Cleo

The man and the woman remained silent as the doctor examined the woman’s pregnant belly. The room was breathlessly quiet as they watched the sonogram. It seemed ages until the doctor said a word. He pointed one meaty finger at the screen.
“It’s twins.” The wife gasped and the husband nearly fell over.
“T-twins?” she stuttered, staring at the screen, realization sinking in. There were two little figures on that screen. Two little beating hearts. Two little girls, intertwined, joined for life inside the womb, seemingly inseparable.
“Twins.”

-- 2 months later --
The world had stopped turning. Fires stopped burning, buildings stopped standing. But most importantly, a heart had stopped beating. The world had ended for the unlucky couple who so recently believed in miracles. Neither of the two looked at the screen, but the doctor kept the instrument on the woman's belly, searching for an answer. But the one he had to give was devastating.
"It seems one of them has killed the other. She was preventing her from getting the nutrients she needed."
There were no more words. The two girls so recently intertwined had separated and left only one to fight for herself. The doctor prayed for the last baby, leaving a stony silence in the air as the image of the last daughter disappeared. The fight had begun.

-- 13 years later --
Cleo Patricia Dodge sat on top of the bike rack, as usual, waiting for the school bus to arrive. Students milled around, saying their goodbyes and happy summers, but no one even cracked her so much as a smile as they walked past. Summer would bring the same as it did every year; three months of solitude and boredom. She had few real friends, and those she had were leaving her behind to go on vacation. They spent the last month telling her about their plans for visiting relatives, touring foreign countries, but Cleo would be staying behind in boring old Chilliwack. Her eyes wandered from the parking lot to her report card. A long line of A's traced one side and comments about how great she was to have in class fell along the other. School was the one thing that could keep her mind busy, and now all she had were crime shows that were unbelievably predictable and books that she's read ten times over.
When the bus arrived, most of the kids had dispersed and Cleo got in line to get on, counting one, two, three, four, five down the right side and sat down. She sat against the window and put her bag on the space beside her. No one would sit there. No one ever did.

She spent the entire ride staring longingly out the window. A crow was sitting on a tree when they came to a red light. She locked eyes with the creature, hazel ones for pitch black ones. As the light turned green, it took flight and Cleo watched it as it flapped gracefully over the traffic, over the buildings, and if it was lucky, maybe even somewhere over the rainbow.

The bus pulled up to her house just as her mother was leaving. She saw her little sister in the backseat, all dressed and ready to go for her swimming lesson. She entered the silent house and went to her room to drop off her school stuff. Only three more hours until dinner.

When her dad came home they didn't exchange many words. He knew where Ellie was, and he knew how Cleo's last day went, but for the sake of redundant conversation he asked anyways. Ellie had gone to a friend's house after her swimming lesson, a privilege never offered to Cleo, and her mom was in the kitchen preparing dinner. Her last day went as well as expected, considering the fact that Cleo actually enjoyed school. She said goodbye to her friends and teachers, got a total of six signatures in her yearbook, and spent the entire day moping about how long and boring the summer was. Her father nodded and didn't hear a word he was listening to. Cleo could've stated that she got a lip piercing and died her hair green and her father still would've ended the conversation with "That's great, Cleopatra" and made an attempt at patting her head without looking away from his newspaper. Everything seemed normal until they sat down to dinner. With Ellie away, the table was quiet. Though Cleo had finished her eighth grade and was turning fourteen in the winter, her six year-old sister always seemed more important. The antics of hyper second graders was apparently vastly more entertaining to hear about. But the silence was different tonight. Over the course of the meal, her mother would look at her father, her father would shake his head, and both would go back to eating. When they were done, her mother left the room and her father went to grasp Cleo's hand before deciding better and put his hands merely by hers on the table.

"Cleopatra, sweetie, we have something important to tell you." She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. When ever her parents used a name like "sweetie" on her, it was usually accompanied by bad news. "It's about time we told you, and we think you're old enough to understand." She returned his strong gaze and he continued. "It's about your sister."

"Ellie?" she asked, since that was the only sister she knew about.

"No, honey." He answered her quizzical look with another confusing statement. "Your other sister."

"My other sister?"

"Yes." he turned to the doorway, where her mother was standing. She was looking at a piece of paper protected in a plastic sleeve, tears in her eyes. She walked over to the table and placed it in front of Cleo. It was a sonogram, a printout from an ultrasound of a pregnancy. It was blurry black and grey shapes, but Cleo could make out two distinct shapes, what she assumed to be hearts.

"Mom, are you pregnant?"

"No, sweetie. We knew we would stop at two. But, honey, we never planned on having Ellie." she pointed one quivering finger at one of the hearts. "That's you."

"Then that's-"

"Your twin sister." she looked up at her father as he said those words. Those words that seemed too unbelievable to be true.

"I have a twin sister?"

