Soulmate: Chapter 1

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The firstborn gets the best pickings. My sister grabbed our mother's petite, hourglass figure and her striking face. She also took our father's fair skin and curly strawberry hair, leaving me with the kind of thin, gangly height that required big feet to match. From our mother, I gained a uniform brownness of hair and eyes that made her quick face luminous, but only made mine extraordinarily ordinary.

I always wanted to be someone else. Not necessarily a Beautiful Someone Else. An Interesting Someone Else would have been fine. And a Sisterless Someone Else would have been even better. Stealing the best genetic material was only the start of it; my sister got whatever else I wanted too. I eventually decided I had to do more than escape comparison. I had to escape her.

On the morning that it happened, I woke up with a different reason for wanting to be someone else. That morning I would gladly have swapped places with the cat next door. I had the mother of all headaches, following the mother of all parties.

I struggled out of bed and stumbled across the landing to the bathroom, ignoring the empty bottles, empty glasses and snoring bodies littering the upstairs of my cousin Georgina's house. The air was stale with the musky odour of sweat, wine, beer and garlic bread. After picking my way swiftly down the narrow hall to the tiny bathroom, I threw open a window. The sudden dazzle of bright spring sunshine took me by surprise. I lost my balance and nearly tumbled into the tub, startling awake the big, square-set guy in a rugby shirt and black jeans who'd been sleeping there. He yawned and scratched his close-cropped black hair.

The light made my head instantly start to throb. I flung open the pine cupboard above the sink, and started rummaging through an assortment of malaria tablets, bug repellents and travel sickness pills. I couldn't find any headache tablets.

I leaned out of the bathroom, and pitched my voice towards the open bedroom door at the other end of the hall. "Georgina? Do you have any Paracetamol? Aspirin? Arsenic?"

The denizens of the hallway groaned and grumbled at me. With a squeak of trainers against enamel, the bath guy sat up.

"She's not there, love."

"What?"

Ignoring the panic in my voice, he gave me an appraising look, his bloodshot eyes coming into focus. "Ah, yes, Maddy, the mad American," he murmured.

I half-nodded. 'Maddy, the mad American' was the way my cousin always introduced me, promoting my lively personality to compensate for my very ordinary looks. Judging by this guy's very direct gaze, Georgina had done a very good job at marketing me. Normally I'd be flattered, and coming from a guy with cauliflower ears and a hard beer gut, I might even be flattered briefly, but I was desperate to know whether 'not here' meant that Georgina had just popped out to supermarket for lots of strong coffee, the makings of a full English breakfast, the Sunday papers, and some absolutely essential painkillers.

"Where is she?" I asked.