Part Two: Impressions. Chapter Four: Kristin Delta Creyton

Say what you will about the similarities between me and Warren, but do not compare me to him when it comes to avocados. Warren will eat those slimy green fruits till kingdom comes. Puts them on salads and tacos and pasts and hamburgers. Once, in high school, I walked into the kitchen and saw he was eating it plain. With a spoon, just like a cup of pudding. Fucking disgusting. I would rather eat pickles covered in chocolate and dipped in raisins rather that ever have to taste another avocado ever again.

We also have very different tastes when it comes to music. I did a lot of theater in middle school and high school, and so I spent a lot of time in my attic room, listening to my favorite cast albums. Warren couldn’t stand any of that; he was always more of a heavy metal kid, and we used to fight and fight on saturdays over who could play their albums in the living room. It wasn’t a pleasant auditory experience, and now I look back and wonder how on earth my parents ever put up with us. Two young twins who were complete opposites in every way except looks; they really ought to be canonized; I mean, really, up there with Saint Thomas and Matthew.

Even our dating habits. I always made friends with all of Warren’s girlfriends; in fact, I usually stayed in touch with them long after Warren had moved on to the next one. In fact, if there was a girl I particularly liked, I always told her to get away while she could, before he could suck away her soul. I don’t know why girls always seemed to like him so much. I mean, obviously I’m biased because he’s my twin brother, and even if he looked like Jake Gyllenhaal and sang like Michael Buble I’d still find the idea of dating him repulsive. But yeah, he’s certainly no Jake Gyllenhaal, and if you put him and a dying cat in a singing competition, I’d bet my money on the cat. Warren made it his mission to torture, humiliate, and drive away any and all of my potential boyfriends. Even the nice ones. In fact, I remember one case in particular, when Stanely Thibodeau, this real sweet mousey kind of guy, came to our house to pick me up, Warren egged his car, and then blamed his anger on some feud they had in elementary school than Stan didn’t even remember anymore. So, yeah. He and I are different people, completely.

But while Warren might say differently, I loved having Ms. Blake as a teacher. It was probably the only thing we agreed on when we were ten. Before Ms. Blake came along, home life wasn’t so great for me. He’s a good brother now, always coming to see his nieces and I at Christmas time. But back then – oh boy. He used to, after i woke up, pour water mixed with yellow food coloring from our pantry on my sheets, and then tell mom and dad that I had wet the bed. And then he would tell the other kids at school, too. A complete nightmare. School was the only escape from that, because we always had different teachers.

But then when teacher I was supposed to have for 5th grade, Ms. Lafayette, died of a heart attack (my parents literally only told me about that the other day. In school we had been told that she was visiting family upstate, how sick is that?), they just made all the other classes bigger, rather than hire a new teacher. So, I somehow ended up in the same class as Warren, much to my chagrin. I figured, if he was that horrible to me at home, then imagine what he’d be like with a whole new set of friends to impress. Luckily, Ms. Blake caught him in the act of pranking on the first day. She was smart enough to see that Warren had snuck out the front door right as she was coming in from the teacher’s lounge, and my parents had warned her ahead of time about his “youthful and misguided energy.” When she noticed that the chair she had placed her binder next to was a little shinier than usual, she switched it with the one next to Warren’s lunchbox. Genius move on her part, although if he’d been one step ahead of her, he would have switched his lunchbox with someone else’s (like mine, probably), that way at least someone would be humiliated. At least, that’s what I would have done.

And then, when we had our one on one meetings with her, she asked me if it was true that Warren and I were fraternal twins. When I told her that, unfortunately, he was my twin brother, she leaned towards me and whispered, conspiratorially:

“If that boy gives you any trouble, either here or at home, you let me know. And he’ll have a lot worse coming to him than a hole in his trousers.”

Well, I liked her immediately after that! And from then on, if I could sense that Warren was up to something, I would remind him that Ms. Blake was my best friend in the whole wide world, and that she and I had a secret signal a la Batman or Powerpuff Girls, and I could have her over to kick his ass like that.

And that shut him up real fast.

Sometimes he forgot about my special connections, and then in class I would slip Ms. Blake a note, real secretive, and Ms. Blake would glance over at me and tap her nose with her right pointer finger, and that meant that she read my message loud and clear. And then at some point during class, Ms. Blake when no one else was looking because they were working on an assignment or reading silently or something, she would lean down over his desk and whisper something in his ear, and his eyes would go really wide, and he’d look over at me in fear, and I’d nod my head, as if I knew what she had just told him. God, I can still remember that same terrified look on his face every time. Priceless.

