The People We Choose

  Also by

  KATELYN DETWEILER

  The UNDOING

  Of THISTLE TATE

  Contents

  Cover

  Also By

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Acknowledgments

  Margaret Ferguson Books

  Copyright © 2021 by Katelyn Detweiler

  All Rights Reserved

  HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  Printed and bound in March 2021 at Maple Press, York, PA, USA.

  www.holidayhouse.com

  First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Detweiler, Katelyn, author.

  Title: The people we choose / by Katelyn Detweiler.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Holiday House, [2021] “A Margaret Ferguson Book.” | Audience: Ages 14 and up.

  Audience: Grades 10–12. | Summary: Seventeen-year-old Calliope Silversmith’s lifelong friendships are transformed when she starts dating new neighbor, Max, but her life is turned upside-down when she learns the identity of the sperm donor her mothers chose.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020034226 | ISBN 9780823446643 (hardcover)

  Subjects: CYAC: Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. Lesbian mothers—Fiction. | Identity—Fiction. Sperm donors—Fiction. | Families—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.D48 Peo 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034226

  ISBN: 978-0-8234-4664-3 (hardcover)

  To Danny and alfie,

  the people I will choose,

  every day, always.

  Chapter One

  AT first I wonder if he’s a mirage.

  The air certainly seems hot enough.

  Rustling branches along the tree line, and then two legs, two arms, one head. The pieces come together to make a boy, and that boy walks across our wild grassy lawn and up to where I sit on the porch.

  I put down my dog-eared copy of Sense and Sensibility to take him in. Long limbs and warm brown skin, black T-shirt and black cutoff jeans. His clothes are splattered in streaks of bright paint, golds and blues and reds and greens and purples, like he is the painting. He is the work of art.

  I’m out here early today because I needed to breathe. Mama and Mimmy are firm believers in open windows and fans, even during the first heat wave of the summer. They only have air conditioners at Hot Mama Flow, their yoga studio—with aerobics classes and weight-machine circuits, too, because yoga isn’t popular enough to sustain an entire business in our small town of Green Woods, Pennsylvania. And even there they keep the AC off for most classes. “A little hot yoga is good for the soul,” Mama says, usually as she’s upside down, balancing on her hands, legs in a split, as if gravity is not an actual thing. And maybe for Mama it’s not.

  “I was looking for some sign of life,” the boy says, his voice somehow deeply growly but sweetly musical at the same time. “I just moved in next door. If you can call it next door when there’s five minutes of woods between us. I mean, Jesus. How is this only an hour outside of Philly? I feel like I’m lost in some kind of West Virginia wilderness.”

  I raise my eyebrows. He looks less art worthy now. And it’s really more like ninety minutes most days because of traffic, at least during rush hours, but I don’t correct him.

  “So anyway,” he starts. Stops. Runs one hand through his tight-cropped curls. “Sorry. I’m Max. Should have started with that.”

  “Calliope.”

  “That’s an interesting name.”

  “My moms are big on mythology.” I emphasize moms and say it like a challenge. It’s a hard habit to break, maybe because Green Woods still has some people clinging to the Dark Ages. But Max doesn’t react.

  “That’s cool. I like it. I don’t actually know why my parents named me Max. My mom does love a good T.J.Maxx deal, but I hope that’s not the reason.”

  “Uh-oh. The closest T.J.Maxx is a forty-minute drive from us. Will your mom survive out here? You can assure her we do get mail. Much faster since they ditched the horse and buggy last year. Mail trucks now, can you believe it?” I smile, kicking back in my midnight-colored rocking chair. Right between Mama’s sky-blue chair and Mimmy’s sunny-yellow one. The wooden slats of the porch floor creak. Our little stone house was built sometime in the early 1800s—or so the Realtor said when Mama and Mimmy bought it before I was born, and I believe it because every last piece of it feels old and persnickety.

  Max squints up at me with dark amber eyes and laughs. “I get it. I was trash-talking your home before I even introduced myself. Not the best way to meet a new neighbor. My mom would tweak my ear for that one. So maybe don’t tell her?”

  I shrug. I don’t love his attitude. But it’s not every day I get to meet someone who hasn’t spent their whole life here.

  “Let’s start over,” he says, taking it upon himself to climb the porch steps. He sits on Mama’s chair, like it was put there just for him.

  “I hope all that paint is dry. Mama will ruin you if you mess with her favorite chair.”

  He looks down at his shorts. “Oh right. I was painting my bedroom walls this morning. I was just going to do normal boring gray on all of them, but then I had this vision of our apartment view, so I painted a mural of my old bedroom window and the scene outside it on one wall. We lived in the tallest building on our block, so I got a peek of the Philly skyline right when the sun comes up. That’s always my favorite time to paint.” He grins at me, bright white teeth with a small gap in the middle. It’s a really good smile.

  “Why did you move here then? If you love Philly so much?”

  The whole porch seems to shift around us with that one question. The good smile disappears.

