The Opposite of Me

by Sarah Pekkanen

  The kid—whoever it was—would invariably shout, “It wasn’t me! I’m Johnny!”

  “No he isn’t!” an outraged voice would shriek. “I’m Johnny!”

  What would it be like to slip into another person’s skin like that? I wondered once as I watched the giggling boys swap jackets before heading home. How would it feel to shed your own identity and try on someone else’s? Would it be like wiggling into tights that were three sizes too small, or would it feel deliciously liberating?

  Who would I change into, if I could be anyone at all? I wondered as I loaded my backpack with gifted and talented math notebooks and Great Books reading assignments while Alex flitted past in the hallways, a gaggle of girls trailing behind her like ladies-in-waiting.

  Would I become the president? A princess? A superhero with the ability to fly and see through walls?

  If anything were possible, who would I be?

  Who was I?

  I stared down at the papers clutched in my hands as the words on them finally stopped churning and twisting around and slowly settled back onto the page. My entire life was a mistake. I was never supposed to be a National Merit semifinalist, or make the dean’s list, or win a scholarship to grad school. Alex was supposed to do all that.

  Everything I’d thought about myself had been flipped upside down. My very identity was wrong, all the way down to its core. I wasn’t the smart sister. I never had been.

  Alex had unusually early childhood memories.

  Most geniuses did; I’d learned that in a psych class in college.

  I dragged a hand down my face. How many other clues had I ignored because they didn’t fit in with what I thought I knew?

  The Wheel of Fortune puzzle. She’d solved it with almost no letters showing. I’d made a joke about it, then I’d reached over Alex to grab Mom’s house assessment letter to decipher.

  Mom had asked the wrong sister for help. Alex was the smart one. I could barely wrap my mind around it. How had such a staggering truth been buried for so long? How could I suddenly feel like a stranger in my own skin?

  I lifted my hand to massage my forehead again and caught sight of my watch. It jarred me back to the present. I had to go right now; I had to get back to the hospital immediately, before Alex woke up. I dropped the IQ tests to the floor and ran down the stairs.

  I left the attic a complete mess, with papers scattered everywhere and half-empty boxes turned on their sides and the Magic 8 Ball sitting there in the center of it all. It wasn’t like me to leave things a mess, but then again, I wasn’t quite sure who me was anymore.

  A few hours later, Alex’s eyes slowly opened.

  “Hey,” I whispered, gently patting her shoulder and being careful to avoid bumping the tubes snaking in and out of her body. She was in the ICU, a place devoid of color. Everything was starkly white—the walls, the glistening tile floors, the nurses’ rubber-soled shoes. No one spoke above a whisper so as not to disturb the patients, who were tucked into private rooms with futuristic-looking machines surrounding them. The machines went about their business efficiently, dripping fluids into Alex’s veins and displaying dancing EKG lines and monitoring her vital signs with metronomic beeping. Alex’s room smelled like bleach and vinegar and something else, something musty and unfamiliar and unsettling.

  Alex looked at me like she didn’t recognize me. I concentrated on not doing the same thing to her.

  “You’re at Georgetown Hospital,” I whispered. “Your surgery went great. The tumor wasn’t malignant, Alex. It wasn’t malignant.”

  Alex gave a tiny nod. Her once-delicate face was puffy, and her head was swathed in a giant white bandage. Underneath it, I knew, was a shiny, bald skull with an angry-looking incision where her hairline used to be. A tube snaked up Alex’s nose, and more disappeared beneath her sheets.

  “Honey?” Mom stepped up next to me and reached for Alex’s hand. “We’re here. You can go back to sleep if you need to.”

  “We’ll watch over you,” Dad promised as he took Alex’s other hand. I felt tears come to my eyes as I watched my parents stand guard. In spite of their bifocals and arthritis and cholesterol medication, they’d protect Alex with a ferocity that would scare away anyone or anything that tried to harm her.

  I stepped out of the room and into the hallway, where Bradley waited.

