My Life as a Novelty Item
Devin Pentecost

            Being a twin isn’t just messing with people’s minds and dancing around with toothbrushes. Twinliness is hard work. In between keeping people from mistaking what my twin does for what I do, or trying to get my parents to realize we aren’t just one entity, there is little time for the “fun” everyone assumes we get to have, pretending to be the other. Don’t get me wrong, I would prefer to be a twin than not, but sometimes you “normal” people are just plain lucky.
            When I was very young, being a twin was a great thing. A twin meant there was always somebody to play with, always somebody who had just as much fun as me at certain things, and knew how to play these things “right”. But, on the rare occasion that I got bored of the “other me”, there was nobody else to entertain me…or at least entertain me sufficiently. I was “one of the two twins”, and that meant that you had to put up with both of us, because we’re the twins. You play with one, you play with the other.
            School was much the same. Whether it was passing papers back to the wrong one of us, or just plain forgetting who you’re sitting next to, being a twin made experiences very different than what it would, or should, be like in school. Since nobody ever wanted to try, we were forever known as “The Twins”. Well, not always. Joel (My eldest sibling) and his friends usually referred to us as “The Little Joels”. I never quite understood how that came into being, but, much like all the other side affects of being a twin, I got used to them.
            Through the years, peers and teachers alike would find the idea of our “twinliness” and our quirky personalities new and exciting. But, like any other novelty life throws one’s way, we would become uninteresting. Similar to the container of snakes that shoot out and scare the unprepared sucker, we lose the attention of people after doing what we do enough times. It was as if people were saying, “Ok, you guys look the same…good for you! Let me talk to this person now. He doesn’t have another him, so I don’t have to try and hold a conversation with two people. Just him. You know, not two people. Like when I talk to you- ah, never mind, I have to go do homework.” It gets rather annoying trying to find new and exciting ways to entertain those who aren’t my twin. But, hey, it’s been like that my entire life, and I don’t plan on anything changing.
            My life at home is different from anybody else’s. Yes, I understand that everybody’s life is different, but mine’s a bit different from what you would expect. I could spend hours explaining to you every little thing being a twin does to my daily life, but eventually I’d ramble and lose you. Let’s just start with some of the basics, and see if I don’t lose you.
 I am younger than my twin, but was born (and still am) bigger than he is. He’s the one with allergies and asthma. Me? I got lucky. I am sure that the “other me” split from my right side, since my right side is weaker and my left stronger (I am also left eye dominant, if you know what I mean by that). With the differences physically, we make up with our uncannily similar minds. I can have an idea, and he will laugh. I randomly start talking about something, and my twin brother will know what it is that I am talking about, and a conversation will flourish, while any bystanders hurt themselves trying to figure out what the devil is going on. Heck, we even had the same dream once! That was yet another thing that has confused my family, but they choose to accept it and hope that it is something that is “normal” for twins to do. It can be great fun to do this, and we have made quite a few people jealous with them asking one of us the name of an animal, and the other one answers the same way.  That’s just another one of the boons of my twinliness.
            If I was asked, I would prefer to be a twin. I'm just used to it, I guess. Nothing bad in particular about the whole ordeal, except one thing: We are treated as one entity. Sometimes I am invited by somebody to go somewhere (and not Caleb), but I am not allowed to go. Why? I am him. I can’t leave without myself. I should have the same friends as him anyway. Obviously a person isn’t a good friend if they prefer one twin over another. I don’t understand why a lot of people can’t realize that we are very different. I think it may have to do with people not wanting to try hard enough to get to know these differences. I mean, when that “can o’ snakes” loses its entertainment value, would you try to figure out how it is different from another company’s brand of “Snake in a Can”? I wouldn’t believe so. Why bother when you don’t care? I believe that to many people I am no more than that novelty item, and will become just “One of the Twins”. When you get bored with the “Can de Snake”, you leave it to itself, and go talk to all your super-cool friends. They have interesting lives that are all their own. No hearing the same stories by two different (The same?) people. No telling something to the same person twice. No needing to worry about making sure both twins get the equal amount of your attention. Just good-old-fashioned one-on-one talking, none of that crazy “Double” stuff. But it’s the “Twinliness” that sets me apart from everybody else.