Prologue

‘You should be dead.’

I know because I was the last person to leave your funeral.

I was the one you last spoke to.

I was the one who killed you with that stone.

***

Do you know how hard it is to be a twin? You share everything with them: Everything you own, for everything is hers, your identity, for no one will bother learning how to tell you apart, and in my case, even my name, for my parents only cared about her.  

My parents wanted a son. The baby outfits had been picked, the nursery painted, and the name chosen. But fate decided to make my life miserable and let me be a girl, it punished me even more when it gave me a twin sister, one that would grow up to be more loved than me by everyone we would ever meet.

At the beginning they cared so little that they gave us the same name: Isabel Atwood. But it was soon revealed just what a child prodigy my sister was, and thus she very quickly became relevant, and even loved by my parents. She was renamed what my parents had wanted to call their son: Abel.

Nothing really changed for me, they didn’t treat me any worse, just with the same indifference, and while it had been tolerable back then, when they used to treat Abel the same, it had  now become unbearable.

At first, I tried to be as flawless as she was, so that I could be loved like she was . I practiced the guitar until my calloused hands bled, studied until I would pass out from exhaustion, tried a myriad of other pursuits, but nothing was enough. I was either barely good or terrible.

So I gave up and tried to live a normal life until I could get out of here, away from them. But as time went on, I realised that I would never be satisfied with any type of life I led. No matter what I did, I would never be Abel.

And then one day I snapped.