52 Project #48: Hoodie (Patreon)

Perhaps you have heard a story, much like but not exactly the same as this one, about twin sisters, one beautiful and one very strange. These sisters were not princesses, but the daughters of a Congresswoman, which is a little bit like princesses, but not exactly.

The young Congresswoman had had a difficult pregnancy. The ultrasound showed clearly that she was having one baby, a little girl, but her stomach was distended as if she was having twins. Her doctor suggested a Caesarian. The Congresswoman rejected the idea, determined to have a natural birth… but after her labor began, it lasted an entire day without the baby’s head crowning, and this time, the Congresswoman listened to her husband and doctor pleading with her, and agreed to the c-section.

It turned out this was a good idea, because there was nothing about the first baby they lifted out that was not strange.

On the table, with an epidural numbing her and a sheet blocking her view of her child, she heard her husband and her doctor speaking in frantic whispers, of which she could make out nothing but “What the hell—” She demanded to see her child, and when her husband demurred, saying she’d just been through surgery and she needed to rest, she demanded it again. So the doctor, having just cut the cord, brought her the baby.

The Congresswoman had certain entirely reasonable expectations for her newborn daughter. Such as, her daughter would look like a baby, without teeth, without hair, with plump bent legs that could not walk. Also, that her baby would be born naked. Also, that she would not be wearing roller skates and carrying a pool noodle.

All of these expectations were dashed. Her child had a monkeylike face and a full head of curly hair, clown-red. She was the size of a baby, but her proportions were those of a child of five or so. She was wearing a yellow hoodie that was somehow entirely clean and untouched by bodily fluids, and roller skates, and she was waving a purple pool noodle, baby-sized, in her hand.

“Yo, Mom, don’t sweat it!” the baby said. “My sister’s still in there and she’s a perfectly normal baby! A real sweetheart. Best baby ever. You’ll love her!”

And so it was. There was, indeed, a second baby in the Congresswoman’s womb. It seemed that the ultrasound had seen her, the perfectly normal baby, but not her sister.

“Hey, can I get some food around here?” the first baby said. “None of that colostrum junk. I want formula until Mom’s milk is in and she’s strong enough to feed me. Anyone got some of that?”

A nurse nervously took the first baby and fed her. Meanwhile, the Congresswoman racked her brain trying to remember if there had been anything that could explain the first-born girl. She finally recalled that day at the farm rally.

***

The Congresswoman represented a state that had many farms. When she succeeded in getting a bill she’d proposed and helped to write passed, which subsidized farmers for growing produce like fruit and vegetables, and gave aid to family farms, a celebration was scheduled for her at a large family farm in the state, and farmers from all over the state came to thank her and speak with her.

She’d just been telling a group of women that she would truly love to have a baby, but her schedule was so busy and she had so much work to do, she didn’t know when she’d have time. An old woman had pushed through the group and handed her two fruits. She didn’t recognize them; they looked like apples, but had the soft fuzz of peaches, and the color of cherries. One of them was large, obviously ripe, soft with the promise of juiciness, and absolutely perfect looking. The other one was missing some of its fuzz and was small and a bit twisted looking.

“You need to eat one of these!” the old woman said. “That’ll solve your baby problems, for sure!” She pressed them both into the Congresswoman’s hands. “But only eat the nice one. If you eat the weird one, there’ll be no telling what will happen.”

“Ma’am,” the head of her security detail said, “give those to us.”

But the big juicy one did look delicious, and the Congresswoman hadn’t had time for lunch. “I’ve never seen that kind of fruit. Let me try that,” she said, and bit into the big one. It was so soft, juicy and delicious, with a tiny pit, cherry-sized. The Congresswoman had just intended to take a taste, but instead she devoured it. She looked up to ask the old woman what it was, and if she could have another, but the woman had faded back into the crowd.

It had tasted so good. The second one wasn’t as appetizing, and the old woman had said not to eat it, but why had the old woman even given it to her if it wasn’t good to eat?

The Congresswoman set it aside, but later, when her aides were packing up the table and her mouth was dry from all the speechmaking she’d done, she saw the fruit again, and this time couldn’t resist biting into it. It was a little more bitter than its delicious sister had been, and a little less juicy, but it had a tartness to it that she liked and it was just a little buzzy on her tongue, as if it had just barely started to think about maybe fermenting. Quickly, before her security detail could see her and tell her to stop, she ate the whole thing.

Three weeks later she missed her period, and there were two pink lines on the pregnancy test. Her birth control must have failed. It was close to the election and she was very, very busy, but in nine months’ time either she’d no longer be a Congresswoman or she’d have made it through another election cycle and could afford to take some time off for a baby.

***

It made no rational sense for a fruit to have made her get pregnant, let alone give birth to a child on roller skates and in a hoodie, but on the other hand, nothing about her older daughter made rational sense, so the Congresswoman decided to just roll with it.

