Call me the evil one.

Or the selfish one. Or the manipulative one. Or pick a short to the point explicative. But whichever bad name you might call me, I can guarantee that my darling twin (I write without sarcasm) has probably never been called that - possibly because the name caller would have to answer to me or our older brother and his wife- but more likely because my twin just happens to be one of the kindest, sweetest people on earth. Just my damn luck to share a womb with her.

Is that enough of an introduction to the three of us?

Okay, okay. I'll give you a little more detail.

As my big brother Alec has already enumerated pursuant to the deadline I happened to miss, I am a twin. My name is Rachel, or Rae for friends, or per this little familial creative circle, you can call me Wasabi.

Why Wasabi? Well, I can't really remember how we originally chose our three nicknames based off of Chinese food condiments (Duck sauce for Alec and Soy sauce for Jessica), but if you want to know why the metaphor works for me, consider a friend of mine who once on a dare ate a fistful of Wasabi - then proceeded to vomit for hours, eyes watering and mouth burning, afterward complaining of butt burning diarrhea for days.

Yup, that pretty much sums me up in a really long run on sentence.

So I'm the younger of us identical beings born a little over 25 years ago to a crazy beautiful mother and hilarious smarty pants dad. Oh, and of course, the mysterious big brother.

Don't ask me how, but during our younger years, I managed to maintain "the baby of the family" status, despite only being one minute younger than Soy. I grew up desperately wanting to be the center of attention, whether it was my siblings', my parents' or just anyone who would look in my direction. But I never knew what to do with that attention when I got it. This led to numerous fights with my sister when she opted to play computer games with Duck instead of Barbies with me, temper tantrums when I was confronted by my parents for misbehavior, bad grades when I should've been getting A's, and countless times when I managed to weasel my way out of trouble or my way in to what I wanted, usually to the disadvantage of one of my siblings (in fact, I'm pretty sure I was much more of a brat than Duck let on in his retelling of the infamous "kick").

And while I screamed and cried all the way through adolescence, fighting my big brother just to be a part of his world, manipulating my sister for what I wanted, and worrying my parents to death... Duck and Soy were somewhere on opposite ends of the spectrum. Duck, as he has already retold, rebelled the big brother status until we were teenagers and Soy, well, like I already said, my twin sister is one of the most sincerely kind people this planet has ever seen, and thus took most of my shit, my brother's shit, even my parent's shit at times, with an unturned ear and even an apology when we were really the ones to blame.

(We used to call her the martyr, but don't mention it or she'll get pissed).

And then, a little less than ten years ago, things changed. Our family changed in drastic ways, and we each in turn changed with it.

Duck joined the army, and although he attributes loaning us his car as being the first major cool big brother thing he did for us, the shift came before that. There was a trip, one in which Duck and I were able to spend a lot of time really talking, and I mean truly conversing, and suddenly we weren't just siblings anymore, we were friends.

Soy, to put it bluntly, got herself a bit of a spine. Though we still argued plenty (and do today every now and then for old times sake), Soy finally stopped letting me walk all over her, and really started putting me in my place. Sure, it may have contributed to one of my biggest breakdowns in high school (just kidding - kind of), but because of my twin sister I learned how to not just accept friendship, but to give friendship as well.

And me? Well, I got to be a big sister myself finally. The younger Caldai spawn were lucky that I had two exemplary older siblings of my own to draw guidance from... hell, I've been lucky to have all of them.

Now we are all grown-up (heh heh). Duck married our best friend (because of meeeeeee), Jessica is an insanely talented artist, kicking butts all over Atlanta (and she cusses now!), and me? I'm not a four letter word anymore. I'm a party girl turned domesticated soon to be teacher, who happens to love writing, taking pretty pictures and trying new extreme sports with my live in man.

Yup, life is good.

So that's just a little bit (yeah I go on and on, I know) about who we are from my perspective (so get off my back Soy!). Soon, hopefully, our writing and art and other projects will speak for themselves.