“You know, it’s funny. I’ve never had a bit of trouble telling the triplets apart,” said Jessi. “Well, maybe a little when I first met them. But after that, never.”
“Most people don’t have any trouble,” I said. “Okay. What would you do with a million bucks?”
“Get my ears pierced,” replied Jessi, and we both began laughing again.
“You know,” I said, “I feel like a baby because Mom and Dad won’t let me get my ears pierced or my hair cut or wear cool clothes. But when I think about it, maybe they’re the babies. I mean, ear-piercing is safe if you have it done professionally. It isn’t safe to have a friend do it with a needle and an ice cube, but —”
“Oh, EW! That is so disgusting! A needle and an ice cube!” cried Jessi. Then she calmed down. “But,” she went on, “I don’t think your parents — or mine — are babies. I know what you mean, but they must have good reasons for what they will and won’t let us do.”
“Whose side are you on?” I demanded, but I wasn’t really angry.
Jessi smiled. “I’m just being diploma — Hey, look! Twins!”
I turned and saw Claire and Margo coming down the stairs hand in hand. Each was wearing a pair of pink sweat pants, a white turtleneck, and running shoes, with a pink bow in her hair.
“What happened to Candy Land?” I asked the girls.
“We got tired of it,” Claire replied.
“Claire got tired of it,” said Margo pointedly.
“Silly-billy-goo-goo,” Claire said, and giggled. She’s going through that five-year-old silly stage.
“So we decided to have a fashion show,” Margo went on. “This is the first fashion of the year. It’s the Terrific Twin outfit.”
“Stunning,” said Jessi.
“Superb,” I added.
Claire turned around gracefully. Margo spun around and fell down.
Then they ran back upstairs.
“Gotta change,” Claire yelled over her shoulder.
“New outfits coming up!” called Margo.
When they were out of earshot, Jessi said, “Remember how much fun it used to be to pretend you had a twin?”
“I guess,” I answered slowly, trying to remember.
“Oh, Becca and I used to do it all the time. Once, we were wearing matching dresses and Mom took us shopping and we told everyone we were really twins. The only problem was, Becca and I are three years apart, and I’ve always been tall for my age, so I was, like, at least a whole head taller than Becca was. People must have thought we were crazy!”
I laughed. “I know Kristy and Karen” (Karen is Kristy’s stepsister) “have a matching sister outfit that they get a kick out of wearing together. But I really don’t remember ever pretending I was a twin. I do remember once, though, when our family was on vacation and Vanessa and I tried to convince people we were French. We said oui and non and spoke with an accent.”
“Okay! Here we come again!” called Margo. “We’re the fashion beauties. Close your eyes. When you open them, you’ll see another new fashion.”
Jessi and I obediently closed our eyes.
“What fashion will we be seeing?” asked Jessi while we waited.
We could hear whispering.
“You will be seeing Beach Fashion,” replied Margo. “Now open your eyes.”
We opened them. It was all we could do to keep from laughing. My sisters were wearing bathing suits, knee socks, some old high-heeled shoes of Mom’s, and a ton of jewelry.
“Impressive,” said Jessi.
“Smashing,” I added.
The fashion show continued until Claire got tired of it and said, “Margo, let’s play Candy Land, okay? Best out of seven.”
The girls disappeared. Jessi and I made a quick check on the rest of my brothers and sisters. Vanessa was murmuring to herself and writing in her notebook. Nicky was patiently revolving a Ping-Pong ball around the yellow tennis ball. The triplets were rewinding the movie, getting set to watch it one final time.
“All quiet on the western front,” Jessi said to me as we returned to the living room.
I laughed. Jessi and I had both tried to read that book and had hated it, even though it was a classic and we knew we were supposed to like it.
“You know,” I said suddenly, “I am so glad you moved to Stoneybrook. I think we make awfully good best friends.”
“Definitely,” agreed Jessi.
“But you know what would make my life perfect?” I asked.
“What?”
“Getting my ears pierced and looking more grown-up. Or at the very least, more human.”
“Dream on,” replied Jessi.
Ding-dong!