She named the older one Katherine, after her mother-in-law, and the younger one Anne, after her own mother. “Katherine” was quickly shortened to “Kate” by her and her husband, but no one else called the child that. The aides, the family friends, and even the grandparents all referred to Kate as “Hoodie”, for the yellow garment that she never took off and that seemed to grow with her.

***

Hoodie’s prediction that Anne would be a perfectly normal baby was slightly off. Anne was in fact an unusually beautiful baby. She was healthy and plump, looking more like a two-month-old than a typical scrawny little newborn, and everyone who saw her had to smile at her, or make a funny face to entertain her, or tell her parents what a beautiful child she was.

Anne hardly ever cried. When it seemed like she might and her babble took on a distressed note, Hoodie was there to translate for her. “She’s hungry!” “Yo, Mom, Anne wants a diaper change! She just laid down a real stinky one!” “Mom, Anne’s bored, can I play with her?”

Hoodie was not quite as mature as her ability to talk – and roller skate – implied. She still wore diapers. Roller-skating and talking were apparently not nearly as challenging as the potty. There were many words she didn’t know. She refused to take off the hoodie, and would bite anyone who tried to remove it from her. And she refused to abide by a bedtime, or instructions that she shouldn’t climb the refrigerator. While she very quickly graduated to solid food she could chew, since she had teeth, she didn’t stop asking for bottles or her mother’s breast. She could also entertain herself for some time by throwing her food on the floor and making her mother or father or the babysitter pick it up.

In addition to her hooded sweatshirt, her pool noodle grew with her, somehow. As did her roller skates, when they reappeared on her feet from time to time.

The Congresswoman, her husband, and her aides discussed whether to allow Hoodie to be photographed. Her strangeness might hurt the Congresswoman’s re-election campaign, but a Congresswoman having a baby while serving in Congress was news – it had happened before, but rarely. Concealing both their children would look odd. Concealing just one seemed reasonable… but the Congresswoman knew that treating children differently could lead to resentment, and as ugly and strange as she was, Hoodie was her daughter too, and she loved both her children.

So she asked Hoodie. “Would you like reporters to take your picture and show you in the newspaper?”

“What’s a newspaper?”

The Congresswoman showed Hoodie a USA TODAY, and the photographs on the front page. “This is a newspaper.”

Hoodie shrugged. “I can’t read. What’s it saying?”

“It’s the news. It’s talking about all the important things that are happening right now.”

“Am I an important thing?”

“You’re very important to me,” the Congresswoman said. “But it’s not important for the whole world to know about you. If you want to be in the newspaper, you can be, when they interview our family, but if you’d rather not be in the newspaper, you can be in your bedroom playing with your toys.”

“My toys are boring,” Hoodie said. “But, Mom… I know I’m a weirdo. If the whole world knew about me would that be a problem for you?”

“It might be. It might not be. I would fight for you if it’s what you wanted.”

“Naah, let my sister get in the newspaper. But don’t leave me alone with baby toys. I want video games.”

The Congresswoman was secretly relieved. “I don’t know if your hands are large enough to work video game controls…”

“I’ve got two hands,” Hoodie pointed out. “And my pool noodle.”

The Congresswoman wasn’t really sure what Hoodie’s pool noodle could do in the context of video games, but she didn’t question it. “We’ll get you a Nintendo Switch. The joycons are small, you’ll probably do fine with them.”

***

When she wasn’t playing with her Nintendo Switch, Hoodie was either getting into trouble or playing with her sister.

“Getting into trouble” generally entailed climbing on things she wasn’t supposed to climb on, skating on surfaces she wasn’t supposed to skate on, going places she wasn’t supposed to go, or running through the house, diaperless, shrieking and hitting people with her pool noodle. “Playing with her sister” involved pattycake, peekaboo, funny faces, and other adorable activities age-appropriate for a baby. Perhaps because she was a baby herself, Hoodie never seemed to get tired of doing these things with her sister, but she also didn’t sleep as much, so there were many hours when Anne was napping and Hoodie had to entertain herself.

Riding a bicycle down the banister of a Washington townhome was right out. The Congresswoman and her husband didn’t even know where Hoodie had gotten a bicycle sized properly for her tiny body, but no matter where it came from, it was to stay in the back yard with the locked fence, and also, do not climb the fence. Do not climb the one tree in the back yard, whether or not you’re going to use it to get over the fence. Do not get the garden hose and a large Rubbermaid bin and fill it with water because you’ve decided you’re old enough to learn how to swim. Hoodie, stop rolling in the mud and get back in the house right now for a bath. Pretending you’re a cat is a fine game for a child, but actually catching mice is not acceptable, and especially not actually eating them. Also, do not feed oatmeal to the DVD player, that is not a place for you to put a plate.

At least, unlike Anne, Hoodie slept through the night.

