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  'You're wrong. This case is about what my doctor didn't do--'

  'Answer the question, Ms. O'Keefe--'

  'Specifically,' I said, 'she didn't give me a choice about ending the pregnancy. She should have known something was wrong from that very first ultrasound, and she should have--'

  'Ms. O'Keefe,' the lawyer yelled, 'answer the question!'

  I wilted against the chair and pressed my fingers to my temples. 'I can't,' I whispered. I looked down at the grain of the wood on the railing before me. 'I can't answer that question for you now, because now there is a Willow. A girl who likes pigtails but not braids, and who broke her femur this weekend, and who sleeps with a stuffed pig. A girl who's kept me awake at night for the past six and a half years wondering how to get through the next day without an emergency, and planning, as a backup, how to go from crisis to crisis to crisis.' I looked up at the lawyer. 'At eighteen weeks of pregnancy, at twenty-seven weeks of pregnancy, I didn't know Willow like I do today. So I can't answer your question now, Mr Booker. But the reality is, nobody gave me a chance to answer it back then.'

  'Ms. O'Keefe,' the lawyer said flatly. 'I'm going to ask you one last time. Would you have aborted your daughter?'

  I opened my mouth, and then I closed it.

  'Nothing further,' he said.

  Amelia

  T

  hat night, I ate dinner alone with my parents. You were sitting on the living room couch with a tray and Jeopardy! so that your leg could stay elevated. From the kitchen, I could hear the buzzer every now and then, and Alex Trebek's voice: Ooh, I'm sorry, that's incorrect. As if he really gave a damn.

  I sat between my mother and father, a conduit between two separate circuits. Amelia, can you pass the green beans to your mother? Amelia, pour your father a glass of lemonade. They weren't talking to each other, and they weren't eating - none of us were, really. 'So,' I said cheerfully. 'During fourth period, Jeff Congrew ordered a pizza into French class and the teacher didn't even notice.'

  'Are you going to tell me what happened today?' my father asked.

  My mother lowered her eyes. 'I really do not want to talk about it, Sean. It was bad enough getting through it.'

  The silence was a blanket so huge, it seemed to cover the entire table. 'Domino's delivered,' I said.

  My father cut two precise squares of his chicken. 'Well, if you won't tell me what happened, I guess I'll be able to read all about it tomorrow in the paper. Or maybe, hey, it'll be on the eleven o'clock news . . .'

  My mother's fork clattered against her plate. 'Do you think this is easy for me?'

  'Do you think this is easy for any of us?'

  'How could you?' my mother exploded. 'How could you act like everything was getting better between us and then . . . then this?'

  'The difference between you and me, Charlotte, is that I'm never acting.'

  'It was pepperoni,' I announced.

  They both turned to me. 'What?' my father said.

  'It's not important,' I muttered. Like me.

  You called out from the living room. 'Mom, I'm done.'

  So was I. I got up and scraped the contents of my plate, which was everything, into the trash. 'Amelia, aren't you forgetting to ask something?' my mother said.

  I stared at her dully. There were a thousand questions, sure, but I didn't want to hear the answers to any of them.

  'May I be excused?' my mother prompted.

  'Shouldn't you be asking Willow that?' I said sarcastically.

  As I passed you in the living room, you glanced up. 'Did Mom hear me?'

  'Not by a long shot,' I said, and I ran up the stairs.

  What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand.

  I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size. In the bathroom, I tried to throw up, but I hadn't eaten enough at dinner. I wanted to run barefoot till my feet bled; I wanted to scream, but I'd been silent for so long that I'd forgotten how.

  I wanted to cut.

  But.

  I had promised.

  I took the telephone handset off its cradle beside my mother's bed and carried it into the bathroom for privacy, since any minute now, you would hobble upstairs to get ready for bed. I had programmed Adam's number in. We hadn't spoken in a few days, because he'd broken his leg and had surgery - he'd IMed me from the hospital - but I was hoping he was home now. I needed him to be home now.

  He had given me his cell number - I was surely the only kid over age thirteen who didn't have one, but we couldn't afford it. It rang twice, and then I heard his voice, and I nearly burst into tears. 'Hey,' he said, 'I was just going to call you.'

  It was proof that there was someone in this world who thought I mattered. I felt like I'd just been pulled back from a cliff. 'Great minds think alike.'

  'Yeah,' he said, but his voice sounded thin and distant.

  I tried to remember how he had tasted. I hated that I had to pretend I knew, when in reality, it had already faded, like a rose you press into a dictionary under the Qs, hoping you can call back summer at any time, but then in December it's nothing more than crumbling, brown bits of dried flower. Sometimes at night I'd whisper to myself, pretending that the words came out in the low, soft curve of Adam's voice: I love you, Amelia. You're the one for me. And then I'd open my lips the tiniest bit and pretend that he was a ghost, and that I could feel him sinking into me, onto my tongue, down my throat, into my belly, the only meal that could fill me.

  'How's the leg?'

  'Hurts like hell,' Adam said.

  I curled the phone closer. 'I really miss you. It's crazy here. The trial started, and there were reporters all over the front lawn. My parents are certifiable, I swear--'

  'Amelia.' The word sounded like a ball being dropped from the Empire State Building. 'I wanted to talk to you because, um, this isn't working out. This long-distance thing--'

  I felt a pang between my ribs. 'Don't.'

  'Don't what?'

  'Don't say it,' I whispered.

  'I just . . . I mean, we might never even see each other again.'

  I felt a hook snag at the bottom of my heart, drawing it down. 'I could come visit,' I said, my voice small.

  'Yeah, and then what? Push me around in a wheelchair? Like I'm some kind of charity case?'

  'I would never--'

  'Just go get yourself some football player - that's what girls like you want, right? Not some guy who bumps into a fucking table and snaps his leg in half--'

  By now I was crying. 'That doesn't matter--'

  'Yes it does, Amelia. But you don't understand. You'll never understand. Having a sister who's got OI doesn't make you an expert.'

  My face was flaming. I hung up the phone before Adam could say anything else and held my palms to my cheeks. 'But I love you,' I said, although I knew he couldn't hear me.

  First the tears came. Then the fury: I picked up the phone and hurled it against the bathtub wall. I grabbed the shower curtain and pulled it down in one good yank.

  But I wasn't mad at Adam; I was angry at myself.

  It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you'd be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there. Either that, or you'd confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.

  I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchyfeely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

  That's why