I'm Addieand I'm Maddie. Ok, Maddie this is my part of the story. You'll get your turn. Maddie already promised I could explain the beginning and then she'll tell the bits she wants to tell. It'll take both of our memories to remember it anyway.

Yes, we are identical twins. Even down to the few freckles splattered on our faces. Mom use to tell us that we each might be the other. I might actually be Maddie and Maddie might actually be me because when we were little she'd sometimes get us confused. Never remembered who was who, but I'll let that slide for now. I hate the name Maddie anyways. It's short for Madeline, ew.

Oh, like Addison is so much better.

My turn, remember? At least I'm not named after a silly little French red headed orphan.

If you're telling the story…then tell the story. You don't have to give out your opinions. No one cares anyway.

Like I was saying… Maddie and I were pretty much deemed as 'the twins'. It was like we were one, connected or something. People were always speaking to us as a single soul in a single body, but we weren't. We were two completely different people. If anyone would have bothered to ask my favorite color was white and Maddies' is yellow. Note, they are not the same.

That was just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, hello, no I don't like to dress like my sister. Yes, I love her, but that doesn't mean I want to be her. I wanted to be me, yet I didn't know who that was. I wasn't… smothered by her. I think the word to use here is suffocated. Not only was she suffocating me, but I was suffocating her. There was just too much of each other.

This all started out in our mother's stomach. Maddie, it seems, hogged everything, even the blood supply. My health started to gradually decline so this, in turn, was why we were born severely prematurely and not on our projected birth date. We just so happened to be born on New year's eve or I was. Funnily enough we had two different birthdays in two different years. I was born on December 31st of one year and Maddie was born on January 1st of another, one minute apart from me.

It's silly how one minute should really make so much difference. It really does though. I mean my mom missed her flight to Texas from Seattle by one minute so she'd ended up talking to one of the air traffic controllers. My mom never did make it to her Houston flight, but that nice young air traffic controller did end up marrying her and becoming our dad.

So you see not only in that scenario did fate play a hand, but in the next one as well.

My mom wasn't a small town girl. She'd grown up in the suburbs of Houston and knew firsthand how she didn't want her children to grow up right outside of a city full of crime. So they opted with my father's home state and town. If you could even call it that.

The Makah reservation could hardly constitute as being a town let alone a city. It was more of a very loose community of people filled with the same beliefs and customs.

This was where Addie and I grew up, in this little village that loved being nosy. They gawked at us at how unusual we were. No, it's not that we looked different, we resembled our father strongly and in turn everyone else around us. No, they just felt like we were two of the same person running around, like clones.

My mom strongly disliked this. It wasn't so much that she sheltered us for all our lives because we did go to school and do extracurricular activities, but she didn't willingly bring us into the public eye. She kept us out of town meetings and the general store, even the few odd vendor shops here and there.

She just wanted us to feel normal and I didn't blame her for trying. It was just inevitable that our lives would be full of strange oddities and coincidences. Our past, present, and future.



I still sometimes wonder if I have a shot at a normal life though. I don't want to completely give up hope. Maddie is the one that loves the life we lead. She thinks our life would make great book material. Yeah, she does like to read in her spare time. She's so weird, but me, well I like reality and the reality is that my life isn't like real life events the everyday person has.

Of course I would have paranormal things happen to me, the one person who didn't ask for it. Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't have my life any other way now, but back then I thought just the opposite. How could I ever love my life like this? Then I got my answer. In the strangest way possible.

My world turned upside down on one morning where everything was out of the ordinary. My mom hadn't had her usual pot of coffee, my father wasn't working that day and we all decided to run errands together as a family. Yes, we were going out of the house. It was a split second decision. One minute we were going to stay in and play games as a family and then the next we were all going for a drive. You see what I mean about minutes, huh?

Maddie and I couldn't stop screaming in delight as we bounced around in the back seat of the car really putting those seat belts to work.

In our twelve year old minds we thought that this day couldn't get any better than it had already. We went to the grocery store (What? We liked looking at food.), the brand new super appliance store, and of course in a few minutes, the toy store.

"Go crazy." My father told us giving that kind smile that he was famous for in my mother's book once we got inside.

Maddie and I ran straight for the girls' section of the store. It was filled with pink crap that we'd probably only use once and then forget about it in the back of our closet only to be found again later and thrown promptly in the trash.

Actually, I think that's exactly what happened too. Anyway, silliness aside, we'd just sat down to actually dig through the mile high shelves to see what we wanted when hurried footsteps echoed off the cold tile floor only a few aisles away from us.

"Claire's turning seven, not seventeen she's not going to want that." A deep voice echoed disgusted. There was a loud clatter like someone had thrown something.

"Then what do you propose genius?" Another voice mocked and two huge men rounded the corner. Maddie and I froze with a huge stack of teen magazines in our hands, trying and failing to fade into the very pink background.

"Maddie! Addie!" We heard our father call out and the two boys looked down at us as they passed. Quite suddenly the first one with the boyish good looks stopped short to stare down at Maddie who was standing in front of me. He did a double take before taking in a very deep breath.

"Collin, what the-?" His friend said looking towards the boyish ones face then towards Maddie. "Oh my-"

The man with the cropped hair looked between those two, like his eyes were betraying him. Like this scene wasn't really unfolding. I wasn't quite sure what to make of everything. I was frightened, but Maddie, she was intrigued. She should have been feeling what I was feeling though, the scared tremors that forced my body to take a step back. She actually took a step forward.

The two men did look quite out of it and even more so when you looked at the whole picture from my angle to realize that they were surrounded by fluffy pink pillows and beaded bracelets.



"Addie, Maddie, what are you doing? Did you find anything…?" My father trailed off once he saw the two men looking like they were. I don't know how his face turned maroon when his skin was as dark as ours, but it happened.

"Who the hell are you two?"

"Sir, it's ok. We're just talking to your, er, daughters?" Collin phrased it as a question of sorts.

"I'm Quil Ateara and this is Collin. We are from La Push." The cropped haired one introduced to my father. He wasn't buying any of their crap. So Maddie decided to intervene.

"We weren't talking, actually." Maddie said matter-of-factly and I nodded in concurrence.

"They're talking to each other though." I murmured and then it was Maddie's turn to shake her head in agreement.

Both men jumped in startled when I stepped out from behind my sister.

"Whoa, there are two of them?" Quil stated harshly.

"I think we'll be on our way then." My father nearly growled leading us out of the store by placing his hands behind our heads and steering us towards the exit.

"They weren't doing anything, honest dad." Maddie tried to dance out of his grip to get one last look at the two men's horror-struck faces. They'd look so hurt and vulnerable.

"That's what they want you to think." Dad snarled in a disgusted tone. I looked toward Maddie in confusion. This was the first time I had no idea what she was thinking. I wasn't getting any kind of vibe from the strange twin connection that we shared. Most of the time I just know what she's feeling. I think that was what scared me the most, not the presence of the two men.

Ok, it was mostly the men.

I was itching to ask her just what the hell was going on when the one named Collin burst from the store.

"What's your name?" He yelled to her. He was not asking me. He didn't care about me at all in fact, his eyes were only for my twin.

"Maddie!" she shouted in a sort of delighted giggle from beneath my dad's elbow.

"Madeline!" My father scolded "What's wrong with you? What do you think you're doing?" I couldn't have phrased my father's question better myself. What the hell was going on with her? She seemed almost too happy. So why wasn't I happy too?

"Come on dad! We live in the middle of nowhere. Nothing's going to happen." Maddie tried to placate. She just didn't know how wrong she was though. We both didn't.