Chapter 17 - "If You Live Through This With Me I Swear That I Would Die For
You" - Michaela's Story
May 12th, 2000 - somewhere between New York and Tulsa

'Crash and burn, all the stars explode tonight
How'd you get so desperate, how'd you stay alive?
Help me please, burn the sorrow from your eyes
Oh come on be alive again, don't lay down and die....'

"Hey hey, you know what to do, oh baby drive away to Malibu...." I sang along with my walkman to myself. How ironic. Here I was, singing about finding happiness near the ocean and I was going out to a city in the middle of the desert. Oh well, there *was* a river there. That was water. But it wasn't Malibu. Then again, we didn't exactly find happiness in Beverly Hills, did we? And that wasn't too far from Malibu....
"Michaela," Tweedle-Tay nudged me.
"What?" I asked, removing the headphones.
"You're singing..... people are giving us dirty looks," Tweedle-Tay said softly.
Oh. "They're probably just jealous," I said, putting my headphones back on. But I *did* stop singing.
Tweedle-Tay and I were returning to Tulsa with our younger brothers and sisters. We were going to be playing Mommies and Daddies for the next sixteen years. Sixteen years with Tweedle-Tay. To tell you the truth, the idea of it didn't exactly thrill me to bits, but I'd thought about it long and hard, and there was no way Tweedle-Tay and I could survive if we weren't together.
Only we weren't going to be *together*. But I was fine with that. The fact that Tweedle-Tay and I were attracted to each other, or 'in love' as we thought, didn't really matter because people should control themselves in these sorts of situations. You couldn't just go and have sex with someone just because you found them attractive. I mean, if you were married to someone, you wouldn't just go sleep with every cute guy who tried to pick you up, would you? So, if married people could have that sort of self-control, surely Tweedle-Tay and I could....
And we would.
And not only for that reason. Think how bad it would have been for our younger brothers and sisters if we'd decided to be a couple..... I mean, what would they tell their friends? 'Oh hi.... This is my sister Michaela and my brother Tweedle-Tay. They're twins..... and lovers! Ain't that lov-er-ly?'
So now, Tweedle-Tay and I were going to be responsible adults. Okay, well maybe not.... let's try responsible teenagers. We were going to take responsibility for our past. It was our fault that our parents (however deserving) were in jail, so we couldn't just leave our brothers and sisters in foster homes. And we didn't want to end up like our parents, so we couldn't act on our sexual tension..... We just had to count on our optimism overpowering the legacy of our past.
Tweedle-Tay and I would begin again in Tulsa and if this time we failed, we'd begin a third time, a fourth.....
And, since this story *is* a good story.....
And they all lived happily ever after.

Not had enough of the Tweedle-Tay Saga? Check out part 5, 'Diabolical Intentions'.