A young woman triumphantly held out her newly-finished script for her twin sister to see. Chloe Webber, 18-years-old. She wore a black sweater, tracksuit pants and beret, a stark contrast to her twin’s brightly colored dress. She also had long black hair which covered her left eye.
“This is it, Mary,” Chloe beamed, “this is the play that’ll get me accepted into my dream drama school!”
Chloe’s sister looked up unenthusiastically from her 8-bit video-game system. Maryanne-Susan Webber, 18-years-old and wearing a short, viola odorata-printed purple dress and purple round-framed glasses. Her hair was the same color as Chloe’s, but it was cut much shorter.
Maryanne paused her platformer game and looked her twin in the eye. “That’s great, Chloe,” she sighed, “…Why are you telling me this, exactly?”
“Don’t you see?!” Chloe exclaimed. “This script is gonna be my ticket to greatness!”
Maryanne rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say, sis…”
“Oh, come on, Mary,” Chloe sighed, “I read all those stories you wrote! The least you can do is read my script in return!”
“You told me my stories were garbage,” Maryanne pouted.
“You asked for my genuine opinion,” Chloe chuckled. “If you can’t take criticism, why even ask me for my opinion?” She paused. “Actually, I kinda want your help with my play…”
Maryanne stood up. “You want MY help?” she laughed, “This must be serious!”
“Well,” Chloe began, “my play has two leads…”
“You want me to play one of your characters, sis?”
Chloe kneeled before her sister and put her hands together.
“Please, Mary,” she begged, “applications for drama school close next week! This is my one chance!”
“You can count on me, Chloe!”
Chloe handed Maryanne the script she had spent all year writing. “You’re going to be playing the part of Jacqueline, ok?”
Maryanne flipped through her sister’s script. “Yeah, yeah,” she said, “you can count on me!”
“Make sure you memorize all the lines and directions,” Chloe instructed. “Oh, and thanks, by the way,” she smiled.
That night, while sitting up outside of the covers on the bottom of a bunk bed, Maryanne read through her sister’s play while Chloe slept above her. Maryanne grabbed a pen from inside a jar next to her bed and took it to the script.
“Jacqueline’s so boring!” Maryanne whispered. “She’s just an ordinary girl! Chloe really expects me to play this?” Maryanne finished scribbling on her twin’s magnum opus. She smiled triumphantly. “There,” she exclaimed, “much better!”
Maryanne put the pen back where she found it, resting the script beside it and pulling the black duvet over her see-through nightgown.
“Chloe’s gonna be so proud of me…” she murmured, as she slowly drifted to sleep.
Chloe awoke the next morning to find her sister had already left their bedroom. She quickly pushed the bed sheets off her body, sliding recklessly down the bunk bed ladder and quickly grabbing her sweater and pants to pull over her rather excessive scarlet lingerie. She adjusted her beret and bolted out the bedroom door, running downstairs to prepare breakfast as soon as possible.
Today was the day. Chloe Webber was going to get into her dream drama school! Nothing on Earth could stop her now! She quickly withdrew a box of breakfast cereal from a cupboard and stuffed her hand in the opening, shoving mounds of food into her mouth as fast as she could, before running to the refrigerator, grabbing a carton of milk and pouring it down her throat. She heard her sister snicker from across the room. She looked over to see Maryanne fully-dressed, standing beside their not-as-fully-dressed father. Paul Webber. A ripped man wearing tight leopard-style boxer shorts.
“Someone’s in a rush!” the man laughed.
“The audition’s today,” Chloe beamed, “staff from the Texas Academy of the Arts are visiting us at school!”
Mr. Webber smiled at his daughter’s enthusiasm.
“If I impress them with my play, they’ll let me enroll in my dream school!”
“Well, good luck, Sweetie!” Mr. Webber smiled. He playfully ruffled Maryanne’s hair as he exited the dining room.
“Hey, sis,” Maryanne smiled, walking over to Chloe, “your play’s pretty boring, don’t’cha think?”
Chloe’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t remember asking for her sister’s opinion. Was this Maryanne’s way of getting back at her for criticizing her stories?
“Yeah, I didn’t think it would be your kind of story…” Chloe sheepishly grinned. “…Have you memorized your lines though? The audition’s only a couple of hours away.”
“Jacqueline’s lame,” Maryanne pouted. “Do you mind if I spice things up a bit?”
Chloe raised an eyebrow. “Improvisation?” she asked. “I suppose the best actors do everything they can to make a character their own, but-”
“That’s great,” Maryanne beamed, “I was thinking I could replace Jacqueline with my own character!”
