SPOTLIGHT Read Free

growing up together being their parent’s only children, and when they were younger they could just about read each other’s minds and finish each other’s sentences. At one point they had been inseparable much to the chagrin of their parents who insisted that they had to learn to make friends of their own. Every night they’d lie awake discussing their shared dream: to be famous actresses in New York City. However, as they’d entered their teenage years, things had drastically changed between them.
     
    Where Abby was meek and shy and awkward, Angelica was boisterous and free-spirited, a natural-born performer. Never was this more apparent than when they reached high school. They had spent less and less time together, understood each other less and less, and every conversation between them would eventually turn into a misunderstanding. The simple fact was they had reached an age when they were trying to define themselves as individuals, Abby would understand later, but everyone in South Meadow viewed them as an interchangeable two-some. Eventually they barely spoke, the rift between them was so great and it was then that tragedy struck.
     
    They had been gifted a new car for their sixteenth birthday and the car crash had happened only two weeks later. Angie had been driving alone, they’d told her, on a winding road in the rain, too fast. The officials had said she must have lost control and driven into the divider, but no one could really say why. Angie had died on impact.
     
    Abby always thought she’d know if anything happened to her sister, she believed they had some intrinsic connection, some soul-tying telepathy. But on the day of the accident there had been nothing. No strange feeling, no hint that where there were two there suddenly was now only one. Abby had been away at theater camp that day and she only knew something had happened to her twin when her parents had come to pick her up. She could remember the pair of matching grief-stricken expressions her mother and father had worn that day and for a long while after. Abby knew it must have pained them to see her out of the corners of their eyes and glimpse both the child they had lost and the child they had remaining in one face.
     
    Still Abby’s parents had stayed strong for her sake. They had told her that she could miss her twin sister Angie, but she had to understand it was God’s plan, His will. For a long time Abby couldn’t understand, she refused to. She held tight to her sorrow, her regret, her guilt. She and Angie had come into the world together, but they had been as far apart as two people could be when Angie had left it. There was a part of herself that Abby would never be able to forgive for that.
     
    Would it ever be gone, that feeling that crept up when she was alone? And now she was truly alone in this crazy, whirling, unpredictable big city.
     
    Her thoughts were raging and wild, but when she spoke out loud to her reflection in the mirror she was surprised to find she sounded strong and calm.
     
    “I’m not alone. I know that, Lord. I know that You are always with me, guiding me.”
            She tried a smile, watched it stretch and meet uneven in the middle of the mirror where the partition fell. Already she felt her agitation calming. She had a gift, a blessing in the form of her talents, and finally after all these years, she could pursue the opportunity to use it. It was a weight, certainly, to bare the load of two people’s dreams on her singular back. But it was nothing she couldn’t handle.
     
    Abby smiled again, a genuine, heart-warming smile and then she imagined Angie smiling back.
     
    “I’m never alone,” Abby said.
     
    Confidence restored, she wiped away the tears that had slipped past her defenses. As she headed back out into the cramped living room to continue unpacking, she could hear classical music playing in the next apartment over. The song sounded familiar, a slow, swelling piano