3
Sometime in the middle of the night, I’m awakened by a loud gasp.
At first I think I’m hearing things. It’s late. The clock reads 3:00 a.m., and after flying to Florida, hitting the theme park, and the slumber party with Ginny, I’d been up for almost twenty straight hours by the time my head hit the pillow earlier. To say I’m disoriented would be an understatement.
So I let my eyes drift closed again, but within seconds, Ginny is shaking me. “Charlotte, wake up.”
“No,” I manage to mutter.
Has she forgotten that I’m on vacation? During the school year, my alarm goes off every morning at five o’clock. I’m not planning on cracking an eyelid until the Florida sunshine is bright enough to penetrate the thick hotel curtains.
“Charlotte, please,” she wails. “It’s an emergency.”
I swear, if she wants me to walk that obnoxious dog in the middle of the night, I’m going to lose it.
“Is the hotel on fire?” I ask, keeping my eyes clamped shut. “It better be.”
“Worse!” She flips my bedside light on, and I blink against the sudden assault of brightness. “Look at me.”
I rub my eyes, and I’m so drowsy that at first I can’t tell what she’s going on about. What is her problem? Did she break a nail? Did one of her meticulously groomed eyebrow hairs grow back overnight?
“Look at my face! What’s happening?” She’s screaming now, and the panic in her voice, sharp and raw, snaps me into consciousness.
I sit up, reaching for my glasses on the nightstand. Ginny wails again and helps me shove them in place.
“Is it still bad?” she asks.
I blink, certain that I’m either seeing things or that I’m still asleep and this odd conversation is just a dream. No . . . a nightmare.
Because the person sitting on the edge of my bed looks nothing like my beauty queen sister. She’s a stranger with a blotchy, swollen face, narrow slits for eyes, and lips at least four times the size of Angelina Jolie’s. Not in a good way.
I peer more closely, trying in vain to see someone recognizable beneath all the swelling. “Ginny?”
She starts to cry, and I wince. Asking her to verify her identity clearly wasn’t the response she was hoping for.
“Of course it’s me,” she says through her tears. “Who else would it be?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I spot Buttercup shimmying her way underneath the bed. Even Ginny’s devoted dog is freaked out by her appearance.
“We need to call nine-one-one. Like, right now.” I reach for my iPhone, but Ginny snatches it from my hands before I can push a button.
“No! Are you crazy?” She throws my phone across the room, and it lands somewhere in the pile of sparkle at the foot of her bed.
“Look, I know you’re upset. But clearly you’re having some kind of allergic reaction. You need a doctor.” I reach for the hotel phone on the nightstand, and Ginny swats my hand away.
I swat back at her, and in an instant we are slapping at each other like we did when we were eight, fighting over the haircut I gave her Miss America Barbie.
“Stop!” I leap from the bed, out of striking distance, and cross my arms. “You need help.”
“I know that. Obviously.” She gestures toward her face, which already looks worse than it did just a few moments ago. “But we can’t call nine-one-one. They’ll send an ambulance, and everyone up and down the hall will see me like this.”
I want to slap her again. For real, this time. “Are you seriously worried about a beauty pageant right now? You could go into anaphylactic shock, Ginny. You could die.”
For a second, Ginny doesn’t say anything. She stands there quietly, and I wait for my words to sink in.
She lets out a deep, shuddering sigh. “You’re right, okay. I know I need to get to a doctor. But no one here can see me like this. You can’t call nine-one-one. Promise me.”
At least she seems to appreciate the seriousness of the situation. “Fine. But get dressed. We’re leaving right now.”
I’ll have to get an Uber or a cab to take us to the closest hospital or something. I vaguely remember passing an urgent-care center earlier in the day on the way to the theme park. It was in a strip mall just down the street. With any luck, they’re open twenty-four hours.
I tug on my jeans, sneakers, and my Talk Darcy to Me T-shirt—always a hit when I wear it to my boozy Thursday-night book club. Ginny looks at it and shakes her head, clearly not getting the joke. Either that, or the head shake merely represents her general disapproval of my wardrobe. It doesn’t matter. I’m just relieved that she’s still well enough to judge my fashion sense. Maybe she won’t die, after all.
“Okay, let’s go.” I shove my room key and cell phone in my back pocket and march toward the door.
