Twins

by Marcy Dermansky

  Chloe had acted like it was nothing. She’d lain on the table, quiet and calm, as if there wasn’t a creepy old man with a gun shooting pain into her beautiful back. My name had only three letters. Chloe’s had five.

  “What letter?” I said. I was practically screaming. “What letter?”

  “O,” Chloe said. She held my shoulders. “This was your idea,” she said. “So stop screaming.”

  My back felt like it was on fire. The tattoo guy dabbed at my skin with his cloth. He was cleaning up my blood with that dirty cloth. I leaned over the table, threw up on the floor.

  I looked down at the vomit and felt bad. This was our birthday.

  “God fucking damn it,” he said. “Never again do I tattoo a freaking kid.”

  Chloe stepped away from me. I couldn’t see her, I was looking at the vomit, but I knew how she must feel. We were half naked, huddled in the back of a tattoo parlor at a seedy strip mall, being cursed at by a foul, ugly, disgusting, horrible man. I hated the tattoo guy. I hated him like crazy.

  “If you want me to finish, one of you twins better clean up this puke.”

  “It’s okay,” Chloe said. “I’ll do it.”

  “Twins,” the tattoo guy repeated, as if he was saying a dirty word.

  I hated him.

  Chloe kissed the top of my head. She found a mop and cleaned up my vomit while the tattoo guy finished up. I was grateful Chloe had kissed my head. She loved me. She did. We loved each other. Now I would be strong. I certainly would not vomit again. I had purpose; the tattoo guy could never hurt us. I’d kill him before I’d let him hurt Chloe. I’d ram his stinking tattoo gun up his ass. I’d spend my life in jail to protect my twin sister. My other half.

  I suffered the next letter in perfect silence. I spelled the word fuck in my head. F U C K F U C K F U C K. Chloe would never even think the word fuck. She was a great speller. She had won spelling bees, but she never cursed.

  “Done,” he said. I felt him smearing cold Vaseline on my back. “Now get the fuck off my table.”

  “Wowee,” I said, sitting up. “Hooray.”

  I felt giddy, gleeful, bursting with happiness. We had done it. Not only was Chloe in my genes, she was part of me. CHLOE and SUE, tattooed on our backs.

  “This must be what shock treatment feels like,” I said. “This must be what you feel like when they shock you in the mental hospital. The zap that wakes you up.”

  “You have to be so dramatic,” Chloe said. “Let’s get dressed.”

  “Let’s look,” I said. “Let’s see.”

  I jumped off the table. The pain was already going away, fading, something to be forgotten. The room smelled like vomit.

  The tattoo guy gave us each a hand mirror. We gazed at our backs the way you would, after a haircut, look at the back of your head, using the small mirror to look into the large one. The skin was inflamed, greasy with Vaseline, and Chloe’s tattoo was crusted with blood.

  “It’s not really pink,” Chloe said.

  “It will be,” the tattoo guy said. “Once the inflammation goes down. Make sure you don’t scratch. Or let the skin get dry. You gotta keep them moist for a couple of days. Hold still, I’m going to cover them up.”

  We stood, silent, as he stuck square bandages to our backs.

  “I love you,” I said to Chloe.

  From the mirror, I could see the tattoo guy smirk.

  Chloe reached for her soft pink T-shirt, shoved it on over her head, covering her soon to be beautiful tattoo.

  “We are sisters,” she said. “Identical twins. You don’t have to say that. It’s an understood fact.”

  “A given,” I said.

  “A given.” Chloe nodded.

  The tattoo guy was still smirking. I wanted to punch him, hurt him. He had no right to make fun of our feelings for each other. No one loved him the way I loved Chloe. He was nothing, nobody.

  “What do you know?” I said. “You’re a creep, a pervert, the local pedophile. You give tattoos to underage girls in your back room so you can leer at them in their underwear. I could call my parents. My mother is a lawyer. My father is a lawyer. They’ll put you in jail and they’ll melt the key. How do you like that idea? Does that make you smirk?”

  His mouth dropped open. “Hey, calm down, kid.”

  Chloe thrust my T-shirt into my hand.