  Impossible to believe it had been less than a week since I’d been breathlessly anticipating my date with him. Everything had changed; it was like we were inhabiting a whole different world now. I didn’t even feel uncomfortable around him anymore. I knew he wasn’t thinking of me sobbing on the rooftop while he tried to tell me, as kindly as he could, that he didn’t love me anymore.

  The only thing Bradley was thinking about right now was Alex.

  “She woke up,” I said. I watched relief pour into Bradley’s eyes and smooth the furrow between his eyebrows. “I think she’s going back to sleep, but the nurses will wake her up every hour to make sure she’s recovering.”

  “Thank God,” Bradley said. “She’s not in any pain?”

  “No,” I said. “And she’s going to have a morphine drip, so she’ll be able to control it if she does. The nurse said you can see her after a few hours. They’re only allowing family in now, but once she stabilizes you can go in. I know she’ll want to see you.”

  Bradley nodded. “Thanks.” He searched my eyes for a moment. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m good,” I said. “The important thing right now is Alex.”

  Bradley took a deep breath and exhaled with a soft whooshing sound. I knew his question was loaded with meaning, and I’d given him the answer he wanted. We weren’t going to talk about us—or the lack of us—now. That conversation could wait.

  “If she’s asleep, I might go grab a cup of coffee,” Bradley said. “Can I get you one?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  He smiled at me and headed toward the elevator.

  “Bradley?”

  He turned around, his finger poised over the call button, and raised his eyebrows questioningly. How could I say this? “I think the recovery might be tougher than Alex expects. I just want her . . . to be prepared.”

  “She’s pretty strong,” Bradley said.

  “Physically, I mean,” I said. “The steroids come with side effects.”

  “We’ll get through it,” Bradley said simply. “Whatever it is.”

  He loved her, I realized. It was as simple as that. He might as well have shouted it so the words echoed off the walls of the long hallway: He loved her and he wanted to be by her side. He was making a vow right here and now to be with her through sickness and health, good times and bad. And for just a moment, my pain and confusion lifted and I felt nothing but pure gladness. Bradley would take care of Alex. He wouldn’t care if they looked perfect together, if everyone stood back and admired them.

  Because Bradley had always found beauty in the unexpected.

  I left the hospital around seven o’clock that night to drive my parents home. By then Alex was conscious and even responding to questions. Mom and Dad had wanted to stay, but we’d all convinced them it would better if they had a hot meal and a good night’s rest before coming back tomorrow. I think the only reason they let themselves be talked into it was because Bradley was staying with Alex all night long. He refused to leave her side.

  When I left, his chair was pulled close to her bedside, and he was leaning over to talk to her in a low voice, even though her eyes were closed and she seemed to be asleep. I quietly pulled the door shut behind me and went to bring the car around for my parents. I’d pick up dinner at Antonio’s and open a bottle of Merlot, I decided. My parents would go to bed early, the stress of the day and the wine combining to make them drowsy. They needed the rest.

  Then I’d climb the rickety stairs into the attic—into my past—to dig through boxes of old report cards and school papers and standardized tests that Mom had never thrown away. To piece together my life’s story, and A
lex’s.

  Twenty-seven

  I USED TO LOVE to draw. How could I have forgotten?

  Stacked in a pile beside me was irrefutable proof: dozens—no, hundreds—of my pencil sketches of winged fairies and horses and flowers, doodled in the margins of my childhood books and on the pages of my three-ring notebooks. Some weren’t bad, especially for a five-year-old.

  Why had I stopped drawing? I wondered as I yanked open another box, sending decades of dust swirling into the musty air.

  “Lindsey is a happy little dreamer,” my kindergarten teacher had written in big, looping cursive on my midyear evaluation. “Sometimes she doesn’t pay attention in class because whatever is going on in her own mind is much more interesting to her!”

  I carefully placed that evaluation on top of my pile. Next to my pile was one for Alex, filled with her old notebooks and homework assignments and report cards.

  “Fantastic imagination!” an enthusiastic teacher had written on one of her stories. “Great job!” blared the faded red ink atop another perfect first-grade spelling test. “Above-grade reading and math skills,” gushed Alex’s kindergarten teacher.