I rang the Arnolds’ bell, expecting to hear feet running toward the door.
Nothing.
After a moment, I rang the bell again.
“Marilyn? Carolyn?” I could hear Mrs. Arnold call. Silence. At last the door was flung open. “Hello, Mallory,” said the twins’ mother.
“Hi,” I replied.
“Goodness, I don’t know where the girls have gotten to. I’m sure they’re here somewhere. I thought they would answer the door.”
I stepped inside. Mrs. Arnold was patting the bow in her hair. I noticed that she was wearing three rings on that one hand — and nail polish, of course.
“Marilyn! Carolyn!” called Mrs. Arnold again. Then, “MARILYN! CAROLYN! I am going to count to three. If you’re not here by then, you will be in big trouble…. One, two,” (no twins yet) “two and a half, two and three quarters, I hope you like your bedroom because you’ll be spending a lot of time there if —”
“Here we are! Here we are!”
Marilyn and Carolyn raced into the hallway. Inwardly, I sighed. They were dressed identically again. I guess I’d been hoping for … I don’t know. But there they were — matching plaid dresses, white tights, black patent leather Mary Jane shoes, red ribbons in their hair, gold lockets, gold rings, pink nail polish, and (thank goodness) their name bracelets.
Mrs. Arnold took one look at her daughters and exclaimed, “Why, you switched bracelets again, you monkeys!” (How could she tell?) “Now switch them back. I hope you won’t be teasing Mallory today.”
Believe me, I hoped they wouldn’t be teasing Mallory today, either.
The twins exchanged a disgusted look as they switched their bracelets, and I frantically checked them over for some sort of difference. Anything at all. A hole in somebody’s tights, a chip in somebody’s nail polish. Just something that would tell me which one was Marilyn and which one was Carolyn. But I could not find one difference.
“Well, good-bye, you monkeys,” said Mrs. Arnold, adding a hat to her outfit. “I’ll be back before you know it. Remember to practice for half an hour, Marilyn.”
Mrs. Arnold left.
I stood anxiously in front of the twins. They stared at me. I held out the Kid-Kit as if it were both a shield and a peace offering.
“Kid-Kit?” I said. “You never did read those Paddington books. And I added some new puzzles, Carolyn.”
“Go-blit?” said … Marilyn.
“Der. Blum snider,” was Carolyn’s response.
And with that, the bracelets were off, tossed carelessly onto a couch in the living room.
Oh, no, I thought. But all I said was, “The least you two could do is speak English.”
“Okay,” replied one twin. “Let’s play hide-and-seek.”
“Well … all right.” How bad could hide-and-seek be?
“We’ll hide, you seek!” cried the other twin. “Stand in the hallway, cover your eyes, and count to one hundred.”
“Okay.” I covered my eyes and listened to the twins run off.
As they went, I thought I heard one whisper to the other, “In-bro duggan, tosh?”
“Tosh,” was the answer.
I began to count. I counted out loud. I had learned to do that long ago, playing hide-and-seek with my brothers and sisters, who would accuse me of cheating and s
kipping numbers if I counted silently and then came looking for them before they’d found a hiding place. “… Twenty-three, twenty-four,” I continued. (I hate counting to a hundred.) “… Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred! Ready or not, here I come!”
The Arnolds’ house was quiet, and I wondered if the girls were hiding outdoors. We should have made some hiding rules before we began the game. Oh, well. Too late now. Besides, I hadn’t heard any doors open or close.
I began to search the house. I felt funny, as if I were invading the Arnolds’ privacy, so I stuck to the kitchen and living room and dining room at first. They aren’t personal, like bedrooms are.
I found one twin behind a full-length curtain in the dining room. (I could see her shoes sticking out.) “Found you!” I cried, pulling the curtain aside. “Come on and help me look for your sister.”
Marilyn-or-Carolyn trailed behind me into the kitchen. “You must know all the good hiding places,” I said to her. “Where should we look?”
A shrug. “I don’t want to look. You’re the seeker. You look. Can I have a snack? We didn’t have one after school.”
