Ayanna could not give her a sister a clear sense of how popular she was. She was in art classes and liked to paint her fingernails black, she was the striker of her high school’s soccer team and had once gotten a red card for throwing a blue-flavored Gatorade after being subbed off after scoring two goals. Those things could be cool or dorky. Olivia wasn’t sure. Ayanna still went to weird door church with their dad, even though more and more people were saying the doors were just a dumb hoax meant to be a distraction from what was actually happening out in the real world. Ayanna was in AP classes and wasn’t embarrassed to say earnest things like “It’s cool to learn new stuff.” She talked about the racist things that happened at school, but when the twins went to the mall together, almost everyone who knew Ayanna stopped to say hi or at least waved. There were so many kids at Olivia’s school who pretended she did not exist, whose parents had told them that she was not allowed to come to their birthday parties or sleepovers, and even the more “moderate” ones talked about how things were always harder when you didn’t “grow up with your own kind.” Ayanna did not diet before prom or homecoming, and Olivia had to take her dress shopping the night before the event. The only dresses Ayanna would ever agree to try on were either lustrous black or electric neons.

“I’m just not pastels,” Ayanna always said, even when Olivia insisted that they could share the same baby blue silk dress because their homecomings were on different weekends. Their mom had convinced Olivia to go only with a group of girlfriends to “avoid temptation.” Ayanna refused to share her plans.

“We’re so different,” they liked to say, Ayanna happily, Olivia contemplatively. They were rarely confused for one another, even though they were identical. Olivia, she thought maybe it was because of how they walked. Ayanna had good posture, didn’t mind eye contact, and didn’t feel obligated to smile. Olivia, when she was objective with herself, thought that she was always looking away from people, that maybe she smiled sometimes for the wrong reasons, and her mom said things sometimes like “You’re so graceful, Olivia, you walk like you’re dancing,” even though that didn’t make any sense to Olivia.

It was easier sometimes for Olivia to list what they agreed on. They liked harmonizing to “Tha Crossroads” by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. They liked Messi better than Ronaldo. They preferred spicy to sweet. They liked staying up late to read any book that had a love triangle and having big opinions about who the main heroine chose.