A woman stands in my childhood bedroom, and she wears my face. I look up at her, my feet fixed to the sidewalk by my car, and she stares back at me from the open window. Both of us watch the other, frozen like prey. The dying sun casts the woman’s figure in gold; the flesh of her face turns supple as candle wax. She’s soft-focused the way dreams are, or ghosts. At first glance, I thought she was my sister, Harper. That scared me more than seeing the stranger in my old bedroom: my sister like a changeling, shedding her girlishness and slipping into my body’s shape.

But it’s not my sister. The hair is wrong, the stature, that dark-eyed stare. The woman looks at me like I’m an intruder—even though she’s the one in my room, wearing my face—but I know, I know she’s right. I shouldn’t be here. I haven’t stepped inside 11 Esau Ave since I was eighteen years old, packing a bag in a flurry while my then-girlfriend, Kitty, lounged in the front seat of her pickup. My hometown, Burnside, relegated to road signs and reel-like memory.

Still, for a moment, I imagine myself crawling up the trellis, the very one I shimmied up and down in high school, a real Romeo in butch boots. Each foothold another step closer to nostalgia. But then I blink, and while I haven’t moved, the woman has. She hitches her leg over the windowsill. My body coils tight. Her oversized T-shirt rides up over her hips; her thigh, large and strong, straddles and spills over the ledge. Stretch marks shift and bend, quick flashes of moonlight. There’s a familiar calf, an identical ankle. An old scar.

There is one terrible moment where I think she’s coming at me. Her body curves towards mine. The woman glances at me over one shoulder, a coquettish flick of her shaggy hair that curdles the spit in my mouth. But rather than making her way down the trellis, she settles on the windowsill instead. Just sitting there, each limb a lesson in repose. We watch each other. Despite the looseness of her body, her eyes are wide, all whites.

Looking at her hurts me—dull pain cleaving me in two, running down the length of my spine. My head swims with vertigo; I’m seeing double. The woman parts her lips, as if to speak; I am staring down the pink slick of her tongue into the blackness of her throat. I don’t know why, but the idea of hearing her words, knowing her voice—a strange mix of fascination and revulsion shudders through me from top to toe. Fear makes me fast. I stumble my way back to my car.

Her silhouette remains a dark imprint against the house as I drive away.

Somehow, I make my way back to the motel. At the click of the lock behind me, Nell blinks awake from her sprawl on the bed. She smiles at me, dried drool like powdered sugar kissing the corner of her mouth; she fell asleep on top of the covers waiting for me. “Hey,” Nell says. Her tongue piercing winks inside her mouth.

My whole face feels flushed. My brain bangs against my skull, asking who is she who is she who is she—? I should tell Nell about the woman, I think. I will tell her. I suck breath between my teeth.

“Hey, yourself,” I say.

The room reeks of menthols, even though neither of us smokes; constellations of blue-green mold pepper the ceiling. A package of corn nuts crinkles where it’s pressed against my breastbone; there are little snack cakes in my jacket pocket, too—the cream-filled ones Nell likes, the kind that coat your mouth like plastic—but I can barely recall the trip to the gas station, or much of the drive at all. My body didn’t belong to me, not then—it belonged to the fear, which made my blood quick, my mind quiet—and all I knew was the rush of grays, greens, the blur of the Blue Ridge Mountains running past me like an oil painting in my rearview mirror. The cavern of that woman’s mouth. The taste of fear like lemon rind, salt.

Nell sits up, patting the empty spot beside her. I follow her without thinking. “Two whole hours for snacks?” Nell asks as I hand them over. The sweet-sharp smell of corn syrup and vinegar plumes in the air when she pries apart the seam of the corn nuts, searing my nose. I make myself useful and tear open the snack cakes for her.

I say, “7-11’s as close as nightlife gets here in Burnside, you know. When I was a kid—”

“Lott,” she says.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Lott,” she repeats, “baby,” and presses our thighs together. Baby, Nell calls me, and liquid heat blooms in me like a gunshot, all at once. Sometimes, I love her so much I wish I could shrug out of my own skin, drape it over her like a coat, keep her warm the way she does me. I never tell her this. It feels too honest in a dangerous way, but I think she knows.