“Okay.” Quickly I set out some juice and graham crackers. “You stay right here,” I told Marilyn-or-Carolyn. “I’ll be back when I find your sister.” I left the kitchen, searched the den, returned to the kitchen — and found only some graham cracker crumbs and an empty paper cup. The snack was gone and so was the twin who’d eaten it. Oh, brother.
I kept searching and came across the other twin under one of the beds in the girls’ room. “Found you!” I cried.
“Can I have a snack?” asked Marilyn-or-Carolyn.
“Sure.” I set her up in the kitchen with juice and graham crackers. “Now where is your sister?” I wondered.
“Isn’t she hiding?”
“Yes, but I already found her once.”
“Oh.” Marilyn-or-Carolyn tried to hide a smile. “My sister is sneaky. I bet she hid again. She does that sometimes.”
“Well, I better find her.” I left the room. Of course when I returned, the snack and the twin were gone again. I should have known better.
I finally found a twin squished behind a couch in the living room, and she said, “Took you long enough…. Can I have a snack?”
“You’ve already had one,” I replied.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, I gave out two snacks.”
“Then you gave both of them to my sister.”
“Sorry. If I knew which of you was which, that wouldn’t have happened.”
Marilyn-or-Carolyn scowled. Then she said, “Okay, I’m Carolyn. Now can I have a snack?”
I almost gave in, but I decided to be firm instead. Maybe that was my problem with the twins. Maybe I hadn’t let them know who was boss. Besides, how could I be sure this twin was really Carolyn and she hadn’t had a snack yet? I was beginning to see what the twins could do. Maybe this twin had already had two snacks and wanted a third.
“Nope. No snack,” I told Marilyn-or-Carolyn. “There are two of you and I gave out two snacks. That’s it. No more.”
“No more? No fair!”
“It’s very fair. Two twins, two snacks. I think you guys just fooled yourselves.”
“Gummy grog!” shouted Marilyn-or-Carolyn.
A moment later, her sister ran into the room. “What?”
“Colley-moss. Der blum tiding poffer-tot.”
“Hanky? No gibble dandy.”
What was going on? The girls were using their twin talk so much I didn’t have a clue. Well, I was sorry I made them angry. Too bad. They had tried to trick me. Oh, all right, they had tricked me.
For the next hour or so, Marilyn and Carolyn chattered away in their twin talk. They ignored me. But at five-thirty they couldn’t ignore me. That was when I said, “Time to practice, Marilyn.”
“Which one of us is Marilyn?” asked one twin.
“Oh. So you can speak English,” I replied.
“ ’Course we can…. Which one of us is Marilyn?”
“The one of you who hasn’t practiced yet, and who has only half an hour to practice before her mother comes home. If she doesn’t start playing the piano now, I’ll have to tell her mother she didn’t get all her practice time in.”
Reluctantly, one twin sat down at the piano. While Marilyn played, I tried to talk to Carolyn, but Carolyn would have nothing to do with me. She took Paddington Marches On out of the Kid-Kit, opened it, and both girls ignored me again until their mother returned.
Finally. Somebody besides me had to sit for the twins and got to see what terrors they were. I think Kristy had sat for them once quite awhile ago. And Mary Anne, too. But no one else. And no one had sat for them recently.
I was almost glad when Claudia had her bad experience with the Arnold girls. Not that I wanted her in trouble. I didn’t. Not at all. It was just that, until Claud sat for the twins, I’d been worried that I wasn’t a very good sitter. Like, maybe I didn’t have enough control or whatever. But when I read Claud’s notebook entry and saw that she’d had trouble, too, I realized the Arnold girls simply were trouble. They were twin trouble. Double trouble. Us baby-sitters were fine.
Anyway, Claudia took her Kid-Kit with her to the Arnolds’ that Saturday morning. She’d learned, from reading my entries in the club notebook, that the twins like the Kid-Kits, so she went prepared.
Claud’s job was to be longer than my afternoon jobs. She was taking care of the twins from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon while their parents went to an antique car show in Stamford. Poor Claud. Five hours with the twins. At least there were special things to keep the girls busy.
