Meredith skipped down the bus aisle, unable to contain her excitement about that evening’s field trip to Hollowbrook Farm. She paused in front of her twin sister and her friends, even though she knew she shouldn’t.
At the start of seventh grade, her sister had asked for space. “I love you, Mer. But it’s healthy for me to have my own friends,” Clara had said. “I want to be seen as myself—not part of a matching set.”
Then Clara had pressed half of a “Best Friends” heart necklace into Meredith’s hands. Meredith had wanted to cry as she ran her fingers along the jagged edge. Her heart had been broken, like the necklace.
“Can I sit with you?” Meredith now asked, ignoring Clara’s blistering glare.
“Mer,” Clara mumbled. “We agreed you’d let me do my own thing at school.”
“We’re not at school,” Meredith replied. “Please don’t make me sit alone on the bus.”
Clara scooched over to let Meredith take the inside seat. But as the bus started rolling, Clara turned her back to Meredith, leaning into the aisle to chat with her new pal Zoe. Meredith curled her knees to her chest. She might as well be sitting alone.
“Corn maze or haunted house first?” Zoe asked.
“Haunted house,” Clara replied, just as Meredith chimed in with “corn maze.”
They’d always been opposites, but to Meredith it was in a French fries-and-ice cream kind of way: good on their own, better together. Clara clearly felt differently.
Bitterness rose in Meredith’s throat as she looked out the window at the fields rolling by. “I wish Clara and I weren’t so different,” she whispered, grasping the half-a-heart charm. “I wish everybody was the same so no one had to feel bad about themselves!”
The metal burned between her fingers, and lightning streaked across the sky in the exact shape as the cut of her necklace. Meredith’s heart hammered. But when she blinked, there was no storm. She must have imagined it. . . .
