Shallow Pond

by Alissa Grosso

  “I hear your sister’s doing better,” Zach said.

  “Yeah, well, as good as can be expected,” I said. I heard the bitter edge to my voice and tried to compensate for it by saying, “She’s awake now, which is nice.”

  “I feel like you’ve been avoiding me,” he said.

  “I see you all the time.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I couldn’t meet his eyes, not because I was afraid he’d see through me, but because I was afraid of what I would feel. What if I looked into those eyes and I lost it? What if there was still some undeniable physical pull between us if I gave it a chance? We were made for each other, after all, and I remembered how I’d always lost control whenever I was with Zach.

  He reached a hand out to grab my backpack, and I shied away. “Come to the pond with me,” he said.

  “I should get to the hospital,” I said, but the truth was I wasn’t sure if I was going to the hospital. I wasn’t ready to give Donald an answer yet.

  “I’ll drive you over,” he said. “But first we need to talk.”

  The surface of the pond still looked frozen, but there was water around the edges and I could tell the ice wasn’t all that thick. It would all be gone soon. The weather was warm and the ground muddy, with only patches of dirty snow here and there. Even though the coming of spring should have been a happy thing, I felt sad inside.

  I walked up to the edge of the pond. A breeze blew across it, carrying the cold off the ice. It felt like someone had opened a freezer door. I shivered, and Zach put his arm around my shoulders. I stiffened, but I didn’t pull away from him.

  “He’s staying at a motel out near the university,” Zach said.

  “Who?”

  “Your father.”

  “He’s not my father.” The angry tone of my words surprised me.

  “I went to see him,” Zach said. “We talked for a while. I know you don’t like him, and I can’t say that I blame you, but he isn’t evil.”

  “You don’t know what he did to Annie,” I said.

  “Actually, I do. He told me.”

  “It was incest.”

  “You yourself said he’s not your father,” Zach said.

  I glared at him. “Well, it’s morally wrong, abusive. And you still think he’s a good guy?”

  “I didn’t say that. He’s got problems, Barbara. He was too much in love with Susie and never was able to get over losing her.”

  “So, that makes what he did all right? Lots of people lose people they love and they don’t go around creating clones.”

  “If he hadn’t, then neither of us would be here. Doesn’t that sort of freak you out?”

  “This whole thing freaks me out!” I screamed. “I wish that I wasn’t here. I wish that I’d never been created by some mad scientist who couldn’t just join a support group or something.” I removed Zach’s arm from my shoulder and stormed back to his car. I didn’t get in, though. I could see my reflection in the passenger-side window and it was like looking at Annie. I felt hot tears stinging my eyes. I thought of Annie in that stupid hospital bed and was reminded of how unfair her whole life had been. Donald was probably lying about being able to fix her—he probably didn’t have a clue. But it didn’t matter. If there was even a tiny little chance that I could somehow save my sister, I had to do it.

  “I’m not accepting that scholarship,” I said.

  “What?”

  I wasn’t sure if Zach hadn’t heard me because I’d spoken so softly or if he was incredulous that I would turn down a free ride to college.

  “I’m staying here in Shallow Pond,” I said. “I’m not going to college in the fall.”

  “Listen,” Zach said. “If this is about me, there’s something I think you should know.”

  His response was so much like Donald’s that I couldn’t help myself. I spun around and shouted, “What is it with you two? Do you really think I’d stay in this crappy town because of some dumb boy? Do you really think I am that pathetic?”

  Zach staggered a few steps backward, as if I’d physically taken a swing at him. I yanked open the car door and got in, slamming the door after me. A few seconds later Zach got in on the driver’s side.

  “I’m not staying in Shallow Pond,” Zach said. I wanted to tell him how that had no bearing one way or another on my plans, but he stopped me before I could say anything. “I always felt like I could never know entirely who I was because of that big, unanswered question about my origin,” he continued. “I imagined all the time what they must have been like, my parents. I figured that some day I’d find them, and then my whole life would come together and I’d finally understand who I really was. But now that I’ve found out where I came from, I’m still as lost as ever, maybe more so. I think I need to go somewhere, take some time to think things over to make sense of it all.”

  “Are you going back to the convent?” I asked.

  “No, not there. I don’t really know where I’m going. I’m going to get in my car and drive, go as far as I can, or to wherever feels like a good place to stop for a while.”

