(Courtesy/ Charlie O., Addison M., Seher R., Academy photographers)
Left to right(top to bottom):
Charlie and Terrence; Avery and Addison; Izu, Chichi, and Keke; Seher and Haaris, Timothy, and Benjamin F.
Some days, I answer to Chichi more than I answer to Izu.
It happens in the hallway, in the lunch line, and in classrooms with teachers who have known me for years. Sometimes I correct them. Sometimes, honestly, I don’t have the heart to, and I end up having an entire conversation as my little sister. The strangest stretch was when Chichi was on crutches. People kept stopping me to say how glad they were to see me walking again and to ask how my hip was doing. My hip was fine. It always has been.
I’m the oldest of my three siblings at CA, but you wouldn’t always know it. To most of the freshmen class, I’m just Keke’s older sister. And with three older siblings who came through CA before us, our name usually walks into a room before we do.
Chi Chi said, “They think I’m a carbon copy of my siblings.” But we’re not the only ones.
This year, 91 upper school students make up 45 sibling groups, and going through high school with a sibling in the building comes with its own set of experiences: getting called by the wrong name, being compared before anyone gets to know you, having someone to lean on when things get hard, and figuring out how to share a last name without losing your own. Every pair handles it a little differently.
Getting mixed up with a sibling is practically a rite of passage here. For junior twins Addison and Avery Medina, though, sharing a last name is the easy part. As identical twins, they also share a face. “Teachers call me Addison all the time,” Avery said, and it isn’t only teachers. One afternoon, while Avery was doing homework on a second-floor bench, a student who knows Addison from speech and debate walked by and greeted her as her sister. Rather than correct him, she played along. “I just didn’t have the heart to tell the sweet kid that I wasn’t actually Addison, so I just said hi back,” she said. Five or six conversations later, he’s still trying to schedule debate practices with her.
Moments like that might push some twins to prove they’re different, but they are happy being a pair. “They always refer to us as the twins, but quite honestly, I don’t mind it. I like it,” Addison said. Their one deliberate difference is small enough to miss unless you’re looking for it: Addison wears gold jewelry, and Avery wears silver.
While people constantly mix up the Medinas, freshman twins Seher and Haaris have the opposite problem. No one confuses one for the other, mostly because people don’t realize they are related at all. Last year, when Ms. Eisert found out they had both come from Wellington, she tried to introduce them to each other. “We were like, ‘Oh, we’re siblings,'” Seher said. Haaris isn’t surprised that it happens. “If they know us separately, they won’t realize that I have a twin or that she has a twin,” he said. That’s partly because, when high school started, the two went their separate ways, with different friend groups and different sections in orchestra. Still, math class and the basketball court keep pulling them back together. “He’s easy to talk to,” Seher said, even if he does make her play defense for him. For Haaris, that’s the best part of being a twin, he said, “You have a built-in friend.”
For other siblings, high school means sharing an entire social life. Senior Terrence and his brother, junior Charlie, turned their built-in friend into a best friend. The brothers don’t share a single class, but almost every free period you’ll find them in Mr. Block’s room with the same group of friends, a group Charlie joined long before he ever got to CA. “I was excited when Charlie came to Academy,” Terrence said. “Since he’d been seeing all my friends on the weekends anyway, he fit right into our group.”
Being that close didn’t stop Charlie from wanting something of his own. He played basketball his freshman year “to show we didn’t do all the same things.” But Terrence has never seen it as a competition. “I’ve never seen Charlie and me as competitors, instead as best friends,” he said. That’s exactly why Charlie is dreading next year. Right now, Terrence “has advice for everything I’m going through,” Charlie said. Once he graduates, “pretty much everything will change for me. He is my best friend.”
When siblings are further apart in age, their time in the same building can be short. The O’Donnells have had years of shared hallways to get ready for that goodbye. Senior Timothy Flythe and freshman Benjamin Flythe get just one. Even so, that one year has already made a difference for Benny. Having his brother around made the jump to high school easier, “because you know you have family with you,” he said. Timmy has noticed a change too, just in the other direction. “I probably am known more by younger classes than if he wasn’t here,” he said.
Both brothers play soccer, and every once in a while they end up on the field together. “It is pretty fun,” Benny said. For Timmy, those games are a chance to watch his little brother improve. “It’s nice seeing him learn and grow and having a chance to compete directly with him,” he said. Off the field, they see each other about once a day, and according to Timmy, the average meeting “usually consists of a nod or maybe a playful jab.”
Neither of them seems too worried about next year. “I feel like he’ll do completely fine without me, but it’ll be weird not seeing my sibling every day,” Timmy said. Benny feels about the same. “Next year, when Tim leaves, I will probably miss going to school with my brother,” he said, “but eventually get through it.”
Like Benny, Keke walked into high school with family already in the building. Most of the students and faculty knew who he was before his first day. Having older siblings who’d already done it all was “kind of like coaching,” he said. But it also comes with a script he doesn’t always want to follow.
“I’m supposed to be identical to you guys, but I’m not,” Keke said. He hopes people see him as “still successful, but I did it differently from my siblings.”
Chichi has her own idea of what she wants her name to mean. “When they hear my name, they think, ‘Oh, she’s good at soccer and track,'” she said.
That’s the thing about going through high school with a sibling: eventually, one of you leaves first. This spring, Terrence, Timmy and I will graduate, and Charlie, Benny, Chichi and Keke will be the ones carrying our last names down the hallway.
For me, it’s a bigger change than it sounds. Since kindergarten, I have never been in lower, middle, or upper schools without at least one sibling in the same division. This has meant getting mixed up, compared, and called by the wrong name, but it has also meant always having someone just down the hall.
Next year, wherever I end up, I’ll just be Izu. I hope that’s who people here remember too: the girl who wrote a book, who was kind to everyone, who had her own big moments. And I hope that, every once in a while, someone stops Chichi in the hallway and calls her by my name. Partly so she finally knows how it feels, and partly so I know I wasn’t so forgettable after all.
