u/Candid_Bank5959

looking for beta readers for this unpublished work. No AI please Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

All of Nine Minutes

I slap my brother on the back of the head, then catch his ear with my fist. He stumbles, and I shove him down into the grass, his knees staining green, as he tries not to cry.

The grade sevens and eights get off the bus and stare, unsure if they’re supposed to stop this. So I take it a step further. I jump as high as I can, then come down on his back with both knees.

That does it.

A girl on the steps lets her bag fall and runs at me, shouting, “Oh my God – get away!”

I take my cue and escape down the street, homebound, legs still pumping.

Whatever he did, this makes us even.

We were supposed to be distinguishable. I wear blue cotton, he wears red, which mostly helps from a distance. From behind, or just by listening, you might hesitate. But up close, it comesdown to the eye, and mine drifts enough to give me away.

We grow up on the north side of Oshawa in the eighties, on a quiet crescent. There’s a Catholic school nearby, with a thin strip of woods beside it, like decoration. After school, when Mom presses us to go outside, we pedal hard on matching red BMX bikes to get there, making a soft rumph rumph with our underinflated tires.

In the woods, we collect whoever’s around and throw sticks and pinecones at each other, anything we can dodge. Winning means you don’t get hit.

That forest holds its own artifacts: a damp nudie magazine and a fresh condom. One kid pokes and lifts it with a stick, then chasesus, howling as we scatter down the trail.

Sometimes I leave Nathan searching alone among the trees, still calling my name. I’m already home, laughing as I run down to the computer, knowing I’ll get a good twenty minutes before he figures it out.

As mirror twins, everything has a counterpart. My freckle on the left side, his on the right. My bad eye on the left, his on the right. We spend so much time together, things start to blur, even for Mom.

I’m nine minutes older, but she keeps calling me Nathan.

Our room on Tampa Crescent has two single beds under a wide window with navy blue cotton curtains and matching blankets. During the day, light pours past the pine trees and washeseverything flat.

One night, our sister hides in the closet to hear what twins might reveal. We talk Transformers nonsense, then drift into SimCityzoning plans. We want to get up early to go play on our friendRichard’s 386. She’s so bored and impatient with our talk, shechanges tactics, and starts scratching lightly, making low raspingnoises in the dark.

“What’s that?” Nathan peeps.

I pull the blanket up to my nose and listen. The scratching comes again, louder this time.

Then the door bursts open and she lunges out howling as we scream back, perfectly in sync.

Mom’s voice shoots up the stairs immediately: “What’s going on up there?!”

Fighting is our language. We irritate each other constantly, from flicks to fists.

Our basement has a fireplace. One night, I chase Nathan, wanting to punch him so bad I can feel it in my arms. We loopthe couch, then he cuts left, vaulting over the back just as I lunge a second too late. I drive my forehead straight into the stonehearth.

Warm blood runs down my face and into my bad eye, stars circling like Wile E. Coyote. Dad hears my wailing and yellslouder than usual, “What the hell is going on down there?!”

At the hospital, the floors shine a sick fluorescent green. I sitwith a bag of ice pressed to my head. We wait so long, I start to wonder how it will look. Mom holds my arm, steady like she already knows I’ll be fine.

My bare arms goosebump against the operating table as the overhead light shines like a gigantic pancake, exposing everything. I can hardly hold still, feeling every stitch.

When I get home, Nathan’s sitting quietly on his bed, lookinglike he’s done something he can’t take back. Now I have a mark above my bad eye, a flag pointing to what’s already obvious. Iwanted revenge before, but now I’m not so sure.

For once, I don’t feel like getting even.

In public school, Mom decides we should be in separate classes. One day, Nathan and I plot the classic switcheroo. We tradeclothes, discuss timing, but stop short of swapping glasses. We aren’t looking to ruin it completely.

The teachers surely know, but say nothing. In my class, there’scake. In his, thirty minutes of math. I hear their laughter down the hall and wish I was there.

