Underneath the table, I felt Adam squeeze my hand. He threaded our fingers together, his knuckles locking against mine. “Adam,” I whispered, as Sarah started to speak about STDs and hymens and premature ejaculation, and we continued to hold hands under the table. I felt as if I had a star in my throat, as if all I had to do was open my mouth for light to pour out of me. “What if someone sees us?”
He turned his head; I felt his breath on the curve of my ear. “Then they’ll think I’m the luckiest guy in this room.”
With those words, my body became electric, with all the power generating from the place our palms touched. I didn’t hear another word Sarah said for the next thirty minutes. I couldn’t think of anything but how different Adam’s skin was from mine and how close he was and how he wasn’t letting go.
It wasn’t a date, but it wasn’t not a date, either. We were both planning on going to the zoo for that evening’s family activity, so Adam made me promise to meet him at the orangutans at six o’clock.
Okay, he asked Willow to meet him there.
You were so excited about going to the zoo that you could barely sit still the whole minibus ride over there. We didn’t have a zoo in New Hampshire, and the one near Boston was nothing to write home about. We’d been planning to go to Disney’s Animal Kingdom during our vacation at Disney World, but you remember how that turned out. Unlike you, my mother was practically a china statue. She stared straight ahead on the minibus and didn’t try to talk to anyone, as opposed to yesterday, when she was Miss Chatty. She looked like she might shatter if the driver hit a speed bump too fast.
Then again, she wouldn’t be the only one.
I kept checking my watch so often that I felt like Cinderella. Actually, I felt like Cinderella for a lot of reasons. Except instead of wearing a glittery blue dress, I was borrowing your identity and your illness, and my prince happened to be someone who’d broken forty-two bones.
“Apes,” you announced as soon as we crossed through the gates of the zoo. They’d opened the place for the OI convention after normal business hours, which was cool because it felt like we’d been trapped here after the gates had been locked for the night, and practical because I’m sure it was-well-a zoo during the day, and most people with OI would have been bobbing and weaving to avoid being knocked by the crowds. I grabbed your chair and started to push you up a slight incline, which was when I realized there was something really wrong with my mother.
She normally would have looked at me as if I’d grown a second head and asked why I was volunteering to push your chair when usually I whined bloody murder if she even asked me to unlatch your stupid car seat.
Instead, she just marched along like a zombie. If I’d asked her what animals we passed, I bet she would have just turned to me and said Huh?
I pushed you up close to the wall to see the orangutans, but you had to stand to see over it. You balanced yourself against the low concrete barrier, your eyes lighting when you saw the mother and her baby. The mother orangutan was cradling the teeniest little ape I’d ever seen, and another baby that was probably a few years old kept pestering her, pulling at her tail and swinging a foot in front of them and being a total pain in the butt. “It’s us,” you said, delighted. “Look, Amelia!”
But I was busy glancing all around for Adam. It was six o’clock on the dot. What if he was blowing me off? What if I couldn’t even keep a guy interested in me when I was pretending to be someone else?
Suddenly he was there, a fine sweat shining on his forehead. “Sorry,” he said. “The hill was killer.” He glanced at my mother and you, facing the orangutans. “Hey, that’s your family, right?”
I should have introduced him. I should have told my mother what I was doing. But what if you said my name-my real name-and Adam realized I was a total liar? So instead I grabbed Adam’s hand and pulled him off to a side path that wound past a flock of red parrots and a cage where there was supposed to be a mongoose, but apparently it was an invisible one. “Let’s just go,” I said, and we ran down to the aquarium.
Because of where it was tucked in the zoo, it wasn’t crowded. There was one family in there with a toddler in a spica cast-poor kid-looking at the penguins in their fake formal wear. “Do you think they know they’ve got a raw deal?” I asked. “That they’ve got wings, and can’t fly?”
“As opposed to a skeleton that keeps falling apart?” Adam said. He tugged me into another room, a glass tunnel. The light was blue, eerie; all around us, sharks were swimming. I looked up at the soft white belly of a shark, the ridged diamond rows of its teeth. At the hammerheads, wriggling like Star Wars creatures as they passed us by.
Adam leaned against the glass wall, staring up at the transparent ceiling. “I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “What if it breaks?”
“Then the Omaha zoo has a huge problem.” Adam laughed.
“Let’s see what else there is,” I said.
“What’s your rush?”
“I don’t like sharks,” I admitted. “They freak me out.”
“I think they’re awesome,” Adam said. “Not a single bone in their body.”
I stared at him, his face blue in the aquarium light. His eyes were the same color as the water, a deep, pure cobalt.
“Did you know that they hardly ever find shark fossils, because they’re made of cartilage, and they decompose really fast? I’ve always kind of wondered if that’s true of people like us, too.”
Because I am a moron, and destined to live alone my whole life with a dozen cats, at that very moment I burst into tears.
“Hey,” Adam said, pulling me into his arms, which felt like home and totally strange all at once. “I’m sorry. That was a really stupid thing to say.” One of his hands was on my back, rubbing down each pearl of my spine. One was tangled in my hair. “Willow?” he said, tugging on my ponytail so that I’d look up at him. “Talk to me?”
“I’m not Willow,” I burst out. “That’s my sister’s name. I don’t even have OI. I lied, because I wanted to sit in on that class. I wanted to sit next to you.”
His fingers curled around the back of my neck. “I know.”
“You…what?”
“I Googled your family, during the break after the sex class. I read all about your mom and the lawsuit and your sister, who’s just as young as they said she was on the OI blogs.”
“I’m a horrible person,” I admitted. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry I’m not the person you wanted me to be.”
Adam stared at me soberly. “No, you’re not. You’re better. You’re healthy. Who wouldn’t want that for someone you really, really like?”
And then, suddenly, his mouth was touching mine, and his tongue was touching mine, and even though I’d never done this and had only read about it in Seventeen, it wasn’t wet or gross or confusing. Somehow, I knew which way to turn and when to open and close my lips and how to breathe. His hands splayed on my shoulder blades, on the spot you’d once broken, on the place where I’d have wings if I had been born an angel.
The room was closing in around us, just blue water and those bone less sharks. And I realized that Sarah had gotten part of her sex talk wrong: it wasn’t fractures you had to worry about, it was dissolving-losing yourself willingly, blissfully, in someone else. Adam’s fingers were warm on my waist, skirting the bottom of my shirt, but I was afraid to touch him, afraid that I would hold him too tightly and hurt him.
“Don’t be scared,” he whispered, and he put my hand over his heart so that I could feel it beating.