Chapter Two Mary
Chapter Two
Mary
Five years ago
The day my life finally made sense was on a Monday in August. It was orientation week at South Central Florida College, and there must have been five hundred freshmen stuck in various queues under the vinyl tent city erected in the north parking lot.
Seriously, they couldn’t have done this inside?
It was ninety degrees outside, and in the forty-five minutes it took me to reach the front of the line for a student ID, three people had passed out from heatstroke.
I was a sweaty, sticky mess by then, but I just didn’t care.
Having my picture taken was the last thing I had to get done.
Then I could go back to my new apartment and finish unpacking.
A disinterested-looking guy with dark curly hair took my paperwork without bothering to look up from the laptop monitor. He waved toward a gray backdrop just behind him.
“Stand up there in front of the screen,” he directed, punching my info into the computer.
A moment later he got up and came around to stand behind the digital camera.
“Make sure your toes are on the line, and look straight ahead at the spot on—” He stopped mid-sentence, then straightened up from behind the lens to peer at me.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“Why are you here?”
“Umm . . . I’m getting my ID? Did I get it wrong? Do I need to be in a different line?”
I looked around, wondering if I’d missed a sign somewhere, dreading the possibility of yet another hour in yet another line.
“You were just here,” he said, irritated.
“Um . . . no . . .”
He nodded. “Uh, yeah! Not twenty minutes ago! I already told you, no do-overs. If you don’t like your picture, you can come back next week after classes start. But for now you’re just gonna have to live with it. Jeez, it wasn’t even that bad!”
I stared at him blankly. “You kidding? I haven’t been here before. I was just in that line for like an hour. You haven’t taken my picture yet—”
“Really? Do you think I’m dim or something?”
I put my hands on my hips and tilted my head the way my mother did when she was irritated with me. “No, but I’m starting to think maybe you’ve been out here in the heat for too long.”
“June nineteenth, right?”
“What about it?” I asked cautiously, unsure where he was going with this.
“Your birthday, it’s June nineteenth.”
“Well, yeah, it was on that paper I just handed you.”
He shook his head. “Uh-uh. I know that because I just did your ID twenty minutes ago! I made a comment about it being my mother’s birthday too. You said that made her a Gemini.”
This guy was starting to creep me out. “Look, I have no idea what you’re talking about . . .”
He came back out from behind the camera and returned to his computer, where he seemed to be searching for something. When he found it, he beckoned me closer to the screen. “Right there. Samantha Kay Kinski,” he declared triumphantly as he tapped an image on the screen with his index finger.
I leaned over his shoulder to get a better look and stopped short.
Then he looked between me and the screen, then back again. “Oh, shit . . . Maybe that’s not you. You have long hair. But you . . . And her . . .”
I reached past him to touch the screen—and the girl who shared my face.
It turned out Samantha Kay Kinski lived in the Kappa dorm.
Getting inside wasn’t hard. I just loitered near the side entrance, pretending to be looking for something in my backpack.
Eventually one of the residents came along with a key card, and I trailed in behind her, slipping into the stairwell and up to the second floor.
According to the sticky note the ID guy had given me, I was looking for 219, clear on the other side of the building.
Much like the Zeta dorm, where I was housed, there were corkboards affixed to each door, and many of them were already decorated with bumper stickers from the occupant’s home state, cartoon drawings, and inspirational sayings.
When a tall brunette girl headed my way, I grabbed my phone from my pocket and pretended to be engrossed in something there so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact.
“Oh, hi, Sam!” she said just as we crossed. “Hey, love your hair with the extensions!”
“Umm . . . thanks?” I muttered and kept walking.
I’d been hoping that I’d meet Sam and see, immediately, that we had only a vague resemblance to each other—one that, for some odd reason, was magnified on camera.
We’d laugh about the confusion and wave whenever we spotted each other on campus.
But if someone who lived down the hall from her could mistake me for her, then . . .
Then what? There was only one way to find out. Outside of Kappa 219, I raised my hand to knock at the exact same moment that she yanked the door open and came barreling out. Before I knew what was happening, I was flat on my butt.
“Oh! Oh, God, jeez, I’m so sorry! Are you—” Samantha Kinski stopped mid-sentence, staring down at me staring up at her.
This was no passing resemblance. Looking at her was like looking in a mirror.
Or it would have been if my hair had been about six inches shorter.
