It happened almost as it did in the movie, but at the national round of a coding competition. Heaven Patterson had just removed her mask to splash some water on her face when she saw double. The girl behind her was also motionless.

“I am Neveah. What the hell! Who are you?”

They started talking, and it indeed was like the Parent Trap story. Just that they were older and their parents, while never having acknowledging that each of them was a twin, had been expressing their hatred for “the dead ex” freely.

It was magical too. All the stereotypes people have about twins were valid for the two of them. They finished each other’s thoughts and sentences, liked the same shows, made the same face when they smelled a boiled egg, they loved Blackpink, even though one had grown up poor on a farm in the middle of nowhere and the other with their wealthy mother in Manhattan.

It was Heaven who suggested it, but it was hanging in the air anyways – “Let’s switch for a few days, then come clean, take a gap year and go travel together.”

Naveah was nodding before her sister had even finished.

They spent the rest of the week having fun and making new friends as sisters.

When Heaven ran to hug her dad at the airport he flinched. Her excitement withered, and he was on the phone the entire ride home, talking about crops.

When they got to the house, she tried again to say how happy she was to be home, and his slap came without warning.

She blurted it all out, but it didn’t matter – he got red in the face and dragged her into a room that only had a thin mattress, a sink, a bucket and a Blackpink poster on the wall and kept her there until she told him what he needed to know.

Then he dragged an old TV in and a few bags of cereal and was gone.

The break in and her mother’s murder made all the news. So did the search for her missing self.

She had no idea what her father had done to Naveah, and she almost didn’t hate her.

Her dad came back, sat next to her, his eyes dead and hollow.

“I am sorry. I was late. We have to leave.”