Self-Reflection
Nina woke to somebody breathing on the other side of her bed.
Not a burglar breath. Not a horror-movie rasp. A soft, clogged little whistle through one nostril, the kind she got when the weather changed.
She lay still.
Her room was blue with early morning. The laundry chair was a mountain. Her phone glowed dead on the floor because she had kicked it off the mattress sometime after two. On the wall above her desk, the calendar still showed April even though it was the seventh of May, and the girl beside her had one knee poking out from under the blanket.
Nina knew that knee.
She knew the pale scar above it from when she’d tried to shave at eleven with her dad’s razor and no water. She knew the constellation of three freckles on the shin. She knew the chipped black polish on the second toe.
The girl rolled over.
Nina stared into her own face.
Her own face stared back, sleepy and irritated.
“Oh,” the other Nina said.
Nina screamed.
The other Nina screamed too, but half a second late, and that made the whole thing worse. Then they both clapped their hands over their mouths, because Nina’s mother had a night shift at the hospital and had only been asleep for two hours.
They stayed that way, breathing through their fingers.
The other Nina lowered her hands first.
“Okay,” she whispered. “That’s rude.”
“You’re me.”
“Yeah. I noticed.”
“You’re in my bed.”
“You’re also in my bed.”
“No, it’s my bed.”
The other Nina squinted at the room. “Fine. Our bed? That’s awful. I hate that.”
Nina sat up so fast the blood went thin in her head. The other Nina did the same, slower, as if trying not to spook an animal.
This was the part where Nina should have fainted. People fainted in books all the time, usually with their hands pressed to their chest like old ladies at church. Nina had never fainted. She suspected she was too tense for it. Her body held onto consciousness the way her mother held onto coupons: badly organized, but with grim commitment.
“What are you?” Nina whispered.
The other Nina looked down at herself. Same faded camp shirt. Same sleep shorts. Same stupid bracelet from the museum gift shop, the one Nina kept wearing because taking it off felt like admitting no one cared that she’d bought matching friendship bracelets for herself and no one else.
“I think I’m you,” the other one said.
“No.”
“Strong point.”
“No, because I’m me.”
“Also fair.”
They stared at each other.
Nina hated her own face from the outside. She hated that first, before fear could get a proper grip. Her cheeks were too round. Her mouth looked permanently prepared to apologize. Her hair had flattened weirdly on one side, and the cowlick by her temple stood up like it had an opinion.
The other Nina touched the cowlick.
“Don’t,” Nina said.
The hand dropped.
A minute passed. The house clicked and hummed. Somewhere downstairs, the refrigerator made its ice-machine death rattle.
Then Nina remembered last night.
She’d come home from Jocelyn Park’s birthday dinner and sat on the bathroom floor in her socks for forty-three minutes because her mother was asleep and the tile was cold and there was nowhere else to put herself.
It hadn’t even been a bad night. That was the stupid part. No one had dumped soup on her or called her a freak. People had been nice. Jocelyn had waved her into the booth. Ben had asked her what she wanted to order. Nisha had said, “You’re so quiet tonight,” in that high, gentle voice people used before they stopped trying.
Nina had spent the whole dinner monitoring her face.
Smile here. Laugh now. Don’t laugh too hard, that sounded fake. Ask about chemistry. No, don’t ask about chemistry, they hate chemistry. Say something about the fries. Why did you say “these fries have structural integrity”? Why did everyone look at you? Stop touching the straw wrapper. Stop. Stop.
At home, she’d washed off her mascara and said to the mirror, “Maybe the only friend I can make is myself.”
Then she’d laughed.
A small, ugly laugh. Like stepping on a cracker.
The other Nina was watching her now with a wary, sickened recognition.
“Oh no,” the other Nina said. “We said something stupid, didn’t we?”
Nina swallowed. “Maybe.”
“What did we say?”
“Nothing.”
“Nina.”
“I made a joke.”
“Don’t tell me.”
Nina told her.
The other Nina closed her eyes. “We manifested? Are you kidding me? We can’t even manifest clear skin.”
“Shut up.”
“No, seriously, this is so embarrassing. Other people get money or romance. We get a second anxious sophomore.”
Nina almost laughed. Then she didn’t, because laughing with herself seemed like the first step toward complete psychological collapse.
They took turns checking the mirror.
It didn’t help.
There were two Ninas in the reflection. One standing by the sink with both arms wrapped around her ribs. One sitting on the edge of the tub, picking at the cracked grout with her thumbnail.
