Have You Met My Sister? She Looks Just Like You

Late in my senior year of high school, my sister Abbie posted a photo album to Facebook labeled “Family.” The cover photo was a family portrait taken that fall, which seemed to indicate that the album would only contain those proofs, all of which I had pre-approved for public viewing. Nervous anyway, I clicked through the images to make sure there was nothing humiliating lurking in their midst. To my relief, while there were other events included in the album, none were offensive. The last few were from a road trip my sister and I took to California with my best friend, Sahara. “I love that I am in an album of yours labeled ‘Family’!” Sahara commented on a shot of the three of us. We could pass for sisters in our identical poses, pasty skin, and dark hair, but I know better and can spot our myriad tiny differences. The last picture is just Abbie and me, hugging on the beach, our cheeks pressed together, a bonfire in the background, our hair windswept and curled with salt water. With the camera so close, all the differences in our faces are clear to me—my green eyes against her brown ones, the roundness of her nose and cheeks in comparison to my pointiness, her thick eyebrows and long hair dwarfing the absence of my eyebrows and my fluffy Shirley Temple curls. Our smiles are not even the same shape, yet, right there, in the comments, a friend of Abbie’s has posted “I can never tell you two apart…!”

I curbed my impulse to reply, and instead looked forward eagerly to the end of the summer when I would be in New York, a place Abbie had never even visited, and she would still be home, and, finally, no one would be mixing us up. I would be Laura and she would be Abbie, and there would be no name tags or clarifications or confusions, just miles and miles of individuality.

It wasn’t until a brisk Sunday morning in October that I began to suspect that it was perhaps not my sister that was the problem in these misidentification scenarios. Standing in the entry way of my small New York City church, a well-meaning, friendly woman greeted me: “Good morning, Abigail!” I smiled and returned the sentiment, giving her my usual one-or-two mix-up grace period. So used to this type of encounter, it slipped my mind that she had no reason to call me Abigail. I got called by Abbie’s name all the time, even by my own parents; it’s a hazard of sharing genetic material with someone only nineteen months younger than you. What’s more, sixteen years of this particular event had taught me that correcting the mistake is never a graceful situation.

“Morning, Abigail, good to see you again!” Another parishioner commented as he walked by us. Then it hit me: I was in New York City, a place my sister had never been. These people didn’t even know I had a sister, let alone a sister named Abigail whose bone structure bore an uncanny resemblance to mine.

“Um, my name is Laura, actually.”

“Oh! Of course! I’m so sorry dear! It’s just, you look just like— Tom, doesn’t she look just like Abbie?”

He nodded. “Just like her, you could be sisters.”

The statistical probability of me bearing a resemblance to multiple women in my age demographic with the name Abigail is probably very high, but the probability of me crossing paths with two of them in such a short span of time seemed a little impossible. Was I experiencing a cosmic improbability? Or was there something else? Gradually, it dawned on me that this was not the first time something like this had happened, nor would it be the last. I don’t just look like Abbie; I look like everybody.

Shopping with Sahara, more often than not sales girls would assume we were sisters. “It’s so sweet the way you two get along!” they would croon, or “I wish my sister were so much fun to hang out with! Ya’ll are sweet.” Dinner parties with my parents’ friends posed an interesting phenomenon. My father’s friends would see me and proclaim “You look just like your father!” while my mother’s declared I more closely matched her, but then when the three of us stood together, I was suddenly a perfect blend of both, their physical average. It wasn’t just family members and close friends, however. My ballet teacher’s husband used to tease me, calling me Margaret because I looked “just like that kid from Denis the Menace,” and one of my supervisors at work calls me Emily for reasons I still do not fully understand. I had always assumed that when my parents addressed me as “Ab-Laura” it was a moment of confusion, a mistake, the same way it was when they addressed Abbie as “Laur-Abbie,” but now another idea was forming. Perhaps I was a chameleon, showing the face of my surroundings instead of my own.

The start of my second semester of college began to reaffirm this theory. Approaching my first class confidently in a cute new sweater, I was faced with a mirror image. Riley matched me completely, from the sweaters on our bodies to the black boots on our feet. We had met early in the previous semester through a series of bizarre coincidences and mutual friendships, and had quickly become inseparable. Since then, we had developed a tendency to accidentally buy the same tops, have simultaneous ear infections, and perform a plethora of mild practical jokes.

