The sun streamed vibrantly through the gap in between the window and the curtain. Emily jumped up out of bed immediately like she did every morning, excited to see the new day with all its opportunities and promises. But then she saw her dark side sitting in the corner.  

She blinked, shocked. Her dark side must have shown up while Emily was asleep—that was how it usually happened with girls.

Her dark side stirred, and her silver and white wings—wings? was that normal?—parted slowly from where they folded over her head and arms. Where Emily's pajamas were blue with gold stars, her dark side had black with white stars. Her skin was smooth grey instead of fair, and her hair was black instead of golden-blonde, but otherwise she looked just exactly like Emily. Her green eyes, her snub little nose, the way her long wavy hair always seemed thicker on one side.  She was just a twelve-year-old girl like Emily.  A twelve-year-old girl with wings and grey skin, that is. 

“Hello,” said Emily.  

Her dark side looked at her.  

“Do you speak?”

She shook her head.

“Only when something is super important, right?”

She shrugged.

“Okay...well...I guess you're supposed to follow me.”

She stared.

Emily opened her door to go downstairs, and her dark side got to her feet and followed.

Emily was startled at how real her dark side was. She could hear her on the carpet stairs behind her, could feel the cold radiating off of her.

An amazing smell drifted from the kitchen. Emily noticed her dark side sniffing the air. Mama had given her the whole lecture last week and said the other sides didn't eat, but Emily's dark side looked awfully hungry.

The dark side trailed listlessly into the kitchen after Emily, and Emily glanced at her mother, standing at the stove and humming softly to herself as usual. Her mother was a bright side like Emily, so that meant she had her own dark side, too, which Emily couldn’t see or hear or feel. Dad was a dark side with a bright side, so he didn't understand as well.
“Good morning, Emily,” trilled her mother. Emily managed a weak smile, self-conscious all of a sudden. She wasn't sure if she should tell her mom about her dark side yet. Mama had said it was a private thing.

Emily sat quietly at the table and waited for her pancakes and bacon, and her dark side looked around uncertainly before sitting behind her on the floor.

When Emily got dressed later, her dark side stood by, leaning casually against the wall, and when Emily looked at her again she was wearing the same clothes Emily had changed in to--still muted, that is.  Her puffy pink jacket was grey, her blue jeans black, her yellow high-tops white.

On the way to school, the dark side walked close to her, looking around vaguely at all the people, silvery wings opening and closing slowly like someone angrily clenching and unclenching their fists.

In school, she held on to Emily's bookbag as she navigated the crowds in the hallway.  They couldn’t get too far apart, Emily realized, or some strange force would push her back until she was within range again.  She felt the tiniest of shudders every time someone passed through her dark side. 

All throughout the day, Emily's friends asked her what was wrong, though she couldn't tell them without being weird, and her bright side teachers gave her that knowing adult look that made Emily uncomfortable.  She inquired in Health class if it was normal for other sides to have wings, since that was a class she could ask questions like that in, and dark side Miss Seymour seemed a bit intrigued.

“Why do you ask, Emily?  I don’t mean to pry, but does your dark side have wings?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I don’t know if it’s normal, to be honest.  I’ve never heard of that before.”

The other students in class, dying for something to talk about, immediately started talking about that, and Emily shrank in her seat, wishing she’d gone home to look it up on the Internet instead.  Her dark side shifted where she sat in front of Emily's desk, looking up at her and shaking her head.  They both sighed in unison.  

By the time the bell rang to go home, Emily felt rather weary from the tight self-consciousness she felt every time someone so much as looked in her direction.  She trudged out, and as she stepped into the road the dark side suddenly grabbed the hood of her pink jacket and yanked her back so forcefully she almost choked and very nearly fell over.

Emily glared at her.

“What was that for?”

A car shot past like a bullet.

The dark side stared at her.

Wide-eyed and a little frightened, Emily turned away.

Over the next few weeks, Emily began to realize something.  Three things, really.

One:  Her mother somehow knew about her dark side.  Emily wasn’t sure when she had figured it out, but she treated her with patience and kindness no matter what was going on.  When Emily got upset—which she had never done before the winged thing had appeared—the dark side would open and close her wings, like a cat swishing its tail in agitation, or get up and pace the room, running her fingers over everything, or simply go upstairs and sit there against the railing until Emily came for her.  Watching her do this made Emily feel even worse for some reason.

Two:  Her dark side had wings for a reason.  The first night, before Emily fell asleep, the dark side shook her shoulder frantically until finally Emily sat up, irritated and sleepy.  The dark side tapped the window, looking at her, until she got up and opened it.

Seeming completely relieved, the dark side lay down at the end of Emily’s bed where she’d taken to sleeping, curling up into a ball like a big dog, silver wings covering almost her entire body, and went back to sleep.

Emily glanced towards the window, at a loss, but eventually shrugged and went to sleep too.

In her dreams, she saw her dark side crawl out the window and jump—and then they were one, and the wind caught her wings and she flew as talented as any eagle, all night, in the clouds, over cities shimmering like light on a rippling river, over forests murky and deep with the sleep of animals, over the ocean, wind in her hair and streaming coolly past her face and through feathers like metallic water. 

