This prologue was written and edited with the help of Bard of the Black Rose. Enjoy and please review.

Mackenzie and I might be two bodies, but together we are one person, easily clicking together like puzzle pieces. It sounds cheesy, I know. When you've known someone since the womb, though, there's some kind of connection that bonds you to them.

I'm talking about the idea that one twin can supposedly "feel" the other's pain, physical or mental. Kenzie and I have something more grounded—but close—going on. It isn't anything either of us has in common with our friends or even our brother.

When we were ten, five years ago, I fell down the stairs of our house. I tumbled down, down, down, finally landing at the bottom in a pile of twisted limbs. Mom took me to the hospital while Noah, then fourteen, watched Kenzie. The fall had left me rug-burnt and with a broken wrist and ankle. They gave me two bright pink casts and a pat on the head with instructions to stay off my feet for a while.

That night and every night after that Mackenzie slept curled next to me in my twin bed. It was like staring into a mirror. Our jet black locks danced over the pillow, braiding themselves together. I watched her grey-blue eyes twinkle in the dark as she held my cast-free hand and told me jokes and fairy tales. We slept entwined in each other.

Two weeks later, I went to the doctor for X-rays. They were absolutely astonished with what they found. My bones were almost completely healed. The casts could come off in less than a week. It was a medical miracle.

Then Kenzie got sick.

It was the flu, and a really awful case of it. I wasn't allowed to see her at all. No one was sure if she would make it… except for the two of us. We were convinced that Kenzie had taken my pain, absorbed it into her own body. That was why my bones had healed so fast. That was why she was now sick. But of course she wouldn't die.

I begged anyone who would listen to let me go into Kenzie's room, told them that I wouldn't get sick, that I could heal my sister. They refused. I didn't listen, of course, and snuck into her bedroom one night. Fever was eating away at her dreams and making her twist and turn. I laid my hand across her steaming forehead—and she was still. My touch cooled her almost immediately. I stayed by her side all night and by morning she was back to her cheery, yet slightly weaker self.

Everyone was baffled. That was the first and last time anything like that happened to us, but ever since then when one of us hurts the other one feels a slight twinge. It's like an annoying little fly banging around in our brains and whispering, something is wrong, something is wrong.

That's how when Mackenzie died, I knew I had to get home immediately.

I was at the library with my best friend Tyler, chilling out and drinking a smoothie from the café downstairs. It hit me out of nowhere. This time, though, it wasn't just a fly. It was like an elephant just slammed into me. I dropped the plastic cup, ignorant to the clatter, hardly able to breathe.

Tyler stopped his long-winded explanation of some movie about cops and leaned forward anxiously. "Emily. Em? Are you ok?"

"N-no," I sputtered. "Tyler, something's wrong with Kenzie."

"Kenzie? Like, your sister Kenzie? I thought you guys were fighting."

I just shook my head at him and began to shove things into my favorite red, pin-covered messenger bag with the beaded floral design. I was only vaguely aware of the strawberry-banana mess oozing onto the purple and green carpet and honestly couldn't care less at the moment. I stood and yanked Tyler up with me by the elbow. "You have to give me a ride back home, please."

"Hey!" an unpleasant-sounding voice called. The kid with the pretentious hipster air about him who had started working here this summer stepped from behind a shelf and pointed to the smoothie puddle. His green eyes blazed. "Are you just going to leave that there?"

"I'm sorry, we have to go," I said and took off.

"Something's wrong with her sister?" Tyler supplied apologetically and followed me. We piled into his dusty red Subaru and rushed towards my house. I nervously twisted my orange bracelet up and down my wrists—the bracelet Kenzie had woven for me when we were twelve. Before things went downhill.

I began to seriously hyperventilate, wrapping my arms around myself and doubling over. It was nothing like other times she had been hurt. I was dizzy, sweaty, could hardly see. Other times I just felt a little twinge. Occasionally I might get a headache. This… this was like nothing else I had ever experienced. I think I knew then that Kenzie had gone. I just didn't want to accept it.

"Jesus, Emily! Do you need me to pull over?"

"No, no, no. Just get me home."

By the time we got to my house—a huge, gaudy white thing—the two cop cars were already in front. They were delivering the news as I flew into the living room. I can picture the looks on the faces of the policemenas I dashed in crying: "What's wrong? What happened to her?"

Terror, their mouths gaping, horrified O's of disbelief. It was as if they were seeing a ghost.

My mother patted the seat on the couch between her and Dad. Her face looked as if the color had been sucked out of it, her lips pressed together in a worried line.

"This is my other daughter, Emily. Mackenzie's twin," Dad said in his standard serious tone. The two cops relaxed visibly. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tyler hovering timidly in the hall as I perched on the edge of the uncomfortable mint green cushion. The cop on the left—short, bald and sporting a killer black mustache—glance at his partner, shifted slightly, and sighed.

"Mr. and Mrs. Cooper, Emily… I regret having to tell you this. Mackenzie was found around noon today in the train yard. It appears she jumped off the North Bridge. She was only unconscious when she was found but I'm sorry to inform you that she passed away during the ride to the hospital."

Mom was the first to react, letting out the most terrifying, broken cry I have ever heard and burying her face in her hands. My father leapt up to comfort her, his own face a mask of pain. It was the weakest I had seen him.

And me, I sat there. The elephant was gone and in its place was just… cold. Tired. Empty. I mean, seriously, how are you supposed to react when you find out that your twin sister, basically the other half of your soul, has jumped off of a bridge? Has killed herself?

My breath caught in my chest as the fact that Kenzie was gone sunk in, and then I began screaming things at the policemen, using words that would have given my parents heart attacks if they had been totally coherent. I jumped off the couch and lunged towards them, aching to make someone other than me feel what I was feeling. How could they just stand there calmly, with their hands behind their backs, surveying our anguish?

Steady, familiar arms wrapped protectively around me and pulled me back. Tyler. I closed my eyes and collapsed into him. Exhausted, just so, so tired. He swept his arms under my legs and carried me, princess-style, up the stairs and to my bedroom. The door shut on the terrible moans of my mom and feeble, empty comfort of my father. I melted into my sheets, covered my ears, and sobbed my way into the warm arms of sleep, Tyler rubbing my back and reassuring me that he's there.

I ached to feel her there, too, singing me to sleep like we were ten again.