They had the same memories up to last night. Same classes. Same mother. Same dead father, though neither of them said that out loud. Same locker combination. Same hatred of phone calls. Same secret belief that everyone else had received a manual in kindergarten and Nina had been in the nurse’s office when they handed it out.
They argued about names.
“I’m Nina,” Nina said.
“You can’t just keep it.”
“I was here first.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I woke up first.”
“That’s not birth order.”
After twenty minutes, the other Nina said, “Call me Anin.”
Nina frowned. “That’s my name backward.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s barely a name.”
“It’s more of a name than one letter.”
“Anin.”
“See? Easy.”
They hid Anin in Nina’s closet when her mother got up to use the bathroom. Anin crouched, tucked into the narrow space between the extra blankets and the wall. Nina on her bed reading her book.
Her mother appeared in the doorway, hair smashed flat, blue scrubs wrinkled, eyes half-open.
“School,” she mumbled.
“Yep.”
“Eat something.”
“Yep.”
“Love you.”
“Love you.”
Her mother shuffled away.
Nina spat nothing into the sink.
From inside the closet, Anin whispered, “She looks tired from the outside.”
“Everyone looks tired from the outside.”
“No. She looks tired-tired.”
Nina opened the closet door. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Know stuff.”
Anin climbed out, rubbing a hanger mark from her cheek.
They decided Nina would go to school. Anin would stay home. This lasted until Nina got one shoe on.
“What am I supposed to do here all day?” Anin asked.
“Don’t touch anything.”
“I’m you.”
“Exactly.”
Anin looked at the desk, at the half-finished sketch of a fox with too many teeth, at the library book with a cracked spine, at the laptop covered in stickers Nina regretted buying because they made her seem like she had a personality she could defend in court.
“I could do your English response,” Anin said.
“You mean our English response.”
“No, yours. I’m unemployed.”
“You are not writing my homework.”
“I write exactly like you.”
“That’s the problem.”
Anin smiled, and Nina saw what other people must see when she tried to joke. A crooked little offer. Take it or don’t. Please take it.
She looked away first.
At school, everything was too bright.
Nina had thought being a person was hard because she couldn’t see herself doing it. Now she had seen herself. It was worse.
She saw Anin in every window reflection. She saw the way she hunched her shoulders in the hallway, as if trying to slip between atoms. She heard her own voice before answering attendance, already apologizing for existing: “Here.” She watched other girls laugh with their mouths wide open and wondered whether Anin could do that if given enough practice.
At lunch, she sat with Jocelyn and the others because changing seats would be noticed, and being noticed was a tax.
Ben was telling a story about his driving instructor.
“So he’s like, ‘Signal left,’ and I fully turn right. Like, into a church parking lot. He just closes his eyes. I think I aged him.”
Everyone laughed.
Nina smiled at the right volume.
Then Nisha looked at her. “Nina, you okay?”
There it was. The soft spotlight. The question that meant: you’re making us aware of your silence.
Nina’s brain coughed up seventeen possible answers and rejected all of them.
Fine.
Tired.
Yeah, sorry.
I woke up next to a duplicate of myself because I made a sad little joke after your party.
Her mouth opened.
What came out was, “I think I’m bad at being in rooms.”
The table went quiet.
Nina’s stomach dropped through the bench.
Ben blinked. Jocelyn’s straw stopped halfway to her mouth. Nisha tilted her head, not pitying exactly. More like she had heard the sentence and was turning it over to see where the batteries went.
Then Ben said, “Honestly? Same.”
Jocelyn snorted. “No, you’re bad at driving near churches.”
“I contain multitudes.”
Nisha laughed, and the table moved on. Not smoothly. There was a bump where Nina’s sentence sat. But no one screamed. No one pointed. No one wrote it down for later use.
Nina ate a fry.
It was cold and limp.
No structural integrity at all.
When she got home, Anin was sitting at the kitchen table with Nina’s mother.
Nina froze in the doorway.
Anin had put on Nina’s green hoodie and braided her hair badly. Their mother sat across from her with a mug of tea, looking awake in a way she almost never did in the afternoon. There was a plate between them with two pieces of toast gone to crumbs.
Nina couldn’t speak.
Anin turned. Her face said, in several languages, I’m sorry and also don’t freak out and also I may have ruined everything.
Her mother looked at Nina. Then at Anin. Then back.
