Synonymous Siblings?

It was easy for the water from our aging faucet to splash out of the sink and onto the plastic counters, but I always let it splash. I spit out the toothpaste in my mouth and tapped my orange toothbrush, complete with tongue scrubber, on the porcelain edge of the right-side sink. All the blue-eyed sisters used the right-side sink .

"Good morning, Bum," I sang cheerfully as my younger sister staggered into the bathroom, a string from the worn hem of her pajamas trailing wearily behind.

A grunt. She was never much for words this early in the morning.

I chuckled to myself, breathing out a minty sigh and glancing in the mirror to see her pull down her pants and plop onto the toilet.

"How was your slumber?" I asked innocently enough, simply mimicking the question my father always asked all of us every morning. Maybe that's why Summer rolled her puffy brown eyes--beautiful even in the morning--nestling her chin into her cupped hands as she started peeing. It had obviously been a long night; I thought for a moment a race horse had somehow crowded its way into our small restroom.

I dried my hands thoroughly on the pink hand towel and started examining my teeth. They were yellowing.

"Ihatheweerestdreamlasnigh," she finally managed to grumble out, just as I was picking at a new zit which had snuck onto my chin while I was asleep. I stopped and looked up, our reflections making eye contact with each other. I understood every word she hadn't said.

"Oh yeah? Who was in it?" Listening time. They were so rare in the morning with Summer.

She yawned and stretched her arms, pulling up her pants then fumbling with the rusted handle. The toilet responded, gurgling with similar curiosity.

"I can't remember." She started gathering her long, dark hair in handfuls and piling on her head, just as I stopped to define the part which kept my thin, blond hair organized. "We were in this weird building and you kept running around and saying hi to EVERYONE. I was just following along but people kept pointing at me. Then you looked like you took a left turn and I took a right turn but somehow we were still walking by each other. I don't know what happened. But you were jumping all over the place and I was just walking to keep up. Anyway," she came to stand next to me in front of the dirty mirror, "it was weird."

"Sounds like it," I said, looking at her long straight nose and wondering how on earth my sister looked so much like Pochahontas when I was a clone of Cinderella.

We held each other's gaze for a while in the mirror before she started busying herself with her toothbrush and I turned towards the toilet. So seemingly routine each morning, but for Summer and me, it was night and day.