The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  Amelia

  So let me tell you why I didn’t take the bus that morning: no one had bothered to check outside the front door, and it wasn’t until Paulette the nurse arrived and totally freaked out when she had to beat off an army of photographers and reporters that we realized how many people had gathered to snap the coveted picture of my parents leaving for court.

  “Amelia,” my father said tightly, “in the car. Now!”

  For once, I just did what he said.

  That would have been bad enough, but some of them followed us to my school. I kept an eye on them in the passenger mirror. “Isn’t this how Princess Diana died?”

  My father hadn’t spoken a word, but his jaw was set so tight I thought he might crack a tooth. At a red light, he faced me. “I know it’s going to be hard, but you have to pretend this is any other normal day.”

  I know what you’re thinking: this is the point where Amelia inserts a really snarky, inappropriate comment, like That’s what they said about 9/11, too, but I just didn’t have one in me. Instead, I found myself shaking so hard I had to slip my hands underneath my thighs. “I don’t know what normal is anymore,” I heard myself say, in the tiniest voice ever.

  My father reached out and brushed my hair off my face. “When this is all over,” he said, “do you think you might like to live with me?”

  Those words, they made my heart pump triple time. Someone wanted me; someone was choosing me. But I also sort of felt like throwing up. It was a nice fantasy, but if we were being totally realistic, what court would grant custody to a man who wasn’t even related to me by blood? That meant I’d be stuck with my mother, who would know by then that she was my second choice. And besides, what about you? If I lived alone with Dad, maybe I’d finally get some attention, but I’d also be leaving you behind. Would you hate me for it?

  When I didn’t answer and the light turned green, my father started driving again. “You can think about it,” he said, but I could tell he was a little bit hurt.

  Five minutes later, we were at the circular driveway of my school. “Are the reporters going to follow me in?”

  “They’re not allowed,” my father said.

  “Well.” I pulled my backpack onto my lap. It weighed thirty-three pounds, which was a third of my body weight. I knew this for a fact because last week the school nurse had a scale set up where you could weigh your bag and yourself, since kids my age weren’t supposed to be hauling around bags that were too heavy. If you divided your backpack weight by your body weight and got more than 15 percent, you were going to wind up with scoliosis or rickets or hives or God knew what. Everyone’s pack had been too heavy, but that didn’t keep teachers from assigning the same amount of homework.

  “Um, good luck today,” I said.

  “Do you want me to come in and talk to the guidance counselor or the principal? Tell them you might need extra attention today . . . ?”

  That was the last thing I needed—to stand out like even more of a sore thumb. “I’m fine,” I said, and I opened the truck door.

  The cars peeled off after my dad’s truck, which made it a little easier for me to breathe. At least that’s what I thought, until I heard someone call my name. “Amelia,” a woman said, “how do you feel about this lawsuit?”

  Behind her was a man with a TV camera on his shoulder. Some other kids walking into the school threw their arms around me, as if I were their friend. “Dude!” one of them said. “Can you do this on TV?” He held up his middle finger.

  Another journalist materialized from behind the bushes on my left. “Does your sister talk to you about how she feels, knowing her mother’s suing for wrongful birth?”

  Was this a family decision?

  Are you going to testify?

  Until I heard that, I’d forgotten: my name was on some stupid list, just in case. My mother and Marin had said that I’d probably never testify, that it was just a precaution, but I didn’t like being on lists. It made me feel like someone was counting on me, and what if I let them down?

  Why weren’t they following Emma? She went to this school, too. But I already knew the answer: in their eyes, in everyone’s eyes, Piper was the victim. I was the one related to the vampire who’d decided to suck her best friend dry.

  “Amelia?”

  Over here, Amelia . . .

  Amelia!

  “Leave me alone!” I shouted. I covered my ears with my hands and shoved my way into the school, blindly pushing past kids kneeling at their lockers and teachers navigating with their mugs of coffee and couples making out as if they wouldn’t see each other for years, instead of just the next forty-five minutes of class. I turned in to the first doorway I could find—a teachers’ bathroom—and locked myself inside. I stared at the clean porcelain rim of the toilet.

  I knew the word for what I was doing. They showed us movies about it in health class; they called it an eating disorder. But that was completely wrong: when I did it, everything fell into place.

  For example, when I did it, hating myself made perfect sense. Who wouldn’t hate someone who ate like Jabba the Hutt and then vomited it all up again? Someone who went to all the trouble to get rid of the food inside her but was still just as chubby as ever? And I understood that whatever I was doing wasn’t nearly as bad as the girl in my school who was anorexic. Her limbs looked like toothpick and sinew; no one in their right mind would ever confuse me with her. I wasn’t doing this because I looked in the mirror and saw a fat girl even though I was skinny—I was fat. I couldn’t even starve myself the right way, apparently.

  But I had sworn that I’d stop. I had sworn that I’d stop making myself sick, in return for a family that stayed together.

  You promised, I told myself.

  Less than twelve hours ago.

  But suddenly there I was, sticking my finger down my throat, throwing up, waiting for the relief that always came.

  Except this time, it didn’t.

  Piper

  I learned from Charlotte that baking is all about chemistry. Leavening happens biologically, chemically, or mechanically, and creates steam or gases that make the mixture rise. The key to great baked goods is to pick the right leavening agent for the batter or dough, so that bread has a smooth texture, popovers pop, meringue foams, and soufflés rise.

  This, Charlotte said to me one day, while I was helping her bake a birthday cake for Amelia, is why baking works. She wrote on a napkin:

  KC4H5O6 + NaHCO3 → CO2↑ + KNaC4H4O6 + H2O

  I got a B- in Orgo, I told her.

  Cream of tartar plus sodium bicarbonate gives you carbon dioxide gas and potassium sodium tartrate and water, she said.

  Show-off, I replied.

  I’m only saying it’s not as simple as beating eggs and flour together, Charlotte said. I’m trying to make this a teachable moment here.

  Pass me the damn vanilla extract, I said. Do they really teach that in culinary school?

  They don’t just hand over scalpels to med students, do they? You have to learn why you’re doing what you’re doing first.

  I shrugged. I bet Betty Crocker wouldn’t know a scientific equation if it flew out of her oven.

  Charlotte began to mix the batter. She knew it in principle: one ingredient in a bowl is a start. But two ingredients in a bowl, well, that’s a whole story.

  Here’s what Charlotte didn’t mention: that sometimes even the most careful baker can make a mistake. That the balance between the acid and the soda might be off, the ingredients not mixed, the salts trapped behind.

  That you’d be left with a bitter taste in your mouth.

  • • •

  On the morning of the trial, I stayed in the shower for a very long time, letting the water strike my back like a punishment. Here it was: the moment I would face Charlotte in court.

  I had forgotten the sound of her voice.

  Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between los