“Marilyn’s piano lesson is at eleven-thirty,” Mrs. Arnold told Claud. “Her carpool will arrive at eleven o’clock. She’s going to be in a recital next week, and today is a special rehearsal and lesson. It’ll last an hour and a half. She’ll be dropped off here around one-thirty. While Marilyn’s gone, Carolyn should work on her project for the science fair. Carolyn just loves science, don’t you, dear?”
Claudia looked doubtfully at the twins in their red flared skirts, blue sweaters, white turtlenecks, and Mary Janes. The girls were pretty, Claud thought, and they were dressed nicely (even if they were a little dressed up for a Saturday morning), but somehow they had the look of terrors about them. They were scowling and didn’t appear to love anything, including science and piano-playing.
“Don’t you love science, dear?” Mrs. Arnold repeated.
Carolyn shrugged.
“Tell Claudia what your project is called,” Mrs. Arnold went on.
“The World of Electricity,” replied Carolyn.
Mrs. Arnold beamed.
Claudia tried to smile back, but found it difficult. Instead, she took a look at the twins. Like I had done, she tried to find some difference between them, while they were still wearing their bracelets. (She was pretty sure they were planning to take the bracelets off as soon as their parents left.) She thought she noticed some differences in their faces, but it was hard to tell, and she didn’t want the girls to think she was staring. And their clothes were impeccable. Not a scuff or a tear anywhere.
“Well, we should be on our way,” said Mrs. Arnold. She showed Claud the emergency numbers and told her what she could fix for lunch after Marilyn returned from her lesson. Then she went on, “You’re ready for your lesson, aren’t you, Marilyn?”
Marilyn smiled sweetly. She showed her mother that her piano books were stacked on the bench in the front hallway.
“And Carolyn, you have everything you need for your project?”
“Yup.”
“All right. Then we’ll be off.”
Mr. and Mrs. Arnold left. Before they had even backed the car down the driveway, Carolyn turned to Marilyn and said, “Snuff bat crawding fowser. Der blem, tosh?”
“Tosh,” answered her sister.
Sensing what was coming, Claud said, “I guess this is the part where you guys tak
e your bracelets off and try to confuse me, right?”
The twins hesitated, and for just a moment, Claud thought they might leave the bracelets on, just to spite her (which was what she was hoping for).
But no such luck.
“That’s right!” cried Carolyn.
In a flash, the bracelets were off and twin talk was in full swing.
“You two just go ahead and play,” Claud told them. “I don’t care if you don’t want me to be able to tell you apart.” (Boy, is Claudia a cool one.) “Anyway, I’ll be able to tell you apart at eleven.”
“How come?” one twin couldn’t help asking.
“Because at eleven, Marilyn will leave for the music school. Carolyn will be the one who stays to work on her project.”
The twins looked at her. More twin talk followed.
“Well,” said Claud, “I’ve got a good mystery to read. If you guys are just going to talk to each other, I’m going to read. You can look in the Kid-Kit, if you want.”
So for the next hour, Claud read and the twins ignored her and played together. At eleven, Claud said, “Okay, Marilyn. Your ride will be here any minute. Why don’t you get your books? Carolyn and I will wait outside with you.”
“Okay!” One twin bounced to her feet and gathered up the piano books.
At last Claud knew which girl was which. She and Carolyn followed Marilyn outside and sat on the front stoop with her. Five minutes later, a car slowed down in front of the Arnolds’ house, and the driver honked the horn.
“There’s Mr. Bischoff,” said Marilyn. “He’s going to bring me home, too. See you later!” She ran across the lawn.
“Okay, Carolyn,” said Claud to the remaining twin. “We better go inside so you can get to work on The World of Electricity.” (Although what Claud knows about the world of electricity you could fit on the head of a pin.)
Carolyn went into the rec room. She opened a door and slid a display out of a closet.
“What are you going to do to your project today?” asked Claudia.
“Just fix the letters on the display and then read. I have to find out more about some experiments I could show the kids. Here are my books.”
Claudia felt relieved. Not only did she know which twin was which (at least until one-thirty), but she wasn’t going to have to work on The World of Electricity. She went back to her mystery while Carolyn fooled around with the display.