Handle With Care

by Jodi Picoult

  'I'm Adam,' he said, and I froze. 'You've got a name, don't you?'

  Well, yeah, but if I told it to him, he might know I wasn't supposed to be here. 'Willow.'

  God, that smile again. 'That's a really pretty name,' he said. 'It suits you.'

  I stared down at the table and blushed furiously. This was a talk about sex, not a lab where we got to do it. And yet, no one had ever said anything to me even remotely resembling a come-on, unless Hey, dork, do you have an extra pencil? counted. Was I subliminally irresistible to Adam because my bones were strong?

  'Who can guess what your number one risk is if you have OI and you have sex?' Sarah asked.

  A girl's hand inched up. 'Breaking your pelvis?'

  The boys behind me snickered. 'Actually,' Sarah said, 'I have talked to hundreds of people with OI who are sexually active. And the only person I've ever known to break a bone during sex did it by falling off the bed.'

  This time, everyone laughed out loud.

  'If you have OI, the biggest risk in sexual activity is acquiring a sexually transmitted disease, which means' - she looked around the room - 'you're no different from someone without OI who has sex.'

  Adam pushed a piece of paper across the table to me. I unfolded it: R U Type I?

  I knew enough about your illness to understand why he'd think that. There were people who had Type I OI who went through their whole lives not even knowing it - just breaking a few more bones than ordinary folks. Then again, there were other Type Is who broke as many bones as you did. Often, Type Is were taller, and they didn't always have those heart-shaped faces that you saw on Type IIIs, like you. I was normal height; I wasn't in a wheelchair, I didn't have any scoliosis - and I was in a session for kids with OI. Of course he thought I had Type I.

  I scribbled on the other side of the paper and passed it back: Actually, I'm a Gemini.

  He had really nice teeth. Yours were kind of messed up - that happened a lot with OI kids, along with hearing loss - but his looked all Hollywood white and perfectly even, like he could have starred in a Disney Channel movie.

  'What about getting pregnant?' a girl asked.

  'Anyone with OI - any type - can get pregnant,' Sarah explained. 'Your risks would vary, though, depending on your individual situation.'

  'Would the baby have OI, too?'

  'Not necessarily.'

  I thought of that picture I'd seen in the magazine, of the lady with Type III who'd had a baby in her arms nearly the same size as she was. The problem wasn't with the plumbing, though. It was with the partner. Every day wasn't an OI convention; each of these kids was probably the only one with OI in his or her school. I tried to fast-forward you to my age. If I couldn't even get a guy to notice my existence, how would you - tiny, freakishly smart, in your wheelchair or walker? I felt my hand rising, as if a balloon were attached to the wrist. 'There's just one problem with that,' I said. 'What if nobody ever wants to have sex with you?'

  Instead of the laughter I expected, there was dead silence. I looked around, stunned. Was I not the only person my age absolutely positively sure I was going to die a virgin?

  'That,' Sarah said, 'is a really good question. How many of you had a boyfriend or girlfriend when you were in fifth or sixth grade?' A smattering of hands rose. 'How many of you have had a boyfriend or girlfriend after that?'

  Two hands, out of twenty.

  'A lot of kids who don't have OI will be put off by a wheelchair, or by the fact that you don't look the same way they do. And it's totally cliched, but believe me, those are the kids you don't want to be with anyway. You want someone who cares about who you are, not what you are. And even if you have to wait for that, it's going to be worth it. All you have to do is look around you at this convention to see that people with OI fall in love, get married, have sex, get pregnant - not necessarily in that order.' As the room broke up laughing again, she began to walk among us, handing out condoms and bananas.

  Maybe this was a lab after all.

  I had seen couples here who clearly both had OI; I'd seen couples where one partner did and one didn't. If someone able-bodied fell in love with you, maybe it would take some of the stress off Mom, eventually. Would you come back to a convention like this and flirt with a kid like Adam? Or one of the wild boys who rode his wheelchair up and down the escalator? I couldn't imagine that was easy on any account - not practically, on a daily basis, and not emotionally, either. Having another person with OI in your life meant you had to worry about yourself and about someone else.

  Then again, maybe that had nothing to do with OI, and everything to do with love.

  'I think we're supposed to be partners,' Adam said, and just like that, I couldn't breathe. Then I realized he was talking about the stupid banana and condom. 'You want to go first?'

  I tore open the foil packet. Can you see someone's pulse? Because mine was certainly banging hard enough under my skin.

  I started to unroll the condom along the length of the banana. It got all bunched up on top. 'I don't think that's right,' Adam said.

  'Then you do it.'

  He peeled off the condom and tore open a second foil packet. I watched him balance the little disk at the top of the banana and smooth it down the length in one easy motion. 'Oh, my God,' I said. 'You are way too good at that.'

  'That's because my sex life consists entirely of fruit right now.'

  I smirked. 'I find that hard to believe.'

  Adam met my gaze. 'Well, I find it hard to believe you have a hard time finding someone who wants to have sex with you.'

  I grabbed the banana out of his hand. 'Did you know a banana is a reproductive organ of the plant it grows on?'

