Jodie Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

"Maybe I should be Six," I told him, when I'd made my way to the bottom of the tequila bottle, "and you could be Nine."

Seven finished stacking the clean glasses. "That's it. You're cut off."

"He used to call me Jewel," I said, and that was enough to make me start crying.

A jewel's first a rock put under enormous heat and pressure. Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.

But Campbell had looked. And then he'd left me, reminding me that whatever he'd seen wasn't worth the time or effort.

"I used to have pink hair," I told Seven.

"I used to have a real job," he answered.

"What happened?"

He shrugged. "I dyed my hair pink. What happened to you?"

"I let mine grow out," I answered.

Seven wiped up a spill I'd made without noticing. "Nobody ever wants what they've got," he said.

Anna sits at the kitchen table by herself, eating a bowl of Golden Grahams. Her eyes widen, as she is surprised to see me with her father, but that's as much as she'll reveal. "Fire last night, huh?" she says, sniffing.

Brian crosses the kitchen and gives her a hug. "Big one."

"The arsonist?" she asks.

"Doubt it. He goes for empty buildings and this one had a kid in it."

"Who you saved," Anna guesses.

"You bet." He glances at me. "I thought I'd take Julia up to the hospital. Want to come?"

She looks down at her bowl. "I don't know."

"Hey." Brian lifts her chin. "No one's going to keep you from seeing Kate."

"No one's going to be too thrilled to see me there, either," she says.

The telephone rings, and he picks it up. He listens for a moment, and then smiles. "That's great. That's so great. Yeah, of course I'm coming in." He hands the phone to Anna. "Mom wants to talk to you," he says, and he excuses himself to change clothes.

Anna hesitates, then curls her hand around the receiver. Her shoulders hunch, a small cubicle of personal privacy. "Hello?" And then, softly: "Really? She did?"

A few moments later, she hangs up. She sits down and takes another spoonful of cereal, then pushes away her bowl. "Was that your mom?" I ask, sitting down across from her.

"Yeah. Kate's awake," Anna says.

"That's good news."

"I guess."

I put my elbows on the table. "Why wouldn't it be good news?"

But Anna doesn't answer my question. "She asked where I was."

"Your mother?"

"Kate."

"Have you talked to her about your lawsuit, Anna?"

Ignoring me, she grabs the cereal box and begins to roll down the plastic insert. "It's stale," she says. "No one ever gets all the air out, or closes the top right."

"Has anyone told Kate what's going on?"

Anna pushes on the box top to get the cardboard tab into its slot, to no avail. "I don't even like Golden Grahams." When she tries again, the box falls out of her arms and spills its contents all over the floor. "Shoot!" She crawls under the table, trying to scoop up the cereal with her hands.

I get on the floor with Anna and watch her shove fistfuls into the liner. She won't look in my direction. "We can always buy Kate some more before she gets home," I say gently.

Anna stops and glances up. Without the veil of that secret, she looks much younger. "Julia? What if she hates me?"

I tuck a strand of hair behind Anna's ear. "What if she doesn't?"

"The bottom line," Seven explained last night, "is that we never fall for the people we're supposed to."

I glanced at him, intrigued enough to muster the effort to raise my face from where it was plastered on the bar. "It's not just me?"

"Hell, no." He set down a stack of clean glasses. "Think about it: Romeo and Juliet bucked the system, and look where it got them. Superman has the hots for Lois Lane, when the better match, of course, would be with Wonder Woman. Dawson and Joey—need I say more? And don't even get me started on Charlie Brown and the little redheaded girl."

"What about you?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Like I said, it happens to everyone." Leaning his elbows on the counter, he came close enough that I could see the dark roots beneath his magenta hair. "For me, it was Linden."

"I'd break up with someone who was named for a tree, too," I sympathized. "Guy or girl?"

He smirked. "I'll never tell.”

“So what made her wrong for you?" Seven sighed. "Well, she—"

"Ha! You said she!"

He rolled his eyes. "Yes, Detective Julia. You've outed me at this gay establishment. Happy?"

"Not particularly."

"I sent Linden back to New Zealand. Green card ran out. It was that, or get married."

"What was wrong with her?"

"Absolutely nothing," Seven confessed. "She cleaned like a banshee; she never let me wash a dish; she listened to everything I had to say; she was a hurricane in bed. She was crazy about me, and believe it or not, I was the one for her. It was, like, ninety-eight percent perfect."

"What about the other two percent?"

"You tell me." He started stacking the clean glasses on the far side of the bar. "Something was missing. I couldn't tell you what it was, if you asked, but it was off. And if you think of a relationship as a living entity, I guess it's one thing if the missing two percent is, like, a fingernail. But when it's the heart, that's a whole different ball of wax." He turned to me. "I didn't cry when she got on the plane. She lived with me for four years, and when she walked away, I didn't feel much of anything at all."

"Well, I had the other problem," I told him. "I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in."

"What happened then?"

"What else," I said. "It broke."

The ridiculous irony is that Campbell was attracted to me because I stood apart from everyone else at The Wheeler School; and I was attracted to Campbell because I desperately wanted a connection with someone. There were comments, I knew, and stares sent our way as his friends tried to figure out why Campbell was wasting his time with someone like me. No doubt, they thought I was an easy lay.

But we weren't doing that. We met after school at the cemetery. Sometimes we would speak poetry to each other. Once, we tried to have an entire conversation without the letter "s." We sat back to back, and tried to think each other's thoughts—pretending clairvoyance, when it only made sense that his whole mind would be full of me and mine would be full of him.

I loved the way he smelled whenever his head dipped close to hear what I was saying—like the sun striking the cheek of a tomato, or soap drying on the hood of a car. I loved the way his hand felt on my spine. I loved.

"What if," I said one night, stealing breath from the edge of his lips, "we did it?"

He was lying on his back, watching the moon rock back and forth on a hammock of stars. One hand was tossed up over his head, the other anchored me against his chest. "Did what?"

I didn't answer, just got up on one elbow and kissed him so deep that the ground gave way. "Oh," Campbell said, hoarse. "That."

"Have you ever?" I asked.

He just grinned. I thought that he'd probably fucked Muffy or Buffy or Puffy or all three in the baseball dugout at Wheeler, or after a party at one of their homes when they both still smelled of Daddy's bourbon. I wondered why, then, he wasn't trying to sleep with me. I assumed that it was because I wasn't Muffy or Buffy or Puffy, but just Julia Romano, which wasn't good enough.

"Don't you want to?" I asked.

It was one of those moments where I knew we were not having the conversation that we needed to be having. And since I didn't really know what to say, never having crossed this particular bridge between thought and deed before, I pressed my hand up against the thick ridge in his pants. He backed away from me.