As the new school year comes closer they host meetings in the kitchens of other mothers to assess the suitability and unsuitability of each other’s sons. At night they say their prayers, purse their mouths to blow their breath on us. This will protect you, they say. They have new mantras, ones they try to get us to memorize. We listen to all their advice, store it away to help us cope with what we feel is coming.

By the time we start classes again, our love for them has grown and is pulsating like the heat of the summer. It is a big and dangerous thing to send us back to school with.

September

We have never had hostelites as classmates before. Other classes yes, but never us so imagine our delight when we get the twins who live in the school hostels. We have won the lottery with them. On our first day back they are already standing at the back of the classroom, behind rows and rows of desks that seem to have grown larger over the break by virtue of being left alone for many months. Our teacher introduces them to us but there is no need. We already know them as our sisters, we want to be their friends. Their hair falls down their backs like dark rivers and their eyes are a golden brown, lighter than all our eyes.

The thing is, we handle it badly. We pressure the twins. We resort to being the girls we were before the summer began, back when we were in fifth grade. We offer them our erasers, our pencils, ask them if they would like to play dodgeball with us—play anything with us? But the girls are impenetrable. The sisters have each other and that, infuriatingly, seems to be enough. They refuse our advances like we are an unwanted new limb, one that will be severed soon.

As the month goes on they take on the translucent quality of girls who live without their parents. Their wrists grow out of the sleeves of their clothes, clean, sharp, without hair.

Every day, after the last bell rings, we watch them walk out of the school building and in the opposite direction of the school gates. They head over the school grounds to the small brown house otherwise known as the school hostels. A woman opens the door for them. The warden is a mustard colored spinster famous for her eyes which are small and black, like raisins.

At home time, our mothers are lined up to receive us with open arms and strained, loving eyes. We cannot help thinking of the twins who have long since disappeared into the hostel to God knows what terrors. We feel ill with how much we want to save them.

October

The school grounds are beginning to go orange, yellow, and red as if the light from the summer sun is hibernating in the roots of trees and leaves. Our teachers are human this year. Whenever we break for prayer, they ask us to pray for them as if we are adults—another encouraging sign of our growing power. They—the teachers—hate the twins because they never talk in class and when they do it is only to whisper to each other. The sisters hold their necks like lovely women who have just become aware of the dips under their collarbones. We beg them to be Cinderella in the End of Year School Play, rehearsals start soon, and yes, both of them will be great for the one part because they are almost the same person. They refuse. Instead they continue coming to class as the personification of the girls we wish we were, untethered and free.

One day in October, the twins arrive in morning assembly with their nails painted bright pink. Their hands look like small beautiful claws. The head teacher, whose duty it is to watch us as we march out of our classrooms to assemble in the grounds, sees their nails and makes them step out of the line. Then in the bright October light, she says, You are too young for nail polish. The twins look like they have never been young. This is the worst school in the world, one that cannot recognize the women it is making. The teacher makes them beat the drums in assembly as punishment. They have to strap the drums around their bellies and hit them loudly with sticks until they are very tired. We sing the national anthem and they provide the beat. They keep beating even as we march back to our classrooms. With each smash of the baton the twins look more and more drained. After assembly, they are made to go back to the hostel. They come back with clear nails and pink, wet eyes as if they have simply rubbed the nail polish into another part of their body. We give them water to make them feel better and watch them sip. They are beginning to realize that their twin status will only take them so far and we may be a good thing in their lives.

Our own mothers are early that day to pick us up. They spot the girls walking to the hostel. Who are they? they ask. The twins, we say, as if they are an institution. We decide to watch the teachers carefully for further and unprovoked signs of bitch-ery. Because it is obvious that the twins are orphans, we start carrying knives to school—steak knives, fruit knives and butter knives—wrapping them first of course in toilet paper so they do not rip through our back packs.

November

We begin to live anti-clockwise. Because of high demand, our houses run out of gas in the mornings so our parents cook and shower and shave at night. We are cold all the time, but not as cold as the twins who are still showing up to class without their required grey cardigans. We give them ours, we take turns. One of us shivers for an hour and then another and then another until the last bell rings. It is a small price to pay because the twins have agreed to be Cinderella.

