Honestly I never thought I’d have the courage to tell this story, but I think it’s best if people knew the truth about my family. St. Robert’s was the K-12 school I have attended my whole life. Every school year was the same friends, same hallways, same teachers. Millstown is incredibly small and surrounded by such a thick forest that it’s inconvenient to leave everyday. There just wasn’t space to have an elementary school and a middle school and a high school, so St. Robert’s was all I had known. Hailey and Luanna have been my best friends since birth, and our moms have been friends forever, too. They’re twins, but the three of us are more like triplets–heck, we even look alike. The three of us have always been inseparable, until a few months ago.
One morning before class, I saw Hailey and Luanna talking to someone I didn’t recognize. Like I said, we have a very small town, so having a new student was a rare experience for me. Admittedly, I was a bit excited to add a new pupil to our repetitive class roster. “Hey, guys. Who’s this?” I asked, coming up behind them. “Uh, this is Micah.” Hailey answered in a puzzled tone. Up to this point his back had been facing me, but as he turned to greet me, my jaw almost fell slack with shock.
He looked just like me. And he had a melancholy smile on his–our–face.
Trying to keep my face friendly, I said, “Hi, nice to meet you, Micah. We almost never get new students. Where are you from, and how’d you hear about Millstown?”
“Makayla, Micah’s been at St. Robert’s as long as we have,” Hailey answered. This time, I almost had to reach for the tape in my backpack to keep my jaw shut.
How was this possible? I know everyone at this school–heck, I could point out the houses that belonged to each student on the town’s main road.
The rest of the day went on as normal, except Micah kept finding ways to rear his head into my school day. No one but me seemed to notice this new-old kid. By lunch, I was sick of the guy, and thanked goodness when he stood up (from my seat, by the way). While he was gone, my friends kept asking me why I was acting so weird around him, to which I responded that I had never met them before. After I accused them of pranking me, Hailey gave me the most chilling talk that still keeps me awake at night. “Makayla, listen to me because you’re really starting to scare me. The four of us are best friends. We have all known each other since birth. You’ve been to his house, his birthday parties. Are you feeling okay?” I swear the room started to spin as I ran out of it to the bathroom. After taking some deep breaths and checking my forehead for a fever, I walked back into the cafeteria, and guess who was back? And still in my seat? And chatting up my best friends like he’d known them as long as I had? And still wearing a sad look on his face?
The next few weeks were absolute hell for me. Micah kept worming his way into our lives, laughing along to inside jokes as if he’d been there at their inception. He even brought up all of these memories that I know for certain he was not a part of. “Hey, guys guess what I found the other day in a box of my dad’s old stuff?” he asked, holding out a photo. I took the picture and was stunned to see all of us at my 10th birthday party, our smiling baby faces covered in vanilla buttercream frosting, a few teeth missing from all of us. It would have been a welcome blast from the past if I hadn’t known for a fact Micah was not at my party. He kept looking at me with a slightly guilty face that made my skin crawl. His presence gave me the worst feeling in my gut, which I tried to mention to the twins, but Micah would find a way to intrude every time.
Even my parents sided with my friends by saying that I’d always known him. “But why do we look so much alike?” I questioned my mom one evening. Sipping from her La Croix, she answered, “I don’t know, but all of us parents always thought it was the cutest coincidence that your friend group is like a bunch of clones.” She sputtered on the last word, beginning to cough and breathe erratically. “Mom, are you okay? Mom, MOM,” I yelled as she passed out. My dad and I frantically tried to revive her and rushed her to the emergency room. The doctors said they found traces of poison in her blood, and that she was very lucky to be alive. I spent the next three days at my mother’s bedside as she regained consciousness. The first thing she said to me was, “Why aren’t you at school?” Well, that’s my mom for you. She even forced me to return the next day even though it was a Friday.
During second period, Hailey and Luanna were called to the principal’s office. They returned looking panicked and began to pack up their things to leave. “What happened?” I asked in a hushed voice. “Our mom was in a car accident.” Hailey said, emotionless.
Micah ran out of the room, claiming he needed air, but as soon as he entered the hallway, I heard giggles. That was all the proof I needed. This guy was evil. And dangerous.
I kept my distance from Micah as much as possible over the next week, which was easy considering I now had two people to visit at the hospital. Conveniently, Micah always had soccer practice when the rest of us asked (really, Hailey and Luanna) if he wanted to visit our moms too. All the better, in my opinion. I wasn’t going to let him near my mom ever again.