Of course, I never knew what she actually told him. Any time I asked she always told me not to worry, that she had taken care of the situation, and that he shouldn’t be causing me any trouble for at least the next week. I always thought it was somehing about how some zombie (at that age, Warren had a curious fear of the walking dead) would come and eat him in his sleep. But now I think it may have been something a lot more sinister than that.

I had totally blocked this memory until recently, when Warren had emailed me to tell me that Ms. Blake had gone missing, and that he was flying back to Goodland to figure out what happened. I had totally forgotten it. Probably I was so disturbed, so traumatized by it at the time, that I hid it in the recesses of my brain. But then the moment I read that email, it hit me like a ton of bricks, and I had to close my eyes the memory hurt me so badly.

I haven’t told anyone this before. Not a single soul. And I wasn’t planning on it, because, let’s face it, it doesn’t reflect too well on my brother, and it certainly doesn’t reflect well on the woman I had once considered my friend and savior. But I feel that, especially now, it doesn’t make any sense to try and cover up the past.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I was still in girl scouts (another difference between Warren and I; he was never one for organized activities) and in March I made my girl scout cookie run as I always did. Well, a new little girl had moved in next door, and she was also a girl scout, and since she was much cuter than I was, I figured everyone would be buying from her and not a scrawny acne-riddled teenager. So I decided to go to the neighborhood a few over from ours, just to try my luck. It turns out that there was a whole new cookie-selling market to be discovered that whole time! Thirty minutes into my route, I had already sold fifty boxes, mostly to old people who didn’t have any grandkids.

Eventually, I came to this small house at the bottom of this really steep driveway. There wasn’t a doorbell, so I knocked on the door and waited. No answer. But then, I heard some noises coming from the back of the house, and I thought, well, maybe whoever lives here is in the backyard and can’t hear me. So I go around the back, and the gate was open, so I let myself in. No one’s in the backyard, but I can see into one of the windows on the ground floor, through the blinds. And what do I see?

Two people. Definitely having sex.

And I’m mortified, right? Because, first of all, I’m a freshman in high school, and it’s not like I had that much experience. I mean, what i was seeing was way beyond any spin the bottle game i had ever played.

By the way, when I say, “what I was seeing”, I don’t mean like I stood around for five minutes and just watched them going at it. It felt like I was frozen still, but it can’t have been for more than a few seconds, because then the woman turned her face to me, and through the scattered light of the window-shade I could see it was her. Ms. Blake.

I ran out of there as fast as i could because why wouldn’t I?! I mean, that was my teacher, for christ sake! That’s like thinking about the day my brother and I were conceived.

And that’s when it hit me: the guy in the room. I could only see his back, but he had a tattoo on his left shoulder blade. This kind of sunburst, with a spiral in it. And earlier that year, my brother had come into my room and told me that he and his friends and one of his friend’s older brothers had gone to some parlor in Indianapolis where they didn’t care if you were a minor or not, and he showed me that same tattoo, and made me promise not to tell mom and dad about it. And then a few days before, he told me he ran into Ms. Blake on the street, and how great she still looked after all those years.

So, yeah. If Warren told you that our opinions on Ms. Blake differ, then he’d be half right. I might have liked her then, but now I feel nothing but disgust for her. I know she wasn’t a teacher any more, and that in the state of Indiana he was technically over the age on consent, but God!, what if she’d done something to him all those years ago?! I think about how much he admired her, how much we all admired her, in some way or another. And I think about her red lipstick, and her smile, and her mischievous eyes, and how she would whisper in his ear and how sometimes he’d break one of her commandments and he’d have to stay inside with her during recess. I think of all of that and I can’t help but feel furious at how blind I was. To think she was trying to help me, when all along she was after him.

I also can’t help but think that after Warren left or after she got tired of him, whichever one came first, she moved on to someone else. Maybe someone even younger, and it terrifies me., because I did nothing to stop her all those years ago. Who knows how many boys I could have protected if I had told the whole town. All I can hope is that she got caught one day by someone with more guts than I did, and that’s why she left town. Because she was ashamed.

Because she ought to be ashamed.