We stare at them a lot, the twins down the street. Not because they’re twins or even because they’re conjoined at the spine. We stare mostly because they don’t look like twins. They don’t even look like they should be related.
Mikey saw them on his first day in town and said, “Those two really like piggyback rides, huh?”
“They’re stuck like that, dingbat,” I explained.
“Yeah, dingbat,” Joe added. “Be more sensitive.”
We only know them as Ketchup and Mustard because Mikey and me, we get Egg McMuffins every morning, and the twins stop at McDonald’s before school to get toppings for lunch. Ketchup, as we know her, is the one with legs and arms long enough to reach the pumps to squirt the condiments into little paper cups.
Ketchup wears her sister like a backpack. She pumps out the mustard and passes the filled cup over her head, placing it in her sister’s smaller hands and leaving a yellow stripe on her cheek.
That’s Mustard back there. She has bright white hair. They say she is Ketchup’s guardian angel, and that someone up there made a mistake. Sitting behind them in biology class every day, I try to figure out where one starts and the other ends. But that hair always steals my attention, and biology dissolves into me contemplating if she would feel it if I stole a few strands. At night I dream about plucking her off like a ripe apple and keeping her in my locker.
Ketchup looks like the rest of us humans. Her face is more freckles than skin.
Their dad has a joke about their condition. In his chuckling voice he says, “Hell, if they weren’t connected, I’d’ve sworn she cheated on me! Am I right?”
The next night, me and Joe and Mikey decide to follow them home after a football game. Mustard’s hair is tied up in a high ponytail, and I wonder if her short arms could really reach that high. It’s real easy to find their house. All you have to do is follow the branches. A block in every direction, the trees bend toward their house. Over the years, after the twins were born, the trunks slowly began to bow and the branches began to droop, as if drawn to the girls. It was so gradual that the neighbours hardly noticed until a botanist came to investigate the odd phenomenon.
“It must be because we have the brightest little girls,” their mother was quoted as saying in the Suburban Times. But the botanist concluded that it probably had something to do with the plant food their father used in the garden. In the picture accompanying the article, the twins and their mother were smiling in front of their house. They stood under two low branches like a frame. Mustard had to wrench her neck to the right to be seen over her sister’s shoulder. She looked like a decapitated head, but we knew she was so much more. It’s the general consensus among the male population that it was sometime between eighth grade and her sophomore year of high school that Mustard grew boobs. We used to wonder if they bumped against Ketchup’s back when they walked.
The thing about bent trees is that they’re easy to climb. Me and Joe and Mikey watch outside the twins’ dark house for a light to turn on. This is how we figure out that their bedroom is on the second floor and that they are actually happy. We get in a row, lying with our stomachs on a branch, and watch the sisters. Joe leaves after half an hour and Mikey eventually falls asleep, but I stay and watch.
They sit in front of a mirror for a really long time, just talking. At some point I realize that they can never naturally look one another in the eye, and it makes me more sad than the time I heard they aren’t going to live past twenty-five. Mustard braids Ketchup’s hair the whole time. She leans back and tugs hard at the handle of a brush, and even from far away I wince because I keep expecting her to break off. Eventually they come back from the bathroom in pyjamas and lie in bed on their side with their heads parallel and speak to the wall.
It was when Ketchup got hit by a car and survived that people really started suspecting that Mustard’s angelic appearance was more than superficial.
I didn’t believe it myself until Mustard scored a secret date for Ketchup at the senior prom, because it had to be nothing short of divine intervention. His name is Tom Felding and he is no easy catch, especially for a girl with two spines, two necks, and two heads — though the four boobs may have played a part in his decision.
It must have been tricky, how Mustard pulled it off. Mikey heard that Mustard passed Tom Felding a note in class and that he was under the impression he was going out with Mustard, not Ketchup. But how could Mustard write a note without Ketchup passing her a piece of paper, a pen, and without using Ketchup’s back as a desk?
Joe and I, we didn’t buy it.
Joe said he heard that one night Mustard hit Ketchup over the head, knocked her out and called Tom Felding on the phone, intentionally misleading him into a date with her, knowing the whole time it was for her sister.
The school rents a boat for the prom and decorates it with streamers that quickly disintegrate from wind and water once the boat sets out. Mustard spends the whole night wearing earmuffs and a blindfold to give Ketchup privacy. Ketchup has on a pink dress that had to be altered with a hole in the back for Mustard, who wears a plain black T-shirt but is still the prettiest girl there. Her nose curls up under the blindfold, and every once in a while she licks her dry lips. We think she falls asleep on the dance floor because as Ketchup and Tom Felding shuffle back and forth, her body slouches and sags. Her arms relax onto Ketchup’s chest, who just smiles and wraps them around her neck like a scarf.
The boat turns out to be a disaster. After an hour out on the lake, we have to turn back because someone discovers flooding in the girls’ bathroom and the captain suspects it may be an old hole opening up again.
It isn’t until we dock that Mikey and I get word that something is wrong. An ambulance is waiting for us on land, and before anyone is allowed to leave, we see Ketchup and Mustard lying on their side on a stretcher.
Carlie McNeil, rumour has it, was all set to go to the dance with Tom Felding, and when she found out that he ditched her for the Ketchup and Mustard twins, she was determined to set the record straight. We heard that she punched out the twins when they went into the bathroom. We heard that Ketchup’s head smashed into Mustard’s head and they ended up on the floor. We heard it sounded like firewood popping and there was a crunch like teeth. We heard that the only reason Ketchup survived was because her head was propped up on Mustard and out of the water.
At Mustard’s funeral they lower an empty casket. It must be the only funeral ever where the dead body watches its own descent into the ground. They dress her in black and tape her eyelids shut. I guess she must be heavy because Ketchup sags lower and lower as the day goes on. By the time the coffin is out of sight, she’s on her knees.
“Do you think she’ll still get ketchup from McDonald’s?” Mikey whispers. “Do you think she’ll switch over to mustard now?”
I guess there were a couple of attempted surgeries, but every one of them failed because it required the doctors to break the spinal cord. Ketchup isn’t expected to live much longer. We think she doesn’t even want to. They threw a black blanket over Mustard, and Ketchup continued to trudge through life.
I saw a strand of blond hair sticking out from under the blanket in biology. I moved in my seat, and the light reflected off her hair moved with me. It seemed to me at the time that she would have wanted me to have some. I tugged so quickly that only Mrs. Field saw, but she didn’t say anything. I heard that Mustard’s hair kept growing after she died and after Ketchup graduated. It grew so long that one day Ketchup tripped on it and they had to shave it all off.
I only see them once more — on the street, taking their morning walk.
“Hi, Ketchup,” I say.
“What did you just call me?”
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