The People We Choose by Katelyn Detweiler (any book recommendations .txt) 📗

is definitely scary,” Ginger says, crunching on a piece of ice. “Especially since the roof has looked on the verge of collapse for the last decade or so.”

“That’s probably a bit dramatic. Maybe just the porch roof,” I say, and then I taste the tea. Ginger’s right. The ginger-lime combo is excellent. Maybe Noah’s best yet.

I sit up taller in the hammock and raise my glass. “Let’s toast.”

Ginger raises her glass up next to mine, and Noah comes over to join us.

“To summer,” I say, “and to the beginning of our last year together.”

“We’ll always be together,” Noah says. “I’m pretty sure we don’t need Green Woods High for that.”

“But it will be different.”

Ginger clinks my glass hard. “To embracing different. Because that can be a good thing.”

I clink back harder. “But to keeping our friendships the same. No matter what.”

“Always,” Ginger says.

“Always,” Noah echoes.

We tilt our heads back and drink.

Always.

Chapter Two

“I’M feeling celebratory today,” Mimmy says the next morning, putting a stack of fluffy blueberry pancakes in front of me. Sun streams in through the lacy buttercup-yellow curtains, making circles of light dance around our old wooden kitchen table. “Mama and I got coverage for the opening shift at the studio, for one. And it’s officially the first Saturday of the summer. A few happy months of sunshine ahead, and then our baby girl is a senior. A senior.”

“Jesus Christ, we’re old,” Mama says, coming up behind her with a bottle of maple syrup—the real stuff, of course. It’s a festive morning in the Silversmith house. “Feels like just yesterday she was sliding out of our uteri, doesn’t it, Mimmy? Almost makes my eyes damp.”

Uteri, always. Never uterus. Though Mimmy is the one who technically carried me for nine months and pushed me out into the world. I’ve seen photos of her bump, so I know that much. But they refuse to say whose egg was responsible for creating me—whose egg was used to make the embryo, my petri-dish beginning. It’s supposed to be a forever mystery, which one, Mimmy or Mama, has half of my genetic code. They won the sperm bank lottery, apparently, because it’s completely impossible to tell whose egg spawned me—the donor must have a weirdly precise blend of both my moms’ features. I have Mimmy’s light freckles and permanently tangled auburn hair, Mama’s blue eyes and slightly upturned nose, which she calls a ski slope and I call a pig snout. I have Mimmy’s squeaky laugh, Mama’s strong yoga arms. Mimmy’s dimples, Mama’s pointed ears. I like to bake and create like Mimmy, but she’s softer than me, dreamier and more meditative. I’m not as tough as Mama either, but I’m type A like she is, a planner and an overthinker—as Ginger likes to remind me. I’m miraculously a perfect fusion of them both.

Mimmy was once upon a time a Silver, Mama was a Smith.

But we’re all Silversmiths now.

“At least we have almost a month until she’s eighteen,” Mama says, digging out a blueberry from the top pancake on my plate. “We can still baby her.”

“Don’t you have your own pancakes to plunder?” I pretend to slap her hand away, but she catches my fingers in hers—all ten of them together, long and slender and big knuckled, I can hardly tell which are hers, which are mine. “You took the best blueberry.”

“Mimmy still has mine on the griddle. We both love you enough to give you the first ones, so don’t you dare complain to me.”

“Do you and Ginger and Noah have any plans today?” Mimmy asks, sipping from her mug of foamy green matcha with one hand as she flips pancakes with the other. “It’s gorgeous out there. Maybe you should have a picnic at the lake? I made some hummus last night and picked a handful of tomatoes and peppers from the garden.”

“Ginger’s around, I think, but Noah’s busy. He’s taking an intensive all-day private cello lesson on Saturdays at a studio in Philly this summer. Prep for college auditions.”

Mama and then Mimmy settle in at the table with their pancakes, and the conversation moves on around me: studio schedules and garden supplies and the merits of veggie burgers versus salmon burgers for the grill tonight. I eat my pancakes in a contented silence, picking all the blueberries out first. I pour more syrup into the holes and watch the dark amber sunrays skim to the edge of the plate.

“I will forever blame Frank for your sweet tooth and odd eating habits,” Mama says, swiping the syrup bottle from my hand. “This is why we only have pancakes on special occasions.”

Frank. The donor.

His name’s not really Frank. Or maybe it is, I have no clue. I’ve been calling him Frank, though, for as long as I knew that half of me logically must have come from someone else. The legend goes that Mama was always listening to Frank Zappa when I was little—she still does sometimes, though the nickname has ruined the music for her, she says—and one day I asked if he was my daddy and that’s why she loved him so much. That was when I learned to never say daddy again, because whoever this man is, wherever he might be—he’s not my daddy. Being a daddy is about much more than DNA. But donor sounded too cold, like I’m a science experiment from a lab—even if, yes, that’s what in vitro fertilization actually means—so Frank stuck.

“When I’m eighteen, I’m buying my own supply of syrup, and you can’t tell me not to.”

“Speaking of eighteen, and Frank, and the decision you’ll have to make—whether or not you want to be in touch…” Mimmy squeezes my hand and gives me a very meaningful look.

“That again, Margo? Seriously, Frank could have died years ago,” Mama says, her eyes focused intently on her pancakes.

Mimmy and I sigh at the same time. We’ve heard this argument before. “Well,” I say, “he could have chosen to be an anonymous donor. But he