We hold the rehearsals up on the small mound near the corner of the hostel underneath the old oak tree from our mothers’ times. There are some swings on this mound. These are never used anymore. Cinderella can hold on to these in the midst of the most powerful throes of her sorrow. The twins give it their all. They are incandescent and spectacular and we are very worried about the other classes finding out about our gold mine.

During lunch hour, we make a ring around the actors so no one will be able to see. When the other classes start to come closer, we take out our knives and hold them so the light bounces off the blade and into the eyes of these spies. Their pupils expand and contract until they retreat, wary as soldiers.

It is our pleasure to teach the twins how to do the kissing scenes. We tell them that they must put their hand over the prince’s mouth (a girl—one of us) and then kiss their own hand so as not to accidentally touch her lips and commit a great sin. The twins think this is very funny because they have already got their periods. They are more knowledgeable about these things. We do not like being condescended to, but when they laugh we laugh along with them and this is rewarded because they finally invite us back to their hostel after school. We do not know how to control our happiness so we all hug after rehearsal and vow to buy them their very own cardigans.

We tell our mothers, who are waiting outside the school gates, that we will be five minutes late. Why? they ask. We tell them about the hostel and they become alarmed. They drag us by our arms to our cars and we think about the twins waiting inside the classroom, us never coming like their poor, dead parents. On the drive home, our mothers say, They are turning you. We bite our tongues so as not to give them the satisfaction of asking, into what?

December

We are all smart girls so we are not too worried about the mid-term exams. Our class is outperforming all eight sections of sixth grade classes at the school and in the top two percentile of the entire country’s sixth grade classes. We are the brightest in the country, The cream of the shining crop, says our esteemed principal, beaming, so we see nothing wrong in continuing our rehearsals through December. The twins haven’t spoken to us since we left for our homes without visiting their hostel. They are proud because they have spent so many years in this world without parents so we have to apologize many times. We are all very sorry. When they finally forgive us we promise we will sneak to the hostel with them during lunch hour and risk getting expelled. They reluctantly agree. We sense this is our last chance and are very nervous when the lunch bell rings. We cannot afford to ruin this.

It is not raining, but certainly there are some clouds as we walk over to the hostel. The flat, one story house looks decrepit up close, and we notice that there is a vegetable patch growing near the entrance. Broccoli heads are shyly peeking at us from near the front door. We garden on weekends, the twins tell us to our delight. They ask us to wait outside the front door and then they go inside. The wind is blowing and those of us who have lent them our cardigans have to stamp our feet into the ground to stay warm. When we breathe, the air mists around us. The twins come back after ten minutes to say the warden has gone out for her weekly meeting with the Deputy Principal.

We walk down a corridor lined with rooms that face each other until we stop outside a door that has the twins’ names etched outside on a wide blue plaque. We feel like we are going to fly out of our heads, that’s how nervous we are. There are no heaters in the room but each of the sisters has a single bed, a desk, and a cupboard. There is a bear on one of their desks whose fat, distended stomach says I LOVE YOU. We look away embarrassed, trying hard not to wonder where the other twin’s bear is. The whole place smells like medicine and there is still half an hour of lunch to go. Let’s do Cinderella, we suggest in our great pity for them and they agree. We shove their furniture to the corners of their bedroom and begin the play.

Actually, they are very bad actors now. Nerves are making them stupid. They forget the names of the step-sisters and do not weep properly when the step-mother slaps them. The look of joy when the fairy godmother shows up is off-center on their faces. They can tell they are losing us so when it time for the kissing scene, they hold up their best card. Let’s kiss properly, they say, chins tremulous and cheeks aglow as if this sacrifice is costing them something other than what they are able to talk about. Now they have our attention again. We watch carefully and the prince blushes and titters. What? say the twins, shining around the shambles of their performance, trying to build themselves up again, You’ve never kissed someone before?

They put their arms around each other and then press their lips together. It’s like crushed flowers, the smell of the room, sickly and rotting. One of the twins opens her mouth for her sister and we see her tongue, dark and pink like a worm. We are very uncomfortable, because technically we are good girls which is something the warden and our mothers won’t believe when we try explaining to them how we came to be here with this white hot feeling in the base of our stomachs. This is why we are particularly alarmed when the warden is suddenly in the room. She can scream louder than all our mothers combined and her anger could technically and literally kill the twins—she is drumming their faces and shoulders with her fists—and so we act a little bit in self-defense and in their defense though some of us try to hold the others back. Some of us, we remember, think this is a bad idea. When the first of the knives goes into the warden, it is a clean, smooth invasion. We feel the blood and muscle move aside to let the metal enter. She does not fall to the ground immediately, so we have to try again, once or twice.

