Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

I tore open the foil packet. Can you see someone’s pulse? Because mine was certainly banging hard enough under my skin.

I started to unroll the condom along the length of the banana. It got all bunched up on top. “I don’t think that’s right,” Adam said.

“Then you do it.”

He peeled off the condom and tore open a second foil packet. I watched him balance the little disk at the top of the banana and smooth it down the length in one easy motion. “Oh, my God,” I said. “You are way too good at that.”

“That’s because my sex life consists entirely of fruit right now.”

I smirked. “I find that hard to believe.”

Adam met my gaze. “Well, I find it hard to believe you have a hard time finding someone who wants to have sex with you.”

I grabbed the banana out of his hand. “Did you know a banana is a reproductive organ of the plant it grows on?”

God, I sounded like an idiot. I sounded like you, spouting off your trivia.

“Did you know grapes explode if you put them in the microwave?” Adam said.

“Really?”

“Totally.” He paused. “A reproductive organ?”

I nodded. “An ovary.”

“So where are you from?”

“New Hampshire,” I said. “How about you?”

I held my breath, thinking maybe he was from Bankton, too, and in the high school, which was why I hadn’t met him yet. “Anchorage,” Adam answered.

It figured.

“So you and your sister both have OI?”

He’d seen me with you in the wheelchair. “Yeah,” I said.

“That must be kind of nice. To have someone in the house who gets it, you know?” He grinned. “I’m an only child. My parents took one look at me and broke the mold.”

“Or the mold broke.” I laughed.

Sarah passed by our table and pointed to the banana. “Wonderful,” she said.

We were. Except for the fact that he thought my name was Willow and I had OI.

A makeshift game of condomball had broken out, as groups of kids batted the inflated condoms around the room. “Hey, isn’t Willow the name of that girl whose mom is suing because of her OI?” Adam asked.

“How did you know that?” I said, stunned.

“It’s all over the blogs. Don’t you read them?”

“I’ve…been busy.”

“I thought the girl was way younger-”

“Well, you thought wrong,” I interrupted.

Adam tilted his head. “You mean, it’s you ?”

“Could you just kind of keep it quiet?” I asked. “I mean, it’s not something I feel like talking about.”

“I bet,” Adam said. “It must suck.”

I imagined how you must be feeling. You’d said a few things in our room, in those gray minutes before we fell asleep, but I think you kept a lot to yourself. I considered what it would be like to be noticed for only one trait-like being left-handed, or brunette, or double-jointed-instead of for the whole of you. Here was Sarah talking about finding someone who loved you for who you were, not what you appeared to be-and your own mother couldn’t even seem to manage it. “It’s like tug-of-war,” I said quietly, “and I’m the rope.”

Underneath the table, I felt Adam squeeze my hand. He threaded our fingers together, his knuckles locking against mine. “Adam,” I whispered, as Sarah started to speak about STDs and hymens and premature ejaculation, and we continued to hold hands under the table. I felt as if I had a star in my throat, as if all I had to do was open my mouth for light to pour out of me. “What if someone sees us?”

He turned his head; I felt his breath on the curve of my ear. “Then they’ll think I’m the luckiest guy in this room.”

With those words, my body became electric, with all the power generating from the place our palms touched. I didn’t hear another word Sarah said for the next thirty minutes. I couldn’t think of anything but how different Adam’s skin was from mine and how close he was and how he wasn’t letting go.

It wasn’t a date, but it wasn’t not a date, either. We were both planning on going to the zoo for that evening’s family activity, so Adam made me promise to meet him at the orangutans at six o’clock.

Okay, he asked Willow to meet him there.

You were so excited about going to the zoo that you could barely sit still the whole minibus ride over there. We didn’t have a zoo in New Hampshire, and the one near Boston was nothing to write home about. We’d been planning to go to Disney’s Animal Kingdom during our vacation at Disney World, but you remember how that turned out. Unlike you, my mother was practically a china statue. She stared straight ahead on the minibus and didn’t try to talk to anyone, as opposed to yesterday, when she was Miss Chatty. She looked like she might shatter if the driver hit a speed bump too fast.

Then again, she wouldn’t be the only one.

I kept checking my watch so often that I felt like Cinderella. Actually, I felt like Cinderella for a lot of reasons. Except instead of wearing a glittery blue dress, I was borrowing your identity and your illness, and my prince happened to be someone who’d broken forty-two bones.

“Apes,” you announced as soon as we crossed through the gates of the zoo. They’d opened the place for the OI convention after normal business hours, which was cool because it felt like we’d been trapped here after the gates had been locked for the night, and practical because I’m sure it was-well-a zoo during the day, and most people with OI would have been bobbing and weaving to avoid being knocked by the crowds. I grabbed your chair and started to push you up a slight incline, which was when I realized there was something really wrong with my mother.

She normally would have looked at me as if I’d grown a second head and asked why I was volunteering to push your chair when usually I whined bloody murder if she even asked me to unlatch your stupid car seat.

Instead, she just marched along like a zombie. If I’d asked her what animals we passed, I bet she would have just turned to me and said Huh?

I pushed you up close to the wall to see the orangutans, but you had to stand to see over it. You balanced yourself against the low concrete barrier, your eyes lighting when you saw the mother and her baby. The mother orangutan was cradling the teeniest little ape I’d ever seen, and another baby that was probably a few years old kept pestering her, pulling at her tail and swinging a foot in front of them and being a total pain in the butt. “It’s us,” you said, delighted. “Look, Amelia!”

But I was busy glancing all around for Adam. It was six o’clock on the dot. What if he was blowing me off? What if I couldn’t even keep a guy interested in me when I was pretending to be someone else?

Suddenly he was there, a fine sweat shining on his forehead. “Sorry,” he said. “The hill was killer.” He glanced at my mother and you, facing the orangutans. “Hey, that’s your family, right?”

I should have introduced him. I should have told my mother what I was doing. But what if you said my name-my real name-and Adam realized I was a total liar? So instead I grabbed Adam’s hand and pulled him off to a side path that wound past a flock of red parrots and a cage where there was supposed to be a mongoose, but apparently it was an invisible one. “Let’s just go,” I said, and we ran down to the aquarium.

Because of where it was tucked in the zoo, it wasn’t crowded. There was one family in there with a toddler in a spica cast-poor kid-looking at the penguins in their fake formal wear. “Do you think they know they’ve got a raw deal?” I asked. “That they’ve got wings, and can’t fly?”

“As opposed to a skeleton that keeps falling apart?” Adam said. He tugged me into another room, a glass tunnel. The light was blue, eerie; all around us, sharks were swimming. I looked up at the soft white belly of a shark, the ridged diamond rows of its teeth. At the hammerheads, wriggling like Star Wars creatures as they passed us by.