Standing in that hallway, she got this evil glint in her eye when she saw my sweater, a grin spreading on her face. Whipping her bangs out of her eyes so that her hair now matched mine, she beckoned me into the classroom. We sat side by side, our hands holding identical pens listlessly over identical notebooks, right leg crossed over left, heads cocked slightly to one side. When our professor arrived he tried not to look at us, but we were drawing attention. The first thing we were asked to do was introduce ourselves, naming our majors and an interesting fact about ourselves. Riley glanced at me, her eyes sparkling again. I nodded as briefly as I could, feeling a laugh bubbling up already.

“My name is Laura, I’m an English major.”

“I’m Riley, a BFA Acting major.”

“We didn’t plan this.”

“But this isn’t the only thing about us that matches.” We volleyed matching facts rapidly; we had plenty to choose from. Eyebrows began to rise around us warily, and mouths began to sag open anxiously.

“We both grew up in Utah, about 45 minutes apart.”

“But we’re not Mormon.”

“Then we both moved away, but we miss Café Rio.”

“Our moms grew up in North Carolina, about 45 minutes apart.”

“Her brother used to be in the same fencing league as my childhood best friend.” I concluded the list, and we resumed our initial posture, waiting patiently for the next girl to introduce herself.

By this point, the class had dissolved into uncomfortable giggles, but our instructor was still staring, as though trying to determine whether or not we were playing some elaborate joke. Riley and I were solid, not a single giggle escaping. After all, we hadn’t told a single lie; unlikely as it sounded, our speech was built entirely upon reality.

“So, did you know each other before you got here? There are an awful lot of similarities!” The professor gestured between us with his pen, clearly confused.

            “Oh, no,” we answered together. “We’re just freaky life twins.”

            It took that poor man about a week and a half longer than it should have to figure out which one of us was Riley and which one was Laura. Meeting Riley in the first place was another cosmic improbability, but cosmic improbabilities are a specialty of mine. I had managed to meet on my second night of college a person who shared not only my history, but also my sense of humor, my low tolerance for social interaction, an insatiable reading habit, and my guilty love of child-exploiting reality TV like Dance Moms. We even owned the same two American Girl dolls; the similarities are endless if you know how to look for them. The more time Riley and I spent together, the more we began to realize that we were probably the same person from different dimensions, and our worlds were colliding which in all likelihood meant something absolutely terrible was going to happen. Or perhaps we were just separated at birth.      

That was when I realized that perhaps it wasn’t my face that was confusing people, but something about my behavior. There had been camp counselors who didn’t believe Abbie and I could be related, and strangers who were convinced we were twins. Sahara and I have the same color hair and we’re both skinny and pale, and our interests collide in many of the same ways my interests collide with Riley’s (Sahara is in fact the girl who fenced with Riley’s brother). The more sameness there is, the more sameness people see. From birth we are trained to find things that match, and then weed out the things that don’t. By age five we’re all tiny little sorting machines which can tell red from blue and circles from squares, and we group them according to their similarities not their differences. The blue squares would never be sorted into the same pile as the red circles—there’s nothing there that matches. When I’m with my sister, people aren’t looking at our eyebrows; when I am shopping with Sahara they aren’t looking at our height difference or the radical variances in ear shape. Riley and I didn’t become friends because she rides horses and I do ballet. We are drawn to similarity like magnets, and when we find it we stick to it. It is not so much that I am a chameleon; it is more that all of my colors are on display at once and people see the ones they recognize.

            Last weekend Riley and I went to the Strand Bookstore, then bought giant chocolate chip cookies from one of those dessert trucks that drive around Union Square. As we were standing on the subway platform to go home, chocolate smeared all over our teeth, a couple of skeezy looking guys looked us up and down appreciatively.

            “You sisters?” One of them lurched a little nearer to us.

            “No! What the hell?!” Riley turned to me with the question written all over her face. “Why does everyone always think that?”

            The train pulled up and I laughed. “It’s because I’m everybody’s sister.” She raised an eyebrow, secure in her individuality. “I’ll explain on the way home.”