Sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, surrounded by everything I remembered — the square in front of the sink where the linoleum had worn thin, the placemats my father had bought for me and Greg at the children’s museum, the postcard of Barcelona that had been taped on the refrigerator for years — I felt that same sensation, of being there and not there, of not really being myself. I watched Kimmie. She had pulled her hair into a high ponytail, spooned her soup, and chattered to me about New York — a restaurant that made what was supposed to be the best fried chicken in the world; a musical, all in Spanish, where they gave student discounts on Wednesday nights. We washed the dishes, then I took a shower, letting the water flow over me, telling myself what to do next. Pick up the soap. Wash your legs. Under your arms. Now the shampoo.

Kimmie was waiting in the bedroom, in her men’s boxer shorts and ribbed sleeveless undershirt, curled up on the bed. “Do you need anything?” she asked me.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, and lay beside her in the darkness, perfectly still, thinking about who I was: a college graduate, a junior analyst, an egg donor, a woman without a father. “He used to braid my hair,” I whispered, unsure of whether I was talking to myself or to Kimmie; unsure whether she was even awake. But oh, I remembered it, every detail: sitting on the floor in front of his recliner in my favorite loose flannel pajamas, his brown lace-up shoes on either side of me, his hand moving the comb against my scalp, his calm voice asking, What color ponytail holders? One braid or two?

A noise came out of me, something between a moan and a sob, a sound I’d never made before, could not imagine making. It wasn’t loud, and I quickly buried my face in the pillow, but Kimmie must have heard me. She pressed her body tightly against mine. I pulled her head close to me and buried my face between her neck and her shoulder, pressing against the softness of her skin.


ANNIE

Before I left Target for the last time, Gabe gave me a reading list. Most of the books I found at the library and started but didn’t finish, but there was one that held my attention. It was called Never Let Me Go. It was set in England, at a boarding school, and it started off slowly, the way so many of Gabe’s books seemed to begin. At first I thought that it would be about rich kids in the countryside, their fads and cliques and crushes, and two girls falling for the same boy. But gradually, the book shed its disguise and showed its true self to me, and it wasn’t a kids-in-school book at all. It was a horror story. The students at the boarding school weren’t real people; they were clones who had been bred so they could donate their organs. When they “completed”—when they made all the donations they could — they would die.

Once I realized this, I thought the book would turn into a thriller, where the girl, Kathy H., and the boy, Tommy, would try to run away and be together. The clones looked exactly like regular people; there was nothing that distinguished them from anyone else. But that didn’t happen. The two of them simply accepted what they were, what they’d been made for, their destiny. They never tried to fight it, never tried to run. I finished the book feeling sorrow mixed with recognition, thinking, That’s Frank. That’s me.

Frank and I met at George Washington High School in Somerton in Northeast Philadelphia, the winter of our junior year. We’d been in the same schools since seventh grade, but we weren’t in the same crowd. I played flute in the school band and took the academic-track classes — not the honors courses, for the college-bound smarties like Nancy, but the classes for the kids for whom community college or an associate’s degree was at least a possibility.

Frank was on the vocational track, for the kids who were going to work as auto mechanics or licensed practical nurses, delivering the mail or reading the meters or mopping the floors. I knew his name, in the way that all of us in our class of just over two hundred knew one another’s names, but I didn’t know much about him. I’d noticed him because there weren’t that many black kids in our high school, and because he was so cute, with green eyes and close-cropped hair and his skin, medium brown and perfectly smooth, and his lips.

One winter day I’d been sitting in the cafeteria at my usual table with my friends, picking at the shredded cheese on my salad (I was dieting, the way I had through most of high school), when Frank walked over to our table. My girlfriends stared. Most of the shop boys, black and white, wore jeans that hung off their butts, exposing as much of their boxers as they could get away with, and heavy workboots and Tshirts advertising some band or another. Frank had the boots but was dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt, neatly pressed, the sleeves rolled up to show his corded forearms. As he came close, I could smell soap and motor oil (he’d been working in the school’s garages that morning), and the good, clean scent of his skin.