  I dug for hours, like a detective seeking clues in a missing persons case. By the time the sky was growing light outside, my fingertips were black from rubbing against old ink and my two piles were as big as sofa cushions. And any lingering doubts I might have had about the IQ test scores being switched were gone.

  Alex was the smart one. She always had been.

  So why had I achieved a 3.96 grade point average in high school while she floated around in the vicinity of a B? Why had I gone to a top college before rocking a career in New York while Alex dabbled in courses at community college and never ended up finishing her degree?

  The switch must’ve happened gradually, I realized as I pulled out a photograph of Alex’s third-grade class. I leaned over, ignoring the crick in my neck that had come from hunching for so long. In the photo, Alex was positioned in the middle of the first row. The other kids were cute—a little boy wearing a lopsided bow tie, a beaming girl in a red and white striped sailor dress—but there was no question who the star was. There was a reason the photographer had positioned her in the prime spot. Already, Alex was being rewarded for her looks.

  As time passed, the message must’ve been pounded home more and more strongly. If you heard often enough that your beauty was what made you special, would those words eventually overpower your other natural gifts? Would those constant compliments be like soft, relentless water gradually imposing its will on the rocks it flowed over, shaping and smoothing them into the image it chose?

  I unearthed a photograph of Alex at a friend’s birthday party. The theme was a Hawaiian luau, and the girls were given leis and grass skirts to wear. Even in that one photograph, you could see the boys watching while Alex’s hips were captured in midsway as she mimicked a Hawaiian dance. How old was she then? Thirteen, maybe?

  Even back then, Alex’s crowd was composed of the best athletes, the prettiest cheerleaders, the genetic cream of our school’s crop. They adhered to the adolescent adage that had been passed down through the ages, the one that decreed it wasn’t cool to be smart. The cool kids called the guys on the debate team Screeches, and tripped them in the halls and laughed when their glasses broke. They met on weekend nights to drink a case of beer bought by someone hip enough to have a fake ID. They hit the mall after school and hung out in packs, appraising each other’s strengths and weaknesses like hungry predators. Alex was the undisputed queen of that crowd, reigning over it with her high cheekbones and blue-green eyes and flawless skin.

  Had Alex even studied in high school? I frowned, trying to remember. We hadn’t spent a lot of time together, but I was pretty sure she only cracked open her books the night before a test. She coasted by on her natural intelligence, racking up Bs without any real effort. Meanwhile, I was stationed in the library, poring over my textbooks until my head throbbed, quietly amassing knowledge and perfecting my Latin. I’d killed myself to get a near-perfect average. To be noticed. To be set apart from Alex.

  And in the process, I’d reshaped myself, too, as determinedly as running water.

  I looked down at the IQ test results again. Had my parents just cast the letter aside and forgotten about it? Maybe they’d never even read it all that carefully. It was possible.

  Or—my eyes squeezed shut as the thought hit me—could they have deliberately kept the results secret because they understood how desperately I needed to believe I was the smart sister? Maybe my parents saw me more clearly than I’d ever realized.

  All these years I’d prided myself on being the one who took care of my parents. Could they have been secretly protecting me all along?

  I sat up straighter and rubbed my weary eyes. The dust on my fingertips made a sneeze tickle my nose. I’d been up here so long I didn’t even know if it was night or morning.

  Did Alex have any idea how brilliant she was? I wondered. During her whole life, the only thing everyone focused on was her looks. Her beauty was how she earned a living. It was what defined her. What set her apart.

  Until now.

  I flashed back to Alex in her hospital bed, her face puffy, her hair gone. She’d lost something today. We both had.

  Suddenly a bone-deep exhaustion crashed over me, making my mind feel fuzzy and numb. I pulled the string on the overhead light, plunging the attic into darkness. I climbed down the stairs, then accordioned them back up into the ceiling and staggered into my bedroom. I slipped off my shoes and crawled onto my bed without even bothering to get under the covers, and within seconds, I was sound asleep.

