• The package came on a Wednesday. It was a large, thick manila envelope with my name typed neatly on the front and a familiar letterhead in the corner. The image stared back at me like the princely wax seal on an old-fashioned letter. All at once I was filled with excitement and shock. Tucked behind the large envelope was another, smaller white one, with a different, yet still familiar, letterhead. I pulled out my keys from my pocket and my hands were shaking with excitement as I slid the key into the lock. The door was already unlocked. Hesitantly, I swung the door open, peaking my head in. “Hello?” I called, hoping it was a family member who had come home early. “In here!” came the response, and I let out a sigh of relief. I pulled my key out of the lock and shut the door behind me.
    The voice became a face as she stepped out of the kitchen. It was like looking in the mirror. Our matching blue eyes deeply resembled the ocean...hahaha, no. Our eyes were a dull blue-grey that looked like watered down paint. No one could glamorize how we looked. We were plain. Average looking. That’s it. Plain old boring. And I was perfectly fine with that. But my sister? Oh no. She tries so hard to be fancy. She wears all of these fancy clothes and makeup. She is so focused on getting good grades and getting a good job and getting a good husband and getting a good kid. It is so annoying. But there was one way in which I was better than her. Here I was, holding in my hand, a possible acceptance letter from my dream school, the best acting school in the country. But I didn’t want to brag just yet. I would wait. If she got accepted to a university, great. If not, I could rub her face in the fact that all of her brownnosing didn’t work. Why am I so bitter at my twin sister, you ask? Because of the typical, cliché, “why can’t you be like your sister?” speech that I get from everyone. And I do mean everyone. Parents, teachers, friends, even my boss. MY boss! And she’s not even all that perfect! Her bedroom is messy, she can’t hold down a job, and she stays at the library until it closes EVERY NIGHT! How lame! Which is why I was so surprised to see her home so early. The library closes at nine. “Why are you home so early, Joc?” I asked, stepping past her towards the fridge.

    “I figured I should spend some time with the fam.” She responded, pulling her hair into a ponytail. Ugh. Black hair and grey eyes? We must be the most boring twins on earth! When people think of twins they think of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed supermodels that once graced the covers and pages of Sweet Valley High. She was ‘Elizabeth Wakefield’, the perfect student, beautiful, always happy. Me? I was ‘Jessica’, but without that whole fashionista thing. Forget it. Clothes don’t make the person. Attitude does. Actions do. Like randomly showing up to ‘spend time with the family’? That isn’t suspicious at all! Oh no... “Really? What do you need this time? Money? Clothes? A brain of your own?” I asked, closing the fridge door with the hand that was clutching the freezing bottle. I tossed it to the other hand and squeezed my fingers together, hoping that it would warm my chilly fingers. My questions were met with a dirty look and silence, so I shrugged and made my way down the broad hallway towards the living room. I took a seat on the sofa in the living room, grabbing the remote on the way down. Knowing she couldn’t keep quiet for long, I waited to turn the television on until after she rounded the sofa with the excited look on her face. “I’m going to try and convince Mom and Dad to buy us a car!” She said, jumping over the low back of the armchair into her spot. I rolled my eyes instinctively, flipping through the channels.

    “What’s wrong with walking?” I asked, finally settling on a children’s cartoon about a kid with wings. I had already tuned Jocelyn out when she began her repetitive rambling rant. I stifled a yawn, which caused her to start complaining about how I wasn’t listening. “I am, I am.” I said, causing a snort and eye roll. She eventually stopped babbling and ran off to her room to do homework or whatever. I simply enjoyed my children’s TV until my parents came home from work. Dad was first, as always. He was the ‘chef’ of the family, so he made dinner every night. Trying to get him to go out for dinner for once was like pulling teeth. Only on birthdays, and even then he made a fuss. I suppose that’s why his job testing recipes for cookbooks is such a great fit for him. The night continued on as normal until we were watching TV after dinner. I grabbed the two letters from the table where I had left them earlier. Sitting on top was another white envelope addressed to Jocelyn. I tossed it to her and took my place on the leather couch. I opened the small one first. “Dear Ms. Banks, We regret to inform you that we cannot offer you admission to your program of choice at this time...blah blah blah.” I read out loud, discarding it onto the table with a shrug. I then picked up the large envelope. Excitement ran through me like water in the pipes beneath the house. I picked at the seal slowly, torturing my family and myself with the suspense. When I opened, I looked first for the letter, even though the rest of the contents already told me what the letter would say. “Jennifer Banks, We would like to offer you admission into the Acting for Stage and Film four-year program at...” the rest of the sentence was lost in the squeals coming from my mother and sister. We shared in the excitement for a few minutes, before it faded slightly and we returned to watching our favourite shows. But the giant ball of fire that glowed in my chest wouldn’t let me focus. I read through all of the paper work and brochures maybe a hundred times, and I never stopped smiling.