***

The two girls grew. Hoodie just got larger, like she was a photograph on a computer being sized up in proportion. Anne grew like a perfectly normal baby, with some exceptions. She was quicker to roll over, crawl and walk than most babies, with a patient older-by-two-minutes sister who already could do those things and was eager to see her sister learn. But she was slow to learn to speak, because Hoodie could translate her baby babble and always knew exactly what she was trying to say.

Eventually the Congresswoman had to separate her daughters for Anne’s own good. “She’ll never learn to talk if you’re always talking for her,” she said, relaying what the speech therapist had warned her.

“But Mom! Don’t you know how hard it is to be a baby who can’t talk yet? All she can do when she wants something is cry, unless I’m there!”

“That’s how it works, Kate,” the Congresswoman warned, as patiently as she could. “All humans go through this… except you, I suppose.”

“That’s because I’m a space alien! Beep boop baap, take me to your leader, Earthling!”

The Congresswoman laughed, though privately she thought, That would explain things. “Anne needs to learn how to talk, and she never will if you always do it for her, because it’s hard.”

“What if I tell her she has to learn to talk?”

“You can certainly try, but she needs to spend most of her time around people who don’t already know what she’s saying.”

The Congresswoman tried to keep Hoodie confined to her bedroom, where she had her Nintendo Switch and a large number of games for it. This didn’t work very well, because Hoodie could reach the doorknob, and when the Congresswoman had a lock installed on Hoodie’s door, she learned that her strange child was as accomplished a lockpick as she was with her roller skates. Nothing would help except teaching her how to read. When she was occupied with learning her letters and how to turn them into an understanding of books, she was willing to settle down and listen, and not go haunt her little sister’s room.

Still, they spent many hours together. When Anne finally learned to talk, her first word was “hoo-hee”… or, translated from Baby, “Hoodie.”

***

Eventually the girls caught up to each other, Anne becoming old enough to match Hoodie’s proportions and Hoodie growing tall enough to appear as a normal child her age… if you could call a child with a monkey face “normal”. Usually she was covered with so much dirt, it was hard to make out her face. The Congresswoman couldn’t get Hoodie to ever take off her hooded sweatshirt, either; its immunity to the fluids of birth hadn’t extended to mud and grass stains and chocolate ice cream, but Hoodie wouldn’t take it off even to take a bath. The solution was to make Hoodie take showers with non-toxic detergent sprayed on her hood and liquid soap drizzled down her body from the opening at her neck, to try to wash her body and her sweatshirt at the same time. The problem with this was that Hoodie hated water, unless she was trying to swim, climb into a fish tank, or get into her sister’s bathtub. The solution to that became to bathe the girls at the same time, and when Anne was old enough, encourage her to tell her sister to wash. It didn’t help much; it got the filth off, but Hoodie was usually dirty again within half an hour of the bath, and her yellow hoodie was permanently stained all over.

When the girls were old enough, they went to kindergarten at a very expensive, exclusive private school that catered to the children of celebrities and politicians, and kept them away from the paparazzi. This lasted about three months before Hoodie was expelled for beating up some older boys with her pool noodle. The principal acknowledged that the boys had been taunting Hoodie about being ugly, and that Anne had yelled at them to defend her sister, and one had pushed Anne and so Hoodie had been defending her sister. But given the strength she demonstrated and the violence of the attack, they simply couldn’t allow Hoodie to remain. And if Hoodie couldn’t stay, then Anne refused to.

The Congresswoman’s husband was a college professor. He took a year on sabbatical to homeschool the girls, and arranged for tutors for future years. Anne was a remarkable student, studious, hard-working and intelligent. Hoodie… was not. Though she was equally as intelligent, and had a keen memory, she didn’t bother to do any of her homework,  she couldn’t be bothered to do classwork, and she wouldn’t sit still long enough to fill out any of the little pencil circles on standardized tests, which homeschooled children were still required to do in most states. Her grades, such as they were, were almost unmeasurably low. But she knew the material she’d been taught. Her parents felt that they had to accept that.

***

The years passed swiftly. The Congresswoman was now of fairly high rank in the House, on multiple committees, and had easily won re-election many times. Hoodie’s existence was known, but when the news media asked, the Congresswoman said that Hoodie was shy and did not want to be in the public eye, and as a mother she respected her daughter’s wishes more than the wishes of people who just wanted to sell newspapers or get clicks.

Hoodie had appeared in a few family videos, wearing her ubiquitous hood pulled up so far over her head, it was impossible for anyone to get a clear look at her face. Her loud voice didn’t seem particularly shy, but when the Congresswoman did an AMA on Reddit and people asked about her older daughter, she gave the keyboard over to Hoodie, who said things like, “Mom dusnt want me 2 say but u are dum. I am speshul & you peple R meen 2 speshal kids so Y wood I wanna see u? My mom and mi dad are grate but esp my SISTER best sister in world! I lik been with them. You peple not so much.” Or “Im not SHY. I just don lik you cuz your meen to peple lik me.” One time when she was thirteen she answered (with slightly better spelling than she had had previously), “So sorry you don get to see this face cuz your dyin to, I know, Im just too cool for y’all. So suck it.” After this the Congresswoman did not allow Hoodie to answer AMAs about why she refused to appear with her family.