There was no bright side or dark side.  Emily was Emily.  Whole and complete.  A twelve-year-old girl who was simply herself, who had both joy and pain in her life.  And she could fly.

Finally, as the sun was turning the dark blue world golden and pink again, she flew home through the gathering morning clouds and came back through the window, and she split in half again—Emily was her bright side self and her dark side was a scary thing with wings that followed her around. 

This happened every night Emily opened the window—although sometimes the heater was on and it had to be closed.  On those nights, Emily dreamed normal dreams.

Three—and this was the most important thing:

Emily’s dark side could see danger.

A week after the dark side showed up, Emily began to notice things.

She noticed the boy who sat alone at lunch, doing his homework.  She noticed the girl who flinched every time someone raised a hand around her, as if she thought the hand would come down on her.  She noticed the few teachers who sat in their rooms during their free time, not socializing like the rest, just sitting alone.  She noticed the people who looked like they were always sick, or always on the verge of crying, or the ones constantly angry in a desperate, exhausted way.

One day Emily was walking up the concrete steps of the school entrance.  A breeze unusually warm for November was blowing.  She wondered if she had picked up her homework from her desk.

The dark side was beside her.  She was emitting a cold colder than usual, and her face was concerned.  Emily glanced at her, and the dark side paused and pointed over in a different direction.

Emily turned to see the same bright side boy who sat on the steps every day, eating a snack cake and gazing off into the distance.  His name was Jason.

Emily’s dark side suddenly reached out and grabbed Emily’s hand in a death grip, and what felt like ice ran up Emily’s arm, so painfully cold she couldn’t move.

What the heck are you doing?  she thought, but no sound came out of her mouth.

Emily was no longer standing on the school steps, but sitting on the hard floor of a garage.  It was warm and humid.  Something wet ran down her face, and, having no control over anything whatsoever, she felt herself scrambling backwards, into a shelf, knocking something over.  A man was yelling.  Abraham.  Something struck her face.  The yells were almost incomprehensible.  Never in this house, you hear me?  I don’t care how important you think it is.  No guilt trips in this house, you hear me?  She was suddenly on her feet, and she ran, and ran, and ran.

And then she was on the steps again, and her dark side was standing back, watching her.  The boy still rested nonchalantly on the cool steps of the school.  He took a placid bite of his chocolate snack cake.  Not a problem in the world.

The dark side tilted her head at Emily.  Emily looked at her blankly for a moment before stepping down to sit next to the boy.

“Hello, Jason.”

He made a confused face.

“Um, hey, Emily.  What’s up?”

“Not much.  I just came to…see if you’re okay.”

“If I’m okay?  What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You looked kind of sad.  I just wanted to know if you needed, like, help or anything.”

“Nah.  I’m fine.  But thank you.”

“No problem.”

She jumped up to go, and Jason stared after her, bewildered.  Emily didn’t know it, but no one had ever come up to Jason to ask if he was all right while he was sitting there on the school steps in the morning.  Not once.

After that, Jason and Emily began to talk more, and Emily found she had a new best friend.

Emily wasn’t sure what to think of all this, but over time her dark side showed her person after person who needed help, and although most of them rejected it, sometimes Emily could tell she had made them a little more at ease.  The things the dark side showed her weren’t absolutely horrifying, but sometimes they made her shiver.

But, as months passed, they did get scarier.  As she was walking with her father one day to the library, Emily’s dark side pointed out a woman standing on the sidewalk.  The bitter cold flowed through Emily again, and this time what she saw made her want to puke.

A bus, white and streaked with shiny yellow, came out of nowhere just as the woman stepped off the sidewalk.  Emily couldn’t look away from where she lay crumpled on the ground afterwards no matter how hard she tried.

When that had ended, a strange sense of déjà vu came over Emily.

A bus, streaked with shiny yellow, came out of nowhere just as Emily pulled the woman back by her jacket hood.  Just like the dark side had done for her the very first day she’d been around.

“You saved my life!” the woman gasped.  “Oh, my…”

The woman was speechless, and Emily smiled cheerily and ran to catch up with her father.

Their shoes echoed sharply on the sidewalk, empty now that they were on this street.  Emily’s father smiled at her as she caught up, but he said nothing.  He was cool like that.  He might have been a dark side, but he wasn’t entirely different from Emily—he was her father, after all.  They both loved to read, and so they went to the library regularly.

Out of nowhere, Emily’s dark side was standing beside her and reaching for her hand.  Again?  The dark side waited patiently.  

Emily made an apologetic face and shook her head slightly and stepped away, not wanting to see anything more at the moment, but the dark side moved closer to her anyway, and whispered something in her ear.  Her breath was warm.

Emily had known her dark side would say something eventually, but she had expected her voice to be as harsh and dramatic as death, a voice pronouncing the worst news imaginable and filling Emily with dread.

But no.  She had Emily’s light-hearted voice, without a hint of murder or chaos lurking in it.

“Sometimes,” said the dark side, “something good can come out of something bad.”

Emily considered this.  A rainbow after a devastating storm, she thought.  Hope in the midst of fear.  One random thing left after a fire that becomes sentimental.  One person who survived something with you who grows to be your closest friend.  Seeing something bad and being given the opportunity to do something instead of letting it happen.

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Emily replied softly after a moment.  Her dark side smiled.