Twins
Over the years, I've read a number of stories here about how husbands can't tell their wives from their identical twin sister (or triplets, in a couple of great examples). I LOVE those stories, for the setup. However.... the first couple of paragraphs of this story might as well be in these notes; they're 100% true and correct, with only names changed (and one set of those not changed!) from my own life. And to top it off... I >DID< date twins in High School, first one, then her twin. I nearly even asked the second twin to marry me, until I found out she'd been cheating on me for the final year of our four year courtship. That's AFTER I'd dated her twin sister for a year, so five years with the pair, and that's one of the inspirations for this story. So, with that note....
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So, you know all those stories about how you can't tell identical twins apart? I call bullshit. Oh, they can be great stories, but I've known twins. In second grade, I met my first pair, a couple of young guys my own age... I could instantly tell them, Peter and Paul, apart, and Paul became a decent friend for most of my school years, although I never really liked Peter much. A year later, the first set of twin girls joined the fray... and while it was confusing for a week or so, especially when they were wearing the same clothes, after a few weeks, most of the kids could easily enough tell Kathy and Karen apart. Three years later, a set of identical triplets joined the fray, Susan, Sheila, and Sandra. Sheila was in a number of my classes, and I could always tell her from Susan and Sandra. I have to admit, since I only ever shared one class all the way through the end of High School with Sandra, and none, ever, with Susan, that it was harder to tell those two apart, and I still made mistakes until the year before we graduated. Sharon and Shirley joined the fray in my Freshman year, two pretty brunettes who made my heartbeat race, when other middle schools started joining our group, and Charity and Chastity joined for our Junior year, though they were Sophomores who transferred in from out of state. Yeah, I went to a VERY big High School; we had nearly 900 in my senior class alone, And yes, out of that almost 900, we had two sets of twin girls, one set of twin boys, and one set of triplet girls, and a set of twin girls I knew in the grade behind me. There were a few sets of fraternal twins, too, and two other sets of twins, per my old High School yearbook, in lower grades who I didn't meet, or at least don't remember, but that's now a total of over 3500 students.
Maybe there was, in fact, something in the water the year so many twins came about, and yeah, it was a DAMN big high school class; we were packed like sardines, and in the years since, the school district has split the students among three different high schools, including my alma mater. It was the biggest in the state the year before my class, and was only the second biggest by a handful the year I graduated; the biggest was literally the next high school over, which ended up being split among three a few years later, as the furious building spree of schools continued.
All that's to say one thing... identical twins aren't. If you get to know them, it doesn't take the deepest, most intimate knowledge to be able to eventually tell them apart. A freckle here, paler skin there, this one weighs a few pounds more (and you can tell), this one's hair parts more towards the center of their head, this one has a slight limp compared to his brother because someone slid into him and broke his ankle back in fifth grade little league baseball (sorry, again, Paul). It's little things, and someone who doesn't spend any reasonable amount of time around a set of twins might be confused... but anyone who knew them could tell them apart, most of the time even from a distance. For example, Peter, Paul, and I all went to the same college after High School; I could tell whether it was Peter or Paul from across the quad even when they were sitting down (and they dressed alike). Never made a mistake.
And then, of course, as I alluded to, their was Sharon and Shirley.
They were both five foot three, dark brown shoulder length hair, the bluest eyes I think I've ever seen, relatively well formed, with a prominent, but not overpowering, bust, thin waist, and legs that went all the way to the ground. That said, they were my cup of tea, but they may not have been everyone's. They both had a somewhat nasally voice, both tended to laugh just a bit too loud for the wrong jokes, and too softly for the right ones, if you know what I mean. Neither dressed to stun, but instead dressed smartly. Both could come across as "too smart" (hey, I'll say it now... the triplets were in the top ten of our class, blonde and brilliant, while Sharon and Shirley were maybe top third, so I'm not kidding that the girls who made MY heart race might have just been "good looking enough" for most of the guys... we had some damn good looking girls in my class!)
I met and got to know Sharon first of the two, late in our Freshman year, and into our Sophomore year. Sharon and I shared some classes together, and kept getting pushed into the same groups for group projects (Matthews and Miller, it was all about the alphabet). We hit it off, I sucked my teenage insecurity up, and asked her to go out with me towards the end of our Sophomore year. During that time, I didn't have any classes with Shirley, but we hung out occasionally when I was around Sharon, even double dating one time.
Of the two, Shirley and I seemed slightly more simpatico than Sharon and I; when we talked about music, Shirley knew the Beatles better, Sharon was more into Pop; I'm a Beatles fan. Sharon didn't "get it" when I mentioned that some animals were more equal than others; Shirley laughed and knew it was a quote from Animal Farm, and even called the woman who'd triggered it (a typical type we'd call a "Karen" now) an overdressed pig, in a way making an additional pun of it. For the entire time we bantered back and forth, Sharon seemed to at first be bored, then annoyed at the conversation.
And one of the things that struck me was that some twins (and the triplets) went out of their way to look as much alike as possible. They would wear, and interchange, the same clothes (so just because one wore a specific T-shirt, for example, didn't mean the other wouldn't wear the exact same T-shirt a week later. Some twins kept their hair the same style, same length, etc. They went out of their way to make sure everyone knew they were twins. Sharon and Shirley, and some of the others, didn't. They did the opposite; Sharon kept her hair in a short bob, while Shirley let her hair go longer, past her shoulders. Sharon like to wear dangling earrings; Shirley preferred studs. Shirley had a white streak (box made) on her right side, kind of a young Elvira look; Sharon liked to have a small colored streak on her left. In other words, everyone could easily tell them apart. I made no direct references to the other, subtler signs. It just never came up. For many years, the girls just assumed the reason I could so easily tell them apart was because they took pains to look different.
Like I said, Shirley and I seemed to have more in common than her twin and I did, even though I was dating Sharon. Now, that's not to say that Sharon and I didn't have an attraction. Remember that heart a-flutter thing that was going on? Beating heart? Something about her really revved my engine, and attracted me. The question, while I was dating her, was is it just physical, or whether it was more.
After a year, in the summer before our Senior year, one of my buddies and I, Tommy Edgars, took me aside and asked me if I was serious with Sharon. As it turned out, he and she had ALSO shared some classes, and while she wasn't dating him, she was flirting with him, and he was interested. And at that moment, I realized I didn't mind that much. Oh sure, she was "my girl", but... I realized I was more attracted to her twin than to her, in the end. And it wasn't even about the flirting; I'd flirted with girls in front of her, and she with boys, but we'd never crossed any lines; I knew, and Tommy confirmed, that it had only been flirting; heck, I'd seen her do it a few times with Tommy at a few of the parties we had gone to.
So I sat down with Sharon, alone, in her living room. I'm sure she was expecting something slightly different from what happened.