Anne, on the other hand, always appeared with the family. She was charming and beautiful and said adorable things. When asked about her sister, she said, frowning, “My sister is wonderful, but people in this world don’t like people who are different from normal. And she’s super different, so she’s afraid if you look at her you’ll make fun of her. And I won’t let you do that. You don’t get to see her unless I know you’re good and you won’t let anyone tease her.” No photographer ever met Anne’s rigorous criteria for being good enough to see her sister, though some interviewers without cameras got to meet her a few times.

The news media’s general consensus was that “Kate”, the Congresswoman’s oldest daughter, was a special needs child who did not want to appear on camera because she was afraid of being mocked. The right wing news media’s general consensus was that the Congresswoman was deeply ashamed of her daughter and refused to allow her to appear, or possibly that the child had been murdered by the Congresswoman and she was just trying to hide her crimes by making it look like her daughter was shy. The right wing news media also relentlessly mocked her for what little they knew about her, validating all of Anne and Hoodie’s concerns, but since the Congresswoman wouldn’t let her daughters read or listen to any of the kind of media that made fun of them, they remained blissfully unaware of this.

The Congresswoman’s profile rose higher and higher. She made enemies. Some of those enemies were happy to weaponize that kind of media, and useful idiots who believed in it, against her.

One day when the Congresswoman was at home, and her girls were sixteen years of age, her house was surrounded by armed protestors, loudly chanting angry slogans. Many of them called her a child murderer, on the basis of the rumor that she had killed Hoodie, or because she supported a woman’s right to abortion, or both. The Congresswoman didn’t usually have a security detail at home, so she was very frightened of this, and wanted her daughters to lock themselves in their bedroom.

Hoodie said to Anne, “I’m gonna go out the window and take care of this, but don’t show your face at the window, ok? You could get hurt.”

“So could you! I don’t want you to take risks like that! Those people have guns!”

“Yeah, but I have a pool noodle.”

Anne allowed that this was true. If the Congresswoman or her husband had been present, they would have argued that a pool noodle was no match for a gun, but the Congresswoman was on the land line in the kitchen calling 911 and her husband was seated in front of his daughters’ bedroom with a gun of his own, declaring that if armed intruders came up the stairs he would pick them off one by one. Neither of them were actually in the locked bedroom they were trusting to protect their daughters.

Hoodie opened the window, instructing Anne to stay behind the bed and well away from the window, and ran out onto the roof of the porch. Protestors saw her and shouted. Some shouted terrible, cruel insults. Some said that since her mother was a baby murderer, it would only be fair if her baby was murdered too.

One shot at Hoodie. She whipped her pool noodle through the air so fast no one but the news cameras recording could even see her do it, knocking the bullet away. Then she jumped down on top of the man with the gun, slapping the gun away with the pool noodle as she did so. Next, she hit him in the head with the pool noodle. One would expect that hitting a man in the head with a pool noodle would be a minor annoyance, and the man himself expected that to be true, right up until the moment the pool noodle struck him and he went down like a stone.

At this close range the armed protestors knew at least enough about the weapons they carried to know they couldn’t shoot the girl without hitting their friends, so they tried to use fists, or use their guns as clubs. It seemed obvious that a teenage girl, even one wearing a hoodie that mostly hid her face, could not possibly fight off an entire mob of protestors. But things that seem obvious aren’t always as true as they seem, and Hoodie used her pool noodle to thrash protestors, gleefully, yelling out fake names for attacks that were inspired by the anime she and her sister watched, such as “Noodle Great Jutsu!” and “Spinning Helicopter Noodle Strike!”

Anne heard the commotion through the open window, and could not help but go to the window to see her sister fighting. She was amazed at Hoodie’s ability. Hoodie, for her part, could not tell her sister was at the window because she was too busy looking at the protestors she was beating the living daylights out of. One of them tried to shoot at her, got knocked over by the pool noodle… and the bullet went into Anne’s chest instead.

Hoodie heard Anne’s cry, cut short. She turned to look, saw her sister fall… and turned back to the protestors. Her hood fell off her face, and protestors cried out. On her monkey-like face, Hoodie’s rage looked like animal savagery, as if she was a gorilla who was about to tear them all limb from limb.

Fortunately – for the protestors, and perhaps for Hoodie’s police record – the cops arrived and started arresting protestors. Explanations of “The girl is crazy! She started beating people to death with a pool noodle! We had to act in self defense!” were met with raised police eyebrows and comments like “Sure, buddy, whatever” or “Shut the fuck up and get on the ground!” depending on how generally sympathetic the officer in question was to the protestors’ cause.