  “Family stuff,” he says. There is an extra-bold black period at the end of his sentence.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, because I’m not sure what other response there is. “But Green Woods isn’t so awful. I promise. You’ll get used to it. There’s plenty of good to go with the bad.” I glance above me at the sprawling canopy of deep green leaves that line the woods surrounding our house—dark and dense, swallowing us up from the rest of the town. “Just close your eyes for a minute.”

  He looks like he wants to ask why, but doesn’t.

  “Just sit there and listen,” I say. “Breathe.”

  I close my eyes, too, even though I know all the sounds and smells as well as I know my own fingers and toes: the soft rumble of the creek that coils behind our meadow of a yard, the buzz of cicadas and grasshoppers and the sea of other insects that come to life every summer, the heady scents of damp soil and wildflowers and freshly cut grass.

  “I bet you didn’t have all this in Philly, did you?”

  “Nope.” He sighs. “Definitely not.”

  I sneak a peek through lowered lids. He’s leaning back in the chair with his eyes still closed, arms spread open. Like he is drawing it all in, this day, this porch, these woods.

  Our old landl
ine phone rings from inside, and his eyes flip open. He looks around, like maybe he’s in a dream. But then his gaze falls on me, and he blinks again, like worlds have clicked back into place.

  I let the call go to voice mail. Only robots call that number these days.

  “I actually came over here for sugar,” he says, laughing. “Which sounds like a bad line from an old TV show. But my mom and I found everything for coffee this morning except the sugar, and there’s no way I’m drinking that stuff unsweetened. Dad’s got the car for a Philly trip today and I have no clue what direction the store is in or if I can even get there on foot. I won’t talk down on your town—our town, wow—anymore, but… there’s something to be said for having three bodegas within a block of your home. I’ll leave it at that.”

  “It’s nice to have trees on every side of your house, too. And no people. Except for neighbors that are a five-minute walk away.”

  “I guess we’ll see about that.”

  “Uh-huh. And I hate to say it… but you walked in the wrong direction. My moms refuse to keep white sugar in the house. The devil’s drug, as they say. We mostly use stevia, and sometimes agave or honey or maple syrup. I could pour some stevia into a cup for you if you want?”

  His mouth drops open in disbelief. “So you’re telling me… if I’d gone five minutes the other way I’d be walking home with bags of deathly but delicious sugar right now?”

  “Actually, no. That’s an old Boy Scout camp that no one uses anymore. If there’s sugar there, you wouldn’t want to use it. Maybe ten minutes north through the woods. I think you’d hit the Coopers’ house then. And they are the jackpot because Mrs. Cooper runs the school’s biannual bake sale. She’s fully loaded, I’m sure.”

  “Do you have a compass on you?”

  “Nope. I usually just lick my finger and see where the wind’s blowing.”

  “Whoa. Really?”

  “No, not really. That was a joke. But I can use the sun and the moon and the stars. Plus, I’ve lived here for seventeen years. I’ve walked through the woods once or twice.”

  “Are you saying you want to be my escort?” The really good smile is back.

  “No thanks, but I can point you in the right direction so you have at least a fifty percent chance of making it there on your own.”

  “You have better things to be doing then?”

  I don’t. I’m working at Hot Mama Flow this summer—odd hours here and there at the front desk, whenever the moms need me to fill in gaps for their regular employees—but not today. Mimmy and Mama are both at the studio now, as they are most days, rotating with the rest of their staff between teaching, training, desk work, cleaning.

  My only plan for today was to read on the porch for as long as I could bear it, then call my best friends, Ginger and Noah, to see if they want to come sweat here with me. Fill up the new inflatable turtle kiddie pool in the backyard with ice water and eat Mimmy’s homemade strawberry basil ice pops, while we complain about having nothing to do all summer except work and sit in my yard eating ice pops. The same thing we did last year, and the year before that, and so forth, only with a pool this time. One of my better ideas, I’d say, bringing back the kiddie pool for the first time in a decade. We spend most of our time together at my house in “the country”—their term, as if living in Green Woods proper with a few streetlights and sidewalks somehow makes them actually urban.

  “Maybe not, but I’d rather do nothing on this hot porch than trek through hot woods with a stranger.”

  “Well, we’re not technically strangers anymore. We’re neighbors and potential new best friends. Besides, those woods look pretty thick and shady if you ask me. I bet it’s much cooler in there. And filled with all sorts of weird bugs and animals that a city slicker like me can’t deal with alone.”

  “Bad news. I’ve had the same two best friends since I was out of the womb. Ginger and Noah. That’s how it works in Green Woods. Total cliché story, too, our moms all meeting at Lamaze class. We were destined prebirth.”

  “Huh.” He pauses, his face suddenly serious. “Well, looks like you and Ginger and Noah might just find yourselves in a quartet now.”

  Before I have time to respond, his pocket starts blaring music.

  “Ghostbusters theme?”

  “You got it,” he says, grinning as he slides his phone out. “Hey, Mom!”

  I pretend to go back to Sense and Sensibility, but I don’t read a word. I’m watching Max over the edges of the book. Watching that grin fade, a small frown taking its place.

  He ends the call after a minute, and I put my book back down. “Mom needs me. My thirteen-year-old sister, Marlow, is on a rampage because her vast collection of shoes is nowhere to be found, so I need to go through the Mount Everest of boxes in the garage to save the day. I’m going to have to chug the coffee down straight. Desperate times. But you are not off the hook.”

  “Oh?” I brace my feet against the porch.

  “Nope. We’re going for that walk in the woods.” He stands up, salutes me, and takes all three porch steps in one leap.

  I watch until he disappears back into the woods alongside our house, the wild trees eating him alive. Until it’s almost like I did imagine him after all. A trick of light and heat.

  It’s hard to refocus on my book after that. I’ve read Sense and Sensibility so many times—too many times, probably, given how many books exist in the world. Maybe because as an only child, I’ve always been envious of the Dashwood girls. My copy of Little Women is just as exhausted looking, filled with rips and scribbles and food stains. I used to dream about being a March sister—minus civil wars and scarlet fever and other such unpleasantries, of course.

  I use my last reserves of energy in this heat to make sure the bird feeder in our backyard is full, and then I top off the birdbath, too. The birds in these woods need the relief as much as I do.

  I curl up in the hammock after, the shadiest place in the backyard. And sure enough, soon I hear tires rolling down our long gravel driveway, and a moment later Ginger slides in next to me. I forgot to call her. Noah, too. Not that I ever have to call either of them to make plans. They just appear.

  “Hey,” she says, lazily turning over to smile at me. Thousands of little freckles shine like copper glitter on her pale skin, and her hair is lit up a blinding golden white from the sun. So bright I need to squint just to face her. I find her eyes, the greenest I’ve seen in real life. If I hadn’t woken up next to her a thousand times at sleepovers, I’d never believe she didn’t wear contacts.

  “They didn’t need me at the diner today and my mom was annoying the hell out of me. Not even air-conditioning made staying home more attractive. I’d rather drown in my own sweat over here with you.”

  “I’m sorry. About your mom.”

  “Yeah, well. Same old Sophie. She casually mentioned setting me up with the son of my aunt’s sister-in-law’s cousin or something like that. The woman just can’t help herself.”

  I was born first, the early baby. Ginger was second, right on schedule for the first and only time in her life. Noah came out late, two weeks after his due date—a September birthday, which meant when the question of kindergarten came up, our moms decided to keep all of us summer babies together, always the oldest kids in our class. Our families understood we couldn’t be separated at that point. Noah’s mom, Beverly, still pops over sometimes for a glass of wine on the porch, but Mama and Mimmy’s friendship with Sophie faded over the years. It turned out they didn’t have much in common other than their pregnancy timeline.

  “I would have come sooner but I was waiting for my leopard nails to dry.” She flutters her fingers in my face, the light catching on her shiny collection of mood rings and crystal bracelets. “Noah’s here, too. In the kitchen, whipping up some iced green tea for us. He was talking about cutting up some ginger and limes for infusing when I left him. How did we get so lucky?”

  “I don’t know. Our parents conceived around the same moon cycl
e?”

  She ignores me. “I’m telling you, some girl is going to swoop in and snap him up, and where will that leave us? Hm? Making our own infused tea? Ugh. In case you forgot, I’m not straight, so it’s not my duty to lock him in to a monogamous romantic relationship. And besides, we both know I’m not the one his sweet, soulful heart wants, no matter which way I sway. Also, can I say, very objectively, that our boy is growing into quite a heartthrob. He’s got that whole skinny-but-ripped thing going on. It’s bizarre.”

  I don’t bother responding. The three of us had our yellow-poop-drenched diapers changed side by side. We played mermaid and merman in the tub together until we turned five and our moms decided it was perhaps time to acknowledge our different genitalia.

  Noah is a brother to us. I understand as well as anyone that family isn’t always about blood.

  “People moved into the old Jackson house,” I say, knowing Ginger will quickly latch onto this sparkly new tidbit dangling in front of her. Max didn’t have to say where he moved into, because it’s the only empty house in a five-minute radius.

  “Oh my god, what? Hanging out with the ghosties? Yikes. I guess no one warned them. I don’t think I could live in a house where humans have died.”

  “Lots of people die in houses, Ginger. That’s not so unusual. And Mr. Jackson seemed pretty ancient.” He’s the old recluse who had died there when we were kids. The police found his body during a check-in after he stopped picking up the newspaper from the top of his driveway. He—and the house—had become a source of all kinds of popular local lore.

  “Not Mr. Jackson, though I don’t fancy the idea of meeting his ghost either. I mean whoever was murdered. Before him. Or while he lived there.”

  “We don’t know for sure that happened.”

  “We don’t know for sure that it didn’t happen.”

  I shake my head. Sigh. “Anyway. Not the point. There’s a boy who moved in, maybe our grade. He came over asking for sugar this morning.”

  She giggles, a light, bubbly sound. “Sugar? For real? That’s actually a thing people do?”

  “Apparently.”