The night of our playground date was no different than any other. Sasha and I had dinner together- macaroni from a box for me, a bowl of cereal for her, since neither of us cook- and cuddled on the couch together for a while. Supposedly, Sasha was reading something for her class the next day, and I was watching TV, but I didn't really notice or care what was happening on the screen, and I don't think Sasha retained a lot of information from her text. We were pretty distracted by each other, and we ended up in bed long before either of us was actually ready to sleep.

I'll never forget how it felt that night to run my hands over her skin, to feel her touching me in return with a confidence she used to lack. I'll never forget her scent, enveloping me until it was indistinguishable from mine, the gasps of her enjoyment in my ear or the wide, blissful smile transforming her face into uncomplicated beauty. Most of all, my mind will hold onto the calm contentment I felt as she settled in my arms, how right and good and comfortable we were as we drifted to sleep, holding each other chest to chest and cheek to cheek.

I told her that I loved her, that night, plainly and without any effort of masking the words. But I said it so softly against her skin that I'm not sure she heard; at any rate, I didn't hear her respond. Now, I wish I had said it louder, more intensely. Hell, I should have shouted it from the roof, wrote it on the walls, and traced the words in permanent ink over her heart. As illogical as I know it is, it feels that if I could just be sure she heard me, if I could be absolutely certain that Sasha knew, everything that took place the next morning would have never happened at all.

I'm not sure how long we slept before I felt Sasha stirring, attempting to gently break herself from the grasp of my arms. Slitting my eyes open in the room's darkness, I squinted up at her, mumbling a question even I didn't understand. I saw just enough to make out Sasha's soft smile as she got to her feet, stood, and leaned down to kiss my forehead.

"Bathroom," she whispered, petting my hair reassuringly. "Go back to sleep, sweetie. I'll be right back."

Had I been less groggy, I would have pointed out to her that anyone who ever watched horror movies, particularly Scream, ought to know better than to use that particular phrase. But I just moved my head in some approximation of a nod and settled back against my pillow, closing my eyes again.

I think I drifted back to sleep for a while. It could have been five minutes or a few hours before I woke up again, just conscious enough to register that Sasha wasn't back beside me. The bathroom wasn't visible from our bedroom, and besides, Sasha had shut the door on her way out. I wondered distantly what was taking her so long- maybe she had started her period and had to clean herself up?

I was beginning to entertain the not very enthusiastic possibility of getting up to check on her when the bedroom door eased back open, and Sasha slipped back in bed beside me. I saw that she had taken her hair down from its loose braid and changed her clothes, which lead credence to my supposing of her starting her period. Without addressing me out loud, she slipped beneath the blanket and wiggled in close to me, wrapping an arm around my waist. With an audible sigh, she closed her eyes, resting her head against my shoulder. I noticed that her heart was beating rapidly and wondered why, but she was back in bed, she seemed basically okay, and I was far too interested in sleep to ask any questions. Instead, I relaxed against her, settling back to sleep.

Morning arrived with the usual irritating generic alarm song that Sasha had set for us on her phone- something that sounded like the Sex in the City theme song to me, not that I've watched the show. Much. Usually, Sasha would stretch, roll over, give me a quick smile and kiss good morning, and then get out of bed, bright eyed, alert, and ready to start her day, whereas I would moan, groan, roll around in a mini tantrum on the bed, and then slump into a sitting position glowering at anything that happened to be in my line of vision. That was our normal, expected pattern.

But that morning, Sasha scrunched her face up against my shoulder, grumbling unintelligibly, and put one hand against her ear. She didn't seem to know where the phone was, to turn it off, and I was amused enough by this change in her usual behavior that I chuckled, actually opening both eyes to watch her.

"Damn, I knew we had a good night, but I really must have been something to put you this much out of commission," I commented, cracking a smile.

Reaching over her, despite Sasha's protested tightening of her arm around my waist, I took her phone off the nightstand and switched off the alarm. Flopping back down on the mattress beside her, I ran my fingertips over her cheek, watching Sasha's lips twitch up into a smile, even as her eyes stayed closed. I stroked the slope of her nose, the surface of her lips, and the outline of her jaw, watching her body loosen under my touch. My hand trailed down her right side, stroking the side of her breast, before shifting my hand to her right hip and sliding my fingers a few inches under her shirt.

Sasha's eyes flew open then, and she grabbed at my wrist with both of her hands, trying to stop me from feeling the skin of her side and stomach. But it was too late. I had already felt the smooth expanse of her skin, unmarred by so much as a mole- on the side of her body that should have been heavily scarred.

My thoughts slowed, then came to a stop entirely as my breath sputtered in my throat. I stared down at the my hand beneath Sasha's shirt, feeling the skin of Sasha's right side, unable to comprehend what my fingers were registering. My eyes blinked several times, but the sensation didn't change, and I had not temporarily lost the ability to know right from left. I wasn't mistaking what I was feeling, and it was impossible for Sasha to have undergone sudden, miraculous healing overnight.