Later, outside the portables, the gravel’s still damp from the rain.When I step down the stairs, there’s Greg Prentice, our arch-nemesis. He’s wearing his stolen Mercedes hood ornament, swinging from his neck like a trophy. I should run, but I don’t.

He steps in, same curls, same frown – and punches me in the face.

I hit the ground, stunned, not sure why this humiliation ishappening again.

“That’s what you get,” Greg huffs, already walking away.

By the end of the day, I find out Nathan had done something –or nothing. He didn’t even know.

One spring morning, Mrs. Shewchuk gets our class singing Eye of the Tiger, the buzz of fluorescent lights above us. She conducts like it’s an orchestra, hands slicing the air, jowls shaking. Some kids are into it. Later, she hands out a photocopy and tells me to practice with Mom and Dad.

I take my crumpled sheet home and ask Mom for help. We practice for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. When it feels like I’ve got it, that’s where we stop.

Nathan has his own project – colouring the provinces of Canada. He flashes through it in about five minutes, then hunts Momdown like it’s a performance review.

“Do you like it??” he strains, waiting for the answer he needs.

Our house always smells delicious – cookies, muffins, and butter tarts, everything in batches, made from scratch.

It’s bedtime, and our older brother Aaron drifts through the kitchen, sampling the goods, working to land jokes and smiling too soon. Mom makes frog cupcakes with green icing smoothed over with a butter knife, two chocolate chip eyes pressed in while still wet. We each get one. I beg for more, but this time she’s firm. Nathan wants more too. I can see it in the way he eyes the tray. But he lets it go, and I go to bed in a mood.

Later, when everyone’s asleep, I drag a chair across the floor, slowly so the legs don’t scrape, and climb for another. I peel the wrapper in the dark, standing over the counter. It tastes exactly the same as the first one. That’s the part I remember most: that it wasn’t any better.

Nathan and I were made from the same thing, but something in him knew when to stop. Whatever that switch was, I don’t think I got one.

I let him use that switch more than once – when my girlfriendcalls one Friday night, I’m playing a Dungeons and Dragons game on our Commodore 64, jostling the joystick. So I get Nathan to pretend he’s me, and it works – until it doesn’t.

By Monday, I’m single again.

When grade six is almost done, I decide to take care of the Greg problem. My sister’s been giving me the pep talk, building me up for weeks. We’re moving to a new school soon and Greg’s about to be someone else’s problem.

He’s near the parking lot, and my sister and Mom are in the car, watching. I walk up, tap him on the shoulder, and when he turns, I clock him in the face as hard as I can.

Greg doesn’t fall, but he doesn’t know what happened either. Then the bell rings and I’m already turning away. We line up for class like normal.

Nathan never confronted him like that.

Some things just hold, without being tested.

At camp, three sets of twins named Matthew and Nathan show up the same week. Everyone’s so proud, someone calls the newspaper. The photo stays on the fridge until it yellows.

Another night, with no reason I can name, my right leg wakes me with a pulsing ache. I stretch it, turn in bed, and wait for it to pass. The next day, I’m on the phone with Nathan and mention it – he tells me the same thing happened to him – but on his left. Of course we laugh.

But the best reminder is that we still know how to get under each other’s skin. Nate has a slightly hooked nose, so I “CAWW! CAWWW!” at him and exaggerate the beak. He answers with a waddle, and a “Quack! Quack!” – he loves to mock my foot.

We’re in our forties now and he quacked at me the other day.

The real departure doesn’t happen all at once.

We move to Kitchener because Dad loses his job at LanticSugar. In high school, Nathan starts answering to Nate more often. Another Greg shows up. He’s less physical, but still cruel, and we deal with him separately. Nate handles it more easily than I do. The only satisfaction I get is during our senior year in the winter, when we’re in the school basement and the power goes out. A spontaneous snowball fight starts and I manage to hit him in the head.

Those days, we still work off each other, like a routine we neverrehearsed. He starts a story, I jump in, rising above the punchline. People laugh. It still works, just not in the same way. I no longer automatically share his friends, and they begin to outnumber mine. I feel it in the way conversations turn toward him – like gravity tilting, almost politely, and then simply resting there. He’s liked more, and that doesn’t feel even.