“Were you camping out at your ma’s again?” she asks, and when I don’t answer, she nudges me with one of her jackknife elbows. When I clasp my palm to my side—hissing like it’s a stab wound, like I’m gushing blood—she elbows me over and over until we are giggling, leaning into each other so close I can brush the beauty mark on her forehead with the tip of my nose, my mouth. I kiss her there.

“I’m serious,” Nell says, laughing. “You can’t just show up and stalk your old place, baby, that’s creepy.”

“I know,” I say. The woman’s face flashes in my mind.

“You’re running out of time,” she insists. “Harper’s graduation is in two days. Two.”

I only learned about Harper’s graduation through an old friend with a sister in the same graduating class. Just another dyke who’d fled my hometown and its limbo state for the city of Morgantown—only three hours from Burnside, if that, and not even over state lines.

It’s not that I ever felt unsafe in Burnside. My family even knew I was into girls. But Old Man Thomas had lived with his partner for twenty years in that little yellow one-bedroom at the bottom of Esau Ave before I left, and my ma still only referred to Matt as Thomas’s “friend.” That sort of half life—it wasn’t for a lot of people. It wasn’t for me.

That’s not to say I never miss it.

When I told Nell about graduation, she insisted we come to town, that I reconnect with the family I’d left behind. Build a bridge between the two disparate parts of myself. I’d like to get to know pre-Lott, she joked. And anyway, her grad classes were done for the semester, and I had enough vacation days saved up at the print shop for a three-day weekend. We could even leave the cat with our elderly neighbor. What could it hurt? her eyes seemed to say, and I bit my lip before I could say it might hurt me. Nell knows the hand I had in raising my sister. She knows the family history carved into me: two deadbeat dads, a single working mother who tried, really tried, but who I knew mainly through her absence.

Now, I am the deadbeat, and unlike our fathers, I come crawling back.

Nell continues, “You can’t gate-crash your sister’s big day. That wouldn’t be fair.”

“I know,” I say again, “I know, but—” But it’s been almost a decade, I don’t say, and Harper is not the nine-year-old I knew: yellow hair, crooked teeth, sparrow bones to my bulk. Invulnerable with youth. Our relationship was not nearly so hardy; it was delicate as gold chain, each link to one another clumsier than the last. There’s no fixing this with glow-in-the-dark stars, or grilled cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off, or the sisterly magic I purged from myself as painless as a bloodletting.

Almost a decade since I left, since I looked Ma in the eye and told her I’m no mother. I don’t care what you have to do. Move around your work schedule. Beg for a raise, whatever. I don’t care, I’m done. Please, I’m done, and Harper’s bedroom door cracked open, a visible wound leaking light into the hall. She heard me, I knew, and at that moment, I didn’t even care. If she were smart, Harper wouldn’t want anything to do with me now. Being unwanted is not something you just forgive.

I loved my sister, I don’t say. But not enough, not near enough to make me stay.

Silence overcomes all of this, all the things I should say; the words jumble up in my mouth. Nell knits our fingers together; her hand is so small in mine, so trusting, and it frightens me. Her family doesn’t speak to her anymore, not in the last two years since she came out. She’d tell the story of being rejected at a Fourth of July picnic to all her friends, to the girls at the bar where she worked weekends. Laughing it off with a sardonic edge to her round, sweet mouth. But she wants better for me. I had brothers once, she told me.

Don’t we deserve both? Love like ours, and a picket fence. A family to return home to.

I find myself waking in strange places these days. I never used to sleepwalk when I was young—my body knew where it belonged to.

The worst bout was two weeks before Burnside, before the woman in my bedroom window who looked at me like she knew me, like she was me. Nell found me at the kitchen counter, eyes open but unseeing. One set of fingers was splayed open, tender, as my other hand chopped and minced, cutting away at thin air with our sharpest knife: the one we used for slicing through sinew, through beef bones to the marrow inside.

