Sisters

(860 words)

When twins are born, people really forget how to act. They’re so caught up in the novelty that they somehow forget to treat the siblings as separate people. This tends to result in the twins reacting one of two ways: they either go with it, and become carbon copies of each other, or they resist so stubbornly that they take being different to an extreme. My sister Erin and I are a good example of the latter.

For gifts at her baby shower, my mother received everything in matched sets. She expected it, of course, but she still talks to this day about how funny it was. Two of the same blanket, the same bear, the same ugly colorblocked overalls. From the start, she tried to combat the fact that the world was going to group us together by never dressing us alike. She always kept our clothes on rotation so that we weren’t wearing the same thing on the same day. If it was for a holiday or a nice picture, we wore different colors, me in purple and Erin in pink. She wanted people to remember that I was not my sister, and she was not me.

All our lives, we worked to be different from each other. We refused to have the same favorite color, Disney princess, or food. She played soccer and I danced. She climbed trees while I dressed dolls. She drew and I read. It didn’t work. We were still “The Twins” to anyone who knew us. Teachers who had us in the same class were especially prone to missing the distinction.

In seventh grade, Erin and I had gym class together in second period. On the morning in question, we didn’t say anything as we passed each other in the locker room, just exchanged a few dirty looks. We’d had a nasty fight that morning over being late to school. Really, it was my fault and we both knew it. I’d been trying to put on eyeshadow before we left, sneakily because makeup was forbidden by our parents until we were thirteen. I wasn’t about to own up to the fact that she was right, though, and I gave her the cold shoulder as we left the locker room and sat in our places on the basketball court.

We’d gotten a new gym teacher about a week earlier, and everyone was excited about him. His name was Mr. Tanner, and he was one of the youngest teachers at our middle school. He played Top 40 songs during the warm-up jog and let us vote on the units we were going to cover every marking period. Needless to say, the whole school was hoping he would stay and continue to be a “cool teacher.”

It was Mr. Tanner who had the attendance clipboard in his hand as the seventh graders sat on the floor, gossiping and discussing how much we loved or hated the newest Justin Bieber song. He made his way across the rows, calling out names. He got past Adam and Bell and worked his way all the way up to the M’s.

“Kyle Miller, Steven McCormick, Rachel McGuire,” he rattled off, looking up to see the raised hands. Then he glanced at his clipboard and called “McGowan squared?”

Our fight forgotten, my sister and I glanced at each other and instantly knew we hated him. She wrinkled her nose and I mustered the grouchiest stare I could throw his way, even with purple glitter smeared across my eyelids, and we raised our hands. Oblivious, he continued checking off names and then turned us loose to pick partners for racquetball.

Erin and I partnered off that day, something we never did, just so we could stand near the net and grumble about it. “Can you believe this?” was the general tone. In a different class we took together, Erin had the teacher once before, and she referred to us as Favorite McGowan (Erin) and Other McGowan (me) during attendance. Even that was better than being squared. If I’m honest, though, I can hardly blame him. It’s just the way people are with twins. We’re “double trouble, peas in a pod.” People tell me to think of a number and tell Erin to guess it. They want to know who’s Mary Kate and who’s Ashley. You either go with it or you fight it, and I’m glad we chose to fight it. After going to separate colleges and finding our own niches, we’re finally treated as differently as we feel. No one’s asked me if I can tell what Erin is thinking in ages, nor have we had a fight over who’s making who late for the bus. People in this world like twins to be caricatures, but being different is so much more interesting. We’re not like Mary Kate and Ashley, or peas in a pod. We’re not like Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap. We’re not like the twins in The Shining, even though I’m sure we’d both love to scare people that way. I’m Meghan, and she’s Erin, and we’ll never be the same. Why would we want to be?