Hoodie ran back inside – the door was locked, but somehow, it opened for her – and raced past her mother, still on the phone. “Call an ambulance! They shot Anne!”

“What?!” the congresswoman screamed, relayed this to the 911 operator, and then dropped the phone entirely to run up the stairs after Hoodie.

Hoodie and Anne’s father had heard the shot, and Anne’s cry. He had run into the room and was trying to stanch the bleeding with a pillowcase pressed to Anne’s chest. The Congresswoman and Hoodie found him there, and Anne unconscious and covered in blood.

For the first time in her life, Hoodie knew fear. Not the unease of being seen publicly by unsympathetic people who might try to use her strangeness against her mother, but fear.

***

The doctors at the hospital had news that was not good. Not the worst, but still not good. They came out and told the anxious family that Anne was in a coma, and while she was stable and recovering physically, there was no way to know when she would wake, or even if she would.

Hoodie demanded the right to see her sister. The Congresswoman requested that they all be allowed in to see her. Upon being told that only two could come in at a time, she insisted, politely. With the implication that there might well be some very bad publicity if they didn’t let the Congresswoman and her whole family see her comatose daughter. The doctors told the nurses to make an exception, and the nurses let all three of them come in.

When Hoodie saw Anne lying in the hospital bed, she sucked in a breath. “This is bad,” she said.

“Yes, a coma is an awful thing,” the Congresswoman said, “but Anne is strong. I’m sure she’ll make it.”

“Not without help,” Hoodie said. “She’s not even in her body, that’s why she’s in a coma.”

“Uh, what?”

Hoodie had never had much patience for grownups’ ignorance when matters were important. “I need to take the car.”

Her father said, utterly discombobulated, “What would you need the car for? You don’t even have a license!”

“You don’t even know how to drive!” the Congresswoman said.

“If I can’t use the car, Anne will never wake up. This is important.” She looked both parents in the eye, one by one. “Mom, Dad… you know I don’t know what I am. And I don’t know what I can do, until it’s time to do it. But I wouldn’t joke or be weird about a thing like this. Anne’s spirit is trapped, and I have to go to her in the car.”

“Why the car?” her father asked helplessly.

“Because the train doesn’t go where I need to get to.”

“I’ll drive,” he said. “I can take you.”

“No, you’ll never get there, and neither will I if you’re driving.”

“But you don’t know how to drive!”

“I actually do,” Hoodie said. “Check the records on the EZ Pass.”

North and west of DC, many of the roads had tolls, and the same was true in the area the Congresswoman lived when she wasn’t in DC. So she had an EZ Pass, a device that could let her cross tolls and would automate her payments, in her car. She logged into her EZ Pass account, using her phone, and saw multiple trips, to places in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and others, all in the dead of night. “Kate! How did you—”

“I needed to practice driving,” Hoodie said. “Don’t worry, Anne was with me to keep me from doing anything stupid.”

“If you were taking the car out without having a license, then you already failed at not doing anything stupid,” her father said angrily.

“Oh, yeah, but actually I do have a license.” She rummaged around in the pockets of her hooded sweatshirt, and pulled out a driver’s license. “See?”

“How—”

“When—”

“It doesn’t matter! Let me have the car to go save Anne, or I’ll just steal someone else’s.”

The Congresswoman and her husband recognized that Hoodie was more than capable of stealing a car, most likely, and it would be far worse publicity if their daughter was caught with a stolen car than if she was caught driving the family car with a fake license, which… surely that had to be. Right? Hoodie was 16, so she could have gotten a license, but she’d have needed parental permission and when had she had time?

Her father drove her back home and gave her the keys to her mother’s car, since they had driven to the hospital in his. “Now you be careful. And no speeding! They can look up your license in a database, and if it’s fake it won’t be there, and you’ll end up in jail.”

Hoodie rolled her eyes. “I was born with roller skates and a pool noodle, and you think I can’t have a real license? I know you’re stressed out over Anne, Dad, but come on.”

“Well, don’t speed anyway. They’ll throw the book at a novice driver. Which you are, I don’t care how many hours you’ve driven, you’ve only been 16 for three months and the cops will be able to see that because there’s your birthdate right there. You can’t have been legally driving very long. Besides, you have a minor’s license, so you’re not supposed to be driving at night.”

“I won’t do anything I don’t have to do, Dad,” Hoodie said, and her father sighed, because he knew Hoodie would do whatever she thought was right, regardless of his or anyone’s advice.

So Hoodie took the car. The family did not actually reside in DC proper when Congress was in session anymore; they had moved when Hoodie and Anne were ten. Like many Congresspeople, the Congresswoman’s new second home, the one she lived in when she was working, was in southern Maryland right near DC. Hoodie drove in a full circle around the highway that circles DC, called the Beltway, in the direction of widdershins, three times. Then she drove in the opposite direction and got on the northbound highway heading for Baltimore.