This dream is no different from the others. It feels so real, it’s fake. I hold a clementine up to my face, searching for sunken spots, bruises; I test the skin of it with my thumb, and the flesh is firm. I don’t question how I arrived at the Food Mart of my youth: a beige box of neat rows. The linoleum sticks like Velcro to my treads, and the air tastes of lemony floor wax, spring onions, and strangely, burning trash.

Fear flirts with my senses, like fingers walking up my spine. Harper calls out to me—her voice near-grown, husky like my mother’s, like mine, and echoing across the aisles. “Charlotte! Charlotte!” My cart’s left behind, piled high with perfect, perfect vegetables. I roam the labyrinth of soup cans, loaves of bread, brand names. I am drowning: canned whole green beans, rows of pickles in brine, bulbs of garlic bigger than my thumb bobbing away in oil, syrupy peaches, San Marzano tomatoes, a school of canned tuna, maraschino cherries bright and gory as bird hearts, mushroom stock, whole skinned potatoes, olive oil and more olive oil, some stuffed with sprigs of rosemary and thyme like underwater terrariums, pineapple chunks that Ma dumps into Greek yoghurt and promises are good, coconut milk, chickpeas and lentils and kidney beans, beets dark and bleeding into the water, beans again, not to mention nasty fucking preserved pears like slugs, and nowhere, nowhere is my sister. I am drowning.

Just then, my focus alters, my vision swivels, but it’s not Harper I see. It’s the woman from the window. It’s myself. Darkness swarms in my eyes, like they’re blotted away. I can’t read my own expression beyond its absence, but I’m smiling. White, pristine teeth; I cannot see anything else. Nausea rises in my throat. Harper shouts my name again, laughing, “Charlotte!”

“Lott,” another voice says.

I blink back into my body. Reality alters; even my sense of gravity shifts. It’s not like waking up—there’s no stillness, no suspension in that strange liminal place before waking. I’m asleep, and then I’m awake.

Nell hovers her palms over my chest and collarbones, as if her touch will be too much, too soon, and send me spiraling back into dust and dream. Back to my sister. Nell’s eyes are dark and wet, like tar, like black holes in the center of her white face, and I start rubbing at the mascara with my thumbs, unthinking at first but becoming more and more frantic as it smears. We forgot makeup remover, I remember nonsensically; I need to get her some. Nell hates a dirty face.

“What’s wrong?” I say. “Nelly, you’re crying.”

My big toe kicks at a crushed soda can. We’re standing in the abandoned car lot next to the motel, all gravel and broken glass. Across the street, someone is burning garbage in their backyard, the same smell from my dream; I can tell from the plume of black smoke, a straight shot to the even blacker sky, and the aroma of rot and plastic. My body feels buzzing and numb at once.

I have no shoes, and the ground bites right through my socks, which feel soaked with blood. I squelch all the way up the two flights of stairs to our room. In contrast, Nell’s face remains bloodless, even as she digs the debris from my feet. My knees are crunched up against my chest, soles bared, as Nell kneels at the foot of the bed. The tweezers are steady as she roots around beneath my skin. They’re the same pair Nell bought for her eyebrows, though she rarely plucks them; she told me she wants to look nice for my mother, my sister. I ache. If I could give her a family, I would. We’d wear matching pajamas on major holidays, and attend weddings, and picnic for birthdays. Lemonade in thermoses, deviled eggs and pasta salad, homemade cornbread with blackberry jam I’d taste straight from Nell’s mouth. It’d be a dream we’d never wake up from.

“What are they about?” Nell asks, voice low, and I force myself back into the waking world. She’s never questioned me about the dreams before, even though she’s heard me at night, mumbling Harper’s name. Maybe she could tell how confused, how unsettled they make me. Nell’s head dips down, the same motion a king makes before being bestowed his crown, but then she kisses my ankle bone. Once, then twice. The air trembles, or maybe that’s just me.

“Just—here,” I say, a bit breathless, “home. I think—” Nell watches me. “It’s like I’ve lost something.”

