Friends & Belonging
We Were Going to Match
Cleo and Della are going to be cats.
They decided on Tuesday, hanging upside down on the jungle gym, with their hair touching the sand.
“Two cats,” said Della.
“Exactly the same,” said Cleo.
Since then, Cleo has pictured it a hundred times. The two of them walking into the party together. Somebody saying, “Look — twins!” And Della squeezing her hand, because that is what you do when you’re a pair.
The tails are made from Dad’s old black socks. Mom helped with the stuffing, but Cleo did the important part.
On Della’s tail, she sewed a tiny white tip, so that they would always know whose was whose. It took four tries. Her thumb still has a needle mark.
Della’s tail sticks straight out. Cleo bends it around a mug and holds it there for a long time.
Boing. Straight again. That’s all right. Della won’t mind.
Ding-dong.
Cleo runs to the door with the spare tail held out in front of her, ready.
Della is on the step.
She is round and orange from her shoulders to her knees. There is a green stalk on her head.
Cleo’s arm stays out, holding the sock, as if it hasn’t heard the news yet.
“My cat top was all scratchy,” says Della, tugging at her collar. “Mom said I could be a pumpkin instead. Isn’t it bouncy?”
She bounces, to show.
Then she holds up a little face-paint pencil. “But I brought the whiskers!”
Cleo looks at the pencil. Then at the pumpkin. Then at the tail in her hand, with its tiny white tip.
It doesn’t look like a twins tail anymore. It just looks like a sock.
“Photo!” Dad calls from the living room. “Before the ears fall off!”
Somebody’s homemade ghost has already lost an eye. Everybody shuffles toward the sofa, laughing.
Della steps into the hall beside Cleo, rustling.
The spare tail hangs between them. Its white tip is pointing at the floor.
Della is ready to go in. Cleo is still holding the second tail.
What does Cleo do?
Every choice costs something. Let’s see what.
Offer Della the spare tail.
“Do you want it anyway?” Cleo asks. Her voice comes out smaller than she meant.
Della takes the tail and holds it against her pumpkin. “At the back?”
Cleo nods.
They find Mom by the sofa, and Mom clips it onto the little loop on Della’s costume. It sticks straight out, like the handle of a teapot.
Della twists around to look at it. The tail twists around too.
She tries the other way. So does the tail.
“Stay there,” says Cleo, and catches the end — the white end, the one she sewed.
So now Della is standing very, very still, looking over her shoulder, and Cleo is holding a pumpkin by its tail. Dad lowers his phone and waits. Somebody giggles. Cleo almost does too.
For the photo, they stand sideways so both tails show.
Cleo’s curls down neatly. Della’s sticks out — straight across the ghost.
“Move your tail,” says the ghost.
“I can’t,” says Della, very seriously. “It’s like that.”
Cleo shuffles half a step closer. The tail comes too. Now their shoulders are touching, the way she pictured it.
When Dad shows them the picture, Cleo looks for two cats.
There is one cat. Next to her is a pumpkin with a black sock sticking out of it.
Della leans over her shoulder and studies it for a long time.
“You’re a cat,” she says at last. “And I’m a pumpkin that wants to be one.”
Cleo makes the picture bigger with two fingers, until it is just the two of them.
Ask what happened to the cat.
“What was scratchy?” Cleo asks.
“The seam. Here.” Della draws a line around the back of her neck. “We turned it inside out, but then the other part scratched. I cried, actually. A little.”
Cleo didn’t know that. She finds the seam inside her own sleeve and rubs it with her thumb. It is scratchy, now that she thinks about it.
From the sofa, Dad calls their names.
“Did you still have the ears?”
“They’re on our kitchen table. I didn’t want to wear them without you.”
Cleo looks down at the spare tail. “I made this one for you. It’s got a white tip, so we’d know.”
“I know,” says Della, and strokes the white tip with one finger, very gently. “Can I take it home? For when I’ve got a top that isn’t scratchy?”
Cleo folds the tail into Della’s bag by the front door. It won’t go all the way in, so the white tip pokes out, like it’s peeping to see what happens next.
From the living room comes a big shout: “PUMPKIN!”
Click.
“Oh,” says Della. “That was the picture.”
They look at each other. They weren’t in it.
Dad offers to take another one, but the ghost has pulled his sheet off and somebody is already crawling behind the sofa.
“Just us, then,” says Della.
She sits down on the bottom stair. No tails in this picture. No matching. Her pumpkin takes up nearly the whole step.
“Scoot over,” says Cleo, and squeezes in anyway.
Put the spare tail away.
Cleo puts the tail in the drawer under the hall mirror and bumps it shut with her knee. Quickly, before she can change her mind.
“Come on,” she says.
Della follows her to the sofa. The pumpkin brushes the doorframe — shhhh.
Cleo does not look back at the drawer. Not even once.
They squeeze into the photo next to the ghost.
“Whiskers?” Della whispers.
Cleo tips up her chin. Della draws three on one cheek, then three on the other. It tickles, and Cleo has to hold her face very still not to laugh.
“What about you?” Cleo asks.
“Pumpkins don’t have whiskers.”
“This one could.”
So Della gets whiskers too.
By the time Dad takes the picture, one of Cleo’s ears has slid sideways and the ghost is holding his missing eye in his hand.
The pumpkin makes it hard to fit. They fit anyway, with Della turned a little sideways and Cleo’s whiskery cheek squashed against something orange.
Later, they sit side by side at the kitchen table, still wearing their whiskers.
“Can you pass the orange pencil?”
Cleo passes it.
From her chair she can see the hall drawer. A tiny bit of black sock is poking out of the edge. Della doesn’t know what’s in there.
Della is drawing a cat.