Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [4]
Looking him right in the eye, I dragged the roll through the slurry of Chinese mustard and duck sauce I’d made, and took a giant bite. His grin widened. “Moxie,” he said. “That’s nice. People like a girl with a sense of humor.”
“Are you serious?” I asked once I’d swallowed. “Twenty thousand dollars for an egg?” I’d seen ads, of course, in the school paper, online, and on fliers posted in the student union and the library. Families seeking egg donors. All expenses paid. Please help make our dreams come true. But I’d never noticed the fee for the egg itself, and I’d never guessed it would be so high.
Jared Baker was friendly, but not smarmy, serious and calm as he asked me more questions: Where had I grown up? What were my SAT scores? Had I ever had an IQ test? Had anyone in my family had cancer or diabetes or mental illness? I gave him the numbers and said no to the illnesses. He pulled a notebook out of his briefcase and asked if I had siblings, how old my mother had been when I was born, and how much I’d weighed as a baby. I was careful with my answers, thinking about what he’d want to hear, what story would go best with the girl he was seeing, a tall, blond, jockish girl in a Princeton sweatshirt who was eating by herself only because her friends had finished first and were waiting for her in the bookstore.
“Ever been pregnant?” he asked, the same way he’d asked if I was a vegetarian or if heart disease ran in my family. I shook my head, ponytail swishing. I’d only had sex with three different boys, an embarrassingly low tally at my age. I was starting to think that I was one of those people who didn’t like sex very much. Maybe it made me lucky. I wouldn’t spend my whole life getting my heart broken, chasing after this guy or that one.
“And are you single?”
I nodded, trying not to look too excited, to give the appearance that men stopped by the food court to offer me piles of cash every Monday I went to the mall, but my mind was racing, imagining what I could do with twenty thousand dollars, a sum I hadn’t imagined possessing unless I won the lottery or married very, very well. Even with the investment-banking job I was going to take after I graduated, I’d have to manage rent in New York City and start paying back my loans, so the idea of having five figures’ worth of discretionary income was new to me, extraordinary, and alluring.
Jared Baker handed me a business card, a rectangle of heavy ivory paper with embossed letters on top that said PRINCETON FERTILITY CLINIC, INC. His name was underneath, with telephone numbers and an e-mail address. “Be in touch,” he said. “I think you’d be an excellent candidate.”
“Twenty thousand dollars,” I said again.
“Minimum,” he repeated. “Oh, and if you wouldn’t mind telling me your name?”
“Julia Strauss,” I said. “My friends call me Jules.”
“Jules,” he said, giving me another appraising look and shaking my hand again.
So that was how it started: in the Princeton MarketFair, over a Styrofoam plate of sweet and sour chicken and a spring roll that I never got to finish. It seemed so simple. I thought that selling an egg would be like giving blood, like checking the Organ Donation box on your driver’s license, like giving away something you’d never wanted or even noticed much to begin with. And yes, at first, I was just in it for the money. It wasn’t about altruism, or feminism, or any other ism. It was about the cash. But I wasn’t going to blow it on clothes or a car or a graduation bash, on Ecstasy or a trip to Vail, or Europe, or one of the hundred frivolous things my classmates might have chosen. I was going to take that money and I was going to try to save my father ... or, more accurately, I was going to give him one last chance to save himself.
ANNIE
I stood in the kitchen with the telephone in my hand, heart pounding, until I heard a familiar voice on the other end say hello. “Ma?”
“Annie?” she asked.