Identical Twins

They even dressed us the same. Sometimes it was the same clothes but in different colours – a red top for me, and a yellow one for my sister, for example. When they did that, we swapped the clothes so that they still couldn’t tell us apart. Not even our parents could tell us apart. Our school teachers never could.

And then there were our names. It was crazy - they called us Edie and Evie! Even our names were almost identical. Two peas in a pod, they called us. Two drops of water.

Everybody thinks identical twins are, well, identical. But if you’re a twin, you’ll know that it’s not true. Physically, yes, we were almost identical. I say almost because there was the birthmark. My sister has a very small brown spot on her left shoulder. I don’t. This was the only way we could ever be told apart.

But other than that, twins, even identical ones, are different inside. I think we started to change when we started school. I was always very good. I never got into trouble, I always did all of my homework and did very well in all the tests and exams.

Evie was always getting into trouble and never did her homework. She would have failed her exams – but of course, she didn’t. Why? Well, it’s simple, isn’t it?

Evie, of course, started by copying my homework. Then she got worse. When there was a class test, she would write my name on her paper. When she got into trouble, she smiled beautifully at the teacher and said: “No, I’m Edie, I’m the good one, it was my twin sister Evie who was naughty!”. Neither of us was ever punished for being naughty, and they never failed either of us in our exams, because they couldn’t be sure which one to fail and which one to pass.

But as we got older, Evie started to steal things. At first, it was only things from other children, sweets or pens or pencils or rubbers, the kind of things that sometimes happen in school. But when we were 15, some money was taken from a teacher’s bag. It was quite a lot of money, and the situation was serious. Then they found the money in Evie’s pocket. Well, of course, she did the same thing she always did. “No, it wasn’t me. It was my twin sister.” And I got into trouble, serious trouble this time. They called the police. They tried to expel me from school. It was only when our parents came in and pleaded with the headteacher that they agreed to drop the charges and say nothing about it.

But the trouble didn’t stop there. Evie was always playing truant, not going to school. Then when she came in again, she said that she was Edie and that I had given the teachers the wrong name when they called the register. I thought about telling everyone about the birthmark on her shoulder, that they should check the birthmark to make sure who was who. That would solve the problem. I don’t know why I didn’t.

After we left school, I got a job working in an office. I worked hard in the office, I did well and was going to get a promotion. Evie, on the other hand, never got a job. She used to come and ask me for money. She often disappeared for long periods of time. I didn’t know where she was. This was bad, but it was worse when one day I looked at my passport and found that I had Evie’s. I didn’t know where she was, but obviously she had taken my passport to get there. Wherever she was, and whatever she was doing, she was pretending to be me.