    It took a couple of days for the excitement to wear off and the reality to set in. And exactly two weeks after I got my letter, two came in the mail for my sister. But, even though everyday she checked the mailbox for a big, thick envelope, it never came. The two letters she got were small, white envelopes. She couldn’t even open them. She had to get Mom to do it for her. Like, really? Grow up. I had a small sense of satisfaction that I was finally better than my darling, perfect sister. I know, it sounds mean, but she would always rub my face in the fact that her grades were so much better than mine. Which is fine. I kept a decent average; I aced my entrance audition, and rocked my essay. I got accepted to my dream school for my dream program and she was receiving rejection letters like they were Harry Potter’s invitation to Hogwarts. I’m not a mean person; really, I just am tired of seeing everybody worship my sister for no good reason!

    Finally, after a while, her final, and most painful, rejection letter came. This is when I started feeling bad. I mean, I never thought she wouldn’t get accepted! I assumed that she would get one eventually. I was speechless. How could I, an average, middle-of-the-road nobody get accepted to the best acting program in the country, and my twin sister, the perfect, all-American, brown-nosing cliché valedictorian not get any acceptances at all? It wasn’t right! It just wasn’t right. I really could not understand it. And neither could she. She spent all day and all night in her room for days. She skipped school, refused to eat, and wouldn’t take any calls. She would just sit at her desk, reading university brochures and old report cards and crying, trying to figure where she went wrong. There was nothing we could do. When she finally returned to school, she just stared off into space, not listening. Her grades started slipping, she stopped hanging out with her friends, and she lost another job. The doctor put her on sleeping pills to help her get to sleep. She had lost weight, and she looked hollow, empty, like a broken porcelain doll shoved at the back of a closet when the owner didn’t want it anymore.

    Now, I was very naive. I just assumed it was just a phase, that everything would get better. That’s what they say on TV. That if someone was depressed, and you got them help, they would be okay. So that’s what we did. We got her help. She started attending therapy weekly. And of course, we pretended like she was getting better. We wanted her to, so we believed that she was. We continued on with our life, believing that this sickness was leaving her body. We believed that medicine and therapy could cure her. Which was why, when she went missing, we were in shock. Our first thought was that she had been taken. Someone had kidnapped her. We feared for her life as the police searched the entire town. It wasn’t a big place, so when they came up with nothing, we became really scared. After two weeks of searching, they found the note. We were going through her laptop to see if she had been chatting anyone online, and when we opened her files, there was only one. A document. So, of course, we opened it.

    A suicide note stared back at us. At first, I didn’t believe it. She had been getting better. Her life had been getting better. The note said that she had thrown herself off of the railway bridge crossing over the lake a few miles away. Anger, shock, and fear filled me at once. Why would she do that? It was so selfish! But no, she’s not that kind of person! She would never! Not getting accepted to university was not a big deal. She could have tried again next year. What if she didn’t write this? What if her kidnapper wrote this? So many stupid theories ran through my head. It felt like someone was threading my heart through my body. The pain rushed through me and I couldn’t breathe. I sat on her bed, watching my mother stare at the computer screen in shock. I was crying, but no sound was coming out. I felt like throwing up. The pain ripped through my chest. Someone let a vicious beast loose in my chest and I could feel it trying to claw its way out. I wanted nothing more in that moment than to turn back time.

    They never found her body, and after a few weeks of more searching, they gave up, and we held a small funeral for her. We kept her room the same as it was when she went missing, just in case she came back. By the time I went off to school, we still hadn’t cleaned out her room. In preparation for my going away party, we had to clean the house, top to bottom. So, we scrubbed the counters, washed the floor, and vacuumed the carpet. As we moved the sofa to vacuum underneath it, I saw a little brown triangle contrasting against our dark purple living room carpet. Curious, I picked it up. It was stuck under the leg of the sofa that hadn’t already been moved. After a little bit of tugging, it came free. It didn’t stay in my hands very long though. As soon as I could comprehend what this meant, I dropped it like burning coals. I stared, with tears flowing from my eyes, at the large brown envelope staring back at me, with the haunting name printed on the label. Was it really all for nothing? All of the pain, the hurt, the suffering? For nothing.