Was it true that identical twins could read each other’s minds? Was she my best friend? Was it strange, having someone else look exactly like me?

I answered as honestly as I could. Yes, Helen was my best friend. Sometimes we had a weird psychic connection between us, but not all the time. It didn’t feel strange to me, having an identical twin. Of course, we didn’t think of each other as identical. There were small differences. A mole on my left wrist, that kind of thing.

INVENTING HELEN BY WENDI LEE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 15

I guess you could say I made her up to keep from slipping into a mental coma. It was Monday morning, and the coffee I was drinking tasted like dirty hot water. My legs twitched in my thick black administrative assistant tights, and the faces around me were blank but earnest, with James’s the blankest and most earnest of them all. James acted as if the 15-minute doughnut-and-coffee meeting, cutely named The Construction Corner, was not unlike dinners at Bloomsbury in terms of sheer brilliance. James would have made a great elementary school teacher. Instead he was my boss, and it bewildered me that I was…