“Wait.” Ginny moves to block my path. She’s thrown on a red baby-doll-style dress with tiny white stars scattered over it. She’s not wearing her sash, but she still somehow looks like Miss Texas.
From the neck down, at least.
“What if someone out there sees me?” She peers out the peephole on our door.
Seriously? “It’s the middle of the night. I’m sure they’re all getting their beauty sleep.”
She hesitates, lingering by the door.
We don’t have time to argue again, and I have the sinking feeling that Ginny might consider death preferable to being seen by her fellow pageant queens in her present condition.
“How about a disguise?” I grab the sorting hat I bought at the theme park and jam it on top of her head.
It’s huge, and even with her swollen face, Ginny’s head is still beauty queen petite, made for a tiara. There’s enough extra room for me to pull down on the brim of the hat so that it covers everything but her chin.
“I can’t see a thing.” Her voice is muffled by the thick brown felt.
“Good, that means no one can see you either.” I open the door and push her swollen, vain self out into the hallway.
We take the stairs because Ginny is convinced the elevator could still be full of pageant contestants—doubtful, considering the hour. But again, I’m too tired to argue. I hold Ginny’s hand, guiding her down the five flights as she peeks beneath the brim of the hat.
I can’t help but think about the charming man I met earlier in the stairwell, and I wonder what he’d say if he stumbled upon us now. No doubt he’d make some witty quip about the sorting hat. The thought makes me smile, and then my grin fades when another, much uglier thought drifts to the forefront of my mind.
For once, someone would look at us and think that I’m the pretty one.
What kind of monster am I? I bite my lip, hard, as a form of self-punishment. And I give Ginny’s hand a squeeze. “We’re almost there. Just one more flight of stairs.”
At last we reach the ground floor, and the hotel lobby is vacant but brightly lit. Two sleek cars for hire are parked in the valet area, and I offer up a silent prayer of thanks for luxury spa accommodations.
We climb into the back seat of the first town car, and I ask the driver to take us to the closest emergency medical center. He assures me the urgent-care center down the road is indeed open all night, and we’re there within minutes.
I don’t have to say a word to the woman at the front desk. We walk in, she takes one look at Ginny and immediately ushers us to an exam room. A doctor in scrubs orders a nurse to prepare an IV drip of epinephrine and Benadryl while he shines a light toward the back of Ginny’s throat and a third person in scrubs takes her blood pressure. The numbers are frighteningly low.
I wrap my arms around myself and pace the tiny room.
This is really happening.
What if I hadn’t been there? What if I’d been back in Texas and Ginny had been in that room all alone, terrified to leave in case someone from the pageant saw her like this?
My hands ball into fists. This stupid, stupid pageant.
“You’re about to feel a shock of cold, followed by a sense of euphoria,” the doctor tells Ginny as the nurse ties a tourniquet around her arm in preparation for the IV. He slides his gaze toward me. “Then she’ll get very drowsy. I’m assuming you’re tourists? You’ll need to stay put for a few days so she can sleep this off.”
Ginny shakes her head. “Days? No. I—”
“Whatever you say, Doctor,” I interrupt, nodding.
The nurse slides the needle in place and attaches the IV tubing. I can tell the moment the medication hits Ginny’s bloodstream because her eyes widen and she lets out a loud shudder.
She takes a deep, cleansing breath, and the nurse wraps a blanket around her shoulders.
All my life, I’ve had to dispel rumors about identical twins feeling each other’s pain. Everyone wants to believe that Ginny and I experience the same emotions, suffer the same hurts. It’s simply not true. We share the same DNA, but we’re two different people. If I cut myself, Ginny doesn’t bleed. Just me.
But in this moment, my relief is so profound that I feel my lungs expand along with hers. My sister’s breath is my breath, and for some strange reason, I want to collapse into a ball and cry.
“Feeling better?” the doctor asks.
Ginny nods. “I guess I didn’t realize how awful I felt until the tightness in my chest went away just now.”
“It’s a good thing you got here when you did. Your airway wasn’t obstructed, but judging by the amount of edema in your face, it was only a matter of time.” The doctor flashes me a thumbs-up. “Good work getting her here quickly, although next time you might want to call nine-one-one.”
Ginny and I exchange a glance. It doesn’t take any special twin magic for her to read my mind. My I told you so is coming through loud and clear.
“What do you mean by ‘next time’? Is this going to happen to me again?” Ginny wraps the blanket tighter around her trembling frame.