The twins are still holding each other but now they are crying too. We borrow clothes from their cupboard and put them on. Some of us button up our cardigans to hide the blood. We lock the body in the room and leave with the twins. We have to be a little rough with them because they will not stop crying. They are like us, back when we were in the fifth grade. We have to, in fact, threaten them. We wash the knives and hold them to their throats and say, JUST SHUT UP JUST SHUP UP OKAY? Then we lead them out of there. They collect themselves when we emerge back out into the cold open air. They have almost stopped shaking by the time we enter the classroom again.

We beg our English teacher for a free period. Please miss, we say, We are so behind in Math! She is our favorite teacher. She relents because she senses that something wild is travelling in each of our bodies. She is a progressive teacher and believes that students are Under a Lot of Strain. We agree with her, we have never felt more strained. We tremble until she tells us it will be okay if we go study in the library very quietly.

The body in the house is still a little warm. The warden looks normal except for the gashes in her stomach and her breasts. We cover her up in the twins’ bed sheet and then ONE TWO THREE LIFT. We take her to the back of the house. One of us watches for straying teachers while the rest of us use our hands and rocks to dig out a hole. We put her in it and cover her up and then take a moment to pray for forgiveness, for her soul, for the twins, and good grades in our mid-terms.

January

Our success in the mid-terms is going to be celebrated with a party. It will be on a Tuesday, after school but in the big cafeteria down the road where the senior girls have their dinners and lunches. The Vice Principal has already given her permission. Our mothers have spent the last week preparing. They’ve baked cakes, cut up fruits and arranged them on platters. On the day we tell our mothers about the twins not having parents and ask them if we can take them from school and then drop them off again later. They say okay so after class we pack them into the car with us. They sit in the back seat and our mothers fuss over them on the way to the party. The twins have grown thin over the break. They have a pinched, hurt look in their faces as if they are being made to gnaw on the bones of things. In the car, they edge away from us and sit together like two chess pieces of the same color. The party room is decorated in pastels. There are purple balloons strung from the ceiling and a banner that says HALF WAY TO GRADUATION. Last year, we studied the States of Matter in Science. We know there are four: Solids, Gas, Liquid, and Plasma. We are almost at the plasma level of happiness by the time we have eaten. Only the twins are unhappy. They have not done that well in the mid-terms compared to us and are starting to show their outsider status. For example, they stand a little bit away from us and when we ask them if they want to rehearse Cinderella they say, No, outright. Even our mothers notice how rude that is because they bring it up after we have driven the sisters back to the hostel. The new warden opens the door. She is taller than the old one, in fact the top of her head almost touches the top of the doorway.

February

The twins are acting very strange. They have not practiced the play with us for weeks and instead stand vigil over the grave at lunchtime. They just sit there on their haunches, side by side. When it rains, they stand up and use their shoes to pat at the ground, even it out. They are worried the body will wash out but our mothers say the rains will stop soon. Spring is coming. The ground is easing up beneath us. We give the twins another chance. We ask them if they’d like to play dodgeball. When they refuse, we have no choice. We tighten our fists around their wrists and track them back from the grave over to the mound. The ghost of this woman will drive you mad, we warn them. We divide ourselves into two teams. The twins are in the team that has to dodge the ball. They stand in the middle and we target them with the ball until they begin to move. Finally, they even laugh.

March

We long to speak to men. We ask the twins where they learned to kiss and they are reluctant to answer. The movies, they finally say when we step on their hands during gym class. We want to practice kissing with real men, but only know one who is not related to us. He is the Music Sir. The Music Sir teaches us piano. Often, when we get to class, he is sitting in front of his computer, tongue out and eyes a little glazed. We grow to look forward to these lessons and notice carefully who he speaks to and who he doesn’t speak to. He doesn’t pay the twins any more or less attention despite their advanced kissing experience.

