( N A M E ) Tallulah Florence Lyons
( N I C K N A M E S ) Lulah
( A G E ) Fourteen
( G E N D E R ) Female
( D I S T R I C T / A R E A ) District Five



( H I S T O R Y )

You don't know what it's like to be close to someone until it's their heartbeat pushing blood through your veins. When I close my eyes, I swear I can hear Peregrine's thoughts in the thump thump thump of her pulse as it collides with mine. (Lulah, I feel restless, let's go for a walk.) Of course, Pere, the breeze is nice today, let's bring Rio with so she can say hello to Effie. (There's an awful memory spinning in my head and it makes me so dizzy.) Last time I covered your ears for you, but you told me it didn't do any good because you could still hear their words through me. (I don't want to listen to Seville practice talking anymore, can we play a song to drown her out?) I'll play clarinet if you take the saxophone part.

We aren't so much hip to hip as we are soul to soul, grown into each other in a way that transcends our conjoined bodies. Our parents used to bring us to doctors, begging them to separate us when they thought we weren't listening and once I realized, I cried myself to the edge of sleep until Peregrine would take my hand and sing me into the land of Nod with a sympathetic lullaby. My sister is a piece of me that no scalpel or bone saw can cut away... although I know there are days when she wishes one could. However, every doctor had the same response to that proposition: "Separation would kill them." Maybe I'm the only one who knows exactly how true that is.

No matter what kind of taunts or teasing the other children in school subjected us too, I cannot think of one time I have ever wished that my sister and I were apart. If anything, the bullying made me thankful that I always had her shoulder right there to lean on and take comfort from. Maybe I've taken too much comfort from her over the years and didn't leave enough for her, perhaps that's why she daydreams of distance while such thoughts are the stuff of my nightmares. If one day I were to awake and find myself alone, I can't — I can't even begin to fathom that. There is no such thing as alone to me and so the world can only threaten me so much, because I know that — like it or not — Peregrine will always have my back.


( P E R S O N A L I T Y )

I suppose that's selfish of me, to have so much love for what my my sister loathes, but I can't allow myself to think about that too much or it starts to hurt in a way that is nothing like a scraped knee or the lingering fear of what might be lurking under the bed at night. Peregrine feels as though she's faking so much of our life — and it is ours — when I have nothing but sincerity. I didn't start playing piano or singing two-part melodies with my sister because I wanted to impress the rest of the world, I only ever liked the way our voices blended together so effortlessly in song, because that is what we do. Each note was joined by the other's and it made perfect, unquestionable sense to me.

Peregrine sometimes calls me an "optimist" like it's a dirty word, her accusational voice declaring that I don't know how to look at the world for how it is, because I'm too easily distracted by the bright and shiny parts. However, just because I don't enjoy looking at the shadows doesn't mean I don't know they're there. I do and I refuse to pretend that I enjoy their presence when all I really want is for the room to fill with such a bright light as to chase them all away. I like sunshine and rainbows and chirping birds; I don't care if it's childish or cliché of me. When the sky is blue and Peregrine is smiling and the sun is leaning down to kiss our cheeks — those are the days I want to preserve in my memory and carry with me like talismans to ward away my sister's moments of frustration.

She has bad days more and more often it seems, when the blood we share runs a little bit colder after it passes through her heart. I try not to talk much when I realize what's happening, quietly following along with wherever her feet aim to take us that day. I don't like the way she snaps at me when I stumble or if I sound a little too chipper for her mood's liking — I can hear the most awful of words in her tone, even if she won't go so far as to say them aloud: Go away, Tallulah. If I'm capable of truly hating anything, then it's that, because the knowledge that my very existence becomes bothersome to her, that I am a burden upon her hip that is almost too heavy to bear, there is nothing quite so awful to me as that.


( A P P E A R A N C E )

Yet, maybe the idea of her disliking me from time to time nags at me most deeply because Peregrine cannot hate me alone — we are too closely connected for that — and so any loathing of me is just the same as self-loathing for her and I worry. We are linked by more than hip bones and a shared circulatory system; our very existence is reliant on the other. When Peregrine looks in the mirror, she sees identical ringlets of tawny hair and two pairs of pale brown irises so similar that when we look at one another, there's a chance it creates an infinite loop in the universe, with my reflection in her eyes and hers in mine, back and forth and back and forth into endlessness. However, when I catch a glimpse of us in one of those bright and shiny things I love with all the optimism I possess, I see so much more.

When my sister frowns, it looks like a terrible storm — cloud shadows fill her eyes and the corners of her lips fall down like the heaviest of rain. It shakes me every time. Then when a smile blooms across her face, it's enough to make me feel as if I am levitating, so light on my feet that one moment I'm balancing on my tippy toes and the next I am airborne. The secret of it is that I am the real mirror. Peregrine leads and I follow, be it feet or emotions. I can't help but wrinkle my nose when she smells something she dislikes or furrow my eyebrows when an arithmetic problem in her homework doesn't go quite the way it's supposed to. It's not so much that I am a mimic as it is a depth of feeling — twice as deep, to be precise — that moves me before I even know it.



( C O D E W O R D ) Odair
( F A C E C L A I M ) Violet Hilton

( C O M M E N T S / O T H E R )

The sister of Zion, Seville, Denali, Peregrine, and Rio Lyons. Also prolly some more Lyons, because I have ALL THE MUSE for this family.

Conjoined at the hip to Peregrine — Tallulah is their right side. They share blood circulation, but no major organs.

( O T H E R ) 2A2A42
( S P E A K I N G ) 372E3A
( T E X T ) 603A45
( T H I N K I N G ) 7E433E
( O T H E R S P E A K I N G / P E R E G R I N E ) 883735