Still, we would periodically get visits from Family and Children. They called them “welfare checks”. My parents called it harassment. Said that they just wanted to chip away at our community because we wouldn’t conform. As we grew older, Jeffery and I started to resent those visits more and more, particularly when they actually took me for a month when we were nine. They never got Jeffery, of course. Our parents refused to give them any information except in writing, and Jeffery had always hidden when they came. We had been born on the compound, so there was very little record of me aside from the busybodies who came to check welfare, and there was no proof of Jeffery existing at all.

Well, that’s not entirely true. After I got taken that time, Jeffery started making himself known in different small ways. One time the caseworker’s tires got cut. Another, her car window got broken out. Police would come out every time, yelling and threatening to lock someone up, but my parents and I were in with the caseworker when the car was damaged, and there were no witnesses who saw it happen.

After one visit, Jeffery whispered to me that he had done something she wouldn’t notice for awhile. He would never say what, and based on the devilish gleam in his eye, I decided it was better not to know. But after that, the visits got less frequent and it was a different lady that would come.

By the time we were thirteen…no, wait. Let me address something before I go on. I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but if you’re reading this, you’re getting to know me a little as we go, right? Except, how much is that really worth if you can’t believe that what I say is the truth? I’m not stupid. I’ve always read a lot and I’ve seen plenty of t.v. and movies in the last few years. Especially horror movies. I know that when you hear something about a “bad twin”, your first assumption is that it’s a trick. That I’m crazy and that I’ve imagined a twin to take the blame when I go out and hurt people or whatever. I get it. I’ve seen that movie too. Like twenty times.

But Jeffery is very real. And back when we were thirteen, he wasn’t the bad twin at all. If anything he was always the best of us.

You might think that twins are identical right down the line. They talk the same, they act the same, they have creepy twin talk and some kind of twin telepathy, right? That’s all bullshit. Jeffery was always smarter and stronger than I was. And while he would sometimes get into mischief, he was also the kindest and most generous person I knew.