The doctor lowers himself onto a rolling stool and crosses his arms. “You’re experiencing an acute allergic reaction to something. Unless you can identify what it was, then yes, this could happen again. The culprit was probably something you ate.”
“But we’re not allergic to anything.” Ginny searches my gaze. “Right?”
The doctor turns toward me. “You’re sisters?”
I nod. “Twins, actually. Identical.”
“Wow, I didn’t realize.” He smiles.
We should be accustomed to this reaction. After all, Ginny and I haven’t been mistaken for each other in years. It would require Rapunzelesque hair extensions and two hours in a makeup chair for me to look like my sister these days.
This time is different, though. And we both know it.
My heart breaks a little bit, and I can barely look at her, sitting there with tears streaming down her swollen face. I’m used to being the less attractive sister, the invisible one.
Ginny isn’t.
“Allergies have a strong genetic component, but they can be tricky. While it’s common for twins to be allergic to the same foods, it’s not always the case. Did you two share food last night?”
“Yes,” we say in unison.
“Then it looks like you drew the short straw, Ginny.” He shrugs.
I feel guilty, which I know is absurd. But Ginny is the golden child. The beautiful one. The fact that I’m not the twin who’s hooked up to an IV and swollen beyond recognition seems wrong on every level.
I clear my throat. “The swelling is only temporary. She’ll be back to normal really soon, right?”
“Absolutely.” The doctor nods and pulls a prescription pad from the pocket of his scrubs.
“Thank goodness.” Ginny’s shoulders sag in relief.
“We’ve given you a good amount of diphenhydramine in your IV drip. You need to stay here for a couple more hours, so you can get some rest and let it do its thing. But you’re going to need to continue taking it in liquid form. I also recommend a course of oral steroids. And you should get allergy tested as soon as possible.”
Ginny nods. “Sure. Anything, so long as it works. I need to be onstage by the day after tomorrow. That’s possible, isn’t it?”
She looks back and forth between me and the doctor. I can’t believe she’s still going on about the pageant at a time like this. The minute she’s stabilized, I’m calling our dad. Maybe he can talk some sense into her.
The doctor’s brow furrows. “Onstage?”
“She’s a contestant in a beauty pageant.” I roll my eyes to indicate my feelings on the subject.
Ginny corrects me instantaneously. “Miss American Treasure. It’s a scholarship competition.”
I roll my eyes even harder. Who is she kidding?
“I see.” The doctor nods. “That’s . . . great.”
His smile fades, and I know what’s coming. “There’s no reason you can’t be onstage by then, so long as you feel well,” he says.
“Perfect.” Her puffy lips curve into a smile.
“However . . .” And here it comes. “The swelling will likely take a while to go away.”
“A while?” Ginny sits up, panicked. The nurse pats her back and tries, unsuccessfully, to get her to lie back down. They might need to put a little something extra in that IV—a tranquilizer, maybe. “How long?”
“It’s hard to say. Three days, if you’re lucky.”
“Three days?” Ginny blinks. At least I think she does—it’s kind of hard to tell because her eyes are still nothing but tiny slits. I can’t even see her Real Housewives–size eyelash extensions. “Three days?”
“If you’re lucky.” The doctor stands, prepared to bolt.
I don’t blame him. I kind of want to slink out the door behind him.
“But I don’t have three days.” Ginny’s voice breaks, and the doctor pauses on his way out.
“I’m sorry. Truly, I am.” He looks at me one last time. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow to check in and see how she’s doing.”
“Sure.” I nod.
I’ll be answering that call from Texas. The minute we get back to the hotel, I’m booking our flights back home. There’s no reason to stay here if Ginny can’t compete in the pageant, and as much as I need a vacation, I refuse to be trapped in a room with her as she mourns the tragic end of her career as a beauty queen. Frankly, that seems like the worst possible way to spend my summer break.
Until the doctor opens his mouth again and suggests something far more horrendous.
“Since you two are twins, maybe you can take your sister’s place in the pageant until she feels better?” He shoots me a wink.
An actual, flirty little wink. I don’t know whether to be flattered or mortified. What is even happening right now?
“Oh my God, yes!” Ginny squeals.
Oh my God, no!
No, no, no. Just . . .
No.
I close my eyes and pray for the floor to open up and swallow me whole. It turns out being the pretty one isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.