Forty-Four Pairs of Twins, and Only Three Look Alike

Anyone who turned up hoping for double vision was disappointed. When ABC News reported on the class in 2018, only three of the forty-four pairs were identical. The rest were what most twins are: siblings who were made to share a birthday cake and have been negotiating ever since.

I have one child applying to things and have aged visibly. One essay, one deadline, one portal password nobody in the house can remember. At New Trier, forty-four families got two of everything on the same deadline, plus a question a single child never faces: are you going where your twin is going?

They answered it in June 2020, which nobody would have chosen. A twin in the class, writing for the school paper, went round asking the other multiples where they were headed. The headline gave it away: most were going to different places.

Not her. She and her brother were both going to Cornell, each, she reported, having arrived at that decision fairly independently. I believe this completely, in the way I believe two teenagers who come downstairs in the same shirt and say they didn't coordinate.

Another twin was adamant about the opposite. He wanted a different college from his brother, not out of any grudge, but because he thought he'd lean on him too much. That's a high school senior diagnosing his own dependence and booking the cure, which is more self-knowledge than I had at thirty. Both plans were made with the pandemic leaving the fall a guess.

Final score for the class of 2020: one world record, three identical pairs, most of the eighty-eight heading in different directions, and one pair heading to the same campus and insisting it was a coincidence.

And eventually, for most of those families, the holidays: two kids at two colleges, two flights, landing at two different times at two ends of the airport. After eighteen years, the first thing the twins didn't have to share was the ride home.