Free The Convent by Maureen McCarthy

she’ll be happy. And I’ll be doing the job that I agreed to do and … that’s important.
    â€˜Tell me stuff,’ Stella murmurs sleepily.
    â€˜Too late.’
    â€˜Just tell me anything.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜I like listening to your voice.’
    â€˜Well, I don’t want to talk.’
    â€˜Hate it when you go all quiet on me, Peach.’
    â€˜Please shut up, Stella. I have to get up early in the morning.’
    â€˜It’s just a stupid old boring cafe job.’
    â€˜But it’s a five-minute bike ride and I need money for the trip.’
    â€˜Have you guys bought your tickets yet?’
    â€˜No, we haven’t and please … shut up.’
    â€˜Okay.’
    The full blast of the fan is good on my freshly showered skin. I watch the way it makes the curtains flutter in the dark and I am lightly and fleetingly happy.
    It is too hot for even a sheet and we are both spreadeagled on our backs as far away from each other as we can get. My right arm is above my head and my left dangles over the edge of the bed. Just as well I’m thin or there wouldn’t be room for us both. Within a minute I hear my sister’s deep, even breathing. I turn over on my side and close my eyes.
    Stella and I are so different physically that it is funny. People who don’t know the situation just about fall over when I introduce her as my sister.
    â€˜ What? ’ Their mouths open in disbelief. ‘But you don’t look anything like each other!’
    Then come the wisecracks about Mum having had a fling around the time Stella was conceived, because oddly enough Mum and I look pretty similar, which is funny, really, because it’s me who isn’t the blood relation.
    I was adopted as a baby when my parents thought they couldn’t have any children of their own. They had their names down for another child when Mum became pregnant ‘out of the blue’, as she likes to say. Stella came out looking just like Dad, a bit stocky, olive skin, with dark eyes and thick curly black hair.
    Sometimes we don’t bother to tell people the truth. We just smile at each other and let them rave on. Of course, all our friends know. Most of them were initially intrigued about what it felt like not to be ‘real’ sisters. I stopped getting annoyed about what that question implied a long time ago. Stella too. We figure we were so damned lucky to get each other that all that crap isn’t important. Everyone has family issues, why should we be immune? When our friends met our parents and saw that we live in a normal family – that me being adopted is not an issue – they soon lost interest.
    My hair is naturally blonde and wavy, and although Mum and I have quite differently shaped faces, and her skin is fairer than mine, I pass as her birth daughter without comment, because I’m fine-boned too, and we both have blue eyes. I’m tall for a girl: 172 centimetres when I last measured myself.
    Stella was pretty too, but in a completely different way. She still is, of course, only it’s getting hard to see it. Her coal-black hair, bright-dark eyes and husky voice make you think of Spain (even though none of us has been there!). People pick up on her warm, gutsy vibe as soon as they meet her, and they either love it or avoid her like the plague. Stella wears her heart on her sleeve. It’s just the way she is. She is fantastic and ridiculous in equal measure. We’re so close that she tells me I am her other side, the ethereal, cerebral guardian angel who lives in her head. If that is true, then she has to be my other side; the tempestuous, brave, wild side that I’m too uptight to let out most of the time.
    People have all these strange ideas about what being adopted must be like. For the record, let me just say that I don’t sit around yearning to meet my real parents, nor have I even wondered much about them. I don’t spend time