Chapter 10: What the Kitchen Revealed

Some things about us, before I tell you what the kitchen revealed.

Parisa and I are identical, and I will tell you exactly what that means, because “identical twins” tells you nothing.

We are five foot five and one hundred twenty-five pounds, and our measurements — identical, we have checked, it was a whole evening — are 34C-25-35. Not perfect. But we like the way we look. Not too big up top — just right, in our shared professional opinion — with a true waist and hips that earn their keep. We have also, thank God and good fortune, avoided the classic Iranian pear that runs in our family, the heavier thighs all our aunts carry. We have great legs, thank you very much. We know it, we dress accordingly, and we accept no rebuttals.

The hair is the first thing strangers see and the last thing they forget — jet black, thick as rope, in long loose waves nearly to our waists. We cut it to our shoulders exactly once, in seventh grade, and our mother mourned so operatically that we never did it again. And in the middle of all that darkness, the surprise that stops people on sidewalks: pale azure eyes, deep-water blue, in black lashes that need no help. Black hair and light blue eyes is rare enough that people assume contacts. We let them.

As for our butts — Brent must approve, because he is always swatting them. We consider this peer review.

The only fixed difference between us is the small white scar through Parisa’s left eyebrow, four stitches’ worth of December. Brent calls it her punctuation mark. Beyond the scar, you tell us apart by carriage. I walk into rooms. Parisa arrives in them. People who knew us well never confused us. People who didn’t were on their own.

Brent is five eleven and a hundred seventy-five pounds, built like what he is — a man who exercises because his father is a physician and made the case early, but who would rather be solving something. Auburn hair, wavy, perpetually a few weeks past needing a cut, the kind women want to put their hands in and eventually we simply did. Green eyes that go darker when he is thinking and darker still at other times, which we would learn. His mother’s coloring entirely — stand Emily Saunders next to her son and you can see the whole genetic argument at a glance.

Two black-haired, blue-eyed women and an auburn-haired, green-eyed man. We were going to be an unmistakable family. We did not fully know that yet.

It took exactly two days to discover the problem.

The evening after move-in I had gone to the library to sort out my student account, leaving the girls to handle dinner. This seemed reasonable. They were adults. The apartment had a functioning stove. I returned an hour later to find Yasmin staring at a pot of rice that had somehow achieved the consistency of wet cement, and Parisa standing at the counter with a cutting board and an expression that suggested she had been fighting the onion and the onion had won.