So I decided to purge myself. “Jake, I gotta tell you something. Back at your apartment, Julie asked if I was gonna sneak another kiss on her. I’m assuming Colin snuck the first one.”

“Really. She told you that?” He bit his lower lip.

“Sorry, man. I know how unnerving that can be.” I remembered how much I’d hated Eric Two once I realized he’d met Maggie. It was invasion of privacy at its worst.

Jake was silent for a long time. I half-expected him to knife me right there in the car. But when he finally spoke, he sounded casual, friendly. “Well, at least it wasn’t more than a kiss.”

Impressive optimism, if you ask me. I mean, we’re all insecure enough when it comes to relationships. But Jake and I had the added complication of Random Identical Guy showing up to steal the girl.

He patted my shoulder. “You’re a good guy, you know that?”

I had a sudden urge to hug him. No one really understands you like these guys do.

“You got a good knife?” he said.

So much for sentimentality. I managed an “um.”

“Look in the glove compartment. There should be a few switchblades. Pick one.”

I chuckled, but, actually, I didn’t have a good knife. So I opened the glovebox and perused the ones he had.

“Listen,” he said, his tone serious, “if you win, I need you to do something for me. I need you to go to Jules and tell her I’m breaking up with her but that I’m too much of an asshole to tell her face to face. I think it will hurt her less.” He stopped abruptly and turned away. After a brief moment, he added, “You got a girlfriend? I’ll do the same for you.”

Now I turned away. “Sure. I can do that,” I told him. But before I could say anything more, I witnessed a red convertible run a stop light and come careening directly at the passenger side of our car. As the front bumper made contact with my door, I had just enough time to marvel at the irony of Jake and I dying together before the airbag turned my world white.

They look fun – airbags – but they’re not. They’re like getting punched in the face by a fat man’s ass. And there’s this acrid taste that you notice once you get over the momentary sensation of suffocating you feel while wrestling with the deflating bag. When I got the damned thing off of me, I glanced out the window at the crumpled hood of the convertible, which was spewing steam or smoke into the air. I looked for the driver, but no one was there. Beyond the car, a limping figure caught my attention. It was Jake, fleeing the scene, running down the sidewalk.

Julie sat on the couch. “So how you been?”

Time to bullshit. “Not bad. I was just up in Seattle last week.”

I expected a follow-up question. You know, something like, “Oh, what were you doing in Seattle?” I was even working on a story about how this guy that Jake and I knew from high school was at U-Dub.

But then she hit me with this: “You gonna try to sneak another kiss from me?”

I had no story for that.

She walked toward me, a mischievous smile on her face. “I know it was you,” she said. And then she moved closer – close enough that I could feel her hot breath on my ear lobe. “You ever do that again and I’ll cut your balls off.” As she disappeared into the back bedroom I was caught somewhere between arousal and shitting my pants.

Part of me wanted to follow her. The other part of me was relieved when Jake came through the front door. “Ready?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Jules, we’re leaving.”

“Okay,” she shouted. “Have fun!”

In the car, Jake pulled out his wallet. “I’m gonna speed,” he said, extracting a driver’s license in the name of one Colin Williams. I considered telling him what Julie told me, but before I could open my mouth, he started up the car and spoke. “So. My mom.”

That changed the mood a little. I offered condolences, which always feel phony to me.

“I was seven, so it was a long time ago.” He put the car in drive. “Not that it didn’t fuck me up.”

I ventured further. “How did she die?”

“Breast cancer. She was 37.”

Maggie lost her mom to cancer soon after we started dating. It’s a shitty way to go – lots of waiting around only to find out your most recent source of hope has evaporated. And then the doctors come in and tell you there’s a chance that this other thing might work. But then it doesn’t work.

I’d much rather get stabbed in the neck in an alley fight.

I remember going to the hospital with Maggie once or twice. Her mom’s room was decked out in the requisite flowers and balloons, marking exaggerated celebrations of small victories. I must have spent a lot of time staring at the walls and ceiling “˜cause I remember this spring-themed strip of wallpaper running along the top of all four walls. It was full of songbirds dispersed amongst foliage and flowering branches. And since it was a repeating pattern (apparently installed by someone who didn’t appreciate continuity), every once in a while you’d see half a bird, its body sliced off with the precision of a utility knife.

When I pointed it out to Maggie, she just smiled and said she loved me. Her mom was dying. An angry outburst would have been justified. In fact, she had every right to lambast me for my insensitivity, to tell me she didn’t care about my quasi-neurotic distaste for asymmetry at the moment.

I tell you, for all my lusting after limber young women like Julie, there was really no beating Maggie. College was draining every last bit of my funds, and with my reduced hours of work, she was pretty much paying our rent. Meanwhile, here I was rewarding her sacrifice with a joyride I’d have to keep a secret.

And I was still kind of picturing Julie naked.

“You always introduce them to friends?” It seemed wiser to me to keep the whole thing a secret.

“No. But I’m not gonna let this stuff dictate my whole life, you know?”

I could respect that.

“Julie’s only met one other, about five months ago, right after we started dating. She liked him a lot; she’ll like you, too. Mainly cuz she’ll think you’re him, but also cuz you’re a nice guy.”

Flattery. Nice touch. But was it just part of a strategy? “Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“How many have you encountered?”

“You’re my fifth.”

Five? Shit. “You must be good.”

“Honestly, I don’t think skill has anything to do with how the fight unravels.” He stopped in front of a small apartment building. “Here’s my place.”