Domesticity haunts me. I had a dream once that was nothing but me on my knees, scrubbing the mildew from our old clawfoot tub; I woke up with red, raw palms from where I rubbed them, over and over, against the carpet. But even the good moments hound me—a film reel of grocery shopping, hair braiding, and lunch packing. Board game nights, hot chocolate bubbling on the stove in mid-March. Ma’s fiftieth birthday. Burned butter, sea salt. Our house on Esau Ave. Harper is always there, my golden child. Everything’s so good, it hurts. Every time, I wake up with my skin too tight, my teeth aching like they’ve grown too large for my mouth. Nothing suits; nothing fits. It’s a lovely life—it’s never mine. It belongs to that woman, that other-self, her indecipherable eyes.

“Is it scary?” Nell asks. She cradles my ankle in her palm.

Her softness undoes me. "Sometimes,” I say, “but they’re only dreams.”

But sometimes, what haunts me most aren’t dreams at all. Sometimes, a haunting’s just a little girl and her sister, a little girl and her realization—that she will never be alone again, even if she wishes it.

In this memory, I am always too small. The solidness of my body is forced back into soft shapes, masculine edges made elastic, adolescent. Harper was smaller still, not even six months old yet, and bald—that’s always what I remember first. The honest vulnerability of her body, the itchy feeling of secondhand exposure.

This was before the office was converted into Harper’s Room, and so she slept with me while Ma did night shift. My whole room reeked of her: soured milk, yeast. Harper’s crib wedged against the back-right corner, as far away as I could get it from my own bed, and I worried that one day soon she would reach out and eat the paint chips that textured the wall like lead-laden coral. By then, she already had curious fingers, big eyes, and a hungry mouth. I worried she would die without me. I worry all the time.

Back and forth, I rocked Harper in my arms. Holding her head still felt like a lesson in restraint; one wrong angle, a slip of the fingers, and that spot where her skull opened like a flower would become a fatal resting place for my thumb. I think Ma worried I’d become jealous of another girl in the house, but the shape of girlhood has never fit me quite right, not even back then. Like a coat too tight in the shoulders.

Harper opened her mouth wide, too wide; there was a darkness there, one that would one day grow teeth. That little mouth opened and closed, like a goldfish gasping for oxygen underwater, and when I offered her my finger, she latched on tight. I laughed; it tickled, and I said something like: Are you trying to eat me, baby? I could feel the ridge of bone beneath her gums as she suckled, and my body warred between love and disgust. And I knew then, right then, that I was her big sister. I would always be Harper’s big sister, and I wished I could hand her over to anyone else. I can never let go.

I don’t wake up. This moment never leaves.

Instead, it grows with me. It becomes a second shadow. It breathes.

Some people say a house looks like its occupants—but I think they’ve got it backwards. Our house on Esau Ave shaped me. Sometimes, when I stand in front of the mirror, every scar, every divot—I can trace it back to that house. It only makes sense, then, that it would follow me all the way to the city, take root in dream.

But this is no dream. Early morning birdsong opens the scene. 11 Esau Ave stands by itself, as it always did, amongst the crop of red oaks and blackberry brambles, the old swing set held together by rust; within, there will be all the old haunts: the kitchen table carved by my grandfather, the crayon drawing I scrawled on the stairway wall, the pinned butterflies above the mantel, a remnant of Harper’s fixation with lepidopterology. The last time I stepped inside 11 Esau Ave, I wished I was anywhere else.

I’d left town the morning before my own graduation, too cunt-struck to wait even for my diploma, but now, here I am, pretending I have any right to show my face at Harper’s.

The front door is unlocked, but the screen one behind it is. Still, it’s only glass, and so many times did I tell Ma, tell Harper, that it would not protect them. Through the glass, I see no one inside. Just shoes without feet, jackets bumping shoulders on the coat rack. But the lights are on, and I’m running out of time. Harper’s graduation is tomorrow.