  I imagined Zach out there, driving down some endless highway against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. I was jealous. Why did he get to leave while I had to stay?

  “It sounds nice,” I said.

  “The thing is,” Zach said, “I’m going pretty soon. I made some arrangements to take final exams early. Donald helped me with that, actually, and, well … ” He looked down at his feet. For the first time, I saw a Zach who was entirely different from the boy I’d known. He looked nervous and unsure of himself. He looked the way a teenage guy was supposed to look, and it was oddly reassuring.

  I smiled at him, in spite of myself. Maybe I’d fallen for Zach simply because I was biologically programmed to. Maybe he only became interested in me because it was embedded somewhere in his DNA. But a part of me wondered whether, if we’d been different people, kids who’d led perfectly normal lives, who didn’t have some weird past life controlling our present life, we could have found each other and fallen in love anyway. I felt so cheated by the whole stupid thing.

  “Look, it’s not anything against you,” Zach said. “I like you, but at the same time, I feel like … ” He hesitated, and I jumped in.

  “You feel like you don’t know whether you like me be-cause of who I am, or because years ago our clones fell in love with each other.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I’m being stupid. It probably all sounds like some excuse.”

  “It’s not stupid,” I said. “As soon as I realized who you were, what you were, I knew I couldn’t trust my feelings.”

  “It sucks,” Zach said. “It really sucks.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “But remember, I just wanted to be friends anyway.”

  This got him to crack a smile and even let out a short chuckle. I held my hand out to him.

  “Friends?” I asked.

  “Friends,” he agreed, and shook it.

  Epilogue

  The feeling stole up on me at unexpected moments. It was a weird hollow feeling, like a small chunk of me was missing. Like I’d misplaced a little bit of myself somewhere along the way. As suddenly as it appeared it would vanish, but it never really went away, not completely. I missed him.

  In the months after Zach left, I would catch glimpses of him in Mr. K’s, only to find upon closer inspection that it wasn’t Zach Faraday but a middle-aged woman or a ten-year-old boy or some other completely random person. My heart quickened at the sound of roaring engines, but they always turned out to be motorcycles or souped-up Hyundai’s. It was never Zach. Zach was gone.

  I knew from the start that I should have kept my distance from him, but the universe had other plans. Even though we were literally made for each other, even though our meeting was completely engineered, I suspect that if Zach had n
ever set foot in Shallow Pond, sooner or later our paths would have crossed, because destiny is a powerful thing. Actually, it’s this thought that keeps me going some days. I’m convinced that one day, maybe a long time from now, I’ll run into Zach Faraday again—not through the deliberate machinations of a disturbed man, but through random chance. And then who knows. Maybe when that happens, things could be different.

  Of course, saying all that makes me sound like some heartbroken, obsessed freak, and I’m not. I mean, most of the time I don’t even think about Zach Faraday. He’s a little blip, a phantom pain that shows up in my life—a life that has veered so far off course, sometimes I have a hard time remembering who I am.

  Because Annie and I share the same DNA, and because I hadn’t yet gotten sick, Donald was able to use my blood samples to create a patch that could repair Annie’s damaged DNA. It was a lengthy process, and I had to provide fresh blood samples every other week. Within just a few weeks, Annie started to get better. I watched her daily, sometimes hourly, for signs of improvement. In the back of my mind was the thought that I’d put my entire life on hold for what might turn out to be no reason at all, but I tried my best to block out all pessimistic thinking. Slowly, I began to see real improvement, and it gave me a glimmer of hope.

  Annie got well enough to continue her treatments as an outpatient. Two months after she first began the treatments, she felt good enough to attempt a second date with Officer Hantz, and he was brave enough to agree to it. On their third date they attended my high school graduation.

  When I phoned the college to explain why I wouldn’t be accepting their offer of a full scholarship (well, I left out a few details, like the fact that my sick sister and I were actually clones), they offered to hold my place and the scholarship until the following year. Maybe that’s how I was able to get through the year, how I was able to force myself every other week to go to the hospital to meet with Donald and have my blood drawn. I made it a condition of Annie’s treatments that all procedures were to be administered by Dr. Feld or a nurse; Donald was to have no contact with Annie.

  Even though I’d already fulfilled my volunteer hours, I continued to put in time over at the women’s support hotline. It gave me something to do, and sometimes it was nice to be able to talk to someone new. Sometimes women called just to have someone to chat with, and I understood it completely. We discussed clothes, the weather, movies. One evening when I returned from a shift at the call center, Annie told me that years before, she’d called the hotline.

