gathering in them. “It’s just a coincidence.”
“Yeah,” I agree, wanting desperately for the color to come back into Mom’s skin. “Stuff happens sometimes. She was a soccer player. It was hot outside. She probably got dehydrated.”
Mom looks at me, and I know what she’s thinking. She’s 6 3
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thinking that she loves video games. That she loves that she’s never sat on hard wooden bleachers and yelled because the refs said I traveled or double dribbled when I hadn’t. She’s glad that I always came right home after school, instead of going to football practice or running laps around the track. And more than anything, she’s glad that I’m sixteen.
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After dinner and an awkward hour of watching television with my parents, I head downstairs, not to play video games, but to get online. I have a feeling that as soon as I left the living room, Mom and Dad jumped online too. I wonder if they’re looking at Alexis Warren’s Facebook page. Probably not. Neither of them use Facebook, so I doubt they’d think of that.
She’s beautiful. Her page is blocked, so all I can see is the photo on her cover page. It’s eerie as hell. Blond hair, blue eyes, a soccer uniform, and a lean, toned body with one foot balanced on a soccer ball. She’s perfect, the female version of Connor. Connor was perfect, physically and mentally. While Emma is gorgeous, Alexis Warren was . . . goddess-like. Put her in a swimsuit and stick her on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and she would look right at home amongst the supermodels. But I bet the other models didn’t take trigonometry in high school, and I bet Alexis did. I bet she was a straight-A student.
I search Bishop Carroll High School and find a link to the school paper, and there she is. She’s on the front page, standing at the podium, giving the graduation speech. The article says 6 5
Copyright © 2015 by Debra Dockter.
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that she’d have attended the University of Kansas, where she had received both academic and athletic scholarships. An active member of the choir and drama club, she recently starred in her school’s production of Godspell.
I do a search for Genesis Innovations Fertility Clinic, and three different ones come up. One is in Wichita. There is another in Arizona and yet another one in Anchorage, Alaska.
When I click on the Wichita clinic, I get a homepage showing a mother and father cozying up on the sofa with their precious infant cradled in the mother’s arms and the dad smiling adoringly. I almost expect them to be high-fiving each other. After all, they did it! They created life! With the help of “a highly qualified staff.”
There are tabs along the left side for potential parents wanting information on financing and insurance, lab services, treatment options, and the ever-important testimonials. I click on staff and see a photograph of two doctors: Dr. Hodges and Dr.
Preston. No Dr. Mueller.
I click on treatment options, then services. It talks about in vitro fertilization and intrauterine insemination, but there’s nothing about genetic manipulations. There’s no section on tweaking genes, on removing sequences for things like cystic fibrosis, or in my and Connor’s case, spinal muscular atrophy.
I start another search: genetic manipulations. Lots of university sites pop up boasting research being done in various areas.
And there’s a blog.
The partial quote starts off, “Are you genetically engineered?
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I was, and I’m looking . . .” I click on the post. A photo pops up next to the title: Superior Beings Unite! The guy can’t be more then seventeen or eighteen. He’s got dark brown hair and blue eyes. What’s up with the blue eyes? And they aren’t merely blue. They’re bright and deep, like the waters off some pristine beach.
His eyes are just like mine.
“My name is Triagon Summers,” he says.
If I were a girl or gay, I’d be instantly smitten. I’d be sending him a friend request on Facebook and moving quickly from acquaintance to stalker. I can’t help but wonder if his name is made up, a way to keep the would-be Triagon worshippers from finding his high school and setting up surveillance across from his locker.
“I wasn’t created like most people. I was created in a lab in Wichita, Kansas, and I’m searching