Chloe folded her arms. “Listen, Mary, you know how much this means to me… I won’t get another chance like this!”
“Alright, alright,” Maryanne sighed, heading to leave the dining room, “I’ve got your back!”
Maryanne closed the front behind her, as Chloe grabbed her schoolbag off the kitchen table and ran after her sister.
The after-school car ride back home was quiet that night. Nothing but the sound of tires rolling on asphalt concrete. Mr. Webber sighed. He took his right hand off the steering wheel and reached into the glove box, taking out a cassette tape and holding it up for his twin daughters in the backseat to see. He wiggled his eyebrows up and down and glanced at the tape.
“Huh,” Mr. Webber smiled, “what about it? It’s your fa-vo-rite song~” he said with a sing-song tone.
Maryanne glanced down at her lap and twiddled her thumbs dejectedly.
“Ok…” Paul huffed, “What about you, Miss Leading-Role?”
“I don’t care, so long as you keep your damn eyes on the road,” Chloe huffed.
“Chloe,” Maryanne piped up, “don’t talk to Dad like that…”
Chloe swung her head around to leer at her sister.
“I’M… I’M PUTTING THE SONG ON!” Mr. Webber blurted out, hastily shoving the cassette into the automobile’s built-in tape deck, as the sudden sound of music broke the silence.
The car was quickly filled with a vocal describing a feeling of confusion in an increasingly confusing world. A world where reason and human decency seemed to be in decline. The somber lyrics were hardly uplifting for Maryanne and Chloe. Paul had always been bad at reading the room (or “the backseat”, as the case may be). He observed his daughters as they slowly sank lower into their seats. He sighed and turned off the song.
“Cheer up, guys,” he smiled. “Let’s get ice-cream!”
Chloe slowly looked up at her father, tears in the corner of her eyes. “Cheer up?!” she bellowed, “Mary RUINED my only chance at getting into TAA!”
Maryanne flinched as she lowered her head in recoil.
“There’s always next year,” Paul reassured Chloe.
“You really think that they’ll accept me after THAT performance?!” Chloe wailed, “Get real, Dad! My life is over…”
Her father slammed his foot on the brake. “Chloe,” he said, placing his hand on the girl’s shoulder, “we’ll get through this. You, me… and Maryanne-Susan.”
Chloe unbuckled her seatbelt and opened the car door to her left.
“Where are you going?!” Mr. Webber called out to his daughter as he rolled down the nearby car door window and stuck his head out of it.
Chloe angrily hopped out of the vehicle and slammed the backseat door behind her, as she started walking along the dirt path just behind the bushes that they had conveniently braked next to.
“I’m just going to walk to clear my head,” Chloe grumpily called back, “home’s only a few miles away, you can leave without me! I’ll catch up!”
Mr. Webber shook his head, “Nuh-uh! It’s late out! You could run into some loiterers or… or some teens publicly playing rap music ever-so-slightly too loud with their boom-y boxes, or whatever! Or, or… help me out, Maryanne-Susan!”
Maryanne nonchalantly lifted her head, “What about panty-raiders?”
“Yeah,” Mr. Webber enthusiastically screamed, “what she said! …So come on, Chloe, get back in the car!”
“Dad, relax,” Chloe solemnly smiled, “I’ll be fine.”
“We should just give her some space for a while…” Maryanne blankly stated.
Paul rolled his eyes, “Alright, if you think it will help… Just call home, if anything goes wrong, ok?” he asked, reaching into the front seats and tossing his 1G brick cellphone to Chloe.
Chloe caught the telephone and sighed as she watched her father slowly drive away with her sister. She put the phone in her handbag and continued to traverse the secluded dirt path.
“Stupid Mary…” she muttered to herself, “stupid Mary, stupid Mary, stupid Mary…”
The girl stopped dead in her tracks as she walked face-first into what seemed to be an invisible wall in the middle of the path. She felt the “wall” with her hands, looking not unalike a street mime in the process. “That’s odd”, she thought, “the path ahead is clear.” After pressing harder against the force in her way, her hand seemed to push through it. Chloe stumbled forward, unprepared for the unseen barricade to give way to her pushing. She didn’t even notice as she fell over onto the other side of the line that was etched into the path.
Her eyes widened as she picked herself off the ground and noticed that her surroundings had completely changed. It was then that she noticed a signpost out of the corner of her eye. She read the words engraved on the sign with confusion.
…
And so, Chloe was never seen by her family again.
“Welcome to Phantasia”
