KIRAN WHEELER
Av e r a g e
O
ur story begins with Mrs. Ellie Smith standing on the front stoop of her perfectly average house, which was surrounded by other perfectly average houses, creating an overwhelmingly average cul-de-sac in a repressively average neighborhood. Ellie’s plain brown eyes were focused on something at the end of the court: a garishly yellow school bus, which had paused to regurgitate high schoolers onto the street. Even from this distance, it was easy for Ellie to tell which two kids belonged to her; Jack and Julia emerged from the bus walking right beside each other, their steps equidistant and perfectly timed, like a metronome. Jack and Julia were twins, as anyone could see, though they were two different people, which was easy to forget. They had the same dark brown hair, lean frames, and, most extraordinary of all, light gray eyes, like sunlight filtered through a glass of water, or a chunk of quartz crystal. “How beautiful!” everyone always said. “Your kids are so lucky to have such incredible eyes!” Ellie would always smile politely and thank them, but she secretly hated her children’s eyes for the curious stares they elicited. No one asked Jack and Julia what they thought of their eyes. Although, looking back on it, it’s perfectly possible that someone had indeed asked them, and had only received blank gray stares in response. “Come on,” Ellie muttered, waving her hand in the universal motion for hurry up, but she knew it was useless. Jack and Julia didn’t hurry unless they wanted to; they didn’t do anything unless they wanted to. They two of them reached the plain blue front door of their house and stepped inside to the foyer when they were hit with the sharp smell of cleaning products, different from the usual scent of nothing. “Clorox,” Jack said immediately. “Mom’s been cleaning.” “Someone important is coming to dinner,” agreed Julia. Ellie had indeed been cleaning for more than usual; someone important was coming to dinner. “Someone important is coming for dinner,” she told her children, but, of course, they knew that already. The twins dropped their identical backpacks beside the table, mechanically ate more food than an average person would have thought humanly possible, and
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