It's a fact of life that, for some reason, one twin will always exceed the other.
Looks, or marks at school, or friends, or parents love, or whatever. It didn't matter what...
She used to be the better twin.
She didn't mean it in a cruel way. It was just a fact.
(Somehow, that it was truth rather than bitchiness actually made more painful, but never mind.)
She was the older twin. Jenna had so often commented upon it when they were younger that it had become an accepted, concrete part of family lore.
Katie was the older twin. That meant she did things first. First born, first to learn to walk, to talk.
Emily was the younger twin. Always, eternally overshadowed. Second best.
Katie was the bold little girl who would chatter fearlessly to strangers, invariably charming them with her lisp and her big eyes and her smile; Emily, shyer, would hide behind Jenna or Rob until they forced her to her sisters side.
Somehow it was Katie, utterly uninterested in anything except dressing up and Barbie dolls, who was given the better reports in Lower School, making up for her disinterest with her own vivacity.
Emily, clever than most people realised, was repeatedly scolded for not joining in with the other children, for not volunteering answers, for seldom answering even when spoken to directly.
As they got older, Katie was the popular one, with boys and girls alike. Their friends were really her friends. Emily just tagged along behind.
Katie was the talker. Emily beat her in exams, but Katie was the star: of dance class, of parties and school discos, when the other children crowded round her like moths around a butterfly.
Emily was called a dreamer, but Katie was the one with dreams- the husband, the children, the big house and flashy car.
Katie was the one with boyfriends. She was the one who got invited to parties. She was the loud one everyone wanted to be friends with.
She wonderd when it was that these things had reversed themselves, when the things she had had stopped being what really was considerd important.
By the time they were eighteen, Katie still had a boyfriend, one in a long line of others.
But it was Emily she had begun to feel jealous of: not because of WHO she had, but jealous of what they HAD, something quieter, deeper and sweeter than anything Katie had experienced so far.
If Emilys relationship with Naomi was holding hands and secret notes left under pilows and imagining a future together, then Katies relationship was louder, brighter. It was fucking late at night in cars, it was getting off your face and getting off with someone else just because they were there. It was not feeling guilty for cheating, because you'd both done it before ,and would both do it again.
Katie charmed teachers for good school reports, until the charm wore off, and grades began to matter. She talked her way through everything, until it turned out that Universities actually preferd the quiet, straight-A Emilys to the Katies. She charmed the other girls, too, until one day she woke up to find that somehow it was Emily, not her, who was considerd the nice twin.
Katie went to the parties- the proper parties, the MDMA fuelled raves that no onecould remember the next day... but suddenly, it wasn't Emily envying her night of wild drunkeness. It was her, envying Emily for her nights in with the person she loved, nights she could remember later, and that made her glow when she remeberd them, rather than squirm at the memory of the one-nighter with the guy whose name she hadn't quite caught.
Katie wanted the babies. But it was Emily who could still concieve...
Katie wonderd when life had switched everything around, when she had stopped being the better twin.
She wonderd when it would stop hurting.