  “I’m just saying the sideburns don’t match!” Dad was bellowing when I woke up.

  Ah, right on schedule. The 9:00 A.M. debate over whether Regis Philbin dyes his hair. More reliable than any alarm clock. Soon they’d move on to whether Kelly was getting too skinny, and from there, none of the women of The View would be safe. An ill-considered perm, a flash of more-robust-than-usual cleavage, a jarring shade of orange lipstick—it would all be picked apart, scrutinized and dissected with the kind of concentration usually reserved for the insides of laboratory frogs.

  “Hi, honey,” Mom said as I stumbled into the kitchen and beelined for the coffeepot, lured by its rich, earthy scent. “Bradley called an hour ago. He said Alex had a good night.”

  “Let me just hop in the shower and we can go see her,” I said as I guzzled my coffee. I leaned against the counter, wishing it would decide to follow me around today and help hold me upright.

  “Someone needs to take that girl to an all-you-can-eat buffet,” Dad opined, watching Kelly do the salsa with the latest winner of Dancing with the Stars.

  Everything was back to normal, except that nothing ever would be again.

  I took a quick shower and was just toweling my hair when I heard the phone ring. A moment later, Mom burst into the bathroom without knocking. I was gearing up to holler, “Privacy!” when I saw her wide, frightened eyes.

  “That was Bradley calling,” she said. “Something’s wrong.”

  I could hear Alex crying as I tore down the hallway. Bradley stood outside her door, still wearing his clothes from yesterday, though by now only one of the tails of his plaid shirt was tucked in; the other was hanging out of his jeans. His hair was more rumpled than usual, and his face looked drawn and tired.

  “She won’t see me,” he said, sounding stunned. “She won’t let me in anymore.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “She asked me to hand her her purse, and she pulled out a mirror,” Bradley said. He took off his glasses and rubbed the little indentations they had left on the bridge of his nose. “I hesitated for a second. But what could I do? Of course she looks different. She had brain surgery, for God’s sakes. But she just started crying.”

  “She saw herself?” Mom asked as she hurried up beside us.

  Bradley nodded and put his glasses back on. “The thing is, s
he’s doing so well. The doctor couldn’t believe how alert she was this morning, and her peripheral vision is already better. That’s why they moved her out of intensive care. She’s doing better than anyone expected. I keep trying to talk to her, to tell her that, but it only makes her more hysterical whenever she hears my voice.”

  “I’ll go in,” Mom said.

  I put a hand on her arm to stop her.

  “Let me try?” I asked, and she nodded and stepped back.

  I knocked on the door and eased it open. “Alex? It’s me.”

  Alex was in a new room now, one filled with the flowers that weren’t allowed into intensive care. Yellow daffodils in wicker baskets and bunches of spring tulips and sweet-smelling roses crowded every available surface. In the middle of it all was Alex, curled into a wretched ball, tubes still snaking all around her. She looked so sick and sad that it broke my heart.

  “Hey,” I said. I tried to keep my face from revealing my surprise.

  Alex was like a stranger. Her skin was blotchy, and angry-looking bruises snaked around her arms from the repeated needle sticks. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her cheekbones—her beautiful cheekbones—had sunk underneath her puffy flesh.

  I eased into the chair next to her bed, the one Bradley had slept in. Alex just lay there, tears steadily rolling down her cheeks.

  “I know you’re upset,” I began stupidly. God, talk about stating the screamingly obvious. Why couldn’t I be one of those people who always knew what to say?

  I tried again.

  “Alex, the swelling is going to fade. It’s just temporary,” I said. “And your hair is going to grow back.”

  It was as though she didn’t hear me. “I’m so ugly,” she said, her voice raw and guttural. Her vocal cords must have been worn out from crying.

  “You had brain surgery,” I said gently. Was it possible Alex had blocked any thoughts about how she’d look after surgery, just like she’d denied anything was wrong when the headaches and fuzzy vision first struck?

  “It’s going to take time to recover,” I said. This was coming out all wrong; I sounded like Dr. Grayson trying to skate over the severity of the situation by using bland, innocuous words.