Elodie and Heloise

It was another sunny Saturday afternoon in Shady Valley, Virginia. Outside the DeGarmo home, life moved in its usual way. Families picnicked in the park, eager sunbathers lay in the warm sun on Sunset Beach, and children rode their bikes up and down the cul-de-sacs in town. Time seemed to stand still in the heat of the Indian summer. It wasn’t unusual for the summer heat to linger for a few extra weeks in mid-October just before Halloween. This was southern Virginia after all, home to unusual and unpredictable weather. If you didn’t like the weather, you could wait ten minutes and it would change.

Inside the DeGarmo home, time also seemed to stand still. Their house sat at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac on a low hill overlooking the town, a small, one-story home surrounded by a few neighbors. White shingles covered the outside while a back porch led to a sparkling blue pool that glistened in the sun. It was the house where twin sisters Elodie and Heloise DeGarmo lived with their parents, a house full of memories from their happy childhood and their sometimes torrential adolescence.

For once the house was unusually quiet. Saturday afternoons were usually their mother Shannon’s writing time, when she would sit at the kitchen table typing away at another story idea. She may have been a world-famous science fiction writer with a dozen bestsellers under her belt, but that didn’t mean she wanted to stop writing. While Shannon wrote, their father Francis would watch a cooking show on television across the room. If Heloise was up for it, Francis would engage his daughter in a game of chess with the television still blaring and their conversations becoming more and more animated the longer the game lasted. 

Today, however, Elodie and Heloise were the only ones home. Shannon and Francis were on vacation visiting Francis’s sister Marie in Richmond for the weekend, so the teenaged girls had the house all to themselves. Both of them were working on their homework in separate areas of the home. 

In her bedroom, Heloise was hard at work on a paper about early 19th century America for her AP American History class. She spread library books across her desk,  stopping at intervals to check her notes before typing away again. Two weeks ago, Heloise’s teacher gave the assignment to the class and she began researching almost immediately, spending whole afternoons in the tranquility of the school library pouring over books and online journals. Only when she felt like she had all her facts straight did she begin typing everything into her computer. She had two weeks left to write ten pages and she was only half a page into the assignment.

Heloise hunched over her desk as strands of her black hair came loose from the hair knot she’d tied just that morning. A piece of long hair fell in front of her face onto the page and obscured a sentence that she was reading. She heaved a sigh as she pushed the strands away. Other than those exasperated sighs, the only sounds in the room were the low hum of her computer and her fingers tapping out a rhythm on her desk. Outside the room, Heloise could hear the scratch of her sister Elodie‘s pencil at the dining room table as Elodie completed algebra problems in her notebook. Heloise basked in this silence as she read the same sentence about the Monroe Doctrine over again, the words blurring in front of her.

I know I should take a break but I really need to get this done, Heloise thought as she glanced at her computer screen. She knew the reason why she’d been reading this same sentence over and over again as her mind began to corrode from such intense concentration. Heloise had been working on this assignment for two weeks and so far she’d only managed to get down a couple of paragraphs before her eyes began blurring. She just couldn’t concentrate, no matter how much she tried.

Her eyes drifted to the bookcase on the left wall of the bedroom. The bookcase consisted of four shelves going halfway up the wall and were filled with classic novels from Jane Austen, Jules Verne, and Charles Dickens. Heloise could feel her bones aching from leaning forward in her desk chair. What she would give to relax and read for a while. 

For now, she needed to work. It was Heloise who had wanted to take on such a large course load in the first place. She wanted to give herself a big push before college to challenge herself. And so far she was doing just that. AP United States History, Advanced Calculus, Honors English 12, just to name a few. The work had certainly kept her busy in her room most nights, working long after her sister and parents had gone to sleep. It was too early in the school year to tell whether or not she would do well, but Heloise had received B’s and low A’s on most of her assignments so far. 

Stop looking at your books. They can wait. Keep going, just keep going. 

She sighed again and began to tap away on the computer. She had just finished her sentence when the silence in the house was broken by a loud peel of laughter coming from the dining room area, a laugh that was unmistakably Elodie’s. The sudden burst of noise made Heloise jump in her seat. She pushed the keyboard away and rose from her chair to go see what was going on, welcoming the break from her homework for a few moments.

She found Elodie standing in the middle of the house pacing along the floor with her cell phone pressed against her left ear. Elodie’s black waist-length hair whipped against her back every time she turned around. She seemed so lost in her conversations that she didn’t seem to hear her sister coming into the room.

“So yeah the party starts at seven. No, just casual. But bring your swimsuit if you want to, it’s such a nice day. Yeah come on over then. All right, see you then!” Elodie’s voice spoke excitedly in her phone. Her eyes lit up with happiness, the same kind of happiness Heloise recognized when she was up to something.

Party? Oh wonderful. 

Heloise hid her head in her hands and groaned. The last thing she wanted that night was a party with Elodie’s friends. Heloise backed against the wall and leaned there with her arms crossed, hoping her sister would notice.  In the meantime, she tried not to think about what it would be like to have all of Elodie’s friends in their house that night. Heloise really disliked her sister’s bubble-headed, superficial friends and she knew that they disliked her as well. They certainly made that clear to her any time they saw her in the hallway at school, when Elodie made a point of ignoring her sister as they passed each other on the way to class. All conversation would stop as soon as Heloise came within earshot, then it would start up again when Elodie and her friends had passed her. All Elodie and her friends seemed to care about in life was whether or not the color of their nail polish complemented their clothes that day or who was dating who. About as deep as a wading pool. And now they were going to descend on their house like locusts. 

