Cast
Darling Brown: a socially awkward, bitter bullying victim with a silly name.

Scene
Hey there. So, my name is Darling. Darling Brown. As in, that’s my actual name. As in, two grown adults had the choice of calling me Darling or any other name in the world, and they were like “Honey, what do you think of ‘Darling’ as a name?” “Nailed it, sugarplum!” My name is Darling Brown and here’s my story.

So I’m a twin. God obviously thought this face was too good to squander on just one person. As first born, mum and dad for some mystical reason thought Darling would make an appropriate name for a human being. Want to know what they called my twin? Jessie. That’s awkward, wouldn’t-give-your-dog-this-name “Darling” and ordinary, perfectly-acceptable “Jessie”.

I’ve had a number of theories over the years as to why I got called Darling. A pretty good one is that my parents were trying to answer the question of how a person’s name affects their choices in life, with me as the variable and Jessie as the control. This theory isn’t too bad because Jessie and I are very different people. The other theory I like is that my parents are complete sociopaths whose very existence proves that you should need some kind of license before you’re allowed to breed. You want to know the worst thing? Their names are Claire and John. Why would people with perfectly normal names call their child “Darling”?

If we’re going with the social experiment theory, the first time our names ever really differentiated us was in year two. I dodged the bullet in kindy and year one, but in year two my teacher Ms Ahmed screwed everything for me. She’s reading through the class role for the first time and she’s like, “Andrea? Hi Andrea. Catherine? Hi Catherine. Darling? Daarling?!”

Let me assure you there is nothing more scarring than being laughed at by a room full of eight year olds. Not only did I have the stupid name but everyone called me by it the way Ms Ahmed did. “Daarling,” they said. Daarling. Daarling Daarling Daarling. Jessie was in the same class and of course took the cue to disown me when that happened. “Us? Siblings? Brown’s a common surname.”

It all started right there in year two. Jessie was normal and I became the outsider. Genetically identical but socially opposite. PS fuck you Ms Ahmed.

No matter what I did, those cold and heartless eight year olds didn’t want to be my friend so I did the only thing I could think of to fit in. I pretended to be Jessie. This was pretty easy to pull off – our voices and appearances are identical.

But the world didn’t need more than one Jessie Brown. Jessie found out about the impersonation after a couple of days and we ended up having a very public argument about our respective identities which culminated in an equally public fist fight. Have any of you guys seen Fight Club? Twins having a punch up must look pretty ridiculous, like Edward Norton hitting himself in the head in Fight Club. Anyways, it ended with me getting in massive trouble with Ms Ahmed (fucking cow), the principal and our parents. Jessie just got a sympathetic squeeze on the arm.

High school was way worse. Can you imagine the teasing? Jessie fit in just as well as anyone else but I was the pariah and only got the dregs as friends. Not that some of those dregs weren’t nice enough people, but they were the dregs and by association I too was dregs. I was a loser with losers as friends...

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