On this highway, to get into Baltimore, one had to go through down into a deep, long tunnel that went under the harbor. Hoodie took the rightmost lane, and when an exit appeared to her at the deepest point of the tunnel, she took it. Now, you or I would never see that exit, but Hoodie knew it was there already, and so she was able to see it.

The exit took her into a different, deeper, longer tunnel, which went down and down and down, and then up and up and up, getting narrower and narrower until it was only one lane wide, and finally out into a world lit by an eerily close moon, which was full, despite it having been a quarter moon when Hoodie drove into the tunnel. The one lane highway crossed through a toll plaza. There was no EZ Pass there, only an old and wizened toll taker.

The toll taker stuck his head out the window as Hoodie approached. “What the hell, kid! You don’t belong here!”

“No, I don’t,” Hoodie agreed, “but neither does my sister, and she’s stuck here. I’m just coming to pick her up.”

“Well, you’d better have the toll! I don’t care what your reasons are, no one comes in this way without paying the toll.”

Hoodie handed over her mother’s entire collection of CDs in the car, which were largely 1970’s rock and roll with a little disco mixed in, and some Best of the 80’s hits. The toll taker scowled. “What use is this to me? I don’t have anything to play them on!”

So Hoodie parked the car, got out, and crawled back in to the back seat. She fished around on the floor until she found her mother’s old Sony Walkman, the one that took CDs, and a pair of rather ancient headphones. “Here you go! Figure this job is pretty boring. Maybe you’d like to listen to some tunes while you’re waiting for the next car to come in.”

The toll taker tested the Walkman. It played CDs, and he could hear through the headphones adequately well. “I have to admit, this is a better toll than most people give me,” he said. “All right, kid, you go on. Hope you find your sister.”

So Hoodie drove on, until the highway ended at a plaza. There were concrete cylinders blocking the car from going any further. All over the plaza, people were dancing. Some were dressed in pajamas, and some were naked, and some were wearing ordinary clothing, but they all waltzed about to the sound of weird music that didn’t quite sound perfectly like music, but if you listened to it, you couldn’t identify it as any kind of sound other than music.

Hoodie got out of the car, pushed past the cylinders, and onto the bricks of the plaza. “Scuse me, coming through!” she said, shoving dancers out of the way when they tried to take her hand and pull her into the dance. The dancers were very light, like paper, so Hoodie had no trouble getting them out of her way.

Finally, in the center of the plaza, she saw a man. Now, many have described this man, but all of their descriptions are different, so all we’ll say is, a man with glowing eyes. Hoodie watched a lot of anime, so glowing eyes didn’t particularly impress her. The man was dancing with Anne, or rather, dancing while holding onto Anne. Anne wasn’t dancing; she was shuffling to keep her balance as the man pulled her this way and that, but she was obviously trying to yank her way out of the man’s grip.

“Hey!” Hoodie yelled at the man. “That’s my sister, and she doesn’t belong here! Let go of her!”

“I don’t think so,” the man said in a voice like liquid… something. “Dear Anne came to visit us here, and she was so beautiful, I couldn’t possibly let her leave us.”

“Hoodie! I can’t get loose!” Anne yelled.

“I’m coming!”

“Are you sure that is wise, dear Kate?” the man said. “Perhaps you, too, will join our dance.”

“Not gonna happen. I’m a great roller skater and I absolutely shred on a skateboard but I can’t dance worth shit,” Hoodie said.

She tried to run toward her sister, but it seemed like the distance between her and her sister grew longer for every step she took. The man laughed. “Join the dance! You’ll be able to come close if you dance, but not if you run.”

“Huh. So how about I don’t run or dance?” Hoodie said, and her sneakers were now roller skates. She skated, with great skill and agility, over to Anne and the man, who was plainly very surprised that that had worked.

“I think he’s Death, Hoodie,” Anne said urgently, still trying to pull free.

“Yeah, I figured that out,” Hoodie said. “You better let my sister go. She’s still alive and she belongs in the world of the living.”

“Ah, but wouldn’t you say she brightens up the place? So many of my dancers are… well, they were beautiful once, but…” And now Hoodie could see that the dancers were almost all either rotting, or fully skeletal. Only a scant number of them were intact, and of them, several were bloody, disfigured by whatever injury had killed them, or burnt, or bloated.

“Look, dude, my sister’s prettier than pretty much any other person on the planet, let alone in here, but that doesn’t give you the right to hold onto her if she isn’t dead.” Hoodie grabbed her sister’s hand as they swung past each other, Anne not-dancing in Death’s grip and Hoodie roller skating.

Death pulled, and Hoodie pulled, but Anne pulled toward Hoodie, and that made the difference. She tumbled free of Death and into Hoodie’s grasp.