It is unlucky that the body of the warden washes up behind the hostel before the holidays. The garden keeper runs like a flag, flying towards the school building with a look of such terror on his face that we know it can be nothing else. Immediately we see swarms emerge from the administrative offices. Even Madam Samina, who is teaching us, is distracted and continues to look out of the window after every two minutes, eyes squinting against the great green expanse of the school grounds.

We have to be alone in rooms with policemen who are kind to us. They ask us questions and call the warden ‘Ma’am Warden.’ Did you know her? they ask. Yes, we say, though only from afar. Doctors pat us down with thin, cold fingers and put their stethoscopes on our skin. They ask us if we have been hurt by the warden, by any of our teachers. Our mothers cry and cry and cry at home and into each other’s arms at the school gates. They ask us over and over again if something has happened to us at school.

What’s strange is that the twins disappear the day before the body is discovered. They don’t come to class all day and we hear the teachers whispering about their suspicious absence. All of their clothes are still back in the room. We picture the teddy bear holding its red heart on that desk. We picture someone giving the bear to one or the other of the twins and saying the words, I Love You, while the other stands there envious and hungry for attention.

We remember how they looked in the room that day, blazing and immodest, two Cinderellas launching themselves at the spinster. We recount the story for the media, the police, the coroner who asks us to re-tell the stabbing part of it. We talk about our passion for education and other human interest things like how one of our main worries at the time of the incident was failing the mid-term exams. We cry inside television screens around the country. What poor girls, everyone repeats, until we begin to believe in our martyrdom.

April

The news of the murder seeps into every corner of the school. This is the final story: Before they left, the twins dug up the body and carried it to the front of the house to lay it near where the broccoli had grown last winter. Now the patch is overrun with tomatoes, the red and green of them a benign backdrop to this horrific event. It is widely acknowledged that the twins killed the warden. Even the teachers admit it. They keep breaking off in the middle of lessons to say, There was something strange about those girls. They need something concrete to pin the crime on them so we tell them about the kissing. This confirms it for everyone. It was definitely the devil, our mothers agree, and they slap us when we get home, something they did not even do when they found out we were in the room when the murder happened. How could you watch that? they ask. The discomfort of that moment comes back to us in sharp clarity and we apologize.

The authorities take the chalk from our classrooms to draw an outline around the hostel. They do this every day so the crime stays fresh. The other hostelites watch from their windows with grim, lost faces. It is unanimously agreed that the twins were prophets, or witches. Something transient. They probably knew the murder was going to happen and still did not stop it. They put us in that room and then made us hot and angry with desire.

May

That cold grey evening is very far away now, as if someone has loped it across time. We were not holding the knife. The twins began to kiss and we felt ashamed. We had been taught the wrongness of this so we pulled them apart but they began to fight and twist in our arms, as if possessed. When the warden walked in, they killed her and said, You are not our mother. Their voices became deep and harsh. The woman wept as she died. She said, Please. No. Don’t. Each word a sentence. She looked exactly like our mothers so we told the twins to stop. We said, Stop please! but the bitches just kept going. This is what happens to girls who live in hostels without much supervision. When supervision is imposed, they break through it, clear and strong and roaring.

We aren’t allowed to go near the scene of the incident. Anyway the area is surrounded by reporters and cameramen and policemen. There are many policemen. At first, there are twenty, standing in a line and bending to the ground to touch the grass, a small army of men with worry in their faces and guns leaning across the lengths of their bodies. Slowly, the men begin to disperse. If at first there were twenty, after two days there are ten, then five and then there are only two—small, ready sentries visible from a distance because of the smoke they are inhaling from cigarettes and then expelling from their mouths into the warm air.

A week later we go back to look behind the hostel. The two policemen are sitting there with their feet over the shallow hole in the ground. They stand when they see us coming and straighten their faces. We leave immediately but go back again after another week has passed.

This time the men aren’t there, perhaps they are on their lunch break, perhaps they have left. The yellow tape loped around the grave has ripped in one part and is swinging in the wind like an extra loose gate. The hole is dry and filled with decaying leaves.

June

The production of Cinderella is a big success. The prince, the fairy godmother, the ugly step-sisters and the step-mother speak to an empty spot in the room and somehow it is very enchanting and moving. Even we are moved. The whole school gives us a standing ovation. We cry afterwards. This will be the summer of our becoming.