"No, honey. You had a twin sister." she looked down at the sonogram as her father told the story. "Before we got married, we decided that we wanted to have two children. But once we decided it was time to have them, we discovered that we couldn't do it on our own." This part she knew. They had to go to the clinic to have both her and young Elizabeth Jasmine. "We found the best doctor we could, but he told us that most of the eggs never stick when implanted. They may not survive, and if more than one does, then they may smother each other out. But we tried anyway. We had to. The moment we saw this," he put his hand on the old picture. "We were amazed. He told us that we had a slim chance of having even one baby, but here we had two. We spent two months preparing everything. We told our families, all of our friends, we bought two of all the baby supplies we needed, we even picked out names." Both her parents shared a look. They smiled through tears, as if they could still feel the happiness of the time. "But we had ignored what the doctor said. One of the babies had smothered the other. There just weren't enough nutrients to support two of you. You got all of it and your sister never developed."

"There just wasn't enough for both of you. Either you both died, or you took what you needed from your sister." Her mother spoke with a cracking voice. There was a short silence before she asked the question that most intrigued her.

"You said you'd picked out names. What was going to be her name?"

"We knew you were going to be named Cleo. But we were going to name her Patricia." a chill ran down her spine and she jumped up.

"You named me after my dead sister? The sister I killed?" she stood gawking for a moment before running out of the room.

Her entire life, Cleo Patricia Dodge had been just a name. But now she knew just what it meant. It was why Cleo had never had a happy birthday. It was why Elizabeth had always been so special. She fell to her bedroom floor in tears, leaning against the door. She sat and cried and hyperventilated until it was dark and her parents knocked quietly against the door asking to come in. She said nothing and didn’t move until the house was quiet, when she moved like a ghost to her bed and slept all the while a screaming demon was trying to claw its way out of her chest with the glorious, newfound realization of its existence.

-- 2 years later --
Thump. Thump. Thump.

Small wads of paper hit Cleopatra in the back of the head. She picked them off of her desk and threw them back over her shoulder in the general vicinity of where they came from.

“Move your head, freak.” A voice whispered from the back of the room. She ignored it like she always did.

THUNG.

An eraser rebounded off of her head and landed on the desk. The teacher saw it and held out her hand for it. Cleopatra handed it to her and class went on. No one cared what happened to Cleo and no one asked her if she was okay. Ever since ninth grade she'd been the outcast. Attribute it to the news of her dead twin sister if you like, but Cleo had long ago accepted the fact she was a murderer and had moved on. The only change was her diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder. The mental illness was more than a bottle of pills. It was therapy, bouts of depression, and short and weak streaks of mania. Not many people knew. But not many people knew what it was like, either.

When the bell rang, kids ran out of class and Cleo packed her notebook away and headed for the door. The teacher stopped her before she got there.

"Was anyone bothering you today?" She answered with the usual "No." The teacher didn't care. She moved out of her way and Cleo walked into the hall.

She moved robotically to her next class. She operated on auto-pilot for most of her day. Whenever she had the chance, she would find some little, insignificant spot on a wall or a pattern on someone’s shirt or a freckle and let the spot take her into her imagination. Her notes were riddled with doodles and she subconsciously found herself counting every step she took.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten…she walked and bumped and swerved her way to her next class. She sat in the front as always. Whatever the teacher was talking about seemed to bore the other kids in the class as well, but the words that appeared on the screen got written down in her notebook, never to be read. When the teacher walked by handing the homework out, Cleopatra stuffed it into her textbook never to be seen again. Her eyes fluttered with insomnia and she rested her head on her desk when the teacher told everyone to work quietly. She put her headphones in her ears and played the same song she’d been listening to for the last two days. She turned it up until it hit the point where it was loud enough to let her drift without everyone else hearing it.

She may have fallen asleep, but the time seemed to pass all the same. Daydreams and sleeping dreams all drifted into each other now. She was lucky if she got five hours of sleep a night. It seemed like such a waste of night time to go to bed before midnight, and past then it was just excuses. Drawings scattered on papers. Poems scratched into notebooks. Strange creatures and bloody demons ran rampant in her brain at these times and her drawing reflected this. She’d collected two thick binders of scribblings and they filled more every night. Poems and songs were accompanied by faeries and monsters and tangled vines and other dark things. Flames, gas masks, skeletons, those appeared on the more recent papers. She never did homework and got C’s. If she tried, she was sure she could get A’s like she did in middle school. But nothing challenged her anymore like her own mind. A vast, twisting maze of faces and animals entertained her more than planetary systems and geometric formulas. All of it had a soundtrack and Cleopatra carried the mix tape. She listened to anything that had a beat or sucked her in. Even if it had one nice line of lyrics she would listen to it for hours if not days on end.
A cold wind blew in through an open window and she pulled her jacket closer to her neck and zipped it up. She wore the same sweater everyday and it thanked her for it by keeping her warm. She layered it in the Winter because of the damn Chilliwack weather. The snow would show up in November, disappear for the rest of the year and reappear just in time to ruin everyone’s New Year and would be completely unpredictable after that to ruin anyone’s chance of making plans. The snow hadn’t fallen yet but it was definitely cold enough. All it would take is some precipitation and BOOM. You’d look out the window one night and snow would be falling. That’s what happened in Chilliwack, and that’s all that happened in Chilliwack. You’d wait for the snow then you’d wait for the sun and have to sit down and shut up in between. If anything else happened in Chilliwack it didn’t get through the rock Cleopatra lived under and she remained oblivious, sitting alone, listening to music, scribbling demons in a notebook in her room at 1 AM.