When they woke up, they knew who was going out to work and who was staying home. There wasn’t a lot of rhythm to it, but it was apparent as soon as they woke up, and without talking to each other. They both got up at the same time. It was sunny the morning after their birthday meeting and there were bagels for breakfast which they’d bought when they got the cake. Peggy had a shower and Greta split a bagel and put it in the toaster – it took a bit of squashing and wriggling because the bagel was bigger than the slot. The griller on the oven didn’t work.

They had a job in a call centre now. The ‘What colour is your parachute?’ course started it all. They both seemed good at analytical work. Which had seemed odd. At least, it had seemed odd to the facilitator of the ‘What colour is your parachute?’ course. Usually ‘girls who dressed like they dressed’ were more artistically inclined. They offered to take the quiz again, but he said no, it was all right, things had changed. At first, Peggy and Greta thought he meant that there were women who had divided into two – that had changed. That had changed overnight and quite recently. But probably what he was talking about was that maybe women were able to do analytical work now – that had changed.

They were INTJ. Both of them. He said it was interesting. He had been doing a few of them. He used the word ‘them’. It was strange because Greta and Peggy didn’t feel like they were part of any group – none of them felt any great affinity with the others. Greta and Peggy got on with Heidi and Dell, but they imagined they would have even if it hadn’t happened. From the outside it looked like a whole new person had been added, in some huge, creative disruption, but actually it was a small, quiet splitting. Like, all the things they’d held inside themselves were now outside themselves. It was hard to explain. Most people didn’t want to hear about it – not when it had first happened and not now.

Any disappointment about not being artists had faded when Peggy and Greta started doing School Certificate calculus and physics by correspondence. They realised that all the places art hit them, maths and science hit them too. There was creativity and beauty in the derivatives and integers, and the physics explained the world back to them like a painting. The correspondence school packages would arrive, and they’d sit side by side at the dining table in the old flat in the old city, completing the worksheets, leaning against each other, trance-like. Two hands working like one. It made them incredibly happy and they were good at it.