Two weeks later, Micah asked if we would all like to come over to his house that night. “Between your mothers in the hospital and schoolwork and my soccer practice, we have barely seen each other recently. I thought maybe we could all just relax for the night and watch a movie.” “Fine by me,” Luanna answered, followed by her sister’s agreement. I didn’t even want to walk on the other side of the street from this guy let alone go to his house, but I got a terrible feeling that if I didn’t go Luanna and Hailey might be next to sustain suspicious injuries. So it was decided. That night, I put two cans of pepper spray in my bag, just in case this clown tried something.
My dad dropped us off, wishing us a fun night. Micah had texted us earlier to let ourselves in, and the moment I touched the door handle every hair on my neck stood up. Someone was here to kill us, I just knew it. Before my dad could drive away, I ran up to his Subaru and asked him to stay in the driveway for a bit. His face was confused because he wanted to go visit Mom, but he knew I would never ask unless I thought it was important, so he nodded. As I pushed the door open and we walked into the house, I think Hailey and Luanna must have felt something too, because their faces turned much more serious and alert. Micah popped up, tracking water in with him. “Sorry, guys, I was cleaning the pool for our relax session tonight. Hope you remembered your swimsuits!” We pasted on our best smiles. Luanna pulled Hailey into the bathroom to change, which was good because I didn’t recognize this house at all. Once inside she looked at the two of us gravely. “I’ve got a bad feeling about tonight.”
After changing, we headed out to the pool in a facade of excitement. “I’m first!” Hailey screamed, running and cannon-balling into the pool. The rest of us jumped in right after, and amid playing marco polo, splashing each other, and swimming contests, we actually started to have fun. The threat of danger was still heavy on my mind though. Then Micah brought out some pool floats and a projector so we could watch the movie and still be in the pool. I’m not sure if this was a warning, but Micah suggested we watch “Heathers.”Ironically–if you know anything about “Heathers”–that’s when it happened. The first thing I heard were slight footsteps that made all of my senses jump to attention. Then I heard Luanna struggling to breathe at the same time Micah lunged for my neck. Kicking, pulling, pushing, fighting with all of my might to get free of him, I could barely make out Hailey and Luanna wrestling a middle aged man, Micah’s father.
The worst part was it looked like they were fighting their dad. Another clone.
Somehow I managed to get to the edge of the pool where my bag was to pull out my pepper spray and spray Micah in the face. He finally released his grip on me, succumbing to the burning on his face, enough that I could escape and help my friends, but not before grabbing my phone to dial my dad. Micah bursted into tears infused with the most pain I’d ever heard. Micah’s dad was stronger than one of us, no doubt, but three? He didn’t stand a chance. We kicked and scratched and punched that man with all our might, screeching so my dad could find us. Dad finally broke through the back door of the house, pistol in hand. He ripped us off of Micah’s dad, took the clear shot, and fired.
The pool ran red instead of blue.
It took months of police interrogation, and the death of his father, for Micah to finally admit to what his father had made him do. According to his dad, it wasn’t a coincidence that we all looked alike. As it turns out, back when they were in high school, our moms, Micah’s included, were all his dad’s, Jonathan, girlfriends–but get this: they knew about each other, and formed a sisterwives type of situation. After high school, they all left Millstown because they knew their families would never accept them and the local priests would never marry them. They ran away to Philadelphia, moved in together, and all of the women got pregnant, one of them with twins. This made Micah, Hailey, Luanna and I something close to half quadruplets, since we were born within weeks of each other. The stress of this news was apparently too much for Jonathan to handle, as he became extremely abusive and started to threaten his unborn children. Nothing changed after we were born, in fact, he got worse. My mom, Hailey and Luanna’s mom, Bridget, and Micah’s mom, Amy, talked many times about leaving while he was at work or asleep. One night two of them finally got the courage to, but Amy stayed behind. She faced the brunt of his wrath, and tormented Amy and baby Micah to avenge for what my mom and Bridget had done. Our moms teary-eyed confirmed our tragic story. She died when Jonathan threw Micah’s toys too hard and straight at her head. After that, Micah was stuck with him and the brutal conditions he forced on his child.
To this day, I still have no idea how they made everyone but me forget Micah didn’t attend our school, but the cops did find evidence of Jonathan’s secret obsession with black magic, including spell books and our DNA samples. Today, the four of us are working towards healing. We’re learning how to adjust our dynamic to a four-person group since there was resentment between Micah and the rest of us for a while. We’ve all gone to therapy to work past that, and the animosity we built up towards our moms for lying to us our whole lives. Our mothers are healing as well, as they are being given the first opportunity to grieve their best friend Amy and the great man they say Jonathan used to be. My dad, Steven, will always be my dad, biological or not, and my hero for what he did that day. We’re all doing much better now, and the four of us even call ourselves quadruplets.