A Dozen Reasons...

Victoria the whimsical. Victoria the wise. Victoria the enigma. Victoria the prize. Victoria the angelic. Victoria the elegant.

Victoria, I despise...

My doppelganger has wavy brown hair, jade green eyes, and skin as smooth a creme fraiche. She's beautiful. She's half German and half Italian: the perfect union of logic and passion. I have brown, spoon shaped eyes: dark, penitent, sunken. In 7th grade, my school teacher made us read the Diary of Ann Frank, and it was that year that classmates and strangers alike would approach me, holding their copies and pointing at the grainy black and white photo of Ann on the cover.

"You know, you look just like Ann Frank," they would chime. The benign introduction would tiptoe into a rhetorical assault: "She's ugly, isn't she?"

Oh, those green eyes! I never longed for those green eyes more than at that moment. Their Greta Garbo iciness. The eyes of Queen Christina. The eyes of Camille. Regal, dramatic, lustrous.

The same green eyes of my mother; eyes that can peel layers and layers of your soul away like dry paint. I suppose Victoria looked more like my mother's daughter, than I. What a slighted and quivering "I", I had become. Standing there, head bowed, body supplicant and accepting of their derision.

Our fates as women were decided as children. I would always play the martyr to her muse. She was destined to shine, I to cast. I was the shadow: perfectly happy to skip along side her, to watch admiringly from the sidelines. I adored Victoria. And for a long time I was even forgiving of her beauty, her intellect.

One day my mother invited Victoria over to help decorate Easter eggs. "Beast, can you tell me how many eggs we have total?" my mother's voice echoed from the kitchen.

I promptly started counting the eggs in the carton, one by one. My knotty, childish fingers striking the air.

"A dozen!" Victoria interjected before I could finish. By then my mother was hovering over the table, and shot a glance in my direction. A glance that seemed to say, "is my kid really this stupid". I could feel my ears burning. I turned to look at Victoria. She was looking squarely at my mother, and clearly avoiding my reaction.

"Sorry," she uttered in a lamb like tone, a glint of superiority in her eye.

Victoria the arrogant. Victoria the proud. Victoria the vile. Victoria the cunning. Victoria the elitist. Victoria the despised.