Aside from that, we could have been the same person: the blue eyes, the slightly upturned nose, the heart-shaped face.
She even had the same slightly bent left ear.
“Yeah, hi . . .” I said, getting to my feet. “Samantha, right? I’m—”
“You’re me,” she murmured, brows drawing together in concentration, like her brain was trying to interpret the data her eyes were sending to it.
“Yeah. I think I might be.”
Her head jerked up, and she glanced down the hall, presumably to see if anyone else was watching this bizarre scene play out. But, while there were a few other residents gathered at the other end of the hall, they didn’t seem to take any notice of us.
“C-come inside,” she said, stepping back into the room and holding the door for me to follow.
As soon as I was over the threshold, she closed and locked the door behind me, then spun around so that we were face-to-face. The same face meeting its mirror image.
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded.
“Mary,” I told her simply. “Mary Langston.”
“I don’t understand. Why do you look like me? Are you . . . are you some creepy stalker or something?” she hissed.
A flash of irritation shot through me. “What? No! And, for the record, you look like me!” I spat back.
We surveyed each other for several long moments. She touched her left ear, noticing the resemblance to her own.
“Birthday?” she asked.
“June nineteenth,” I replied.
“Same,” she agreed. “Blood type?”
“AB negative.”
She nodded. “That’s super rare.”
“One percent of people have it,” I agreed. “Allergies?”
“Peanuts. You?”
I produced an EpiPen from my bag. “Same.”
“Are you . . . ? Were you . . . ?”
“Adopted?” I finished for her. “Yes. You?”
She took a few steps back before dropping onto the corner of her perfectly made bed and looking up at me. “No.”
I blinked hard, not expecting that answer. “No?”
She shook her head. “No. I grew up in the system.”
“The system?” I echoed, uncomprehending.
“The foster system. My parents gave me up, but I was never adopted.” She considered me, tilting her head slightly. “Unlike you, apparently.”
The statement felt a little like an accusation, and I shifted from one foot to the other uncomfortably.
“Where did you grow up?” I asked finally.
She shrugged. “Here and there. Mainly Homestead. Mainly institutions. The occasional trailer park. What about you?”
Suddenly I regretted asking the question. “South Florida,” I said. “Not that far from Homestead.”
Samantha’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. She didn’t miss a thing. “How ‘not far’ from there? Exactly?”
“Coral Gables.”
Even her snort sounded just like mine.
“So let me get this straight . . . You and I—we’re identical twins, right? Are you thinking that? ’Cause I am.”
“Sure looks like it,” I responded softly.
“Right. So eighteen years ago, some knocked-up teenager was either too dim, too religious, or too broke to have an abortion, so she gave birth to twins. You and me.” She gestured between us as she said this.
“Somehow I end up in one shithole after another, and you . . . you’re like the cute little puppy at the pound that gets picked out by the rich kid.
The one whose parents are bleeding-heart liberals—all opposed to puppy mills and shit.
That’s you, right? And your parents? Except they didn’t want your littermate. ”
Somehow she’d twisted this entire bizarro situation into a judgment against my parents—birth and adoptive.
“How do you know she was a teenager? Or that she was dim?” I countered. “Maybe she was raped . . .”
“Yeah, because that’s better—bio dad is a rapist. Or hey, maybe he was her father, right? Then it could be incest—”
“Stop it!” The two words came out loud enough to startle us both. “I don’t know who you are or how this happened. But I don’t have to stand here and listen to this BS.”
I spun around to leave, my hand on the doorknob, when she jumped up.
“No, no, wait. Mary . . . please, wait.” When I turned to face her again, she looked totally different. She was softer, more vulnerable. “I’m sorry. I just . . . Yeah, you know, it’s a shock. And it’s not like anything good has ever just come knocking on my door. So you have to give me a minute.”
My hand dropped back down to my side, and I sighed. “I don’t know what happened or why. But I know one thing for certain—my parents wouldn’t have taken one sibling without the other, let alone a single identical twin. I don’t think they knew you even existed.”
She looked down at the floor. “If you say so.”
I straightened up. “I do. But, God, they’re gonna be thrilled to meet you!”
Samantha looked up tentatively. “Yeah? You think so?”
“I know so,” I told her confidently, picturing an extra place at the Thanksgiving table and another face on the family Christmas card.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.