There’s a nest in the drainpipe hanging above the front porch, a riot of dried twigs and weeds and small, pink bodies roiling within, and I stand below them, feeling exposed. Knock, I tell myself, just knock. The doorbell’s dead. I know it’s dead. It has been since before I left, since before Harper was even a clump of cells, since before my living memory. It’s all I’ve ever known. But for some reason, I press it anyway—for the joy of the familiar, maybe—and when the doorbell trills, I rip my hand away, scalded. I stare. I wait.

The woman answers.

First, it’s only her shadow, slotting over the top my body, and I fit perfectly within it. Our edges align. Staring at her through the glass, I can imagine for a moment that she is my reflection. Dark eyes, too-large ears, the little scar above my lip. What Nell would call a pretty mouth. Shoulders broad but rounded, hard lines disrupted by a doughy middle, a woman’s hips. It’s me. She’s me. But then I lean back, and she stays still, and the illusion shatters.

That stillness unsettles me. Her head stays tilted to one side, a birdlike facsimile of interest. The skin beneath her eyes is smooth, veinless. I feel that same pain from the first time, like I’ve been bisected, but besides the slight tightening of her jaw, her face is unreadable. There’s a comfy domesticity to her outfit: a pair of terry shorts, her bangs tucked away in a bandana. Her feet are bare, and this unbalances me. She’s at home here, and I am not.

“Who are you?” I ask. What are you? A cuckoo in the nest.

She won’t answer me. I ask, “What are you doing in my house?” She opens her mouth.

Another voice calls out from within the house. “Charlotte?” I hear. It’s Harper’s voice. She’s the only one who ever called me by my full name. I’ve never felt like a Charlotte in my whole life, but I didn’t mind so much when it was her. Unnamable emotion leaps into my throat. I want to leap into the house; I want to run. I hear the padding of feet, I see the flick of a braid, and then the woman blocks my line of sight. I hate myself when I’m relieved.

The woman barely twitches my face as she calls back, “Coming,” and her voice. Her voice—it’s my voice, of course it is—but it’s the first time I’ve heard it undisturbed by the confines of my own skull or the slight crackle of a recording. It’s crisp, and real, and it’s as if my own voice has dried up. I stare at the woman, open-mouthed, speechless. She says to Harper, “Don’t let the cornbread burn, kid. I won’t let you ruin your senior picnic like you did Ma’s birthday.” The taste of burnt butter floods my mouth.

Harper laughs. “Fuck you,” she says to my double, and my sister’s gone, just like that.

Charlotte’s eyes swivel back to mine. That’s the scariest part about her, those eyes. A stranger’s gaze staring out from within my face. Looking at her, I remember what Nell said about her history of photography class last semester. How, in Victorian England, photographers propped up the dead for one last photo shoot. It was better, even, photographing the dead rather than the living; any movement made people ghoulish, blurred. Apparitions captured on film. But corpses know stillness well. After the photos developed, photographers would paint the eyes back in and resurrect the dead.

This woman’s eyes are too deep, too rich, glossy as marbles. I thought I’d killed this part of me, but she’s standing right here.

Charlotte props her hip against the doorframe, a sentinel guarding her post. The dark wood of the house and the darkness of her hair meld into one being, each an extension of the other. Each keeping me out; Harper in. “I’ve dreamed of you,” Charlotte says. “An apartment in Morgantown, one with a green velvet chair. A cat and—and a woman. Nell. No one’s ever smiled at me like that before.” I think of my own dreams, the little glimpses of a life I didn’t choose. A forked tongue in the path.

“You scared me at first,” she admits. “I thought you were haunting me.”

Had my family even noticed I was gone? My mouth wells up with sourness. Had they worried about me? In my mind, there’s a revolving door. One Lott leaving, only for another to slot into her place. None the wiser. I wonder how long this other version of myself has been here. Was it when I told Kitty I would go with her, or after I’d already placed Burnside firmly in my rearview mirror? Was it before then, maybe the first time I ditched one of Harper’s band concerts to kiss a girl behind the gymnasium? Or has it always been this way—Charlotte, the sister-mother, and Lott, the fag? I wonder who created who, or if we created each other.

