“Well, I kind of wondered, now that I’m older, if there’s any more information they could give us about, uh, my birth parents,” Jonah said. “I mean, not that it really matters. I’m just curious, like—did either of them have dimples? Like me?”
“Dimples!” Katherine snorted indignantly.
Mom shot her one of those looks that said, as clear as day, If I hear one more word out of you, young lady, before you have permission to speak, I will cover your mouth with duct tape for the rest of the night. Of course, Mom had never done anything like that, but her looks always made you believe that she might.
Dad very, very carefully laid his fork on his plate.
“I can certainly call the agency and see if there’s any more information available,” he said. “But I have to warn you, it’s not likely. They weren’t even willing to give us a medical history.”
“Not that we minded,” Mom added quickly. “We were just happy to get you!”
Now Mom and Dad were both beaming at him, stereo smiles. Jonah kicked Katherine under the table.
“Tell your stupid cheerleader story,” he muttered.
Later that night, while Jonah was sitting at his desk doing his social studies homework, Katherine shoved her way into his room.
“Don’t do this,” she said, standing dramatically in his doorway.
“What? Social studies?”
Katherine cast a glance over her shoulder. She stepped aside and eased the door shut behind her. Then—almost cautiously, for her—she sat down on the edge of his bed.
“No, you know,” she said. “That whole adopted-kid search-for-identity thing.”
Jonah pressed his pencil down too hard on the sapiens part of homo sapiens, and the lead snapped. He dropped the pencil and whirled around.
“What’s it to you?” he asked.
“Hey, I’m part of this family too,” Katherine said.
“No, duh.” He thought about snarling, Of course you are. You’re actually related by blood. You belong more than I do. But that wasn’t a very Jonah thing to say. It was like all those cruel things Chip had been saying about his dad all afternoon, that were just Chip being mad and surely couldn’t be true. He decided to stick with “No, duh,” as his best comeback.
Katherine rolled her eyes.
“Look,” she said. “It makes them mental, every time you bring up the adoption, or your birth parents, or anything like that. They start *footing around and being so careful, like, ‘Now, Jonah…’” She’d dropped her voice an octave, in a pretty decent imitation of Dad. “’…I can certainly call the agency…. We’ll do anything we can…. We would never want your adoption to impede your self-actualization….’”
Whoa—where had Katherine learned a term like self-actualization?
“So what?” Jonah said. “And why’s it my fault? They’re the ones who always bring up the story of how they got me. ‘Blah, blah, blah, call out of the blue…blah, blah, blah, blinding rainstorm the night we picked you up…’”
Katherine giggled. Then she leaned forward, her eyes round and earnest.
“Yeah, but see, that’s the past,” she said. “That’s the beginning of the story of them having kids. It’s their story with you. It’s like them telling about giving me Barbie stickers to get me potty-trained. Or telling about the time I threw up into Mom’s purse.”
Jonah snorted, remembering. That had been funny.
Katherine eyed him suspiciously.
“You haven’t told anybody at school those stories, have you?” she asked.
“No—why would I? Who cares?”
Katherine nodded approvingly.
“You better not,” she said. She glanced toward the door once more. “When you start talking about wanting to know more about your birth parents, that’s different. You know what they’re doing down there right now, don’t you? They’re reading those books again.” Jonah didn’t have to ask which ones she meant. “They’re trying to figure out what they’re supposed to say so you don’t start acting out and using drugs and flunking out as your cry for help.”
Jonah realized that Katherine had probably read Raising the Well-Adjusted Adopted Child and Adoption Without Secrets too.
“I’m not going to do any of that stuff,” Jonah said. “That’s crazy.”
“Yeah, well, so’s getting all worried about your birth parents. Because, Jonah”—Now she was leaning so far forward, she was only inches from falling off the bed—“your birth parents don’t matter. You’re Jonah. They could have dimples or they could have three eyes apiece and six fingers on every hand, and it doesn’t change a thing about you.”
Jonah kind of thought that might be impossible—twelve-fingered, three-eyed parents having a ten-fingered, two-eyed kid—but he wasn’t sure. Genetics had never been a big interest for him.
“That’s easy for you to say,” he muttered in a huff. “You can look in a mirror and know exactly where everything came from. Eyes—brown like Mom’s. Nose—ski slope, like Dad’s.”
“I do not have a ski-slope nose!” Katherine protested. “It’s…classical.”
She turned sideways, as if modeling.
“Classical ski slope maybe,” Jonah said.
“It is not! Er—never mind.” Katherine waved her hands in front of her face, like she was trying to erase the nose debate. This was a miracle—Katherine backing away from an argument? “What I meant to say is, that doesn’t matter either. If you’re going through some adolescent ‘Who am I?’ phase, it’s not because you’re adopted. Everyone goes through that. I don’t know who I am either.”
Jonah reached out and tapped her on the arm.
“Katherine Marie Skidmore, remember?” he said. “Daughter of Michael and Linda. Granddaughter of—”