creating a complex and nuanced relationship between ruby and jade pike. their ghostly offscreen theoretical toddler presences…..the golden twin daddy’s girl and black sheep twin scapegoat is HAPPENING. in my mind. i mean it’s kind of an eventuality when you have one parent who is the head of the household who pits you against each other like that. so you’ll wind up with straight-A neurotic eating disorder jade who sees exactly what happens if she isn’t perfect and loveable (shane thinks she’s just the greatest kid around), and then ruby is gonna be stealing schnapps. let’s all kill hayden pike together.
Jade who has $3000 highlights the same shade as her beautiful mother’s, whose nickname is ‘dolly’ because that’s all she’s every been, her mother 2.0, a doll to be dressed up and shown off and picked up and put down and toyed with at leisure, it’s all she’s ever been EXPECTED to be, beautiful and smart and never the protagonist in her own life, just the perfect adornment to whatever man she is dating at the moment. She would win every girlfriend award and one day every wife award but no award for a person because how can she be a person when she has only ever been a decoration? Arm candy or a magazine cover but never a girl and never a woman and certainly never a person, but does it really matter when she has no idea who she is as a person anyway? Does it matter that the price is soullessness when she’s her mother’s favourite and her father’s pride and her famous uncle’s caricature of what a child is supposed to be? Does it matter she is a treasure instead of a truth when she is so beloved? Better to be a product than a problem, to swallow cotton in place of calories, to pay the price of her health when the reward is love, adoration, attention, praise. After all, she looks so beautiful in her father’s shadow and her boyfriend’s wake- it hides the intelligence in her eyes and the fire in her belly. Better to be adored and unknown, perfect and poisoned, a mirror reflecting all the greatness around her back on those who cast it on her surface, than to be herself and be found wanting. Better to be fake and adored than real and despised.
Better to be Jade than Ruby.
Ruby who could never keep her dresses clean when they were little or her nose out of a scandal as they got older, who mom sighed at and dad yelled at, who uncle Shane had never understood and never wanted to because she never took to perfection well enough for a man obsessed with it. Ruby whose eyes were as bright as her twin’s but who never learned how to dim that light into a sparkle and instead grew it into a flame, who stayed whip smart and defiant, who refused get with the program, refused to mould herself a place in the family around Arthur (perfect Arthur) and behind their father or content herself to a life forgotten like little Amber. Ruby who shoved kids on the playground years before she shoved herself out of Uncle Shane’s circle because she couldn’t play nice with anyone, least of all those who treated her as lesser, who saw an inconvenience in a force of nature contained only by skin. Ruby who cut her own hair with safety scissors and dyed it with kool aid, jagged and uneven and purple, who relished it because she could no longer be confused with Jade, even though it was already impossible because Ruby was always too much a person to ever be a doll and her twin had never been anything but. Ruby who refused to be toyed with or shown off or anything less than herself, who was never gentle enough, poised enough, well behaved enough for their parents, whose personhood spilled out of her so completely that sometimes it spilled onto Jade, stained her enough that she got in trouble too. Ruby whose fire was so bright it’s sparks burned her twin no matter how hard Jade tried to avoid them, but whose love was strong enough it soothed the hurts. Ruby who Jade sometimes thought must have stolen her soul in the womb they once shared because Ruby was twice the person she’d ever be and ever had been, could rage harder and love harder and care more than Jade ever had, about anything. Ruby who she hated sometimes as much as she could hate anything but loved more than anyone else too, because they shared the same face and none of the same fire. Ruby who is the person Jade might try to be if she ever learned how to be a person at all, the one being who never treats her like a commodity and who despises her for being one anyway. Ruby who Jade loves simply because sometimes it seems like no one else does. Ruby whose hatred for her grows the more everyone else loves her, who adores her only when others don’t, who draws her into drunken shenanigans and matchless pranks, who has so long been immune to the sting of disapproval she doesnt notice let alone care that it cuts her twin right down to the bone. After all, people don’t feel the pain of toys, a doll bleeds stuffing while a girl bleeds blood, and Ruby doesnt bleed at all, while the lecture from their father cuts Jade to her core, and it’s all Ruby’s fault even when it isn’t.
Yes, Jade thinks, even as Ruby laughs and cries and screams and eats and runs and plays and lives, better to be fake and infallible than real and unloved. Better to be Jade than Ruby. Better to be unhappy than unheld, to be occasionally pushed aside instead of eternally pushed away, to be unhealthy than unwanted.
Better to be Jade than Ruby. At least in the Pike household.
