I have a little different perspective and have no idea if my experiences apply to yours. But I'll tell you about how things are here with my 15 year old boy-girl twins. My son is difficult child, bipolar and has been a difficult kid his whole life. easy child says she is afraid that her brother will hurt her. She says he has threatened her with a knife and grabbed her and roughed her up some. Of course she didn't tell me about it until last week and it happened when they were home alone together.
My easy child is a freshman. She has been different this year. Distant, angry, goes for long walks alone or with our dog, she's upset and crying at times but won't talk about what's going on. She gets angry sometimes if I just walk into the same room.
I have struggled with what to do too. I decided to be strict about some things - no sleepovers unless I knew the other family - and loose about others like letting her hang out at school for an hour or two. She goes to a small high school - 400 students - where the teachers stick around a long time after school and they really know the kids. That was a tough call but I sometimes show up at school unexpectedly and I e-mail her teachers pretty often too.
I decided not to force the issue of communication. I found that writing her notes about important things worked well - I think that the sound of my voice was actually triggering her for a while. She has gradually gotten more open with me - occasionally coming to chat with me late at night.
She started missing school but it was because she was staying home "sick" or going to school late too often. I was worried about drugs and pregnancy too. One day when she said she felt sick in the morning - I just stood there and looked at her. She said she didn't know why she felt sick. I said well it could be a stomach bug, or her late nights, or her diet. She said no it's not any of those. I said, well morning sickness is the only other thing I could think of and she nearly shouted at me "I am NOT that stupid". I said No I knew she wasn't, that she had plans for college. And we left it at that.
When she started being tardy every week I got on her case, pulled her phone privileges and talked to her teachers and principal. Now she's only tardy by a few minutes once every couple of minutes and her 1st period teacher seems OK with that so I've backed off on pushing her about that.
One of her late night chats included telling me that her advisory class (it's sort of a counseling class) talked about drugs and that she and another girl were the only ones who said they had never done any and the other kids wanted to know why. My easy child said she told them that doing drugs was stupid and that people who do drugs get seriously hurt. The other kids scoffed at her. She told them her brother (difficult child 1) had gotten both his legs and one arm broken by somebody he was getting high with and she was never going to do drugs. I guess that shut the other kids up.
We have gotten tougher and tougher with her brother and he's now on probation for being aggressive toward us. We don't leave them alone together ever now.
Recently we started family therapy with a really good therapist who specializes in working with at risk youth. Our son refused to go more than once but we went anyway. She totally nailed my daughter for refusing to communicate, for picking fights, for sabotaging family time. And she did that in such a supportive and grounded way that my daughter took that in and started changing her behavior at home. When we got referred for wrap-around services that include family therapy I arranged for her to see this therapist individually. That has made an amazing difference. She talks to me now most days - telling me at least a little about her trouble with friends, things that are driving her crazy at school.
I think we are on track to a better relationship now but I am still very cautious about pushing her to share or include me in things. And her therapist and I communicate a little by e-mail because some of what was happening was simply miscommunication due to my daughter's Learning Disability (LD)'s and the therapist has been able to give me some feedback about that. I have accepted her refusal to "friend" me on FB but that's partly because her godmother is one of her friends and is keeping an eye on her posts.
I'm not sure my experience applies to yours. My daughter never actually skipped school. She has never, to my knowledge, gone somewhere and misled me about where she was or who she was with. But she knows I will make unannounced checks on her so perhaps that has helped with that. I turn her phone off at night and weekend mornings because it's my opinion that middle of the night plans made by text or cell phone are more likely to lead to trouble and secrecy than ones made in broad daylight. Perhaps that's naive of me but there's something about night that changes our perceptions of risk and reality that I think is biological and therefore much harder for kids to resist.
Does she have a therapist? Are you doing family therapy? Maybe this would be something to explore. I think that when we started family therapy my daughter had proof of our commitment to her and to our family that she needed to feel safe.
I would not have her twin try to intercede or appear to be interpreting her behavior to you. With my kids, anything like that ends up with splitting and triangulation. And that is very ugly and destructive. So I would be very, very careful about doing anything like that.
I hope things get better and that your worst fears are proved groundless.
Many hugs from one mom of twins to another. It's never been easy has it??
