Besties

by Clara Modlin

“I’m thinking of a…thing,” my sister says.

My parents, my twin sister, and I are playing 20 questions.  I am seven years old.

“Hmm,” I say. “Is it a leopard?”

“Yep,” my sister says. “Your turn!”

This happened all the time when my sister and I were younger.  I would refer to something that we’d talked about a month ago, and she would know exactly what I meant.  Leopard.  Ron Weasley.  Our grandma’s macaroni and cheese.  It could be anything that had come up in our daily life.  I could mention it a day, two days, six weeks later, and, “Yep, leopard.  Your turn,” while our parents looked at each other and shook their heads.  Normal.

Yet when my friends tell me, “Oh my god, it’s like we’re twins.  It’s like we always know what the other is thinking,” I find it annoying.

They usually tell me this after a long and drawn out conversation about how they’ve known each other forever, how they’ve always been best friends and will continue to be best friends forever.  Then they say that they’ve know each other so long they can read each other’s minds.

People think my sister and I can read each other’s minds.

Yeah, I wish.  That would mean I could get the answers to the math test two periods early.

But mind-reading isn’t part of being a twin.  Being a twin means always having someone there for you.  It means knowing someone better than anyone else.  It means having someone to bounce ideas off of:  if I’m struggling with an assignment and I’m stuck, my sister can help me think about it.  She can give me new words, or new ways to think about the problem.  It means that we’ve done the same things:  we both remember the time I fell into the Bethesda pool after closing time and the lifeguard yelled at me.  We both remember the time that my sister’s horse decided to take a swim and she had to jump off.  Mid-stream.

When two friends are so close they can ‘read each other’s minds’ I admire them.  That’s really cool.  But when they then turn to me and say “Oh, you must be used to it,” I get annoyed.

Because I’m not used to it.  Because maybe, if possible to believe, my sister and I aren’t, in fact, the same person in two bodies.

We experience the same things, sure, at the same time,  okay, but we remember it differently.  On our trip to the National Portrait Gallery to see the portraits of the presidents, I remember being bored out of my head.  My sister, however, remembers learning a lot and being enthralled by the history.  I was plotting my escape while she and my mother were examining John Adams.

Even though my sister and I have grown up together and I know her mind inside and out and vice versa, we don’t know absolutely everything about each other.  That’s impossible for anyone.  We just have a strong connection.

No, we can’t read each other’s minds.  No, we don’t always know where the other is, all the time.  No, I don’t know what my sister thinks.

But it would be nice.