“I thought,” her mother said slowly, “I was more tired than usual.”
Nina dropped her backpack.
No one moved.
The clock above the stove ticked like it was being paid per tick.
Finally, her mother said, “One of you needs to explain why there are two of you before I call someone expensive.”
Nina started crying.
She hated that. She hated crying in front of people. Tears made her face hot and stupid, and once she started, she could never stop fast enough.
Anin cried too.
“Oh, good,” their mother said, voice thin. “Stereo.”
They told her. Not well. They interrupted each other. They argued about whether “manifested” was the right word. Nina insisted it had been a joke, and Anin said, “A deeply pathetic joke,” and Nina kicked her under the table.
Their mother listened with both hands around the mug.
When they finished, she sat there for a long time.
Then she said, “I used to pray for this.”
Both girls looked at her.
Their mother’s mouth twisted. “Not this exactly. Don’t look at me like that. But after your dad died, you were so little, and I was so tired, and sometimes I’d think: I wish there were two of me. One to go to work and one to stay home with you. One to sleep. One to be nice.”
She looked down at her tea.
“I guess the universe has terrible aim.”
Anin made a sound that might have been a laugh.
Nina wiped her face with her sleeve. “Are you mad?”
“I’m confused,” her mother said. “I’m scared. I’m probably going to be mad later, after I google something useless and don’t sleep.” She leaned back. “But mad at you? No.”
Nina had not expected that answer. She didn’t know what shape to make around it.
That night, Nina and Anin lay on the floor because sharing the bed had become impossible in daylight. Anin had stolen the good pillow. Nina let her.
“What if you disappear?” Nina asked.
Anin was quiet for a while.
“What if you do?”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why? Because you decided you’re the real one?”
“I am.”
“Maybe.” Anin rolled onto her side. “You feel real to me.”
Nina stared at the ceiling. One glow-in-the-dark star remained from when she was six, dim and stubborn above the closet door.
“I don’t want you here forever,” she said.
“I know.”
“That sounded mean.”
“It sounded true.”
Nina breathed in. The carpet smelled like dust and old shampoo.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said.
“Talk to people?”
“Be a person.”
Anin sighed. “Bad news. I don’t know either.”
“You’re supposed to be me. Couldn’t you be the version who knows?”
“That would’ve been useful. Instead I’m the version who ate toast with Mom and panicked.”
“She seemed okay.”
“She misses us,” Anin said.
Nina turned her head. “We live here.”
“No. I mean, she misses when we talked to her. Before we got all...” Anin waved a hand over both of them.
“Difficult?”
“Spiky.”
Nina considered this. Spiky was better than difficult. A cactus was spiky. It still counted as alive.
At school the next day, Anin went instead.
Nina stayed home and discovered that being alone felt different when someone else had taken your face into public. She wandered the house like a ghost with a pulse. She opened the fridge six times. She read half a page of her book. She sat on her mother’s bed and noticed the little pile of unsorted mail, the hand lotion, the framed photo of her father holding infant Nina like she was a bomb he’d been trusted with.
When Anin came back, she threw herself onto the bed.
“Jocelyn thinks you’re mad at her,” Anin said.
“What? Why?”
“Because you left fast after the party and then yesterday you were weird.”
“I’m always weird.”
“People don’t know which weirds are personal.”
Nina sat beside her. “What did you say?”
“I said you weren’t mad. Then I panicked and said your stomach hurt.”
“My stomach always hurts.”
“See? Plausible.”
Nina picked at the bracelet on her wrist. Anin had the same one. Of course she did.
“Did anyone notice?”
“That I wasn’t you? No. That you were slightly less terrified? Maybe.”
“Ouch.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“It isn’t.” Anin sat up. “I’m sorry.”
Nina didn’t answer.
Anin looked smaller than she had yesterday. That was strange, because she was the same size. Maybe the first day of existence took a lot out of a person.
“Do you like them?” Nina asked.
“Who?”
“Jocelyn. Nisha. Ben.”
Anin made a face. “Yeah. I think so. They’re loud. Ben chews like a dog with secrets. But yeah.”
“Do they like me?”
Anin paused too long.
Nina laughed once, sharp. “Great.”
“I think they don’t know you,” Anin said. “And I think you’re so busy guessing what they want that you never give them anything true to like.”
Nina hated her for that.
Then she hated herself for knowing it already.
For three days, they alternated.