Death scowled at Hoodie. “Very well, then, but there are conditions! Your sister must sit in the back seat in the ride back, and you cannot look at her in the mirror or turn your head to look back, or she will be lost to you forever! Only when the car is fully out of the tunnel can you look at her or speak, and she will be unable to speak until then as well! If you fail to meet this challenge, Anne will return here and dance with me for the rest of eternity.”

Hoodie said, “You have got to be shitting me.”

And then she hit Death with her pool noodle.

Using her sister’s weight as a counterbalance, Hoodie skated this way and that, back and forth, smacking Death over and over with the pool noodle. Every time he staggered in one direction, Hoodie was there, slapping him back to the other direction. He tried to back away, but Hoodie hit him in the legs with the pool noodle, and he fell to the ground, whereupon Hoodie really started whaling on him.

“All right! All right!” Death yelled. “No conditions! Just take your sister and go!”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Hoodie said. She tried to take a step away from Death, but the distance to the car only became greater.

Hoodie looked back at Death. He smirked. “That’s not a rule I can break. That’s just the way this place works. You can’t walk here, you can only dance. Or skate, I suppose, but your sister has no skates!”

And Hoodie knew that to join the dance meant joining the dead, with all that meant.

“Anne, get on my back, you’re gonna piggyback ride on me.”

“How is that going to work? You’re the same size as me.”

“It works because I say so,” Hoodie said. “You’re my sister and I’m not leaving you here.”

So Anne got up onto Hoodie’s back, piggyback style, and Hoodie skated away toward the car, with some effort. The car had already started fading out of this reality a little bit, but as soon as Hoodie reached it, she thumped the hood and said, “This is a great car! Really nice styling! And Mom hasn’t even finished paying for it, so we’d better be able to drive it back!” After she said this, the car was entirely real again.

Anne got into the passenger seat, and Hoodie, no longer wearing roller skates, got into the driver’s seat. Hoodie started the car, and backed it up, and they drove back the entire way, past the toll taker who waved them through (a sign said TOLLS ONLY COLLECTED INBOUND), and down the highway. Because it was only one lane, it was dangerous, because any cars coming this way would be on a head-on course toward them, and the area outside of the road didn’t quite look real enough to risk driving on. But when cars came their way, Hoodie somehow managed to get the entire car onto the shoulder, where it really didn’t look like it should have fit.

They merged back into the tunnel out of Baltimore safely and drove all the way home, talking about the sorts of things they always did, like what the characters they liked in the TV shows they watched should have done or might still do, and the colleges Anne was planning to apply to, and other things like that. When they got back to the hospital, the sun was coming up.

Hoodie went through the emergency room lobby and demanded to be allowed in to see her sister. The security guard apparently could not see that her sister was right behind her. He buzzed her in, and Hoodie and Anne both went straight to where Anne’s body was lying in bed. Then Anne jumped into her body like she was jumping into a swimming pool, and opened her eyes.

“Mom? Dad?” she asked weakly.

“Anne! Oh, thank god!” her parents said, and fell all over her apologizing for allowing her to get shot, and swearing they would never let something like this happen again. Anne embraced them, and then looked at Hoodie. Hoodie winked. So Anne didn’t tell their parents anything of her trip to the land of the dead, the way Death had tried to force her to dance, or Hoodie showing up in the car.

***

The Congresswoman and her husband began lobbying for gun control – a cause the Congresswoman had always believed in, but had never actively thrown all her political power into – while Anne worked to recover her physical and mental health, and then took the tests that would allow her to graduate and go to college. Because she had been homeschooled, Anne couldn’t get a state diploma; the procedure was to go straight to taking the GED test for high school equivalency. She also took the SAT and the ACT, the tests most American children who wanted to go to college had to do. Hoodie, for her part, worked on getting very good at video games.

Anne applied to several of the best colleges, and was accepted to several of them, with nice scholarships offered as well. She visited the colleges, along with Hoodie, who had many opinions about which college Anne should choose. The Congresswoman felt a pang when she saw her strange daughter talking to Anne about college, because of course Hoodie couldn’t go; her grades had been consistently terrible her whole life, and she had never tested well on standardized tests because she got too bored, or played Connect the Dots with the little ovals she was supposed to fill in with a No. 2 pencil. The Congresswoman and her husband had never even pushed Hoodie to take the GED. But she had always hoped, in her heart of hearts, that her children would go to college. What would Hoodie do with her life? The Congresswoman had a hard time imagining any job that Hoodie would want to do that would allow her to do it. Would she have to live off her parents and sister forever?

But when Anne finally picked a college and sent off her acceptance letter, Hoodie told her parents that she was going, too.

“Kate.” The Congresswoman tried to break it to her gently. “You can’t go. I know you don’t want to be separated from Anne, but you can’t go to college without a GED.”

