Twins Maid Service
Do your dishes need washing?
Do your floors need shining?
Do your gutters need clearing?
Call 1-800-TWINMAIDS
*
"Jared, why are we doing this, again?" Jared looked up at his brother; he didn't expect Derrick to forget so quickly.
"Derrick, do you want to go to Harvard?"
"Well, yeah."
"Ok, then you need to be able to pay for it, correct?"
"Yeah." Derrick sighed. Jared was really good with the condescending tone, and that irritated him to no end, but what could he do?
"Ok, then how can you make the money? First you need to find out what you're good at. What exactly are you good at?"
"Cleaning and schoolwork." Derrick sighed again. If he hadn't had such a crappy childhood with control freaks for a stepfather and stepbrother, then maybe he'd be better at more things. If it weren't for his twin, he had no idea how he'd have made it out.
"Why is that?" Jared asked.
"William's homework and Henry's - I mean, stepfather's housework."
"So what kind of job would you be good at? Just to get you started, before you get a Ph.D. in psych."
"Cleaning houses and, slash or, tutoring."
"Dude, you're talking in note-taking shorthand again."
"Sorry."
"Anyway, do you have any other skills, Derrick?"
"That's why I'm going to Harvard, to learn more skills."
"Is that a no?"
"Yes, it's a no." The phone rang, "That's the business line, right?"
"Yep, what do I tell them, genius?"
*
Derrick and Jared walked down the road to their new client's house, pushing two wheelbarrows filled with cleaning supplies ahead of them. To look at them, it's near impossible to tell that they're brothers, let alone twins.
Derrick is seven feet tall with a set of long, toothpick-like arms and legs. He walks using his whole body, normally exaggerating how far his arms should sway in order to stay balanced. It doesn't always work, he often trips over his own size seventeen feet. His brown hair is kept trimmed, and blue eyes peer from behind wire-rimmed glasses.
Jared is five-foot-four, with fiery red hair and a face covered in freckles. His green eyes are usually bright, but they sometimes give a glimpse of the kind of life he's endured. He's more barrel-shaped where his brother is wiry.
The twins reached the front door of the estate that they were supposed to clean. It was a four-story house, with a weathered looking, previously whitewashed exterior. The hedges were overgrown, though one of them may have once been a topiary elephant. Or maybe a dragon. The windows were dirty, and looked like they had endured years of grubby little fingers pushing them open and closed. The doorknocker was shaped like a lion's head with a ring in his mouth, and Derrick knocked three times.
A young woman opened the door. She was taller than Jared, but shorter than Derrick, and had a clear porcelain complexion with short black hair in a bob. She looked down at Jared and up at Derrick, raised an eyebrow, clearly wondering about the whole "twin brother" thing, but shrugged and let them in, requesting that they leave the wheelbarrows outside. She brought them to the kitchen and disappeared up a staircase.
The kitchen was an absolute wreck. Dishes spilled onto the counter from the sink, food was rotting in the open fridge, the originally white marble tiles were covered in grease and grime, and that was just the beginning.
Derrick began working on the things his brother couldn't quite reach; scrubbing the uppermost cabinets and cleaning the ceiling fan, while Jared was busy with the floor. Derrick climbed down from the stool he was standing on and went to the bucket of soapy water near where Jared was working. He grabbed their only sponge and climbed back to his perch. Jared finished the square he was working on, "Only a hundred and twenty-nine left to go," he said, and reached for the sponge in the bucket.
"Hey Derrick," he called up, "Do you have the sponge?" Derrick, who had tossed it into the sink by this point, answered with a negative. "Any idea of where it went? It didn't just walk away."
"Try the sink, I tossed it in there." Oh, the sink... The dishes hadn't been washed in at least a month, and Jared didn't even want to look at it yet. He did look though, and he picked the sponge up when he noticed what was under it.
"...Derrick?" A hint of panic edged into Jared's tone.
"What?"
"You threw the sponge on a freaking daddy long legs!" Jared flung the sponge back down and began to look for something to squish it with. He hated spiders above all other things and had a good reason too; his mother died from a brown recluse bite when he and Derrick were seven.
"Did you bring the bug spray?" Derrick was calmer about spiders; after some research he learned that if you don't mess with them, they usually don't mess with you.
"No! I'm not the Orkin guy!"
"Then squish it with something, jeez."
"Give me your shoe."
"What?"
"Give me your friggen shoe!"
"No! Use your own shoe!"
"No! I don't want spider guts on my shoe!" At this point, the spider had some inkling of what was going on and crawled out the open window above the sink.
"I don't care, you're not using my shoe!"
"Then what am I supposed to use?"
"Your. Own. Shoe." Derrick emphasized, when he noticed that the woman who answered the door was standing in the doorway, giggling to herself. Jared followed his line of sight, saw her, and realized that he looked like a total wimp. He calmly went to the sink and was about to drown the spider when he realized that he had no idea where it went. Dread prickled inside his stomach and threatened to make him panic when he took three deep breaths, counted to ten, grabbed a pair of gloves, and started washing all the dishes.
"Die, spider, die..." He muttered to himself as he washed, mentally making sure that no spiders sneak up on him in nasty kitchen sinks again.