"What the hell?" I blurted, my words slow, confused. "How…"

I shook her hands off of mine, even as Sasha grabbed for them again, still trying to control where they went, how they touched her. I captured both her hands in one of mine and kept them at bay as my other hand moved back to the hem of her shirt, intending to lift it up entirely, exposing her skin to my view. Sasha hunched forward, still trying to hide herself from me, to stop me from baring her.

"Don't," she murmured, her words rougher and raspier than I was used to hearing. "Leave it be."

But how could I?

In one jerky motion I pulled her shirt up, enough to expose all of Sasha's stomach and waist and part of her breasts. Her stomach moved in and out with her rapid, shallow breaths, her hands slick and clammy in mine, but none of this concerned me. I could see her scarring now, every bit as extensive as I remember, as it had always been before.

Only not. Because Sasha's scarring was on her left side, rather than her right, as it should have been. Her left side- precisely the opposite of where it had been just last night, only hours before.

"You're not Sasha," I whispered, barely audibly at first, then more loudly, fear mingled with dawning understanding in my words. "You're not Sasha. But why? How did you…?"

The name of Sasha's twin came unbidden into my memory, along with a vivid image of Sasha's face, tense with guilt and pain as she spoke of her. Maria. This was Maria in bed with me- but if this was Maria, then where was Sasha?"

"Where is Sasha," I whispered, struggling to keep the words steady and calm, instead of shouting and swearing like I very much wanted to. Something told me yelling at a crazy person wasn't going to be any kind of help to the situation. "Please, tell me what happened to Sasha. I'll help you if you need it, I just want to know that Sasha's okay."

Maria Thomas exhaled, eyes narrowing as she regarded me with wariness. Looking at her with full awareness of her true identity, I couldn't understand how I had mistaken her for Sasha, identical twin or not. They might have similar body shapes, but the way she held herself within her body was sharper and more angled than Sasha, the lines of her face less soft. Her eyes were the same color and shape as Sasha too, but the personality and emotion behind them was nothing I'd ever seen from Sasha, nothing I could imagine Sasha conveying. Maria seemed simultaneously calculative and flat, desperate and resigned, her conflicted expressions of feeling and thought jibing sharply in her gaze so the overall impression she made was unsettling even without knowing the truth of who she was.

"So you're the girl she left us for," Maria stated, still watching me, judging me, although there was no way she could have been judging me nearly as much as I was judging her. "You're pretty enough, I suppose. You have an appeal, physically speaking, at least. Still, it would have been helpful for us if she'd told me we were gay. It would have explained a lot. But maybe she thought we knew?"

She sighed, making her tongue cluck in what sounded like disappointment. "We wouldn't have judged, we're not that petty. I thought she knew that about us. It hurts, that she didn't."

My eyes blinked several times at her, as though maybe by clearing my vision, my ears would suddenly realize they had misheard or misunderstood the girl. Nothing suddenly reworded itself in my memory to make more sense, nor did I feel any less thrown off and weirded out by Maria's interchangeable use of differentiating between herself and Sasha as separate people and not-separate people in her speech. Did she even notice how she flipped between referring to herself and Sasha as one entity and also distinguishing between them, or was she so completely nuts that she couldn't hear the difference even in her own speech?

She seemed to be waiting for an answer from me, and it still didn't seem like the best idea in the world to provoke her, not if I wanted answers on Sasha's whereabouts. I struggled to come up with something that might somewhat satisfy her that I was listening, eventually settling on, "Um, that's, that's good to know, about the judging. That you don't, I mean. I'm not a fan of that myself. But, uh, can we please get back to my question? I really, really just want to know where Sasha is. Please, Mar- Masha," I corrected myself quickly, remembering Sasha's emphasis to me on Maria's preference of the nickname. "Please, Masha, tell me?"

Maria's eyes, already suspicious, became slits that made me think of shallow slashes in her face, and I suppressed a shudder at the weirdness of the thought and the involuntary images it brought to mind. She pursed her lips at me, exhaling with an edginess that bordered towards anger.

"That isn't the right question, Caitlin," she informed me, taking on both the expression and tone of a lecturing teacher, educating a disrespectful student. "But I'll answer it anyway."

She propped herself up with her elbow against the mattress, her jaw in her palm as she shifted closer towards me. I forced myself to stay still, even though all I wanted was to leap off the bed and across the room, away from any risk of touching her or being touched by her. But again, that didn't seem to be the best plan, not when I already seemed to be bordering too close to offending her- the girl who was crazy enough to have tried to kill Sasha once already.

As soon as the memory flashed into my thoughts, I was sorry for it, because it sent my fear for Sasha into much higher levels. But it wasn't possible that she had killed her, was it? Maria was small, just as small as Sasha. I didn't see blood on her, and wouldn't it be hard to kill someone without blood? I would have heard it, in this tiny apartment, if someone had died just one or two rooms over. Wouldn't I?

None of this reasoning was any sort of comfort, though, without any actual knowledge of where Sasha was and what had happened to separate her from me.