“No. We didn’t break up.”
“Oh, thank god. I was starting to feel positive about love again after the pep talk you two gave me on your birthday. If you two broke up now, we’d both be hopeless.”
“Ginger…” I wipe my clammy palms against my dress. My stomach twists. This is Ginger, I remind myself. I shouldn’t be nervous. I can tell her anything. Always. “Any chance you have a break coming up soon?”
She studies me for a moment, her heavily darkened eyebrows pulled in a tight line. Then she glances at the clock, sighs. “Give me fifteen minutes, okay? I’ll bring you a root beer.”
I drain two glasses of root beer while I wait. The bubbles float in my empty stomach.
“Sorry,” Ginger says a half hour later, putting a piece of strawberry pie in front of me. It’s unnaturally red and shiny and covered in a swirly mound of whipped cream. It’s nearly as big as my head. There are two forks on the plate at least. She slides into the booth next to me, close enough that our arms and legs are pressed together. Her apron is off to show that she’s on her break, and her glasses are clipped to her collar. “You looked like someone who needed some pie. I have fifteen minutes. Tell me everything.” She picks up one of the forks, cuts off a squishy-looking lump of strawberry from the tip of the pie.
“I did it. I requested Frank’s name.”
She drops the fork, and the sad strawberry, on the table. “You did?”
“He wrote me a letter.”
“Oh my god. That was fast.” Her red lips are a perfect O. “Calliope. This is so huge.”
“His name is Elliot Jackson.”
She starts to say something. Stops. Starts. Stops again. It’s like the sound our old lawn mower makes when I first try to rev it up.
“Not—it’s not—?” She’s begging me to fill in the blanks for her.
“I don’t know. He gave me a phone number. I tried calling it before I came here, hoping I could hear his voice and figure things out that way, but I got a robot voice. I didn’t know what to say in an actual message, so I hung up. I used the number to search the internet, too, but didn’t find anything helpful.”
She stares at me with wide, unblinking eyes. “How does this happen, though? I mean the likelihood of being neighbors. It must be one in a million. A billion even. Don’t they have rules in place to stop exactly this from happening?”
I shrug helplessly. “I was researching earlier today. The system has flaws. I’m proof of that.”
“But it can’t be him. Right? You would know. You just would.”
“Would I?”
She nods, but not with her usual Ginger flair of confidence. “I mean, you met Elliot, didn’t you? Did you notice any similarities?”
“No. Besides the fact that we’re both white, I look nothing like him.”
“Okay. Then you probably have nothing to worry about.”
“So you think it could be another Elliot Jackson?”
She picks up the dropped berry with her fingers, pops it in her mouth. I don’t know how she’s eating right now. I want to scream as I wait for her to finish chewing.
“Maybe,” she says finally.
“Maybe?” I definitely want to scream now. And I would, if we weren’t sitting in Ginger’s place of employment.
“I don’t know, Calliope. We have no other facts. You didn’t get the answers you needed from calling the number. So you can either keep trying until he picks up the phone, or you can put your big girl pants on and walk next door and talk to him.”
“Even then, say I talk to him and he tells me he wrote the letter—maybe the cryobank messed up. They could have had a glitch in the system, or the person referencing the donor number was hungover and miserable and not paying attention. It could be a mistake.”
“That’s why you have to talk to him face-to-face. And look at him. Really look at him.”
“But we see what we want to see sometimes, don’t you think? Or in this case, don’t see what we don’t want to see. I don’t think I can trust my eyes.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think you have another choice. He’s the only way to get answers. He’s the key to everything.” When I don’t have a response, she asks, “Have you told anyone else yet?”
“No.”
“So Max has no clue about any of this?”
“No.”
“You know you have to tell him.”
“If it’s true. Only if it’s true. Why scare him away if I have it wrong?”
She bites down hard on her lip, smearing her perfectly applied lipstick. Her teeth are now as unnaturally red as the pie. “And you never felt… anything off about you and Max? Never picked up on any weird vibes?”
“No, Ginger. Never once when we were making out did I stop and think—Gee, could this be my biological half brother? Wouldn’t that be something? And then keep going.”
“I know that. I’m sorry. I don’t know what the right questions are right now.”
“I don’t know the right words either.”
“I mean—your brother.”
“My half brother.”
“If it’s true, what would you do?”
“What do I do? I have to break up with him. It’s—” I can’t bring myself to say it out loud.
Incest. Test-tube incest, maybe, a product of science. But still—incest.
I start laughing hysterically. It’s just so ridiculous—I can’t not laugh. Ginger’s eyes widen with concern. She picks up the fork and cuts off a big chunk of pie, lifting it up to my lips. “Eat. You need pie. Please.”
The pie tastes as fake as I expected, the strawberries sugar-soaked and gelatinous. But the whipped cream makes it more palatable. I obediently chew and swallow.
“It would be illegal to ever have sex with him,” I say matter-of-factly when I’m finished.
“That’s why you were laughing?”
“Yep.”
“You didn’t, though? Yet? Did you?”
I shake my head. “No. Definitely not. We’ve only kissed. But we did say—”
She waits, compulsively eating a few forkfuls of pie in the interim.
“We said ‘I
