At a high school in suburban New York City, people will think they're seeing double this weekend when 500 of the nearly 30 graduates at the graduation ceremony will be twins.
They're a tight-knit group. Some of the students at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School on Long Island have known each other since kindergarten, and their parents meet through a local twins' club. Some even still plan family vacations together.
Today, some of the twins are on a group chat together, which has helped them cope with their newfound fame as their graduation celebration approaches.
"Honestly, when we're together, there's an electric atmosphere. We all feel very comfortable with each other and we all have shared experiences so we understand each other, it's really cool," said Sydney Monka, during a rehearsal for the graduation ceremony with the other twins this Sunday.
But apart from the same last name, the twin pairs will be hard to spot when they walk across the stage at the ceremony, which is being held at Hofstra University in Hempstead.
They are all fraternal twins, meaning they are created from different embryos that develop simultaneously in the mother's body, and none of them are identical. Many of the twins are of different sexes.
That doesn't mean the ties are weaker, said Barry Cohen, who will attend Indiana University this fall.
"Especially for boy-girl twins, a lot of people think of them as just brother and sister, but it's more than that because we're going through the same things at the same time," she said, referring to her brother, Braydon Cohen, who will be attending the University of Pittsburgh.
Many just shrug off the strange phenomenon at their high school, which is located in an affluent, mostly white district about 50 miles east of Manhattan.
"I guess there's something in the water," said Emily Brake, who will attend the University of Georgia, echoing a frequent statement by the twins.
"We're all just very lucky. I think it's a coincidence," said her sister Amanda Brake, who will attend Ohio State University.
Others admit that this is about something other than just Mother Nature.
Arijana Kamameri said her parents had been trying to have a child for years and that in vitro fertilization was their last option. At the time, it was more common for babies conceived through this method to be twins or triplets.
It is also possible that a genetic component plays a role.
"There are a few twins in our family, I have relatives who are twins so that raised the chances of having twins," she said.
Large cohorts of twins are not uncommon at the school. It had back-to-back graduating classes of 10 sets of twins in 2014 and 2015, and next year, nine sets of twins will be enrolled in the first grade of high school, according to school officials.
Other schools across the country with high numbers of twin graduates include North Clovis High School in Fresno, California, with 14 sets of twins, and Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, with 10 sets.
Last year, a high school in suburban Boston had 23 sets of twins in its senior year, but that's still far from the record for the most twins in a single academic year. New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, had 44 sets of twins, and one set of triplets, in 2017, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
Most of the twins at Plainview-Old Bethpage have chosen to attend different colleges. The exception is Aidan and Chloe Manzo, who will both attend the University of Florida, where they will live in the same dorm on campus and both study business.
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