He Chose My Twin, So I Walked Away novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: It Sounds Really Nice
At her graduation dinner, Amy's boyfriend hears her twin talk and says that's what Amy would sound like, and later Amy sees him kiss Jenna on the porch while Jenna looks right at her.
When my twin sister and I were born, I couldn't make a sound, and Jenna couldn't hear one.
For a while, our parents tried to fix us both.
Then Jenna found out that crying worked.
She cried when the TV was too quiet for her. She cried when the other kids talked too fast.
Every time, my mother ran to her.
I couldn't cry out loud. I stood in the doorway and waited for someone to look up.
Nobody did.
My aunts called me cold. My teachers called me shy. My mother called me difficult.
Jenna got an operation when we were seven, and a new pair of hearing aids every year after that.
I got a picture board with a cartoon toilet on it, and a promise.
Next year, Amy.
By the time I was twelve, nobody said it anymore.
On the day I graduated from college, I brought my boyfriend home for the first time.
Josh Rinehart and I had been together for two and a half years.
My parents lived twenty minutes from campus.
I had kept him away from that house on purpose.
He parked his car behind my mother's in the driveway in Mt. Lebanon and squeezed my knee.
"Relax," he said. "Parents love me."
I typed on my phone and held it up.
"They're going to love Jenna more. Everyone does."
He laughed and kissed my cheek.
There was a banner over the front door.
CONGRATULATIONS JENNA, in pink glitter letters.
Under it, in black marker that didn't match, someone had added: & AMY.
Jenna had graduated the day before, from a state school two hours away.
So it was our dinner. That's what my mother had said on the phone.
Inside, the house smelled like pot roast. Jenna's favorite.
My sister was curled up on the couch between our parents with her shoes off.
Same face as mine. Same gray-green eyes.
Her hair was down and streaked with honey highlights, and she had tiny rose-gold hearing aids tucked behind her ears.
Mine was in one long braid, the way it always was.
It was the only way strangers could tell us apart.
"Oh my God, you're Josh!" Jenna sat up and held out her hand. "She's told us nothing. Literally nothing."
That wasn't true. I had told them his name.
Nobody had asked anything else.
Josh shook her hand and smiled the smile he used on investors.
My father stood up to shake his hand too.
My mother didn't get up. She had Jenna's feet in her lap.
I sat on the arm of the recliner and nobody moved over.
Jenna started telling them about her commencement.
The speaker had been terrible. Her roommate had tripped on the stage stairs. Her gown smelled like a basement.
She did all the voices.
My mother laughed until she wiped her eyes. My father kept saying, "No. She did not."
Josh laughed in all the right places.
Then he stopped laughing and just watched her.
He turned his head and looked at me, and then back at her.
"So this is what you'd sound like," he said to me. "If you could talk."
Jenna paused in the middle of a sentence.
"It's really nice," Josh said.
My phone was in my hand. I didn't type anything.
My mother didn't look at me. She looked at Josh, warm and sorry.
"Oh, Amy's always been like this. She never wanted to try, not even as a baby."
My father nodded at the carpet.
"You must have the patience of a saint, Josh," my mother said.
Jenna tucked her hair behind her ear, so the little rose-gold aid caught the lamp.
"Hey, it's fine," she said sweetly.
"We've got the same face. If you ever want to hear it say something, you can just come find me."
Josh laughed.
He didn't say no.
At dinner my mother put Josh next to Jenna, because that's where the extra chair was.
I sat across from them and cut my pot roast into very small pieces.
Josh asked Jenna what she wanted to do now.
"Sing, honestly," Jenna said. "I've got forty thousand followers. People like hearing me."
"I bet they do," he said.
My father raised his glass of iced tea.
"To our girls."
Everyone lifted their glasses.
"And to Jenna," he added, "who had to work twice as hard to get here."
They drank.
I put my glass down and signed, "And me?"
My father saw it.
He knows enough sign for that.
He looked at the gravy boat and passed it to Josh.
After dinner my mother brought out the cake.
It was white with pink roses, and it said JENNA in pink icing across the top.
"They ran out of room," my mother said, and handed me the knife. "Cut it, would you? Small pieces."
I stood at the kitchen counter and cut twelve small pieces.
When I carried the plates back out, Josh's chair was empty.
So was Jenna's.
My mother was on the phone with my aunt. My father had the TV on.
The patio lights were on out back.
I could see them through the screen door.
Josh had Jenna up against the porch rail with his hand in her hair.
They were right under the string of little yellow bulbs I had helped my father hang when I was ten.
He was kissing her.
The plates tilted in my hands. A slice of cake slid off and hit the floor.
Over Josh's shoulder, Jenna opened her eyes.
She looked straight at me through the screen.
And she kept kissing him.
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