Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [84]
“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 T-shirts 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,