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Matching always. In all ways. William and Abigail Carter.
He’d been named William after his uncle, who had gone missing only a few years after his birth. He found his name no different and no less lasting than an epitaph on a tombstone— Father used to wince when he’d say it. William. William. William.
‘Willy’ seemed to soften this blow, making their father think less about what happened to the other half of him. Willy was soft on the tongue of schoolmates, William sharp in the mouths of schoolmasters. Yet, wrong when he’d carefully write it in the margins of his papers.
‘Abby’ came so naturally to Abigail you could think that was her given name, in fact, each part of her sister seemed to come with congenital confidence.
Willy envied his sister. It was a dark, juvenile evil. One he didn’t care to admit to himself besides when the night was dark and no one was awake but him. This envy ran deeper than their trials of childhood; Abigail getting the larger cookie out of the jar, the wooden soldier with a trumpet instead of drums, inheriting Mother’s cordialness instead of the Carter meekness.
It was a fact now that they were growing out of the soft androgyny of early youth. This had made them start to match less and less. Despite her boyish tendencies, Abigail was gifted dresses and dolls, Willie got books and pinches on the cheek. Mother braided Abigail's hair, and Willie had watched the scene with curious fascination, the slender fingers weaving in and out of the golden strains. His own hair had been cropped a few years ago into a proper boy’s cut.
And, Willy would begin to think with dread, what would happen when they didn’t match at all? When he’d get the tall and gangly features of his father, the softness of child features abandoned. Or, worse, the gurgle of scratchy facial hair he saw on the older boys. Abigail would stay soft as she grew, doll-like, just with the grace of a proper young lady instead of the clumsiness of the toyboy-ish child.
Willy closed his copy of The Sea Fairies, Feeling the tickle of spring’s chill on his neck. It was warm outside, cloudless, but not so warm that cold didn’t pervade the wind. He hadn’t been reading it, not really, he’d been thinking. He traced his finger over the picture of Tiny Trot, the girls of today were starting to crop their hair like boys.
Flowers were starting to sprout out from the grass, dotted with shiny mildew, and salted with the sea breeze. Abigail came urgently rushing up with him with bundles of them carefully nursed in her elbows, the blouse Mother had mended for her yesterday was already slick with the post-rain mud. With her infectious eagerness, she commanded her brother into stillness.
“I saw Ethel do this to Gladys at recess,” Abigail elaborated, and with awkward fingers began to tie the flower into Willy’s hair. She pulled slightly, making inelegant knots along his scalp, “I wanna help Elsie do it,”
“We aren’t sisters,” Ethel and Gladys were, and they hardly ever seemed to get along. Despite this supposed incident Abigail saw some schoolday. He brushed the flower that was more tangled in his hair than the delicate tie Abigail had no doubt intended. He’d take it out before Mother and Father saw, it wouldn’t be proper of a boy.
“I know,” Abigail huffed, “But I don’t have one to do this to,”
“Abigail?”
“What?”
“Do you think it would be different if we were sisters?”
Then they could match. In the truest sense of the word.
Matching always. In all ways.