At university, we share the same group of friends, but they feel more his than mine. I find a place for us to rent, but he decides who fills it, then jokes I’m only there because they need my money.

One night, we’re at a Hallowe’en party; a couple of girls are standing outside in the cool air, showing off their costumes: one’s a sexy pirate, the other something clownish. Nate chats upthe pirate while I stand there, awkward with the other girl, my hands busy with nothing. Then he takes a pen and draws a tattoo on his chest, and tells the pirate to lick it.

She does.

They laugh hard.

I tell the clown I like her costume – but she’s already walking inside, close enough to hear me.

On campus, it’s hard to tell where he ends and I begin, especially when strangers keep calling me Nate. It happens often enough that I start to let it slide. Sometimes I play along, trying to match the version of him they seem to know. One girlis genuinely startled when I come clean: “I’ve known him for two years and he never mentioned you!”

When I bring this up to Nate, he shrugs it off – people call him Matt all over campus too.

Near the end of the year, we’re invited to dinner by a girl who seems to like us both. Her three brothers and parents are there, and she’s half-flirting, half-teasing us all through the meal. ButI’m distracted because Nate’s sitting closer. He’s talking to her, trying to make her laugh, and I assume he has it handled. So I amp up my game, but the conversation starts to stall.

Then after dessert, without warning, the whole family starts to sing an a cappella piece. Their voices are so perfectly in tune it feels like an interruption – the pleasant kind, where you forget what you were thinking about. Mrs. Shewchuk would be proud.

Curious, we dig a little more and she explains: “We hardly fought as kids.”

Nate and I just look at each other. As siblings, all we did was fight.

On the way home, I’m driving, still thinking about dinner, whenhe leans in: “I had no idea what I was doing back there.”

We both laugh when I confess I didn’t either.

Years later, when we’re in our late twenties, a mutual friend from university reaches out to Nate and arranges a dinner date with her husband’s sister. Because I know them and live in the same town as the sister, I’m invited too.

During the meal, my brother tells her we share a rare condition –myotonia congenita – most common with goats – then pulls up the video to prove it. She leans over his shoulder, watching, not quite sure what to make of him. I think she’ll come to her senses. But the meal ends and she’s all smiles.

At first, it feels like nothing’s changed.

But the calls and visits build, then something shifts for good. I call; sometimes he calls back. Sometimes he doesn’t. Our visits become less frequent. I notice but don’t push. I know it isn’tpersonal. But I miss my brother. I’ve already moved away from Nate to Peterborough, and soon I’ll move even farther to Ottawa.

Weeks before their wedding, I labour over the video and speech for hours, fixing and refixing them long after they should be done. The night I finish it, it’s 3 a.m., and I’ve been staring at the screen, with all of our days laid out – university, Japan, Thailand, on a boat to Korea – all of our greatest adventures.

And now, I’m back to the start – the two of us, side-by-side, in red and blue.

Closeness like ours comes with its own rules. You learn how to get under each other’s skin because you already live there. We were close enough to hurt each other without thinking, close enough that it often didn’t feel like hurting someone else at all. That’s the part that’s hard to explain to people who grew up with ordinary siblings, with distance built in.

We didn’t have distance. We had a mirror. And even now, I’m not sure where that line ever was.

On their wedding day, it’s overcast. Our mutual friend lends them his ’65 Ford Galaxie 500XL, white over chrome, and it glows without quite shining. The door opens and Nathan and Melody leap out, excited for this moment, excited for each other. They can’t stop smiling, and I understand it.

Even so, we’re still twins.

Ten minutes after the ceremony, she looks right at me.

“Nathan, I need you.”

She motions people into place for a photo. When I don’t move, she realizes her error, laughs, and looks for the real Nathan.

I laugh too.

And for once, there’s nothing to fix.

[Complete] [12k] [Memoirs] Being a twin, travel through northern Canada &amp; life in Japan — seeking beta readers

[Complete] [12k] [Memoirs] Being a twin, travel through northern Canada & life in Japan — seeking beta readers