We walked up a flight of stairs and entered a second-floor flat. Lying on a couch facing the door was a beautiful blond-haired girl, who looked asleep. She was tall and leggy, which I could tell because she wasn’t wearing pants. Just an oversized t-shirt and some underwear.

“Julie! Guess who’s here.” Jake picked up a pillow and threw it across the room at her.

She stretched her arms over her head, revealing even more skin. “Don’t you have class?” she said groggily.

“I’m skipping out. My brother’s here.”

She looked past Jake and saw me standing there, waving and grinning apologetically. “Oh shit!” She leapt off the couch and ran into an adjacent room, returning a second later in a pair of jeans, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. “Why didn’t you say something?” she said, throwing the pillow at Jake.

“I did say something. You were sleeping.”

She waved at me sheepishly and said, “Hey, Colin.” Her gaze lingered on me a little longer than I was comfortable with. But she had some stunning eyes. Green. Almost emerald.

Jake slapped Julie’s butt, distracting her from staring at me. “We’re twins, Jules. Get over it.”

“I know. It’s just so weird.”

“You’re telling me,” I said. We locked eyes again. I’ve got to admit, the thought crossed my mind. Hot girl can’t tell you apart from her boyfriend. Opens up some possibilities, you know?

Jake cleared his throat. I wondered if he knew what I was thinking. “Can we borrow your sleds?” he said to Julie.

“Sure. They’re still here.”

“Where?”

“In the basement. You want me to get them?”

He glanced at me and back at Julie. “No, I’ll get “˜em.”

Jake was a talkative fellow – a philosophy major who was disconcertingly unfazed by having a conversation with himself (I mean, me). But he thought it was an amazing coincidence that my first kill was also named Eric. He actually said, “I’ve never heard anything so crazy.”

When I suggested that the fact of our looking alike was stranger than our coincidental names, he said, “You’re not a philosophy major, are you?”

“You find this normal?”

“What’s normal?”

I shot him a look. “Oh, is that how this is gonna go?”

“No, I’m sorry. Look, I’m just happy to have a real experience. I spend all day in classes discussing the meaning of life, but the only time I ever really feel a sense of purpose is when I meet one of us, you know? I suppose it’s somewhat solipsist, but it’s better than talking about Heidegger’s reevaluation of ontology.”

I had no idea what the fuck he was saying.

He seemed to guess as much. “Listen, you wanna have some fun?” He proposed skipping class, taking a joy ride to Mount Hood and sledding down the snow-capped top. “My girlfriend’s got some sleds. We can be back by 7:00.”

Given the fact that we’d be trying to kill each other soon, I didn’t exactly trust him. I told him so.

“Don’t worry, man. Nothing will happen until our second meeting. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, it’s just that, you know, couldn’t you tie me up somewhere and come back tomorrow?”

He bit his lower lip, which reminded me of Maggie. She does that whenever she’s pondering a question. “I never thought about that.”

“Seriously?” Are all philosophy majors like this?

He grabbed me by both shoulders and looked into my eyes. “I swear to you, on my mother’s grave, that I will not harm you.” He let go. “Until tomorrow.”

“Your mom’s dead?”

“Yeah, c’mon. We’ll talk about it in the car.”

His apartment was within walking distance and also, he pointed out, not far from where he went to high school. On the way, he warned me that his girlfriend Julie might call me Colin. “She thinks I have a twin brother who comes to town unannounced every so often.”

I enrolled at Portland State University that fall as a Zoology major. Ornithology classes would have to wait a year or two, my adviser told me. “And you’re really not going to do much with birds until graduate school,” he said. So I joined a birding club. Keep the fire going and all.

Birdwatchers are total dorks. You go on a Saturday outing with them, and they gush over their rare finds.

“Last week, we saw a king eider!”

“Don said he saw a curve-billed thrasher, but Renee swore it was just a California thrasher.”

“Rumor has it there’s a crested caracara near the inlet.”

They go on and on like this all day until somebody spots a plover or a wagtail. Then they go silent and gaze through binoculars, holding their breath. “See the second pine tree to the right of the rocks?” they whisper. “Look at the bushes just in front.”

They utter exclamations in hushed tones until the bird flies away, and then they erupt into noisy chatter like blue jays. Complete and total dorks.

But it’s contagious. And before long, you’ll find yourself peering at the nearest foliage for winged rarities. You’ll feel a certain compulsion to observe every creature that flutters into your line of sight. Because it’s about opportunities. It’s about not missing out.

One afternoon, just before my Biology class, I was sitting on a bench on Park, looking up at the tall evergreens when some guy stepped into my field of vision and said, “Well, well, well.”

I expected to see another birdwatcher, joking about our skyward addiction, but instead I saw myself – or, you know, another one of those guys who looks exactly like me.

This one had the same haircut, the same backpack, and the same haggard look I’d been noticing on my face in recent months every time I looked in the mirror. The look of the overworked college kid.

“This is so weird. We were just discussing Heidegger’s views of ontology in class.”

I hate college kids who try to impress you. “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” I said.

“What?”

“See? I’m smart too.”

He chuckled nervously. “I’m Jake.” He offered his hand, and I shook it. It’s such a surreal experience, shaking your own hand.

“Your name’s not Eric?”

“No.” He turned his head like a confused dog. “It’s Jake.”

“Nice to meet you, Jake. I’m Eric.” We both looked down at our still-shaking hands and pulled away.