Les Jumelles – Emily Farnsworth

Knock, knock! From above my head came the signal: “Are you sleeping?”

Quickly, I responded with four sharp raps to the wall: “No, are you?”

I was itching with excitement. This was the most recent in a series of secret codes my sister and I had developed to appease our childhood need for the clandestine; surely this one would work.
Six knocks and a giggle from the top bunk; she was awake, too.

In the back of my mind, I could hear my father’s warning issued to us not fifteen minutes previously: “If I hear any talking, any whispering, any communication of any sort, there will be severe punishments.” ‘Severe punishments’ usually meant a repeat of this speech in a slightly grumpier tone a few minutes later; my father was not one for severity.

And so the schemes continued: swimming noodles threaded from one bunk to the next as a privative telephone, coded messages written in one of many highly intricate and furtive alphabets of our own device (“4r3 U s/33p!n6?”), even an attempt at channeling the psychic – we tried to read each other’s thoughts, although I maintained that the bunk between us interfered with my reception.

I remember once, my father read us a book about a pair of twin girls who were separated as babies by a witch who spirited away one of the girls and raised her as her own. But despite the distance between them, the girls always knew each other existed because they could communicate through their hearts.
That book always reminds me of my sister and me.

Through every laugh and scheme and broken heart, Nicole has been my partner in crime, my shoulder on which to cry, giggling at my botched jokes and sitting beside me when the world feels as though it is too heavy to bear. There is an understanding between us, tacit and immutable: we are twins at heart. She’s in college now, living hundreds of miles from home, and more importantly from me; I have never felt more like one of those little twins missing her other half.

Often, people remark on how alike we look, how cute it is when we blurt out the same sentence in unison. This observation of the irrelevant amuses me, almost in a pitying sort of way; they have no idea what lies beneath the skin, pulsing through our veins – the inscrutable and infinite love of a sister.

I realize now that I never needed ESP or a cup-and-string telephone to reach my sister; we are, and always have been, like those little twins separated at birth – connected by heart, eternally.