought about us. I told myself that I would willingly give up being smarter if I could be more self-confident. There were fifteen students in our third-grade class. Five were boys. These other students knew one another from attending first and second grades together. Just about everyone was watching us. Haylee looked back at as many of them as she could, challenging them with her smile. She was acting as if she really was the prettiest girl in the class.
“I’ve seen twins,” a boy with short sweet-potato-colored hair leaned over to tell Haylee, “but you’re really, really twins.” He was on her other side. He had a mischievous smile and eyes the color of fresh grass.
“Yes. We’re perfect twins. Monozygotic twins develop from a single egg-and-sperm combination,” Haylee recited, with an air of superiority.
“Mono what?”
“Monozygotic. It’s DNA. Don’t you know what DNA is?”
“No, but I know what D-U-M-B is,” he replied. He kept his smile, looked over at me, and then turned to whisper something to the girl on his other side. They laughed until Mrs. Elliot clapped her hands, and everyone settled down.
I looked back. Mother was still standing in the doorway. Her eyes were small, like Haylee’s could get. Was she angry already? Would she come charging in and tell us to get up to leave, that the class wasn’t good enough for us, just because she saw what had happened between Haylee and the boy sitting next to her? I held my breath.
“Okay,” Mrs. Elliot said.
She looked at least twenty years older than Mother, maybe old enough to be her mother. She had gray strands like ribbons in her hair and wore no makeup, not even lipstick. Our mother looked like a movie star compared with her, I thought. Mrs. Elliot was a little stout, too, and had eyes the color of black spiders. I thought of that because of the thin wrinkles that seemed to explode through her temples like webs when she squinted.
“I’d like to introduce you all to our new students, Kaylee and Haylee Fitzgerald,” she said, nodding at us. “How about a nice welcome?” she added, and the other students clapped, the boy with the mischievous smile clapping the loudest.
Haylee seemed to burst like a flower blossoming in slow motion on one of those television science shows. Mother made us watch those shows in our science class at home. I just smiled slightly. When I looked back, Mother nodded and left to go help the second-grade teacher. I breathed easier.
“Which one is Kaylee, Mrs. Elliot?” the boy asked. “I can’t tell them apart.”
“That’s enough,” Mrs. Elliot said when the class laughed. “Okay, yes. Kaylee, please stand.”
I did.
“Thank you. Haylee?”
Haylee rose more slowly and turned so everyone in the class could have a full view of her. I hadn’t done that.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Elliot said.
“I still can’t tell,” the boy said.
“Why don’t you write that out five hundred times after school today, Stanley Bender?” she said, and he wilted a little.
While Mrs. Elliot passed out a booklet of school rules, however, Stanley Bender, still wearing his mischievous smile, leaned toward Haylee again. “Do you two always wear the same things?”
“Yes,” Haylee said, without skipping a beat. “We do everything together, like a team. But I usually choose what we’ll wear.” She glanced at me and saw how astonished I was at her bold lie.