Nina went to chemistry; Anin went to gym. Anin took a math quiz and got one point higher, which Nina found unforgivable. Nina had dinner with their mother; Anin folded laundry with her and learned that their father used to sing fake opera while cleaning the bathroom. They both cried over that, but at different times, which helped.
The problem was that Anin began to fade.
It started at the edges. Her fingers went faint when she held them up to the lamp. The light shone through the thin skin between thumb and forefinger, then through the bone, then through the bedspread behind it.
“Well,” Anin said. “That seems bad.”
Nina grabbed her hand. It felt warm. Real. Too real.
“No.”
“I didn’t vote for it.”
“No, you can’t just—” Nina stopped. She had almost used an em dash out loud, a sentence breaking in the middle because the end was too big to hold. “You can’t leave.”
Anin watched her. “You said you didn’t want me here forever.”
“That was before.”
“Before what?”
Nina squeezed her hand until their matching knuckles hurt. “Before you were my friend.”
Anin’s face crumpled.
It was awful, seeing her own face cry. Worse, because this time she didn’t hate it.
They tried everything that night. They repeated the joke backward. They stood in front of the mirror and demanded a refund. Anin wrote I AM REAL on Nina’s arm in black marker. Nina wrote SAME on Anin’s. Their mother called in sick and made pancakes at midnight because she said if reality was going to be ridiculous, they might as well use the griddle.
At 3:12 a.m., Anin sat on the bed, almost transparent, and said, “I think you have to stop needing me.”
“That’s evil.”
“I know.”
“I just got you.”
“You got practice.”
“I don’t want practice. I want you.”
Anin smiled, tired and fond. “Yeah, well. We never get assigned the good project partners.”
Nina laughed, and it broke halfway.
Anin touched her wrist, right over the museum bracelet.
“You’re easier to like from the outside,” she said.
“That’s not helpful.”
“It is. Because now you know. You’re not some impossible creature. You’re a girl who says strange things about fries and tries too hard and notices when Mom is tired. That’s a person. People can like a person.”
Nina shook her head.
Anin’s hand was barely there.
“Say something true tomorrow,” Anin said. “Just one thing. Then do it again.”
“What if it’s terrible?”
“Then we’ll hate it.”
“We?”
Anin smiled with Nina’s mouth.
Then she was gone.
No sparkle. No flash. No cinematic mercy.
Just an empty dip in the blanket and Nina’s own hand clutching air.
The next morning, Nina went to school wearing the green hoodie.
At lunch, Jocelyn waved her over. Nina nearly turned toward the bathroom. Habit was a strong little monster. It tugged at her sleeve.
She sat down anyway.
Ben was talking about the driving instructor again. Nisha had traded her pudding cup for Jocelyn’s apple slices. Normal things. Tiny things. The kind of things that went on even after your impossible friend vanished before dawn.
Jocelyn glanced at her. “Your stomach better?”
Nina looked at the table. At the fries. At her hands.
“No,” she said. “I lied. Well, I didn’t. Someone else lied for me. That’s hard to explain.”
Ben stopped chewing.
Nina kept going before she could fold herself shut.
“I left your party fast because I thought everyone could tell I didn’t know how to act. I’m not mad at you. I just get tired trying to be normal, and then I get weird, and then I assume everyone hates me, which is stupid because sometimes people are just eating pasta.”
No one spoke.
Nina’s heartbeat climbed into her throat and set up camp.
Then Jocelyn said, “I thought you hated us.”
Nina looked up. “What?”
“You always look like you’re waiting for us to leave.”
“I’m waiting for me to ruin it.”
“That’s exhausting,” Ben said.
“It is.”
Nisha pushed the pudding cup toward her. “Do you want this? I can’t eat while people are being emotionally honest. It makes me feel watched.”
Nina stared at the pudding.
Then she laughed.
Too loud at first. Then for real.
That afternoon, when she got home, the house was quiet. Her mother had left a note on the counter.
Work. Eat the soup. Love you. Both of you, somehow.
Nina stood there for a long time.
Then she took the bracelet off her wrist and tied it around the lamp on her desk. The other bracelet wasn’t there. Maybe it had vanished with Anin. Maybe it had never existed separately. Maybe the universe was bad at paperwork.
Nina sat down and opened her English document.
For once, she didn’t write what she thought the teacher wanted.
She wrote about a girl who woke up beside herself and discovered, to her annoyance, that she was decent company.