The Unseen Road

Chapter One: Kylie and Celeste

June 5, 2016

Hartsville, FL.

"They did it again!" a classmate sneered, looking down at the two smaller girls cornered in front of him. That was not to say that these girls weren't tall or at least of average height for their age, though; for this boy was in every sense a beast of a young man, or rather a thirteen-year-old.

"Did what again?" another girl asked, glancing up from her iPhone. "Who? The Shining twins?"

"Yeah, they did it! They said something at the exact same time!" the boy replied, laughing.

"Cree-py!"

"Trey, leave them alone," the teacher warned the boy noncommittally from her desk. Study hall at Hartsville Middle School always passed in this way; nobody really studied, and the teacher never really cared, leaving the poor sisters Kylie and Celeste Jacobs to fall victim to their jeering and teasing classmates.

"We don't even look the same," Kylie, the younger of the two, although by only two minutes, mumbled under her breath.

"What was that?" Trey barked in reply, taking Kylie's response as a rather entertaining challenge. The girl who had been holding her cell phone now watched with eager, glinting eyes, her thumbs poised over her handheld keyboard to pass on whatever gossip might entail from today's events regarding The Shining twins.

"Shhh!" Celeste hissed at her sister, and then got up on her toes to face Trey. "It's none of your business."

Kylie, however, still had a point. There was no reason for them to be called "The Shining." Although both girls had hazel eyes, Kylie was a dirty blonde while Celeste had darker hair and was taller. If you didn't consider the kinship of their facial features, they could have been mistaken for simply being cousins.

"It's true!" Kylie murmured assertively.

"Are you trying to tell me that you don't look like these things?" Trey remarked all-knowingly, shoving his own cell phone in front of Kylie's face with a screen that displayed, low and behold, the screencap from The Shining movie with the two twins standing ominously in the hallway.

"Yes," she sighed, not wanting to put up with any of her classmates' nonsense today. Celeste, in the meantime, tilted the phone in Trey's hands to look at the picture. She had never actually seen the movie before- it was too much before her time- so she was eager to finally get to see what the teasing was all about.

Celeste smirked. "Actually, I thought they looked a little like you."

The entire classroom went silent. That had been the first time either of them had talked back while being bullied.

Celeste held her breath. She knew that she had made a mistake- she wasn't stupid. Being a few months younger than the taller boy, she and her sister were still "only thirteen." Kylie had recognized the error as well; but the younger sister was at least hoping for, in the best-case-scenario, a rare teacher intervention- or, if not, just a stinging comeback from Trey or Tasha, the darker-skinned girl with her iPhone, would do.

But what they got instead was forty times worse. The silence ensued for a few more seconds, but then, everybody- or what seemed like everybody in the moment- in the small, brightly-lit seventh grade homeroom burst into laughter. And it wasn't directed at Celeste's comment- it was at her; and because Kylie was often associated with Celeste whether she liked it or not, they were all laughing at her too.

"Where the heck did you steal that line from?" one boy guffawed.

"How stupid!"

"Poor things!"