Page 6 of Good Half Gone

“You take Sundays, now you want Saturdays as well?”

“It’s not my fault we go to church, Iris. I just leaned into what Gran made us do.” She was right but I didn’t care. We both used to complain about church all the time. Then all of a sudden, I was the only one complaining. It felt like a betrayal, for her to start liking something we’d hated together.

Later that night, when I was helping Gran make dinner, she asked if I was excited to see the movie. We were moving around each other to get to things, the kitchen a mere sliver of space. I heard the hiss of something in the frying pan, the TV playing in the living room. The commercial was about yogurt, and everyone was dancing.

“We’re going to the mall instead.” I was dismissive as I stood over the sink, rinsing vegetables. Gran leaned over from the stove to stare at me. She was wearing a lavender sweater set underneath a lime-green apron.

“You were born six minutes apart. Not six years, you know… You don’t have to go along with whatever she wants.”

“It’s fine, Gran.” I could hear the exasperation in my own voice. I dumped lettuce into a bowl with a handful of cherry tomatoes, and grabbed the ranch from the fridge.

“Will there be boys?” She held up the spatula as she glared at me, meat popping in oil.

“You look like a neon demon,” I told her.

“Don’t let her out of your sight,” Gran said firmly. “I mean it. I’m not raising her babies.”

I couldn’t voice the irony even if I wanted to—that Gran was referring to the twin who actually went to church. Regardless, if Gran told me not to let her out of my sight, that’s exactly what I’d do.

“What about me, who watches me?”

She rolled her eyes. “You take care of yourself, it’s my favorite thing about you…”

I was so shocked by her words that I froze. What a thing to say, I thought, hands cradling the wooden salad bowl. Gran flipped the patties, oblivious.

On Saturday, I pretended to read a novel on my bed while Piper sat on her knees in front of our mirrored closet doors. There was an array of things around her: brushes and tubes in toddler colors. She slapped at her face with her fingertips, brushed her eyebrows with a wand. The end result was me with a good filter. “Does the cult know you’re not attending service tonight?”

I was eating a Slim Jim, trying to get under her skin for changing our plans and being pretty. It had become a habit of mine to catalog our differences. I was the dull-skinned twin, the late bloomer, the one with a snaggletooth. People’s eyes skimmed over me and landed on Piper. She’d been unfairly favored in utero. Though we both had blue eyes that curved up at the corners and our coloring was blond on olive, I looked sloppily put together, like a genetic afterthought. Piper looked like a designer doll.

“I hate it when you stare like that.” She cast a glance at my reflection in the mirror as she reached for a section of hair.The curling process had begun.

“That’s why I do it.” I was down to the last inch of my Slim Jim and sad about it.

“You’re just like Dad,” she said.

“You’re just like Mom.” Neither was a compliment, so we glared at each other until Piper burned her hair and yelled at me to get out.

Another one of our differences: Piper’s was an explosive anger, and I was passive-aggressive. Aggravating her was my one true joy.

My preparation for the mall involved wrapping my hair into a knot at the nape of my neck and putting on a clean T-shirt. We met outside the front door of the apartment—me snapping gum, her taking a selfie. There was no one to tell that we were leaving; Gran wouldn’t be home until seven.

“Ready?” She didn’t wait for my answer as she flipped the hood of her rain jacket up and darted for the bus stop, her Converses tiptoeing around the puddles. I took my time zipping up my hoodie before I followed behind her, hoping the bus would come and leave me. Oops. I could go back inside with a clear conscience and read.

“Hurry up, Iris!” The bus was wheezing to a stop. I had a brief moment of defiance where I wanted to run back to the apartment and lock myself inside, but the bond I so rudely shared with my sister pulled me forward. Where she went, I went.

We got Slurpees from the 7-Eleven because Piper thought walking around the mall with Burger King cups was trashy. She always got whatever flavor was red and filled her cup so full it mushroomed out of the plastic hole like lava.

“If you get the blue, you’re going to have blue mouth,” she warned. Ignoring her, I filled my cup with razzle dazzle blue raspberry. She frowned, disappointed. Piper considered herself the worldly one.I found her naive, but to each their own. I made her pay for our Slurpees, and she grabbed my arm on the way out, her baby-blue fingernails squeezing apologetically.

“Are you mad at me?”

She knew I was.

“You’d only have lain in bed and read all day. Come on, Iris…”

“We had plans,” I insisted.

She stared straight ahead without acknowledgment, typical Piper. If she didn’t like it, she’d pretend it wasn’t happening. How often did her plans supersede mine? If she wanted to do something, she sulked until she got her way.

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