Page 81 of Our Secrets and Scars

“Augustin, you’ll get a ticket.”

“Mi vida,will you relax? It wasn’t even red.”

“I swear, sometimes you should have your license taken from you.”

Papa snorts. “Then who will take you everywhere? Not any man would be happy to be your personal chauffeur.”

Mama frowns and turns to look out the window, lips pursed together as she sulks like a little kid. “I’d drive myself.”

That only makes my father laugh. “You haven’t driven a car since the girls were still in diapers.”

Bex and I ignore them, used to our parents’ gentle bickering. For as long as I remember, they’ve had at least one mini argument a day. Papa says it keeps the love alive and keeps the passion strong. The idea of my parents having any sort of “passion” makes me feel violently sick, but if they’re happy, then I guess all I can do is leave them to it.

Bexley, on the other hand, told him that if she ever hears them having “passionate relations” then she’ll file for emancipation on behalf of the both of us.

But then, she’s always considered sex an event punishable by death. When I pointed out to her that killing everyone who dares to do it would result in the end of the human race, she told me that technology should be advanced enough by now to grow babies in incubators from conception.

Needless to say, I haven’t told her that Shane took my virginity last week. Even though I ache to talk to someone about the pain I felt the entire time and the incredible emptiness of the experience. How I wish I hadn’t done it all. How it feels like he stole my virginity instead of it being something I gave him.

I hold my hand out the open window and try to catch fistfuls of the wind as we speed down the highway, crossing the state line from Utah into Idaho.

We’ve spent the weekend with family friends down in Bauer, a couple who Papa knew growing up and immigrated to the States not long after he and Mama settled here and had Bex and me. It wasn’t an unenjoyable few days necessarily, but the drive back home is a four-hour trip, and I’d rather be hanging out with my friends than stuck in the back of the car trying to catch the air in my hand.

Bex apparently feels the same, if the sour expression on her face is anything to go by. She’s hunched over her phone, fingers speeding across the keyboard as she answers the messages pinging into her group chat every half second.

“Who are you talking to?” I ask for the sole purpose of initiating conversation.

“My friends,” she says shortly, shooting me a sideways look before turning her attention back to her phone.

“Any gossip?”

She huffs. “Mind your own business, Kinsley.”

I deflate.

There goes another rejected attempt to bond with my sister.

I reach my hand back out the window to grab another fistful of wind, but it doesn’t bring me the same contentment it did just minutes ago. So I wind up the window and rest my head against it, closing my eyes and wishing that things between us were different.

Bexley and I have never been close in the way that other twins are. We never had that weird psychic connection people tell us we’re supposed to have. But up until recently, I could, at the very least, call us friends.

But everything changed when we went to high school. We fell into different friendship groups, found different hobbies, and became different people. Our already fractious connection grew even thinner. Our after-school trips to Starbucks were filled with awkward silences, and even though we kept the tradition, the fact remained that Bexley and I would never have the sisterhood I’ve craved since we were little.

It doesn’t stop me trying though. Reaching out to her,desperate for the smallest slice of connection, begging her to just give mesomethingto let me know she was still in my corner. But even on the nights she’d allow me to watch a movie with her, maybe even fall asleep in the same bed and stay there until morning, she always made it clear that it was only because she had nothing better to do.

I try to talk to her, and she scowls at me until I fall quiet again. I ask to hang out with her only to receive no answer at all, as if I’m not even worthy of a simple response. As if the effort it would take to just say “no” would be wasted on me.

And yet, here I am. Still trying. Still hoping she’ll finally deem me good enough to be her equal. That we’ll one day have that bond that every other set of identical twins seems to have. Because the truth is, despite the eternal frost of her apathy, I miss her.

I miss my sister.

So fucking much.

“Mierda.”Papa’s moan of exasperation startles me, turning my attention to the front of the car. “We’ve lost power.”

Mom’s frowning at a vehicle warning light that’s just appeared on the dash, mumbling something about how long it’s going to take for a tow truck to be sent out. Bexley finally looks up from her phone and sighs in embitterment.

“Well, isn’t this just perfect?” she grumbles.

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