  God, I sounded like an idiot. I sounded like you, spouting off your trivia.

  'Did you know grapes explode if you put them in the microwave?' Adam said.

  'Really?'

  'Totally.' He paused. 'A reproductive organ?'

  I nodded. 'An ovary.'

  'So where are you from?'

  'New Hampshire,' I said. 'How about you?'

  I held my breath, thinking maybe he was from Bankton, too, and in the high school, which was why I hadn't met him yet. 'Anchorage,' Adam answered.

  It figured.

  'So you and your sister both have OI?'

  He'd seen me with you in the wheelchair. 'Yeah,' I said.

  'That must be kind of nice. To have someone in the house who gets it, you know?' He grinned. 'I'm an only child. My parents took one look at me and broke the mold.'

  'Or the mold broke.' I laughed.

  Sarah passed by our table and pointed to the banana. 'Wonderful,' she said.

  We were. Except for the fact that he thought my name was Willow and I had OI.

  A makeshift game of condomball had broken out, as groups of kids batted the inflated condoms around the room. 'Hey, isn't Willow the name of that girl whose mom is suing because of her OI?' Adam asked.

  'How did you know that?' I said, stunned.

  'It's all over the blogs. Don't you read them?'

  'I've . . . been busy.'

  'I thought the girl was way younger--'

  'Well, you thought wrong,' I interrupted.

  Adam tilted his head. 'You mean, it's you?'

  'Could you just kind of keep it quiet?' I asked. 'I mean, it's not something I feel like talking about.'

  'I bet,' Adam said. 'It must suck.'

  I imagined how you must be feeling. You'd said a few things in our room, in those gray minutes before we fell asleep, but I think you kept a lot to yourself. I considered what it would be like to be noticed for only one trait - like being left-handed, or brunette, or double-jointed - instead of for the whole of you. Here was Sarah talking about finding someone who loved you for who you were, not what you appeared to be - and your own mother couldn't even seem to manage it. 'It's like tug-of-war,' I said quietly, 'and I'm the rope.'

  Underneath the table, I felt Adam squeeze my hand. He threaded our fingers together, his knuck
les 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 leg 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 boneless 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.

  I leaned forward and kissed him. And again. As if I were passing him all those silent words I could not say, the ones that explained my biggest secret: that I might not have OI but I knew how he felt. That I was breaking apart, too, all the time.

  Charlotte

  O

  n the flight home from the convention, I formulated a plan. When I landed, I would call Sean and ask him if he could come over to talk. I would tell him that I wanted to fight for what we had between us, just as hard as I wanted to fight for your future. I would say that I needed to finish what I had started but that I didn't think I could do it without his understanding, if not his support.

  I'd tell him I loved him.

  It was a strange trip. You were exhausted after three days of interaction with other OI kids,
and you fell asleep immediately, still clutching the piece of paper that listed the email addresses of your new friends. Amelia had been brooding ever since we had gone to the zoo - although I assumed it was a residual effect of my frantic reprimand there after she disappeared for two full hours. Once we had landed and collected our luggage, I told you girls to use the restroom, since it was a long ride back from Logan Airport to Bankton. I instructed Amelia to help you if you needed it, and I stood guard over our luggage cart outside. I watched a few families pass by, little kids wearing Mickey Mouse ears, mothers and daughters with matching cornrows and deep tans, fathers dragging car seats. Everyone in an airport is either excited to be going somewhere or relieved to be back home.

  I was neither.

  I took out my cell phone and dialed Sean. He didn't pick up, but then again, he rarely did when he was at work. 'Hi,' I said. 'It's me. I just wanted to tell you we landed. And . . . I've been doing some thinking. Do you think you might be able to come over tonight? To talk?' I hesitated, as if I expected an answer then and there, but this was a one-way conversation - not unlike all the others we'd had recently. 'Well, anyway. I hope the answer's yes. Bye,' I said, and I hung up the phone as you girls came out of the restroom, waiting for me to take the lead.

  Mailboxes made the best breeding grounds: I was certain, sometimes, that in that dark, cozy tunnel bills multiplied exponentially. As soon as we got home, I sent you and Amelia up to your rooms to unpack your suitcases while I sorted through the mail.

  It had not been in the box but, instead, left neatly in a pile on the counter for me. There was fresh milk and juice and eggs in the fridge, and the ramp you used to wheel yourself up to the front door had been rebuilt. Sean had been here while we were gone, and that made me think that maybe he was trying to wave a white flag, too.

  There was a bill from the credit card company, with its astronomical finance charge. Another one from the hospital - copayments for a visit six months ago. There was an invoice for our insurance premium. A mortgage payment. A phone bill. A cable bill. I began to sort the stack into bills and nonbills, and you could probably guess which stack was taller.

  In the nonbill pile were a few catalogs, some junk mail, a belated birthday card for Amelia from an ancient aunt who lived in Seattle, and a letter from the Rockingham County Family Court. I wondered if this had something to do with the trial, although Marin had told me that would take place in superior court.