  “Get dressed,” she said. But I didn’t want to go. I felt too good. I didn’t want to cover my tattoo. We had suffered, Chloe and Sue, together.

  “I bet you violate health codes,” I yelled.

  “Come on, Sue,” Chloe said. “Stop screaming.”

  The tattoo guy picked up his cigarette, but he didn’t bring it to his lips. He stared at me, confused.

  “You’re all done here.”

  “I’ll scream rape, you ugly bastard,” I said. “You’ll get thirty years. You’ll get life in the penitentiary.”

  I could feel the rush of color in my cheeks. I felt great, really great. I’d get the tattoo guy. I’d ruin his life and then I’d go after his family. Chloe tugged on the loop of my jeans.

  “We have to go,” she said. Sweet, good Chloe. Always avoiding a fight. She never wanted to hurt people, to break things. She was turning into a Goody Two-shoes, studying for tests and doing the laundry. I had no idea why I had turned out so badly.

  I gently touched the place beneath her shirt where our new tattoo lay. My name. Chloe flinched.

  I pointed my finger at that tattoo guy. “You want to go to jail?” I said.

  He had backed away from us, moving all the way to the opposite corner of the small room. His hands were shaking. I had him scared.

  “The federal penitentiary,” I said.

  I put on my T-shirt, grabbed Chloe’s hand, and we ran out the door. Outside, it was still bright daylight. We were back in the cool spring air.

  “We did it,” I said, hugging Chloe as hard as I could. “We did it. We did it, we did it.”

  Chloe pulled away.

  “That hurts,” she said.

  “We did it. We’re marked forever. Forever and always.”

  Chloe shrugged.

  “We already were.”

  When the scabs healed, the tattoos would be perfect. We would always be a part of each other, our names inscribed on each other’s skin. But Chloe seemed sad. She kicked a pebble down the sidewalk as we walked home. Why wasn’t she happy? I put my hands in my pockets and walked ahead of her. My tattoo had started to itch. I wouldn’t scratch. We walked this way, one block then another, until the houses and the lawns got bigger and nicer, and we were almost home. I turned a corner, I could see our house, the house we had grown up in, and I was walking all alone, when Chloe suddenly bounded forward, wrapping her arms around me from behind.

  “Okay,” she said, her breath warm on my ear. “The tattoos are cool. Or they will be cool, after they heal.”

  “They will be so cool,” I said.

  “You are my sister,” Chloe said.

  “I am your identical twin,” I said. “I am part of you.”

  Chloe kissed the top of my ear.

  I dragged Chloe the rest of the way home, her arms around my neck, her legs heavy as mud. I loved our birthday, I loved Chloe. I didn’t want anything else.

  Our parents’ Mercedeses were parked in the driveway when we got home, but the house was dark. I didn’t like it. “Nobody’s home,” Chloe said, pulling on her hair.

  We went inside. Daisy barked. The lights flashed on.

  “Surprise,” yelled a room full of people. “Surprise.”

  My parents had thrown us a party. I could have killed them. There was no one I would invite to a birthday party. I didn’t care about anyone besides Chloe. Other people didn’t interest me, they only got in the way. The living room was decorated with colored streamers dangling from the chandelier, a birthday cake, and a punch bowl on the coffee table. Presents stacked on the mantelpiece. My parents stood behind the couch, beaming, wearing polo shirts and fad
ed khakis. Daniel glared at us from an armchair. Lisa Markman was on the couch, her horrible group huddled around her. They were the popular girls. They were not welcome in our house. They would have to leave.

  “This is so wrong,” I whispered to Chloe.

  But tears were streaming down Chloe’s cheeks. She was smiling. She was crying and happy at the same time. I couldn’t believe it. We had gotten tattoos. That was all that we wanted, all that we needed. But there was Chloe, ready to love this stupid party. Her response was exactly what was required. Chloe was right, I was wrong. Always wrong. I pressed the tips of my fingers into the bandage covering the raw flesh on my back. The pain felt good. Tears sprang to my eyes.

  It was as if I had entered a slow-motion universe. They were all there, in the living room, waiting, watching. Chloe gasped for breath. Daisy raced toward us.

