Ryan and Mark Quigley lost their virginities nearly simultaneously one May night when they were both eighteen. Ryan had arranged the double date with the notorious Owens sisters for the express purpose of ridding himself of the burden of his innocence. His identical twin brother Mark's involvement was purely incidental.
Dana Owens, Ryan's date, was a girl of demonstrative compliance. Ryan personally knew four guys who had fucked her. She wasn't very attractive, to his eye. Dana had a somewhat piggish face, which she habitually coated with many heavy layers of make-up, and was voluptuous to the verge of chunkiness. But she did have the junk-food appeal of the unabashedly promiscuous and, to her credit, occasionally attended school braless. Ryan had no intention of making Dana his girlfriend. In his cooly pre-meditated plan she was nothing more than "practice." Ryan wanted to be experienced when he finally got with a girl he really liked.
There was a catch to dating Dana, though. Just one. Dana would only go on double dates with her younger sister, for reasons of safety. Tanya Owens, according to rumor, was as sure a thing as Dana, but whatever marginal allure she might have shared with her sister was negated by a couple of notable birth defects. For one, Tanya had a cleft palate, giving her a very pronounced hair-lip. As if this wasn't bad enough, her right leg was also shriveled and deformed, a full four inches shorter than her left. She wore a bulky metal brace on the bad leg, and walked with an awkward gait which had earned her the cruel high school nickname "Wobbly." It was said that were it not for the unique arrangement she had with her "normal" sister, Tanya would never date at all.
Ryan knew some guys overcame the problem of finding a date for the troublesome sister by trading favors. In order to take out Dana, a guy would have to find a buddy willing to have a go at Tanya. Then, as little as a week later, they could switch. Ryan had no intention of ever going with Wobbly Owens, though. This was how Mark got involved. Mark would go out with Tanya, and not expect to be re-paid by a turn with Dana. Mark did whatever Ryan told him to do.
Despite their nearly identical appearances- the same thick, wavy brown hair; the same intense blue eyes; the same sharply etched jaw line- there were vast differences in Ryan and Mark's personalities. Ryan was charismatic and out-going, a natural athlete. Mark was the scholar, more quiet and introverted. He was very intelligent, but tended to become a stuttering idiot whenever he found himself in conversation with a girl.
For the most part, Ryan was ashamed of his loser twin. But in the date he saw a mutually beneficial arrangement. Mark would take out Tanya, allowing Ryan access to Dana. In exchange, Mark would receive valuable experience he was not likely to find any other way. God knew he had little hope of popping his cherry on his own.
So the date was made. After the perfunctory dinner-and-a-movie prelude, Ryan drove the Quigley family car to a dark and secluded location outside of town. Ryan and Dana called dibs on the back seats. Mark and Tanya had to make do with the front, which was not well-engineered for the purposes of lovemaking. Their situation was made even more awkward by Tanya's cumbersome leg brace and Mark's fumbling inexperience. Despite these handicaps, soon Mark and Tanya were just as conjoined as their respective siblings in the back seat.
Then it happened.
Tanya was the first to notice something out of the ordinary. Her legs were spread at an awkward angle while Mark labored earnestly between them. The ankle of her leg brace had caught in the window crank, and the window rolled up and down an inch or so with Mark's every thrust. Tanya did her best to ignore this. She closed her eyes and imagined it was Brad Pitt grinding into her instead of pimply Mark Quigley. This mental trick had never failed her. The tension built until it was nearly unbearable. Tanya cried out when she reached her peak but then, instead of the familiar flush of orgasm, she felt a strange tingling sensation on her lip and in her right leg. The vibrations radiating from the points of Tanya's deformities were soon so intense it felt as though buzzing insects were crawling over her skin.
Mark pumped away at her, his mind consumed by the hundred conflicting thoughts and emotions of first-time sex. When he opened his eyes and looked down at the girl receiving him, Mark saw something very puzzling. The jagged line which divided her upper lip all the way up to her nose seemed to be erasing itself. This was surely a trick of the moonlight, but he did not know how to explain away the even stranger feeling that Tanya's shriveled leg seemed to be growing straight against his thigh. Mark was so distracted by these inexplicable events that his own ejaculation took him completely by surprise.
From the back seat came a startled cry from Dana, and Ryan's satisfied grunt. The Quigley twins were officially deflowered.
Tanya pushed Mark off of her. She screamed and tore off the hated brace, her leg burning with weird electricity. The leg was normal. Inexplicably, impossibly healed.
"Son of a bitch!" Tanya cried, realizing at once that she was not lisping, that she was in fact saying it without spraying it for the first time in her life. Tanya grabbed the rear-view mirror, in her frenzy ripping it right off the windshield. She held it up to her face. The defect was gone. The line which had always divided her face, which she had once tried to scrub off with a Brillo pad when she was very young, which had marked her and made her monstrous, was no longer there.
"Dana!" Tanya twisted around in her seat to share this astonishing news with her sister.
Ryan was still resting between Dana's legs, blinking with disbelief of his own. There was something very wrong. Dana's eyes had become dull and glazed. She wasn't breathing.
"Dana?" Tanya said.
Ryan sat up beside his motionless date and looked to Tanya, his lips quivering with mute apologies. Tanya leaned over the seat and grabbed Dana's naked arm. Her sister's muscles were slack and unresisting.
Dana was dead.
Tanya's mind reeled, unable to handle the two impossibilities which had occurred in the space of seconds.
"What did you do to her?" was all she could manage.
Ryan gulped hard, but could make no other response.
Tanya tore out of the car half-dressed and ran all the way home, four miles back to town, her mind wild with horror and joy. She had never run before, but the strong new leg carried her with impossible speed. When she arrived home, she tried to explain to her parents what had happened. She was out of breath, though, and could barely speak. Her parents had a hard time working past the apparent miracle of her healing, and the embarrassing fact of her near nudity. Finally, she made them realize the terrible price her healing had fetched. When they understood that their other daughter was dead, Mr. and Mrs. Owens called the police.
Back at the lover's lane, the Quigley brothers had got out of the car and were standing beside it, not knowing what else to do. They stood in silence, each boy lost in his own mind.
Ryan's first coherent thought was that now he would never get laid again. After that, he tried to figure out a way to blame this on his brother.
Mark spent this time reliving the moment when the energy had flowed from him into Tanya. He had felt powerful and whole at that moment. There had been an exquisite release. A pressure which had been building for his entire life, too slowly to be noticed, was instantly relieved. At the same time, though, he felt a nagging guilt about what had happened in the back seat. Mark felt that somehow it was his own fault.
When the police car finally arrived, painting the dark lane with flashing red-and-blue light, the twins were relieved. The purgatory of their thoughts, smelling the guilty reek of sex on their bodies and knowing there was a corpse in the back seat, had grown unbearable.
The Deputy Sheriff was a huge man, tall as a windmill and wide as a tank. "Where's the body?" he said, by way of greeting.
Mark pointed at the car. Ryan stared at his feet.
The Deputy Sheriff shined his powerful flashlight through the window, onto the blanketed mass which had once been Dana Owens. He climbed into the car and poked the body several times with a cigar-sized finger until he was satisfied that she was dead. Then he backed out of the car and shined the light back and forth between the brother's faces. Their identical features seemed to confuse him.
"Is this some kind of joke?" he boomed. The brothers were unsure if he was referring to the dead girl or their twin-ness, neither of which was a joke.
"No sir," Mark said when it became apparent that Ryan wasn't answering.
"Which one of you did this?"
Ryan hesitantly craned his neck to look the deputy Sheriff in the face.
"She was my date," he stated.