“Hi there, Annie,” he said. His eyelashes were long and curly, the kind a girl would spend forever torturing herself with an eyelash curler clamped against her lids to achieve. I remember exactly what I was wearing: a red jersey Henley T-shirt with three buttons at the collar and my favorite pair of jeans, the size-ten Calvin Kleins, a silver locket on a heart that my father had given me for my sweet sixteen. My hair was long, in ringlets that I crafted each morning with a curling iron, and I wore big hoop earrings, studded with fake diamonds, that swung almost to my shoulders and made me look like J.Lo, my fashion icon at the time. “Want to go to the Sweethearts Dance with me?” Frank asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, yeah, I’d like that.”

My girlfriends started giggling. I blushed, admiring him for the way he’d asked, for approaching me in public instead of with a phone call, for risking embarrassment. I also couldn’t quite believe that he knew who I was, that I wasn’t just one of the faceless girls who moved through the same hallways and classrooms but might as well have inhabited a different world. But I also had the strangest sense that I knew him. . that, somehow, my entire time in high school, maybe even my entire life, had been leading up to this conversation.

“I’ll pick you up at six,” he told me. He was very calm, looking at me steadily, ignoring my friends. “We can go to dinner first, if that’s okay.”

“Sure,” I said again. “I live on Crestview.”

“I know.” He walked off, and my girlfriends fell on me, scooping me up like a quarterback in a huddle.

“Oh my God! Frank Barrow!” I smiled, feeling flushed, almost feverish. I still couldn’t quite figure out how he knew me. The next week revealed nothing. Frank smiled when he saw me in the hallways. At lunch, he’d make a point of coming over and saying “hello.” But that was all. I should have been frantic with nerves, part of me wondering if he’d asked me out as some kind of joke or dare. (In the movies I loved, the ones I’d watch every time they came on cable, 10 Things I Hate About You and Never Been Kissed, things like that happened, there were pranks and jokes and misunderstandings, but the boy and the girl always wound up together, the way they were meant to be.)

My friends were useless when it came to figuring out what was behind Frank Barrow’s interest, but full of suggestions about what I should wear. I had the dress I’d bought for homecoming, but I wanted something new for Frank. So I used eighty dollars of my babysitting money to buy a simple sleeveless dress in periwinkle blue, with a deep V-neck and a skirt that swished around my ankles and had braided gold metal buckles at the shoulders, an inexpensive knockoff of the Badgley Mischka gown Kate Winslet had worn to the Oscars that year. I borrowed a pair of gold strappy sandals from Nancy and paid another twenty dollars to go to the beauty school and have my hair curled, then arranged in an updo, with a little rhinestone butterfly clipped over my right ear.

Frank wore a dark-blue suit with a light-blue tie almost the exact same shade as my dress. He held my arm as he walked me to his car, which was his father’s Buick, very old but very clean (I learned later he’d washed and waxed and vacuumed it for the occasion). It wasn’t until he was backing out of my driveway, one arm over my seat, that I realized I didn’t know where we were going. Before homecoming that fall, my date and I and three other couples had gone to the Chart House in Center City, which was, as the name implied, right on the water (the Delaware, which wasn’t one of the world’s prettiest rivers, but when you lived in Philadelphia, you took what you could get). The tables there were set with an array of silverware that most of us found bewildering, and the cheapest entrée, pasta with roasted seasonal vegetables, cost fourteen dollars.

“Burgers okay?” asked Frank.

“Sure!” My voice was too loud. I worried that it sounded like I was disappointed and trying to hide it, but the truth was, I’d left the Chart House with a stomachache, brought on, I figured, by sitting up perfectly straight terrified that I was going to spill salad dressing or step on the hem of my dress or do something that would reveal to the grown-ups eating their meals at the tables around us that none of us had any business being there.

Frank drove to McDonald’s on Broad Street. “Wait here,” he said, hopping out of the car. Five minutes later, he came back with a steaming, fragrant bag, already spotted with grease from the fries. My stomach growled, and, instead of being mortified, I laughed — I hadn’t eaten in days so I could look good in my gown.