  I reached for Chloe’s hand, but she was already gone, rushing to the couch, to Lisa Markman. Daisy jumped on me, licking my face. I stood in the doorway, patting Daisy’s fluffy poodle head, watching as Chloe hugged Lisa and then, one by one, hugged the other girls from school. As if she liked them.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much for this party,” she said to everyone in the room.

  My parents held up their glasses of punch. They looked pleased with themselves.

  Lisa Markman whispered something into Chloe’s ear. Chloe giggled, then she shrugged. They walked together to the punch bowl. She looked at Lisa Markman and said, “I can’t believe you’re here.”

  Lisa Markman’s skin was the color of coffee ice cream. Her father was a professional basketball player. Tall, black, and handsome, he used to play for the New York Knicks. He did TV commercials for Nestlé Crunch bars and multivitamins, so Lisa was popular even though she had a big, ugly nose like her father. Her mother was white, dead, killed in a car accident when we were in the fourth grade. Chloe thought that Lisa was pretty.

  I wanted Lisa to get her hands off my sister. I looked at my brother in the corner. Daniel was staring back at me. He seemed to understand what had happened. He stuffed a baby carrot up his nose. The scabby tattoo on my back had started to itch. It itched like crazy. Daisy stood next to me waiting.

  “Hey, Daisy,” I said. “Hey, good girl.”

  Daisy jumped back up on me, wagging her tail, licking my face. Chloe and I were identical twins, the same in almost every way, but the dog, I knew, loved me more.

  Chloe

  I had trouble sleeping after we got our tattoos. The skin on my back itched, and my mind couldn’t stop racing. At our thirteenth birthday party, Lisa Markman had whispered in my ear that she liked me better than Sue. I knew that I should have defended Sue, my other half, but instead I was pleased. I took Lisa up to our bedroom, where she laughed at all the pictures of us: identical twins wearing matching clothes.

  “I’d go insane,” she said. “Having another person who looked exactly like me, following me around all day.”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s not that bad.”

  I looked down at my shoes, trying not to let her see how thrilled I was. Somehow Lisa was able to recognize what no one else ever could. She was the richest, most popular girl in the eighth grade, and she understood me.

  “Is that you?” Lisa said, picking me out from our second-grade class picture. Sue and I were standing next to each other, wearing matching green corduroy overalls. Sue had loved those ugly overalls. She wanted us to wear them everywhere.

  “Yes,” I said shyly, looking at Lisa sideways. “Guess again.”

  With every picture, Lisa was able to tell us apart.

  My entire life, no one had ever singled me out in this way. When we were younger, my parents used to call our names so fast it sounded like one word: Chloeandsue. Strangers would point to us and whisper: Look at the twins. We were constantly told how pretty we were, together, but somehow on my own, it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t interesting. At school, Sue and I were in all the same classes, and she always sat next to me. Everyone took for granted that Sue was my best friend and that I was hers. We were considered the same person, undistinguishable, even when Sue threw pens at boys or hopped through the halls like a kangaroo. But I was not Sue.

  I was not Sue.

  I would say this to myself over and over, lying in bed, praying that the tattoo would heal properly, that the itching was not a sign of infection. I didn’t want to be ruined before I had a chance to begin my own life.

  Sometimes Sue would follow me into the bathroom; she would keep on talking to me while I brushed my teeth or washed my face. She wouldn’t leave, even when I had to pee. She didn’t think I ever needed to be by myself. Sue said that we would never have to get married, that we’d never need to bother making friends, because we’d always have each other. She said we didn’t need anybody else. She had scared me the night she convinced me to get a tattoo. She stuck a pencil into her arm, and I watched her, imagining that one day it would be a razor blade. Sue thought tattoos would prove to the world that the bond we shared went deeper than DNA.

  The funny thing was, the tattoos made us different. When we died, it would be easy for a forensic scientist to tell us apart. It wouldn’t be necessary to check our fingerprints or our dental records or measure our bodies from head to toe. After we got our tattoos, we were never really and truly the same.

  I didn’t tell this to Sue.

  For a little while, at least, she’d be happy.

  Sue

  Not long after our birthday, Chloe got her period.

