Jodie Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

"Kind of."

Jesse reaches across my body to the glove compartment. He takes out a pack of Merits and a Zippo, lights up, and blows smoke in my direction. "Sorry," he says, though he isn't.

"Can I have one?"

"One what?"

"A cigarette." They are so white they seem to glow.

" You want a cigarette?" Jesse cracks up.

"I'm not joking," I say.

Jesse raises one brow, and then turns the wheel so sharply I think he might roll the Jeep. We wind up in a huff of road dust on the shoulder. Jesse turns on the interior lights and shakes the pack so that one cigarette shimmies out.

It feels too delicate between my fingers, like the fine bone of a bird. I hold it the way I think a drama queen ought to, between the vise of my second and middle fingers. I put it up to my lips.

"You have to light it first." Jesse laughs, and he sparks up the Zippo.

There is no freaking way I'm leaning into a flame; chances are I'll set my hair on fire instead of the cigarette. "You do it for me," I say.

"Nope. If you're gonna learn, you're gonna learn it all." He flicks the lighter again.

I touch the cigarette to the burn, suck in hard the way I have seen Jesse do. It makes my chest explode, and I cough so forcefully that for a minute I actually believe I can taste my lung at the base of my throat, pink and spongy. Jesse goes to pieces and plucks the cigarette out of my hand before I drop it. He takes two long drags and then tosses it out the window.

"Nice try," he says.

My voice is a sandpit. "It's like licking a barbecue."

While I work on remembering how to breathe, Jesse pulls into the road again. "What made you want to?"

I shrug. "I figured I might as well."

"If you'd like a checklist of depravity, I can make one up for you." When I don't reply, he glances over at me. "Anna," he says, "you're not doing the wrong thing."

By now he's pulled into the hospital's parking lot. "I'm not doing the right thing, either," I point out.

He turns off the ignition but doesn't make an attempt to leave the car. "Have you thought about the dragon guarding the cave?"

I narrow my eyes. "Speak English."

"Well, I'm guessing Mom's asleep about five feet away from Kate."

Oh, shit. It is not that I think my mother would throw me out, but she certainly won't leave me alone with Kate, and right now that's what I want more than anything. Jesse looks at me. "Seeing Kate isn't going to make you feel better."

There's really no way to explain why I need to know that she's okay, at least now, even though I have taken steps that will put an end to that.

For once, though, someone seems to understand. Jesse stares out the window of the car. "Leave it to me," he says.

We were eleven and fourteen, and we were training for the Guinness Book of World Records. Surely there had never been two sisters who did simultaneous headstands for so long that their cheeks went hard as plums and their eyes saw nothing but red. Kate had the shape of a pixie, all noodle arms and legs; and when she bent to the ground and kicked up her feet, it looked as delicate as a spider walking a wall. Me, I sort of defied gravity with a thud.

We balanced in silence for a few seconds. "I wish my head was flatter," I said, as I felt my eyebrows scrunch down. "Do you think there's a man who'll come to the house to time us? Or do we just mail a videotape?"

"I guess they'll let us know." Kate folded her arms along the carpet.

"Do you think we'll be famous?"

"We might get on the Today show. They had that eleven-year-old kid who could play the piano with his feet." She thought for a second. "Mom knew someone who got killed by a piano falling out a window."

"That's not true. Why would anyone push a piano out a window?"

"It is true. You ask her. And they weren't taking it out, they were putting it in." She crossed her legs against the wall, so that it looked like she was just sitting upside down. "What do you think is the best way to die?"

"I don't want to talk about this," I said.

"Why? I'm dying. You're dying." When I frowned, she said, "Well, you are." Then she grinned. "I just happen to be more gifted at it than you are."

"This is a stupid conversation." Already, it was making my skin itch in places I knew I would never be able to scratch.

"Maybe an airplane crash," Kate mused. "It would suck, you know, when you realized you were going down… but then it happens and you're just powder. How come people get vaporized, but they still manage to find clothes in trees, and those black boxes?"

By now my head was starting to pound. "Shut up, Kate."

She crawled down the wall and sat up, flushed. "There's just sleeping through it as you croak, but that's kind of boring."

"Shut up," I repeated, angry that we had only lasted about twenty-two seconds, angry that now we were going to have to try for a record all over again. I tipped myself sunny-side up again and tried to clear the knot of hair out of my face. "You know, normal people don't sit around thinking about dying."

"Liar. Everyone thinks about dying."

"Everyone thinks about you dying," I said.

The room went so still that I wondered if we ought to go for a different record—how long can two sisters hold their breath?

Then a twitchy smile crossed her face. "Well," Kate said. "At least now you're telling the truth."

Jesse gives me a twenty-dollar bill for cab fare home; because that's the only hitch in his plan—once we go through with this, he isn't going to be driving back. We take the stairs up to the eighth floor instead of the elevator, because they let us out behind the nurse's station, not in front of it. Then he tucks me inside a linen closet filled with plastic pillows and sheets stamped with the hospital's name. "Wait," I blurt out, when he's about to leave me. "How am I going to know when it's time?" He starts to laugh. "You'll know, trust me."

He takes a silver flask out of his pocket—it's one my father got from the chief and thinks he lost three years ago—screws off the cap, and pours whiskey all over the front of his shirt. Then he starts to walk down the hall. Well, walk would be a loose approximation—Jesse slams like a billiard ball into the walls and knocks over an entire cleaning cart. "Ma?" he yells out. "Ma, where are you?"

He isn't drunk, but he sure as hell can do a great imitation. It makes me wonder about the times I have looked out my bedroom window in the middle of the night and seen him puking into the rhododendrons—maybe that was all for show, too.

The nurses swarm out from their hive of a desk, trying to subdue a boy half their age and three times as strong, who at that very moment grabs the uppermost tier of a linen rack and pulls it forward, making a crash so loud it rings in my ears. Call buttons start ringing like an operator's switchboard behind the nurse's desk, but all three of the night-duty ladies are doing their best to hold Jesse down while he kicks and flails.

The door to Kate's room opens, and bleary-eyed, my mother steps out. She takes a look at Jesse, and for a second her whole face is frozen with the realization that, in fact, things can get worse. Jesse swings his head toward her, a great big bull, and his features melt. "Hiya, Mom," he greets, and he smiles loosely up at her.

"I am so sorry," my mother says to the nurses. She closes her eyes as Jesse stumbles upright and throws his sloppy arms around her.

"There's coffee in the cafeteria," one nurse suggests, and my mother is too embarrassed to even answer her. She just moves toward the elevator banks with Jesse attached to her like a mussel on a crusty hull, and pushes the down button over and over in the fruitless hope that it will actually make the doors open faster.