The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley

kitchen embraced me, I remembered her first name—Nell—and realized that Cole had heard the name Nell because he was familiar with it. We hear what we expect to hear. We accept things in the terms we can understand. That’s what I was hoping for—that everyone would, like Cole, see what they expected to see and believe me.
    From that point on, Addie Nell was just Addie to me.
    W e rode back to my house. Cole’s father, his two brothers, and me. We squeezed into the front of their truck, with me sitting on the younger brother’s, Reese’s, lap bunched up against the door. We drove as far up the road as we could, then walked and slipped the rest of the way. The sky had grown even lower and darker, a hand slipped between us and the sun. Mr. Starnes fell coming up the bank and muttered something about his son being a fool. Otherwise, we were silent and hunched against the thick, cold rain. I feared this first meeting: my strange new twin and these quiet men who smelled of tobacco and cold leather.
    Inside, Addie rose from the floor where she had been lying next to Cole. I was the first in the door and heard that soothing faint bell tone withdraw like a wave back toward the two of them. The skin along my forearms tingled. Cole did not move; he seemed to be asleep or unconscious.
    The men filled the room awkwardly, watching Addie get up and then glancing at me for an explanation. “This is my cousin, Addie Hardin.”
    Without question, they nodded politely at her, then turned their attention to Cole, who had begun to moan as soon as they touched him. Only Reese looked back, his eyes going from her back to me, as they began to lift Cole.
    His face blanched again and he twisted his neck to see me. “I just wanted to know if you were all right. You have wood and food?” The men stopped.
    “I’m okay. We’ve got plenty of both.”
    “She’s got better sense than you, Cole, going out in this weather,” Mr. Starnes said, then they continued maneuvering him toward the back door.
    “Bye,” I told him and pulled the oilcloth over his face to keep the rain off. “I’ll come see you as soon as I can.”
    Addie and I went to the front of the house, returning to the bedroom window to watch them ease down toward the road with Cole, and then reappear at the truck. Covered like that with his brother crouched beside him in the rusted truck bed, Cole resembled a dead man.
    Alone again, Addie and I turned to each other. She was flesh and blood. Undeniable, impossible flesh and blood. I felt the startle of her presence in my chest, deep in my gut, but made myself look at her and breathe normally. She still had Uncle Lester’s hat on. She’d had it on the whole time. Maybe the men hadn’t seen her face very well. I felt the pressure of her unformed questions, but I held my hand up before she could speak and pulled her back over to the mirror.
    “Take your clothes off,” I told her. And she did, just like that. The hat, too.
    “You?” She pointed to my clothes. And I took them off, everything. The air was cold, but the cold stayed outside us. I turned to her, staring. We were exactly alike. The only difference I could see was her straight left collarbone. Mine had a lump in it where I’d broken it as a baby. Her hair, much shorter than mine, was the same copper color and just as coarse and curly. We were the same height. Her toes were long, like mine. The veins branching across the backs of our hands were not identical. I turned her and saw, for the first time, my own back. “Is my behind that broad?” I asked. I didn’t expect an answer, but she backed up against me and ran her hands from her hipbones back to mine.
    “We’re the same,” she announced.
    “How did you do this? What did you do?”
    She stared down at her own hands, then her breasts. “I don’t know. You were next to me.” She shrugged.
    “Why do you look like me? How?”
    “I am like you. I don’t know why. I opened my eyes and you were there. If I