“And so, my fellow graduates, in conclusion, I leave you today with the immortal words of Lord Alfred Tennyson from his poem ‘Ulysses.’?”
My finger shakes slightly as I trace the typed pages in front of me, and my bottom right eyelid is still twitching, but I force my voice to be steady, reminding myself I worked hard for this moment, that it’s all mine.
“Though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find—”
And then, when I’m within four words of being done, a loud “Vroom vroom!” bursts into the air from the left side of the auditorium.
It stills everyone and everything, even me.
I see her: a dark-haired little girl, squatting in the aisle, gleefully running a toy car around on the floor.
The whole crowd shifts like they’re waking up, adults smiling, people from my class laughing.
An older woman leans into the aisle, jerks the child’s arm, and shushes her.
The little girl starts to cry, a wail echoing through the auditorium, and a man—probably her dad—scoops her up, heads toward the exit.
I stop, close my eyes, listen as the cry gets fainter.
In front of me, there are 233 fellow seniors in bright-red polyester gowns, and I don’t have anything real to say to them—not anything they care about, not anything that’s mine.
I’m just quoting some words from a dead white guy.
I wish I had something of my own to say. Something totally new—words that no one in the entire history of the world has ever said before, a sentiment that is totally and perfectly and particularly mine.
But I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
I open my eyes and finally see him, right under the exit sign.
Charlie.
My twin, my other half, cohabitant of our mom’s womb, older by six and a half minutes, the person in the world whose DNA is the closest to mine.
Except my blood cells have always been orderly, behaved, healthy.
The light makes the brown fuzz of his newly grown-in hair look even softer.
He’s leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, legs forever too long for whatever space he’s in, his face unreadable from where I’m standing, and I wonder when we lost each other.
“?‘—And not to yield’?” I finally say, making it a question.
There’s an excruciating silence, everyone waiting because they’re not sure it’s the end of the speech—who ends an inspiring poem with a question? Tennyson didn’t, that’s for sure—but then Emerson starts clapping like she thinks I’m Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama all in one, and then more people join in, and I step back, let out a long exhale, finishing up quite possibly the worst conclusion to a valedictorian speech in the history of valedictorian speeches.
Principal Taylor steps to the podium and thanks me, and I smile hard, because right now my teeth have a mind of their own and if I don’t, I’m pretty sure they’ll start chattering and never stop.
Sitting on a folding chair on the side of the stage, I tighten my hands in my lap, listening to Principal Taylor talking about this year’s class of graduates—all the scholarships we’ve won, all the marvelous places we’re going, the incredible adults we’re becoming.
I pretend to listen, but really I’m promising myself that if I see Charlie again, everything—this summer, college, med school, my life—will be okay.
When I look back at the exit sign, he’s gone.
Two
CHARLIE’S BEEN LEAVING ME behind since we were born.
He was the first out of the womb, a full six and a half minutes before me, a fact he never tires of pointing out.
According to our parents, he learned how to crawl a good month before me, while I remained stuck in tummy-time limbo, red-faced and furious, my fists clenching emptily in space trying to pull him back.
He was the first to learn how to walk, to utter “Da” and “Ma” and “cat,” to lose a tooth (the front bottom one, earning him five dollars from the tooth fairy and plunging me into a frantic tooth-wiggling campaign of my own).
In fact, my earliest memory is of him leaving me. I don’t know how old we were or where we were, other than old enough to walk and outside—a freshly mowed green lawn beneath my feet, the sun shining hard and yellow above us.
The memory is like a short home video.
First, an image of Charlie’s back as he runs. He’s wearing a red-and-blue striped shirt, gray sweatpants, and gym shoes, his thick, dark curls wild.
I can’t keep up.
I know this because I can never keep up with him.
That doesn’t stop me from trying.
I call out his name once and then again, my feet pushing on the ground, arms pumping faster, like I can catapult myself into supersonic flight, but instead Charlie gets farther and farther away, while I get a cramp in my side from running so hard.
And then I can’t see him anymore. He’s too far gone.
Right then, the sense of having lost something is so enormous and unbearable that I press my palms to my eyes, making sun spots dance in my vision, trying not to cry.
But here’s the thing: Charlie comes back for me.
After a few seconds, I sense him rather than see him in front of me. I imagine him squatting down and resting on his calves, waiting for me to open my eyes.
“Parker,” he says. “Why are you crying? I got you.”
And without even needing to open my eyes, I know in the deepest parts of me that he does, because Charlie always comes back for me.
These days, I wonder if I made up the entire memory.
These days, I have moments when I see my brother and he’s so impenetrable, so far away, that even his physical appearance has become unfamiliar, like I’m passing him on the street for the first time, noting his lanky frame, the way his ears stick out a little, how it’s possible for brown eyes to burn.
He’s become a stranger.
Mom insists it’s just a phase, that our very natures are inseparable, that we’ll always come back to each other.
For proof, she pulls out her old sonogram pictures, the ones that show Charlie and me curled around each other like a pair of opposing quotation marks in her stomach. “That’s the thing about being twins: You’ll always have each other. Always.”
Dad says that before we learned to talk, we had our own language, speaking to each other in a strange mix of consonants and vowels no one else understood, that sometimes we were downright creepy: these two small people who came from them but clearly occupied a separate world.
When Charlie and I bicker now, Mom brings up the day in preschool I stayed home with the flu. I cried the whole morning—not because I felt sick, but because my brother wasn’t there. Within the first hour, Mom got a call from the school saying Charlie was in hysterics too.
“You two were inseparable,” she says again.
At times I’ve wondered if my parents invented these stories solely to demonstrate why Charlie and I shouldn’t argue over who has the remote control or gets to use Mom’s car on Friday night.
But then I remember those three words: I got you.
They’re leftovers from a morning dream, the kind that as soon as you try to remember, you start to forget, making it easy to dismiss, to let go.
But there are traces glimmering on the edges of your memory, clues something more once existed.
I got you.
Here’s the thing: Charlie and I don’t hate each other now. At least I don’t think we do.
We coexist at the same school and in the same home with a minimum of hostility and angst, like distant planets in the same solar system. Occasionally we hang out together when Matty and Em are involved.
But I can’t imagine Charlie ever sitting down and confiding to me how he feels about not graduating with us.
I can’t imagine confessing to him how lonely it is to be the one running ahead for the first time in our lives.
We don’t have words in our vocabulary for that, let alone a secret language.
And these days, other than our mostly shared genetics, we could not be more different.
Charlie is confident and loud, popular and fearless.