Lily and Emily arrived on a Thursday morning in June, eight minutes apart, in that order — Lily first, which she would claim as evidence of superiority for the entirety of their childhood, and Emily second, which Emily countered was simply evidence that she had taken time to prepare. They were identical in the technical sense — the same genetic material, the same dark eyes, the same way of tilting their heads when they were listening carefully — but different in every way that mattered within about six weeks of knowing them.
Lily was deliberate. She approached everything with the focused caution of someone who wanted to understand a thing before committing to it. She learned to walk later than most children because she spent months studying the mechanics of it from the floor, watching adults move around her with the careful attention of a junior engineer. When she finally walked, she walked correctly. She has never fallen down since in the way that children fall — she simply incorporated balance into her understanding and moved on.
Emily was the opposite.
Emily walked early and ran immediately and fell constantly and got up without interruption and ran again. She was the kind of child who greeted the world by throwing herself at it, trusting that it would catch her or that getting up was fine either way. She laughed loudly and at things that weren’t always conventionally funny. She had my mother’s habit of talking to strangers as though she had known them her whole life, which had been my mother’s most exhausting and most wonderful quality.
Together they were a complete system.