And what if their parents came home early? One of Elodie’s parties a few years ago left a huge mess afterwards. Toilet paper hanging in the trees, mud all over the wood floor, food and drinks everywhere, and a stray party guest asleep in the bathtub the next morning. Of course it had to be after that party that their parents came home early and grounded Elodie for two weeks. Or what if the party made so much noise that it made their neighbors call the police to come and break up the festivities?  Of course Heloise was the only one thinking about these things.

Elodie yelped as she pressed a key on her phone and put it to her ear. Only when Heloise cleared her throat in a bid for Elodie’s attention did Elodie even notice her sister’s presence, finally glancing in her general direction. Elodie gasped and covered her mouth in mock surprise.

“Oh I guess I should’ve told you. Oops. We’re having a party tonight.”

“Oh really? Gee, I wouldn’t have guessed,” Heloise spoke with as much sarcasm as she could muster, sauntering toward her sister with her arms still crossed in frustration.

Elodie faced her sister with her phone against her ear, waiting for the other end to pick up. “Mom and Papa will never know. They won’t be home for another day anyway. Hi! Cecilia!” She began talking happily to her cousin Cecilia on the other end of the line without even missing a beat, turning away from Heloise.

“But Elodie, what if they come home early? How do you think they’ll feel when they see our house a mess? Remember last time you had a party and we had to clean up all the toilet paper from the trees outside before Mom and Papa got home? And they grounded you too!” Heloise protested. “Not to mention I really can’t stand your friends and I really don’t want them here.”

“Oh come on! You like Noah and he’s coming.” 

“Yes but that’s different. He can actually hold a decent conversation about something other than makeup and fashion!” 

Elodie put a finger up to her sister and continued talking on her phone. “Yeah uh huh, seven PM. It’s going to be a great party. Can’t wait to see you!” She hung up her phone and jumped up and down like a kid at Christmas. Heloise rolled her eyes and plopped herself into a chair at the dining room table, resting her head on her hands and peering out the dining room window.

Elodie saw her sister sitting at the table and sat down next to her. “Well if you must know, I’m keeping it small, so Mom and Papa will never know. I didn’t call anyone who would be throwing toilet paper at our house. And I really want to see Quentin.”

“Of course. Quentin. Here we go again. It’s bad enough that we have to hear about him. Now we actually have to see him? Good Lord,” Heloise groaned. All her sister could talk about was Quentin Rice. Did you hear what Quentin said today? Oh my God, wait until I tell you the joke he told us all at lunch, it was SO funny. On and on and on. Heloise would leave the room whenever her sister began babbling about him to their mother.  

“I need to see Quentin. But of course you wouldn’t understand that, now would you? Being in love, that is.”

“Oh shut up.”

As much as Heloise wanted to reach out and slap her sister for saying such a nasty comment, she knew that wouldn’t do any good. Instead, Heloise threw her chair back against the wall with a thud, shook her head and walked back into the bedroom to pick out a book to read, something to keep her mind occupied on more substantial things. She needed a break after staring at the computer for the last few hours working on her homework.

Emma. That’ll do.

How did we get to be so different?

It seemed the only things that Elodie and Heloise even had in common anymore were their appearances. Being identical twins, during their childhood one was always mistaken for the other, at least among strangers and new friends. There was no mistaking whose children they were, however. The sisters were an intriguing combination of their parents. Both of them inherited their father’s dark black hair, sunken, dark brown eyes and French cheekbones, while their five foot five frames and their noses and lips came straight from their mother. When they were little, they loved playing pranks on their substitute teachers as to who was really who, usually at Elodie’s suggestion.

Not only were they identical in appearance, but also their personalities were very similar when they were young children. Both were outgoing and highly imaginative. Elodie remembered those times well. She remembered the makeup and hair styles that they used to put on each other all the time, pretending they were ladies of high society in their mother’s old high heels and fake pearl necklaces. When they weren’t being sophisticated ladies, they would wile away the warm summer days in their treehouse, fighting off pirates and bandits and roleplaying swashbuckling stories that Heloise loved to read in her spare time, or they would stay inside the house on a rainy afternoon pretending that the couch cushions were a deep cave. Heloise had checked out a book from the school library on caves and thus was fascinated for about three months with cave drawings, especially those in Lascaux in France. Knowing their French heritage so well, the girls were enamored of those pictures, so on a rainy summer afternoon, they pretended to be cavemen, drawing their hunts and daily life on scraps of paper and taping them up to the “walls” of their cave. 

Their childhood wasn’t completely co-dependent, though most of the time they only hung out with each other. Occasionally their cousin Noah would come over to visit and he was the only boy allowed in their usually “girls only” clubhouse. Elodie would invite over a few of her friends from school to play in their backyard or go swimming in the pool when it was warm enough outside to swim without catching a cold. No matter who else was there, the sisters always stayed together. 

“It probably started in middle school,” Elodie surmised, putting her finger to her chin. “No, it was before then. Fifth grade, I think.” That’s when most young people begin to change, whether for better or worse. Instead of being a sweet and happy person to be around, Elodie became more surly and unenthusiastic about the things she used to enjoy doing with her sister. She also was suddenly more interested in trying to get the attentions of other boys in the class than in studying with her sister. Then there were the friends that Elodie would bring home. They were more interested in gossip and fashion and they certainly didn’t like having someone lower on the social ladder like Heloise hanging around with them. Whenever Heloise would try to join in their games, Elodie and her friends would pretend to not even hear her, until one day, Elodie asked her sister in a rude tone to stop asking them if she could play with her and her friends. By seventh grade, Elodie wanted to know how to apply basic makeup and she would spend more time every morning worrying about what she was going to wear to school to best impress everyone. Heloise would scoff at her sister’s behavior and instead of trying to gain popularity like her sister seemed to be doing, she turned inward to her books and schoolwork, wanting to spend more time rereading Wuthering Heights or The Good Earth than being with Elodie.