“Who are you?” I repeat. I realize I’m pleading with her, even though I already know the answer.

In the kitchen, Harper’s hum trails all the way back to the front door, and Charlotte’s face softens into something sweet and terrible. Her features are grotesque in love. None of the waxy perfection I remember from that first night remains. She seems so real, so solid. Human. I look down at my hands as if checking their opacity.

Her voice tugs my vocal cords like the taut string between two cups. “I know what I’m not,” Charlotte says. “I know I’m not what you’re looking for. And I know Harper isn’t either.” She studies me the way you would roadkill, a bloody smear on pavement like a Rorschach inkblot: a bit repulsed but fascinated, too. Like she can’t look away. Like she wants to understand the shape of me.

“Harper’s my sister,” I say. “We’re family.” The words feel wrong in my mouth.

Charlotte laughs, but those eyes turn hard and mean. “It’s a little late for that. You don’t get both,” she says, “you don’t get to have both and just—just leave me with nothing.” I’ve never heard my voice sound like that before. “It’s time to leave.”

But where can I go? I can’t speak.

Echoing someone else from long ago, Charlotte says, “Who cares?”

The senior picnic. My senior picnic. Ma was at work because she was always at work, and Harper’s fingers were tacky between mine, though she hid our handholding behind a tupperware of bread rolls. A bit of chocolate smudged across her chin, and looking at her made me feel tender, almost bruised, as she wiped ineffectually at the mess.

Here, I might have said, or let me get that. Harper swatted my outstretched hand, and before the pang of loss could hit me, I caught Kitty’s eyes across the park. I’d told her I’d be there, but I never thought she’d come. Kitty was twenty-five, a recent college grad, and our front-desk secretary at Burnett High. Red hair like a river of blood over her shoulder; a quick-draw smile; mean, in a way that made me wet. Kitty treated me like an adult, a real one, not a kid playacting at parenthood; she liked the heft of me, the way I could loom over top of her and pin her down. How I could thrust my hips against hers, like I was fucking her for real. How, with a sweet word, I’d bend to all five-foot-one of her.

I’ll be back, I told Harper. My sister’s shoulders hiked up to her ears, and she stared out at the sea of teenagers with color high up on her cheeks. She always wore her emotions on her face, in her blood. Harper opened her mouth, but I repeated, sterner now, I’ll be back. Stay here.

We fucked in Kitty’s backseat. I shoved my hand down the open zipper of her jeans, and she wound a fist into my hair, and when I tucked my fingers into her, she yanked until my eyes watered and my body’s core went molten, narrowed down to nothing but the lit-up nerves of my scalp and the heat clutching at me. And when Kitty said afterwards, sweaty and disheveled, her hand pressed against my throat, so what do you say? I didn’t worry about Harper, my mother, my home there in Burnside at all.

Where would we go? I asked.

Who cares? Kitty said. And I grinned and agreed and let myself be a bad sister. A bad mother.

Nell props her feet up on the dash. “So, Harper’s senior picnic,” she says. Clad in a bright yellow jumpsuit, I’m surprised all the June bugs don’t abandon the sun and flock right to her. Sunglasses obscure her face, leaving black pools where her eyes should be, and I can’t read her at all. Drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, I hum out an affirmative. She’s skeptical. “Are you sure it’s all right for us to just show up? Don’t you need, like, tickets or something?”

“It’s at a public park,” I say. “It’s not like graduation.”

Always the day before graduation, senior picnic is a tradition Burnett High never skips out on. It’s always at Saint Anthony Park. It’s always at noon, weather permitting. I should have thought of it sooner. Even with the sunglasses, I can feel Nell’s gaze lingering on my face; her hand reaches over the middle console and grazes my knee, almost shy. The scent of peach hand lotion trails after her. “Baby, I don’t think—”

“Please,” I say, unable to even look at her, and I hear the click of her teeth as she closes her mouth, words caught midway. My breath trembles. “Harper’ll be there. I know it.”

Nell grips my thigh and holds me, just holds me. “Okay,” she says.

