The Opposite of Me - Excerpt

Chapter 3

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, I used to be the pretty sister.

I've even got proof: an old sepia-colored photograph of Alex and me as babies, being wheeled down the street by Mom as we sat side by side in our double stroller. My thick brown hair was tied up in crowd-pleasing pigtails with pink bows, and my arms and legs were soft and plump-the only time in my life when people have complimented me on that particular trait. I was a happy, easygoing baby who smiled a lot, even when the Greek grandma down the street pinched my rosy cheeks and turned them redder. Alex, on the other hand, was as scrawny and bald as a plucked chicken for the first twelve months of her life. She also had a bad case of baby acne, she was colicky and fearful of strangers, and her crying, as Dad says, still shuddering at the memory, "could drive bats insane."

I have no memory of what it felt like to have people's eyes drawn to me during that first year of my life, to have them coo and exclaim over my big eyes and pretty smile, to soak up their compliments while Alex wailed and spit up her breakfast. Because right around the time of our first birthday, our family photo album began telling a different story.

Alex outgrew her colic and acne and shyness, and though our eyes were a matching navy blue when we were born, mine darkened into a muddy brown while hers grew lighter and lighter, until they were the shade of a Caribbean sea with sunlight filtering through. She put on some much-needed weight, though she remained small-boned and delicate, and her hair began growing faster than Rapunzel's, coming out in long fiery-gold spirals.

No matter where we went-the playground, the beach, the first day of preschool-one sentence always surrounded us, like the background music of our lives: "Ooh, that hair!"

People would smile at me, too, and maybe even say something nice, after they'd finished gushing over Alex and telling Mom she should be in commercials. At least the kind people did. I remember once when I was about five or six years old and my family was eating lunch at our neighborhood deli. Alex and I were sharing an order of French fries-the good, greasy, crinkle-cut kind-as a reward for going to the pediatrician's office and enduring an immunization shot. Mom was just starting to divide up the fries on our plates, with Alex and me both watching to make sure the other one didn't make off with a single extra fry, not even the charred brown one that had gone a few extra rounds in the deep fryer, when an old lady tottered by. She was so arthritic and bent over that she was almost at my eye level, and I couldn't help staring because she looked just like the witch in my Snow White book. She was even dressed all in black. She didn't smile or say hello; she just reached out with a hand that looked like a claw and touched my head, while I sat there, frozen in fear.

"Too bad this one doesn't look like her sister," she said in a raspy voice.

Mom tried to distract me by talking loudly about something else, but I could still feel the touch of that blue-veined hand, and I could tell Mom knew. Then, when Alex wasn't looking, Mom slipped me a few extra fries. That was what did it; that's what caused a lump to form in my throat that made it hard for me to breathe. It was like Mom was trying to make up for me not being as special as Alex. Like she was conceding the point, too. I hadn't cried at the doctor's office, not even when the nurse jabbed a needle into the soft flesh of my upper arm, but as I sat there looking at the French fries I was no longer hungry for, it took all I had to hold back the tears from rolling down my cheeks.

Don't get me wrong-my parents did the best they could. They tried for ten long years to have kids before Alex and I came along. On the day we were born, Mom, still woozy and weepy and holding a pink-wrapped bundle in each arm, asked the doctor for advice on raising twins.

He thought about it for a minute, then said, "They're individuals. Treat them that way. Don't dress them alike."

Mom took his words to heart: Those pink hospital blankets were the last things Alex and I ever wore that matched. We had our own rooms and our own clothes and our own friends. We never had to take the same ballet class or get the same haircut. But Mom needn't have worried. Left to our own devices, Alex and I would've carved out completely different paths all by ourselves. I can't imagine my life without Alex, but not because she's the only one who truly understands me, or because we have a psychic connection from the womb. It's because I've spent my entire life pushing away from Alex, like a swimmer using the force of a concrete wall to do a flip turn and kick away in the opposite direction.