  Chloe did everything first. She was the first one out of the uterus, the first to hold up her head. First to walk and talk. We were identical, but my parents could tell us apart because I was always two steps behind. I didn’t stand up until a month after Chloe had started walking. Chloe learned how to read first, to scramble eggs and memorize her multiplication tables. She was the first to make the honor roll. Actually, I’d never made the honor roll. There was no point to it. Chloe’s success was my success. I never got jealous of Chloe; she was my other half, my property, my identical twin. Studying her, I always knew what to expect from life. When I finally did learn to walk, I never fell.

  We were in the school cafeteria sitting across from each other at an empty table when Chloe started to bleed. Even before she put her hand on her stomach, I knew what was happening. I knew. My face turned hot. Before, guys could only look at Chloe, but now they could get her pregnant and buy her earrings. Nothing had been the same since Lisa Markman had shown up at our house. Chloe had shown Lisa our room. Lisa had petted our dog. I felt numb watching Chloe walk quickly out of the cafeteria, pushing the swinging doors open wide, disappearing down the long hallway. I didn’t run after her because Chloe hated when I did that. But I watched, stunned, as Lisa and her gang followed after her.

  I counted to one hundred and touched my tattoo. Then I made my way to the girls’ bathroom. I tried to walk slowly, but my stomach hurt and at least four minutes had passed. I was scared I might be bleeding too. We were twins, had the same DNA. I ran down the hall into the bathroom and crashed right into Lisa Markman, who was standing in front of the mirror, putting on mascara.

  “You know Chloe can go to the bathroom all by herself,” she said.

  I felt my face turn red. Melanie Meyer and Brittany Lopez giggled. I wanted to throw Lisa against the wall, but I didn’t do it. Lisa was taller than I was. Her father was enormous.

  Chloe emerged from a stall, smiling shyly.

  “Are you okay?” Lisa asked my sister.

  Chloe nodded. She shrugged. She must have seen me, but she walked straight over to the mirror, straight to Lisa. The metal counter above the sink was covered with products: minipads, maxis, tampons with and without applicators, a pack of condoms. The periods had started almost three years ago. Lisa Markman, already five feet, ten inches, had gotten hers first, breaking all menstruation records at the age of ten.

  “I feel fine,” Chloe said. She pulled a pink lip gloss from her purse and
examined it. “I feel older, somehow.”

  She meant older than me. She always thought four minutes made so much difference. I reached around to touch my back, to press my fingers against my tattoo. Knowing it was there made me feel better. We had taken the bandages off. The flaking had stopped and the skin was smooth. If I stood naked in front of the mirror, held another mirror to my back, I could read Chloe’s name backwards.

  “You do look more mature,” Lisa said, nodding her head.

  I wanted to cry.

  “You look the same,” I said, but Chloe didn’t look at me.

  “Did you use a tampon?” Brittany Lopez asked. Chloe shook her head no. “I would never use a tampon,” Brittany said. “Never ever. Not until I’ve lost my virginity.”

  Lisa Markman snorted.

  “Grow up, girl,” she said.

  Chloe applied her lip gloss, nodding as she listened to this rush of womanly advice from these girls who would ruin her. She seemed happy. For a second, she looked at me, we were looking at each other, but then she was gone, my twin sister, disappeared. She simply stopped seeing me. She brushed mascara onto her pale eyelashes.

  “I am not going to be a slut,” Brittany said. “I might even wait until I get married.”

  Melanie Meyer moved closer to Chloe and touched her hair. “You have such pretty hair,” she said. Melanie’s hair was curly and dark. Brittany examined Chloe’s hands. “I want to give you a manicure,” she said. “My mother taught me how to do French tips.”

  They surrounded Chloe from both sides. My leg started to shake.

  Lisa Markman uncapped a thick purple Magic Marker. She added Chloe’s name to a long list on the door of one of the stalls. I could not believe what was happening. It wasn’t right for Chloe’s name to be on the wall without mine. We were a package deal.

  They wanted Chloe, not me. We were identical, but it was Chloe they liked.

  “You have to call your mother,” Melanie Meyer said.

  Finally I spoke. “You’re going to call our mother at the office about this?”