“You don’t think I could get a GED?”

As tactfully as she could, the Congresswoman said, “Well, it doesn’t play to any of your strong points.”

“You might want to consider a career in the trades,” her father said. “You’re strong, and talented with your hands.”

“No, I’m going to college with Anne.”

The Congresswoman sighed. “I just said you would need a GED, at the least, to even begin thinking about going to college.”

“Hang on.” Hoodie went to her spot on the sofa, where she and Anne sat to play video games or watch TV or surf ridiculous videos online. There was a tall, disorganized pile of random papers, comic books, notebooks full of notes and sketches about video games and fan art of anime, and, apparently, a GED certificate, which Hoodie pulled out to show her parents.

“When did you get that?”

“How did you get that?”

“I took the test. It wasn’t hard. I mean, just because I never bothered to do any homework doesn’t mean I wasn’t listening when you guys were teaching me.”

The certificate showed that she had a score even higher than Anne’s. Both of them were in the range where they might be able to get college credit based on their high scores.

The Congresswoman sighed. She supposed she should have expected this kind of thing from Hoodie. “Well, all right, but the college that Anne is going to requires high SAT scores, and you haven’t even taken the SAT.”

“What makes you say that? Hang on a mo.” Again Hoodie dug through the pile, and retrieved a piece of paper from the College Board, stating her SAT scores, which were again slightly higher than Anne’s.

“I’m not even surprised anymore,” Hoodie’s father said.

“All right, that’s wonderful, but Kate, you never even applied to this school. You’d have to wait until next y—oh, come on.” Because Hoodie was digging through her pile of random paper again, and eventually pulled out multiple college acceptance letters, including one from the school Anne had chosen to go to. Hers also offered a good scholarship, again slightly better than Anne’s. Although that part was relatively normal, for the second child from the same household to apply to a given school.

“So, I’m going to college with Anne,” Hoodie said again, as if it had never been in question.

“Honey… are you sure that’s what you want?” The Congresswoman wanted Hoodie to go to college, but she was afraid for her. She tried to find a way to phrase her worries tactfully. “You’re, uh, very different looking. I’ve always supported you being in the public eye as much as you want to be, but you’ve always chosen to avoid it and stay home. You won’t be able to do that in college. There’s no homeschool option, no way to avoid going to classes and being seen by everyone.”

“Because I look weird, right?”

“I never wanted to actually describe it that way…”

“Mom, you can’t hurt my feelings. I’m a weirdo. I’ve always been a weirdo, right?”

“Well, you’ve always been an unusual child.”

Hoodie grinned broadly… and her face was suddenly different. There was no moment of visible change, no transition – between one blink and the next, she went from a monkey-like face to a face much like Anne’s, though not identical. Now Hoodie’s face was beautiful, just like her sister’s, but with a sparkle of mischief and danger in her eyes where Anne had intelligence and charm. “How about this?”

The Congresswoman and her husband just stared. Finally the Congresswoman said, “Have you had the ability to look like this all this time?”

“Would you rather I have, if I did have that ability?”

“…No,” the Congresswoman finally said. “If you had the ability to look like this the whole time, but you chose not to use it, there must have been a reason. And for a moment I was thinking of the fact that your sister was shot, in part, because some of those protestors seriously believed I had killed you, because we kept you out of public at your request… but if it hadn’t been that, it would have been some other slander, because that’s the way those people operate. If they have nothing they can distort into a terrible rumor, they’ll literally make things up. So no. If you’ve had this ability but you haven’t used it, I have to assume you had a good reason.”

Hoodie laughed, and hugged her mother, and then her father. “You guys are the best,” she said, and shucked off her hooded sweatshirt for the first time in her life. Underneath she was wearing a clean pink t-shirt that said “Let your FREAK flag fly” in blue sparkly cursive, and a pair of designer jeans. “I don’t know how long I’ve been able to do this. I didn’t exactly come with a manual. I have a lot of abilities that I don’t know I have until it occurs to me to try.”

“Is this how you want to look from now on?” the Congresswoman asked.

And suddenly Hoodie’s face was her own again, and the Congresswoman felt a strange sense of relief. “Just in public, in places where I care about anyone’s opinion. If you guys don’t mind, around my family I’d rather be the self I grew up being.”

“That’s fine,” the Congresswoman said. “What about your hoodie?”

Hoodie sniffed it and frowned. “I think I’m gonna go put it in the laundry. It could use a wash.”

***

So Hoodie and Anne both went to the same college. In public, Hoodie wore her pretty face, and did not always wear her hooded sweatshirt, although she had managed to get all the stains out, somehow. In their dorm rooms, in front of her sister or either of their roommates – for the school did not allow sisters to room together – she wore her old face, the one she had grown up with.

And they both had great fun at college, and made many friends. But this is the story of how they grew up, so now it’s all told.