“Whatever we find there,” I start to say, but I can’t finish. Nell says nothing, only squeezing my thigh. I love her. The breadth of her hand can’t even enclose my wrist, never mind my leg. She's hollow boned and spindly, as substantial as a stick figure, but something about her makes me feel cherished, makes me feel small. When I was younger, I hated that feeling, when adults would see me at parent-teacher conferences or picking up Harper from school, pity pinching their faces like they knew just how ill-suited I was to the motherhood allotted to me, poor thing. But now that I’m older, now that I’m with Nell, I wish for soft things again: pillow forts, oil pastels, the weight of two hands swinging together.

Nell and I swing our hands between our bodies, now. I hunch my shoulders, just a little, so we can link our fingers together comfortably.

In the cradle of birch trees, the park stretches out before us, the gravel parking lot blooming into green grass, dandelion weeds. A gaggle of parents speak in low, indecipherable voices. Teens lounge on every available surface; their bodies dip in and out of view in waves, the hills swallowing them down. Someone had set up a volleyball net, and in a crash of thunder, one girl leaps up on long, tan legs, her body’s curve following the invisible line of gravity, and spikes the ball straight into the ground. Clods of dirt and grass shower their audience, who shriek. A puppy’s overgrown paws catch on a picnic blanket, and it crashes, nose first, into someone’s lap. A laugh track plays. A boy feeds his girlfriend a grape from his fingertips. None of them look at us. I feel like they might be deliberately not looking at us.

Nell shifts next to me. A rustle of cloth, and her shoulder brushes mine. “Cute,” she says into my ear, but her voice holds an odd, discordant note.

“Eighteen years of this,” I say.

“Jesus.”

Cupping a hand over my eyes, I scan for my family, for Harper, but it’s not me that finds them, it’s Nell. “Who’s that?” she asks. Again, her voice catches in a strange way; she hushes. Nell doesn’t point, but I can feel the pull, the connection like a tug from my belly button to the top notch of my spine. I turn my head. My family sits on the grass. They are closer to us than I thought they’d be, almost too close. A couple steps, and I could touch them, hold them. My senses hone in on the scene: the matching scratchy voices, all three of them, the rumble of Ma’s laugh rolling over the top; the rich lavender color of Harper’s sundress, the newness of her adult face, her yellow hair now darkened into gold; my doppelgänger in between them, smiling with all her teeth.

In that moment, she looks nothing like me.

Salt spills like thousands of ants across the blanket, the grass. Ma’s hair glints silver, but the lines of her face seem creased with happiness rather than the exhaustion that defined her during my childhood. Maybe it’s an overindulgence—but I let myself imagine my mother at my own graduation, how she might’ve put an arm around me and told me she was proud. Thanked me, even, for looking after my sister so well. Ma swings an arm across Charlotte’s shoulders, instead, while Harper licks her fingers, bright with blackberry jam. There’s chocolate, too, at the corner of her mouth, and she doesn’t flinch when Charlotte wipes it away. She laughs, instead. They’re living in an idyll, and Nell and I are outside the narrative, looking in.

I ask, “Is this a dream?”

But Nell is fixated on Charlotte. "Who is that?” Nell repeats, high and tight. I shake my head. I thought Charlotte was the cuckoo, that she crawled into the nest, but I was wrong. I was wrong. “Baby,” Nell is begging. She clutches my hand, like I might disappear, like I might become someone else altogether. I want to tell her not to worry—that‘s it too late to be anything other than what I am, what I’ve done—but I can’t tear my eyes away from Charlotte, either. Charlotte perks up at Nell’s voice; her head turns. She stares at our joined hands, at Nell. Big, dark eyes. She looks hungry. Like even on a day like this—sunshine and plenty, sisterly magic and blackberry jam—she’s left wanting. Beyond our identical features, I see myself in her face.

Maybe we’re both starved for things we’ll never have.

Maybe we’ll never be whole again.

“I think we should leave,” Nell says. “Please, let’s go home. Baby, baby.”

Editor: Dante Luiz

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors