The People We Choose Page 2

  “Fascinating.” She lifts her eyebrows, two perfectly symmetrical white-blond arches. “What was he like?”

  I shrug. “Not sure yet. But he wants to be best friends with us.”

  “Did you tell him it’s a pretty exclusive club? Tied forever to our moms’ vaginas?”

  “Ew, Ginger. Unnecessary visual. But yes. I did express it, though more politely.”

  “Well, I suppose we can give him a chance to earn it.” She pauses. “Is he pretty?”

  There’s no point in lying. “Very pretty.”

  “Worth breaking the rule for?”

  “Ginger! No! I am not—”

  She exhales loudly, cutting me off. “I know, I know. It doesn’t matter if he’s very pretty. Or very charming, sweet, smart, funny, talented, et cetera et cetera. You aren’t dating anyone before college.”

  I reach out and pinch her elbow. “Yes, and it’s a good rule. A great rule.”

  A rule that served various helpful purposes. I could focus on friends, family, school. Avoid the drama and heartbreak that goes along with dating in high school—especially a small school like ours, where relationships are often like a messy overlapping Venn diagram. But the primary purpose—the one I absolutely never say out loud, and the reason I came up with the rule in the first place—is because of Noah. I can avoid the idea of dating him specifically if I make it clear I’m not dating anyone period. He’d slipped an anonymous Valentine’s Day card in my locker sophomore year, but “anonymous” isn’t possible after a decade and a half of seeing your best friend’s handwriting. You are the most beautiful human in the world. I knew the loops and slants of his letters as well as I knew my own. But it was obvious without the card anyway. Had been for a while, really. The way he looked at me was evidence enough. I never acknowledged that I knew—that I’d recognize his words anywhere. Instead, I declared my rule the very next day: No dating until college. To be fair, I had never dated even before I came up with the rule. No one had ever asked. But there was no one I wanted to ask me either.

  “It’s an arbitrary rule.” She pinches me back with those fresh leopard nails, the tips fittingly sharp and clawlike.

  I wince and rub the half-moon imprints on my wrist. “It’s not arbitrary. And it’s more important now than ever. We only have one year left in Green Woods together. One. I intend to use my time wisely. You and Noah. My moms. College applications. The Environmental Club—which, now that I’m president this year, I fully expect you to join. So, yes, actual important things. Not a meaningless relationship that’ll inevitably end anyway when it’s time for long distance.” And I do believe in all of these reasons. They’re good ones. Just not the only ones.

  “Uh-huh. And have I ever told you that you seriously overthink everything?”

  “Oh, at least a million and two times before today, I’d say.”

  “Well, then let’s make it a million and three. Because you do. Overthink. Just let life happen sometimes, okay?”

  I shake my head, and Ginger knows me well enough to move on. “Anyway, in other news, I think Penelope Park smiled at me a little… I don’t know, wistfully, yesterday when I went to buy some almond butter and fluff at the store. She was checking me out—at the register, I mean, but maybe actually checking me out, too—and our hands touched for a good three seconds when she handed me the receipt.”

  “Not to be a buzzkill, but isn’t Penelope still with Ethan? And… potentially straight?”

  “Well, right, that’s why I said the smile was a little wistful, like she maybe wants to be with me but is still too ensnared in the oppressive chains of her heteronormative lifestyle to break away quite yet. But maybe she will. I can be patient. It’s hard to come out when there are only two confirmed lesbians in a school of, oh, you know, five hundred students.”

  The kitchen door opens before I can respond, and Noah steps outside slowly, balancing a pitcher of tea and three glasses on a wooden tray. He’s dressed like he usually is, plain white T-shirt and dark denim shorts, battered gray slip-on sneakers. In the cold months it switches to dark jeans and a sweater over a white T-shirt. He has the kind of fair skin that somehow turns a deep tan after one summer day in the sun—whereas I go straight to pink—and he already has that bronze glow now. His thick golden-brown hair is curling up in the humidity, looking purposefully, artfully messy, but I know he’s never touched a dab of product in his life.

  He smiles wide when he sees me watching him.

  Ginger looks between us and sighs dramatically. “What a shame.”

  “What’s a shame?” Noah asks as he puts down the tray on the picnic table. He pours two tall glasses of tea and then delivers them to us in the hammock.

  “Oh, nothing important,” Ginger says, waving him off as she lifts the glass to her bright red lips and takes a sip. “Mm. Excellent infusion. I do have a real affinity for all things ginger, not surprisingly.”

  “I was just telling her,” I say, “about the new neighbors that moved into the Jackson house. It’s a shame, isn’t it? A nice, innocent family picking such a sad place for a home.”

  “Seriously?” Noah looks off toward the woods, as if he might actually make out the Jackson house behind all the trees. “Someone is really living there?”

  “Yep. I met one of them, a boy around our age. Max.”

  “Yeah? Well, we’ll have to be extra nice to Max. Show him Green Woods isn’t all scary and gloomy like that house. Boring, maybe. But the scariest thing about Green Woods is the lack of good food options. Or maybe the fact that even a mediocre hospital is thirty minutes away.” He turns back to the table, pours himself a glass of tea.

  “That house is definitely scary,” Ginger says, crunching on a piece of ice. “Especially since the roof has looked on the verge of collapse for the last decade or so.”

  “That’s probably a bit dramatic. Maybe just the porch roof,” I say, and then I taste the tea. Ginger’s right. The ginger-lime combo is excellent. Maybe Noah’s best yet.

  I sit up taller in the hammock and raise my glass. “Let’s toast.”

  Ginger raises her glass up next to mine, and Noah comes over to join us.

  “To summer,” I say, “and to the beginning of our last year together.”

  “We’ll always be together,” Noah says. “I’m pretty sure we don’t need Green Woods High for that.”

  “But it will be different.”

  Ginger clinks my glass hard. “To embracing different. Because that can be a good thing.”

  I clink back harder. “But to keeping our friendships the same. No matter what.”

  “Always,” Ginger says.

  “Always,” Noah echoes.

  We tilt our heads back and drink.

  Always.

  Chapter Two

  “I’M feeling celebratory today,” Mimmy says the next morning, putting a stack of fluffy blueberry pancakes in front of me. Sun streams in through the lacy buttercup-yellow curtains, making circles of light dance around our old wooden kitchen table. “Mama and I got coverage for the opening shift at the studio, for one. And it’s officially the first Saturday of the summer. A few happy months of sunshine ahead, and then our baby girl is a senior. A senior.”

  “Jesus Christ, we’re old,” Mama says, coming up behind her with a bottle of maple syrup—the real stuff, of course. It’s a festive morning in the Silversmith house. “Feels like just yesterday she was sliding out of our uteri, doesn’t it, Mimmy? Almost makes my eyes damp.”

  Uteri, always. Never uterus. Though Mimmy is the one who technically carried me for nine months and pushed me out into the world. I’ve seen photos of her bump, so I know that much. But they refuse to say whose egg was responsible for creating me—whose egg was used to make the embryo, my petri-dish beginning. It’s supposed to be a forever mystery, which one, Mimmy or Mama, has half of my genetic code. They won the sperm bank lottery, apparently, because it’s completely impossible to tell whose egg spawned me—the donor must have a weirdly precise
blend of both my moms’ features. I have Mimmy’s light freckles and permanently tangled auburn hair, Mama’s blue eyes and slightly upturned nose, which she calls a ski slope and I call a pig snout. I have Mimmy’s squeaky laugh, Mama’s strong yoga arms. Mimmy’s dimples, Mama’s pointed ears. I like to bake and create like Mimmy, but she’s softer than me, dreamier and more meditative. I’m not as tough as Mama either, but I’m type A like she is, a planner and an overthinker—as Ginger likes to remind me. I’m miraculously a perfect fusion of them both.

  Mimmy was once upon a time a Silver, Mama was a Smith.

  But we’re all Silversmiths now.

  “At least we have almost a month until she’s eighteen,” Mama says, digging out a blueberry from the top pancake on my plate. “We can still baby her.”

  “Don’t you have your own pancakes to plunder?” I pretend to slap her hand away, but she catches my fingers in hers—all ten of them together, long and slender and big knuckled, I can hardly tell which are hers, which are mine. “You took the best blueberry.”

  “Mimmy still has mine on the griddle. We both love you enough to give you the first ones, so don’t you dare complain to me.”

  “Do you and Ginger and Noah have any plans today?” Mimmy asks, sipping from her mug of foamy green matcha with one hand as she flips pancakes with the other. “It’s gorgeous out there. Maybe you should have a picnic at the lake? I made some hummus last night and picked a handful of tomatoes and peppers from the garden.”

  “Ginger’s around, I think, but Noah’s busy. He’s taking an intensive all-day private cello lesson on Saturdays at a studio in Philly this summer. Prep for college auditions.”

  Mama and then Mimmy settle in at the table with their pancakes, and the conversation moves on around me: studio schedules and garden supplies and the merits of veggie burgers versus salmon burgers for the grill tonight. I eat my pancakes in a contented silence, picking all the blueberries out first. I pour more syrup into the holes and watch the dark amber sunrays skim to the edge of the plate.

  “I will forever blame Frank for your sweet tooth and odd eating habits,” Mama says, swiping the syrup bottle from my hand. “This is why we only have pancakes on special occasions.”

  Frank. The donor.

  His name’s not really Frank. Or maybe it is, I have no clue. I’ve been calling him Frank, though, for as long as I knew that half of me logically must have come from someone else. The legend goes that Mama was always listening to Frank Zappa when I was little—she still does sometimes, though the nickname has ruined the music for her, she says—and one day I asked if he was my daddy and that’s why she loved him so much. That was when I learned to never say daddy again, because whoever this man is, wherever he might be—he’s not my daddy. Being a daddy is about much more than DNA. But donor sounded too cold, like I’m a science experiment from a lab—even if, yes, that’s what in vitro fertilization actually means—so Frank stuck.

  “When I’m eighteen, I’m buying my own supply of syrup, and you can’t tell me not to.”

  “Speaking of eighteen, and Frank, and the decision you’ll have to make—whether or not you want to be in touch…” Mimmy squeezes my hand and gives me a very meaningful look.

  “That again, Margo? Seriously, Frank could have died years ago,” Mama says, her eyes focused intently on her pancakes.

  Mimmy and I sigh at the same time. We’ve heard this argument before. “Well,” I say, “he could have chosen to be an anonymous donor. But he didn’t. And you could have picked an anonymous donor to use for me. But you didn’t.” Just in case, they say. Just in case of what exactly, I’m not sure. I don’t think they’re sure either. Maybe access to future medical information. Or maybe it just felt too final to close that door for good. “You picked someone who was willing to be contacted. When I turned eighteen. If he’s still alive.”

  I might not even request any information about him. A month from now, or anytime ever. Because then what? We talk on the phone? I search for him online? Pore over photos that come up, dissecting eyes, lips, cheekbones, ears, to find something that looks slightly like mine?

  Mama impales a blueberry with her fork. “That may be true, but—”

  “Can we talk about something else?” I interrupt, tapping my fork against Mama’s plate so she’s forced to look up at me. “Aren’t we supposed to be celebrating?”

  “Sorry. I do come on strong, don’t I?” She grins. “Part of my charm. Can’t deny it.”

  “Mm-hmm, whatever you say, sweets,” Mimmy says. She rolls her eyes, but in a loving way. She’ll never be immune to Mama’s charms. “Oh, I have something else to talk about! I went for a walk this morning, and I saw a car pull out of the driveway next door—the old Jackson place. I wonder what that was about? Could someone actually be moving in?”

  I glance toward the window. “Yes. A family—they already moved in. I met the son. Max.”

  “Oh?” Mimmy asks. “When?”

  “He came by yesterday morning. Asking for sugar. I forgot to tell you last night.”

  “Sugar!” Mama laughs incredulously. She scoops a forkful of dry, unsyruped pancake into her mouth.

  “Yes, sugar. I had to regretfully inform him that sugar wasn’t allowed in our home.”

  “So what was he like? It’s hard to imagine anyone besides Mr. Jackson living there. I assumed at this point that house was permanently abandoned.” Mama tilts her head, likely considering all potential cons of this development. “At least if they’re terrible, we have a sturdy army of trees between us.”

  “I’m not sure we need an army. He seemed friendly enough.”

  “Maybe we should bake something for them?” Mimmy says. “Welcome them to Green Woods. It can’t be easy, living in that house.”

  That house.

  My skin prickles at the way she says it, even though it’s already ninety degrees in our kitchen.

  “There’s nothing wrong with that house,” Mama says, shaking her head. “It’s just an innocent dilapidated pile of dust and stone and I’m glad someone outside of this silly town can clean it back up. Otherwise it might as well be knocked down so the animals can have more room to play.”

  Mimmy doesn’t seem convinced. “Maybe the stories aren’t all true. But I don’t have a good feeling when I drive by there. I swear my bones can feel it. The sadness.”

  We all quietly continue eating after that.

  Mimmy looks like she’s still thinking about ghosts. And Mama looks like she’s mentally planning out poses for her weekend classes.

  I wait until I’ve cleared every last golden pool, running my finger against the plate and licking it clean. And then I say: “You’re right, Mimmy. It’s a good idea to bake something for the new neighbors.”

  I walk into the shadowy trees later that afternoon.

  I’m carrying a plate of Mimmy’s signature dessert, peach cobbler bars, with a tiny bowl of homemade maple-tofu whipped cream on the side. She’d walked me through the recipe before she and Mama left for the studio. Hopefully it’s at least half as good as hers. Half as good would still be far better than anyone else’s peach cobbler bars.

  The woods become thicker and duskier as I get close, branches dipping low across my path. Leaves muffle the sound of the creek that runs behind both of our properties. I am alone. The only creature on this planet.

  But then a ray of sun filters in. The trees open up slowly, one by one, like the woods are laying down a leafy golden trail for me.

  One more step, and there it is, a hulking stack of old stones and wooden beams. The Jackson house. Looking just as decrepit and foreboding as I remembered. Even the meadow it sits in seems washed out, like every natural color has been bleached from too much exposure to the sun. Noah never understood our squeamishness, but after Mr. Jackson died, Ginger and I used to dare each other to see who would get closer to the house. She touched the front door once with the tip of her pinkie. I couldn’t even make it up the porch steps. It’s been a few years,
though, since we cared about the house. Or cared enough to pretend to be brave.

  But I’m brave today.

  My feet skitter purposefully across the dull green grass, broken up with patches of cracked dirt and debris, rotting remains of old leaves and weeds. There’s a light scent of smoke in the air. I don’t see any cars, though the garage door is closed.

  The first porch step is fine, but the second one gives as I step down, and I hop quickly to the third and onto the porch. Empty windows watch me. I can’t hear anything besides my own breath.

  I knock three times. Wait. Knock again, louder. I even try what looks like an old rusty doorbell, but I can’t tell if it chimes inside the house.

  No one comes.

  I don’t leave the dessert on the steps. Animals might eat it, after all.

  Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.

  An owl hoots outside my windows that night. My owl.

  Calling out to another bird. Serenading the stars. I see this particular great horned owl sometimes, yellow-eyed and resolutely somber-faced up in the high branches. I like to believe she guards our clearing by night.

  My bedroom is in the attic, planked wooden floors and rough plaster walls, the ceiling slanted on both sides with a steep point in the middle. Mama and Noah both have to stoop when they come inside. If I wear a bun, my hair snags on the rafters. Ginger’s hair, too. Only Mimmy fits just right.

  From the big round window over my bed, I see leaves and branches and sky. My moms tried to keep me in the bedroom downstairs next to theirs, but I’d always wanted this. So when I turned twelve, I moved up here. My bird’s nest. A tower in the clouds. The walls are covered in photos—some snipped from old magazines, others professional prints I’ve ordered, framed and unframed, a total mishmash of animals, trees, insects, mountains, lakes, rivers, oceans. Pictures that I’ve seen and thought: this is our world and I’m lucky enough to live in it.

  The owl hoots again.

  Ginger is sound asleep on a cot across the room. There’s a breeze coming in the windows, making the curtains rustle. I listen to the rhythmic hum of the fan, Ginger’s soft in-and-out breaths. I should feel sleepier than I do.