  “It gave me the courage to do what I needed to do,” she said.

  “They told you how to get Donald to leave?” I asked.

  “No, but they told me to be strong, and they convinced me to do something I probably should have done much sooner.”

  I never found out what happened to a lot of the women I spoke to, but I liked to think that talking to me had helped them find their own inner strength.

  In the fall, Officer Hantz learned that Cameron had registered as a sex offender in a town in northeastern Pennsylvania near the New Jersey border. We didn’t know for sure whether Gracie was with him, but it was worth a shot. At Christmas I sent her a card, with a note explaining everything that had happened since she’d left. We didn’t receive a response.

  With the blood samples he’d taken from me, Donald had also been working on creating a serum that would repair the problems in my DNA as well as in Gracie’s, if we ever found her, before we became sick. He was working on a way to alter some of his notes, hiding the fact that his discoveries were based on research with human clones, in order to create a cure for others with the same disorder. I sent another note about this to the address Officer Hantz had given me.

  In the spring, Gracie, Cameron, and their child—a baby girl named Lisa—showed up in Shallow Pond. The baby was adorable, and I’m happy to say she looks nothing at all like Gracie. Gracie and I received our treatments at the same time; as far as Cameron knew, it was because we’d all tested positive for the same hereditary disease—which was, technically, true. For a little while, with Gracie, Cameron, and Lisa staying at the house, it was sort of like old times. I was worried that seeing Gracie and Cameron together might open old wounds for Annie, but she didn’t seem affected; maybe it helped that she and Officer Hantz—who now insisted I call him Steve—had gotten engaged on Valentine’s Day.

  “How are you doing?” Cameron asked one morning as the two of us sat eating breakfast together. Everyone else was still asleep upstairs.

  “Okay,” I said. “I have a college scholarship for next fall.”

  “That’s great. You know, Gracie’s planning on taking some classes at a community college.”

  While a part of me felt that Gracie was wrong to keep Cameron in the dark about the cloning, more and more I was coming to realize that it didn’t matter. While it’s true we’re clones, it doesn’t have to have any bearing on who we are or what we do with our lives. We share the same DNA and we all look alike, but we’re unique individuals.

  “Is it weird being back here?” I asked Cameron. “Surrounded by Buntings?”

  “A little unsettling,” he admitted, “but now that I’ve spent so much time with Gracie, you all look so different to me.”

  I laughed at this, and he did too. But I think he was serious about this, even though I’d let my hair go back to strawberry-

  blond and was once again looking like a younger version of Gracie and Annie.

  In the end, we all left Shallow Pond. After her treatments, Gracie returned to her home with Cameron and Lisa. Annie and Steve Hantz got married in September, and when he accepted a job with the Hershey police department, they bought a house there. Of course I finally left Shallow Pond too, a year late, to go to college. I didn’t bother to stay in touch with Donald, but the hospital knows where to reach him if we ever need to.

  I think about Zach sometimes. My past and where I came from is something I can never entirely escape, but at least I’m not alone. I have Annie and Gracie. Zach has no one other than Donald, the man who remotely controlled his life for so many years. I think about that day I first saw Zach Faraday walking down the hall at school and how hard it was to take my eyes off of him. I wonder what would have happened to us if we’d never learned the truth about our origins. Would we have unwittingly followed the path that Susie and Donald followed all those years before? Or could we have found our own path, lived our own lives, and still have been happy together?

  I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it doesn’t matter. That’s all part of the past, and with each step I take away from Shallow Pond, I put a little bit more distance between myself and the past. I used to live with one foot in the future, desperate to get out of town and get on with my life, and we know how well that worked out. So I’m trying to remain right here in the present for a little while.

  I’m more interested in now, anyway. Not having to worry about the past or the future frees up my mind to think about things. For years, long before learning how very much alike my sisters and I are, I would worry about growing up and turning out to be like either one of them. And it was an unfounded fear. Of course, we do have quite a lot in common, but that doesn’t make us carbon copies, despite what our DNA says. Little by little, I’m beginning to understand who I am. I’m not Susie or Annie or Gracie. I am Barbara.

  About the Author

  Alissa Grosso is the author of two previous young adult novels, Popular and Ferocity Summer. She lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and can be found online at alissagrosso.com.

 

 

 
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