The Pratts of Pineville #T

 "Hi.  I'm Darlene and I am nine years old.  This is my brother."

"Hello.  I'm Darren.  I am nine, too."

"Oh, you are twins. How adorable!"`

There is an opinion that will change in less than a week. Most people who know them will say, "Darlene, indeed.. She's no darling, that's for sure. And Darren will dare anything, so long as it's ornery."

 Darlene and Darren are the first offspring of the Rev. Mr. Edwin Pratt and his lovely wife, Samantha. The twins have a sister, Mindy, age four. Technically, Darlene is the first-born of the Pratt children, being four minutes older than her brother. Pratt is their name, and mischief is their game.

Darlene's strawberry blonde hair is almost always in pigtails. Her complexion, to use a cliche, is peaches and cream, but that she wears a permanent Swiss dotted ribbon of rusty freckles across the bridge of her nose and under the eyes to the very corners of those bright blue orbs. A level could be placed across the tops of the heads of these two when they are standing side by side and the bubble would fall strictly inside the lines. It is likely, though, that in a couple of years Darlene will be the taller, but that probably won't last very long.

Darren has distinct double cowlicks and some wag said, not in the hearing of the Reverend, that those were exactly where the boy's horns would sprout in a couple of years, at the rate he was going. Of Darlene, well, she already has horns but keeps them pulled back in braids. Darren's band of freckles is the mirror image of his sister's. The eyes are the exact same shade as Darlene's baby blues.

Despite their similarities in appearance, however, these children were possessed (someone once said, "No kidding!") of two distinct personalities. Prepare to be surprised. Darlene was by far the more rambunctious, the one more likely to engage in physical altercations, and the one chosen first in most pick-up games on the playground or in a vacant lot. By contrast Darren was more the contemplative type, likely to be in a corner with a book, sometimes even a dictionary or encyclopedia. He is the kid who is picked on by the playground bullies. In particular, Darren has one nemesis who persists in annoying the lad, though this exchange once took place when Darlene was with her brother.

Clifton: "One of these days soon I will catch you when your sister's not around and I'll beat the crap out of you."

 Darlene: "You do that and when I catch up with you I will break every bone in your ugly body."

Clifton has confined his pestering to verbal taunts, a circumstance which will doubtless prevail.

 ©2017  David W. Lacy