Have you ever been so close to someone that you could wah-wah in whale song?

I have. Well, sort of, anyway.

When I say wah-wah, I mean communicate, but not in a normal way. In a special telepathic way that wah-wahs out of your brain and into theirs, or wah-wahs out of their brain into yours. Come to think of it, it’s nothing like whale song. I don’t know why we ever thought it was, but when we were little that’s what Eleni called it, and it stuck. Look, we were about five at the time, and when you’re five, the craziest nonsense makes perfect sense.

What our five-year-old brains were trying to say was this: sometimes two human beings know each other so well they can talk in a language that isn’t made up of words. It isn’t made up of eye squints, hand twists, or face gymnastics, either. No. This communication is much more wooooohhh and spooky than that (just without the aliens and ghosts).

You can only wah-wah with someone you’re super-ridiculously-mega-extra-seriously close to, and for me, that person is Eleni.

She’s my cousin, but the word cousin needs an update, if you ask me. You know how some languages have tons of words to describe one thing? I looked up “Eskimo words for snow” once, and found out that the Sami people of Scandinavia and Russia use around 180 snow-and-ice-related words, and 300 words for types of snow, snow conditions, and snow tracks. Even more mind-blowing, they use around a thousand words for reindeer.

A thousand words!

FOR REINDEER!

I was so amazed by that, I had to write some down in my notebook.

Sami words for specific types of reindeer:

• short fat female

• pregnant female

• female that has not given birth to a calf that year

• female that lost her calf in late spring

• female that can never have a calf

• miserable, skinny female without a proper coat

• miserable, skinny male without a proper coat

• young, healthy male matured enough to accompany his mother in difficult conditions

• dark yellowish-gray male with brown belly

• males with no antlers, cut antlers, many-branched antlers, quivering antlers, etc.

• lazy old hand-biters

• flying red-nosed present deliverers

(I might have made those last two up.)

So it’s strange that there’s only one word for cousin. Cousins aren’t all the same—there are degrees of cousin-ness. Some are close as twins, like Eleni and me, and some are people you barely know. Amy Mitchell in my class has cousins she’s only met once because they live in Germany.

Weird.

The only person I know who has more first cousins than us is Mohammed Rashid. We have twenty-eight and he has forty or fifty—he doesn’t know the exact number—but his are spread out all over the world, and ours all live in the same five-mile radius of South London. I bet if we could, we’d all live in the same house. Maybe even the same room.

When I grow up, I’m going to write dictionaries and invent a thousand words for cousin. These are just a few of the very complicated rankings:

Degrees of cousin-ness

Categories:

• Cousin on mom or dad’s side

• Older or younger than you

• Degree of hairiness

Subcategories:

• How close they live to you

• How often you see them

• How well you get along

• How many games you make up together

• How likely you are to win at those games

Likability:

• Do they fire Nerf guns at you/stick gummy bears in your shoes/give good birthday presents/let you watch stuff you’re not allowed to watch when they’re babysitting at your house?

• Are they a bit strange, but you need to be nice to them or you’ll get yelled at?

• Are they useful to know later in life, like Vasillis, who’s a locksmith?

As for Eleni, she’s the closest a cousin could possibly be. Closer than anyone could be. I mean, if it’s possible to have a twin who isn’t really your twin—like not from the same egg or mother, but a twin deep down in your heart and your cells and your soul, or something—then Eleni is mine.

We don’t look like twins. My hair’s dark brown, but it looks a little reddish in the sun. It’s also thick and wavy, and even though Mom makes me put it up, it still gushes to my waist in a hair waterfall. Eleni’s hair is light brown, and it’s so fine and straight and thin, it’s more like hair dribbling out of a faucet. She has a small, pointy nose and huge hazel-green eyes, so if you ask me, she looks a little like a bush baby. My eyes are chocolate brown, I’ve just gotten new glasses, and I look more like a human being. I’m strong and healthy, but Eleni’s weak and as skinny as a broom because of her complication. That’s one of the reasons we’re so close, but I’ll get to that later.

So we might not look identical, but that doesn’t mean anything. We’re twins anyway. And we need each other for all kinds of things. Eleni’s terrified of the dark and of spiders, and she freaks out over fireworks, thunder, and the sound of bathwater being sucked down the drain. She makes me go into rooms and turn lights on, do spider checks under the beds, and let the water out of the tub for her so she can run away to a safe place with her hands over her ears, yelling.

And when I worry too much about the bad things in the world, she reminds me of some of the good things, like pizza with pineapple, snowy days, and watching cartoons in pajamas, to make me feel better. We have notebooks full of them, just in case, and write lists of them all the time, so we have them whenever we need them.

So I make sure the bath monster doesn’t suck Eleni down the drain, and she reminds me that because the world contains hopscotch, hummingbirds, and brownies, everything is going to be just fine.

What I’m trying to say is that we look out for each other. We always have. And we always will. At least that’s what I thought. But then something bad happened, which led to some really bad stuff happening, and then I did something that changed everything.

After that, we forgot we were basically twins, and that we were once so close we could wah-wah in whale song.

And it all started with the picnic.