To most people, my sister and I were completely opposite twins. The obvious first of all would be that one of us was a girl and the other a boy, but it went far deeper than that. Only one of us was beloved by their classmates. Maintaining a steady GPA of 4.0 since early middle school. Beautiful and elegant. Proud and ambitious. Athletic with the accomplishment of earning a black belt and playing soccer. Not only playing, either but winning first place more than once. In comparison to her, I was subpar.

What most people didn’t know was that this was all part of her fantasy to have the “perfect life”. She wanted to be the perfect girl with the perfect mind and body. She didn’t want anything negative said about her so she would act and say things according to the public eye. So when it came to me she jumped right on that bandwagon of ‘lets hate on Peter’. A wagon that most people got off after about a year, but she was still tightly holding onto the handle.

She slammed the frozen yogurt down on the table beside her. A bit of it escaped the cup and spotted her dress, yet she continued to focus only on me. “What the hell are you doing here, loser?” She immediately crossed her arms.

“I can’t do things?” I deadpanned.

“You never do things.” She glanced at Donovan standing awkwardly next to me. “Whos this?”

“Our new classmate.” I turned to him. “Well, this is my evil twin.”

“Fuck you. If anything, you’re the evil twin.” She turned to Donovan with her innocent puppy dog eyes. “He slapped me yesterday. Can you believe it? All because he can’t admit he was in love with Lucas!”

My jaw clenched. I could feel the heat of everyone’s stares as she threw herself into a tangent about Lucas’ gay crush on me. If we weren’t in public, I’d of slapped her stupid face again. But I restrained myself.

“- and everyone knew about it when Lucas finally offed himself. ‘Bout time, too. He was always crying that his life was so unfair. Like, if you’re going to keep complaining then just put you out of all our misery.”

Donovan frowned. “Wow… you really went and said all that.”

Her smile was wiped clean off her face. “You didn’t know Lucas at all so don’t think he was a saint because that’s how Peter remembers him.”

“What does that mean?” Donovan looked between us. “Was he a good guy or not?”

I fired my sister a warning shot and she held her hands up in surrender. “Let’s go.” I spun around.

“What about Henry and Rachel?”

“Let’s just go buy the backpack,” I suggested. Not like I wanted to go there originally, but if Natalie was going to be there I definitely wanted to be as far from the area as possible. She was like a ticking time bomb and I didn’t know when or where she’d blow up next.

For some reason, it was hot outside. Even with the crisp, Wisconsin air whispering by. Donovan freed himself from my grasp. “The hell was that about?”

“What?”

He pointed behind him at a giant cow grazing on grass. “Who is Lucas? I keep hearing all these weird things about you. Like a boyfriend and anniversary, and now this Lucas guy killing himself.” He paused and looked me dead in the eye. “What’s going on with you?”

This is why I hated talking with people. They always dig into problems that have nothing to do with them. Maybe it’s natural human curiosity, but I could do without other people prying into my personal issues. If I told him the top of the story I’d have to dig down even further.

So far into a place even I didn’t want to revisit. But the fear of him asking other people kept me in this perpetual debate tearing my brain apart. “A classmate of ours committed suicide. I was his friend. That’s it.”

He didn’t look any less confused. “So… were you dating him?”

“No.”

“Then why -”

“Drop it?” I turned back around for his car. Amazingly, he did drop it. “Anywhere you want to go is fine. I don’t care what backpack I have as long as it has a bottom.”

He sat there for a moment. “You okay?” I asked. He looked like he was in a daze.

“Yes.” He said. “Then let's go.”

I leaned against the passenger door as we pulled out of Smack Cows parking lot. We stayed incredibly quiet.