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cosmic reflection (drabble)
Possibly to be continued at a later time. As soon as I figure out how.
Sander and Tieunis were thirteen when they first realized that there was a way to parley peoples' inevitable confusion at their mirrored faces to their own advantage. And after that, they never looked back.
Oh, sure, they'd been playing 'let's lie to dad' games since they were old enough to realize they could. Mom was harder to fool, but Mom was also of the opinion that life was summed up by the inevitable dilemma of sinking or swimming, and so she just sat back and smiled and took another bite of Chunky Monkey while Dad tried to figure his way out of how he'd managed to give out three allowances when he only had two children, and if he hadn't, what on earth had happened to that phantom twenty dollar bill?
It was pathetically easy to lie to teachers, to impersonate each other in math class; a simple game of one hand washes the other. Tieunis got Sander out of some creepy blind dates with girls he had less than no interest in; Sander spent the time doing Tieunis' algebra homework (complete with meticulously copied handwriting, down to his brother's peculiar habit of center-stroking the sevens). It was sweet revenge, in a way; after all, if the world couldn't be bothered trying to tell them apart, why should they try and make it any easier? They'd heard enough of "Sander-Tieunis-whatever" to last a lifetime before their age collectively hit double digits.
When they moved out it was harder, but the act was ready to go beyond the off-Broadway run of friends and family and overworked high school teachers to the grid-pattern streets of New York and the urban campus of NYU. Sander majored in political science (minoring in drama, his other passion besides making money and buying good suits); Tieunis majored in anthropology and minored in classics - he always preferred digging around in the dirt and picking up girls with the dusty silver tongue of dead languages.
And in this way they passed four years of college and two years of graduate school; sharing books, living space, occasionally a job (double shifts were for some reason not a problem); writing each others' exams and papers, taking phone calls and notes and making a complete mockery of the university's attendance policy, and in one remarkable case also a portion of the GRE.
Oh, sure, life was not without its difficulties. Tieunis had an interesting time adjusting to his brother's life out of the closet, and had a few creative moments when "Tieunis" was supposed to be in class and therefore he, "Sander", was alone in their room and ripe for the plucking by Sander's real-life potential boyfriend; Sander had to pull off one of the most dramatic saves of his life when he was picked out of "Tieunis"' Latin seminar to translate something on the fly, throwing himself to the floor in a remarkably accurate dead faint which he passed off later as low blood sugar.
But somehow these difficulties only added a little more spice to the game.
Sander and Tieunis were thirteen when they first realized that there was a way to parley peoples' inevitable confusion at their mirrored faces to their own advantage. And after that, they never looked back.
Oh, sure, they'd been playing 'let's lie to dad' games since they were old enough to realize they could. Mom was harder to fool, but Mom was also of the opinion that life was summed up by the inevitable dilemma of sinking or swimming, and so she just sat back and smiled and took another bite of Chunky Monkey while Dad tried to figure his way out of how he'd managed to give out three allowances when he only had two children, and if he hadn't, what on earth had happened to that phantom twenty dollar bill?
It was pathetically easy to lie to teachers, to impersonate each other in math class; a simple game of one hand washes the other. Tieunis got Sander out of some creepy blind dates with girls he had less than no interest in; Sander spent the time doing Tieunis' algebra homework (complete with meticulously copied handwriting, down to his brother's peculiar habit of center-stroking the sevens). It was sweet revenge, in a way; after all, if the world couldn't be bothered trying to tell them apart, why should they try and make it any easier? They'd heard enough of "Sander-Tieunis-whatever" to last a lifetime before their age collectively hit double digits.
When they moved out it was harder, but the act was ready to go beyond the off-Broadway run of friends and family and overworked high school teachers to the grid-pattern streets of New York and the urban campus of NYU. Sander majored in political science (minoring in drama, his other passion besides making money and buying good suits); Tieunis majored in anthropology and minored in classics - he always preferred digging around in the dirt and picking up girls with the dusty silver tongue of dead languages.
And in this way they passed four years of college and two years of graduate school; sharing books, living space, occasionally a job (double shifts were for some reason not a problem); writing each others' exams and papers, taking phone calls and notes and making a complete mockery of the university's attendance policy, and in one remarkable case also a portion of the GRE.
Oh, sure, life was not without its difficulties. Tieunis had an interesting time adjusting to his brother's life out of the closet, and had a few creative moments when "Tieunis" was supposed to be in class and therefore he, "Sander", was alone in their room and ripe for the plucking by Sander's real-life potential boyfriend; Sander had to pull off one of the most dramatic saves of his life when he was picked out of "Tieunis"' Latin seminar to translate something on the fly, throwing himself to the floor in a remarkably accurate dead faint which he passed off later as low blood sugar.
But somehow these difficulties only added a little more spice to the game.