How to Date the Guy You Hate by Julie Kriss Page 0,21

on to them. I thought I might cry.

He patted my hand. “Did you father come with you today?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “I didn’t even tell him I was coming,” I said. “I don’t think he can deal with this. I really don’t. He’s sort of… stopped functioning ever since my mother died.”

“Okay,” Dr. Pfeiffer said reasonably. “He should be informed at some point, but you’re an adult, and you need to make that decision. Do you have a husband?”

What? Oh, God. I shook my head.

“A serious boyfriend?”

I shook my head again.

“Okay,” Dr. Pfeiffer said again, and I was glad that he gave this kind of news all the time, that he was so experienced with it. It was keeping me from falling apart. “There are three things I want you to do today. Okay? Just three things.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay.”

“First, the nurse is going to take some of your blood, and we’ll send it for the test. We’ll match your profile to your mother’s and find out if the genetic mutation matches. The test results will take a few weeks.” He watched me nod, then continued. “The second thing I want you to do is book some counselling for after you get the results. We have experienced counsellors here, Megan, and we deal with this all the time. It’s actually a requirement that you talk to one of them.”

“I’ll book something,” I said. “What’s the third thing?”

“I want you to think about the people in your life,” Dr. Pfeiffer said. “Think about a best friend, or someone close to you that you can rely on. Maybe that’s your father. Maybe it’s another relative, or a girlfriend, or a teacher, or someone at your church. I want you to think of someone you can trust, and I want you to tell them about all of this. Because you can’t go through this alone, without leaning on someone. You just can’t. Do you understand?”

Crazily, stupidly, the first thing I thought of was Jason saying, It seems important. Do you want me to come? But no. I wasn’t telling Jason. I could tell Holly—she was my best friend—but Holly was with Dean, and she’d want to tell him, and I’d have to ask her not to. I’d have to ask her to keep a big secret from both her boyfriend and her brother, because I didn’t want them to know. Did I want to do that to her?

I couldn’t think about that now. My mind was white space; I couldn’t think about anything. So I filled out paperwork, and signed consent forms, and sat in a chair while a nurse took my blood. And I took the stack of literature Dr. Pfeiffer handed me, and I wandered back through the maze of the hospital, blankly looking for the parking lot where I’d left my car.

It took a long time to find it. And then I drove back to Eden Hills, my jaw aching and my hands like ice on the wheel. I could deal with this. I could. I’d been through my mother’s death, after all, and nothing was worse than that. Nothing could possibly be worse. But in the back of my mind, I saw the vial of blood they’d taken from me, the label they’d put on it for the lab. For better or for worse, I’d set this in motion.

The clock was ticking.

Nine

Jason

As I’d predicted, my mother figured out that I was no longer working at the bank. I found her sitting in the kitchen one morning, dressed for work, waiting for me, her fingers drumming on the kitchen table when I stumbled out of the basement, where I’d set up my temporary bedroom.

“Sleeping in, huh?” she said.

I ran a hand through my hair. I’d taken extra shifts at Zoot Bar, and on the nights they didn’t need me I’d worked out a deal to work a neighboring bar for cash under the table. I hadn’t gotten home until nearly three o’clock last night. “I thought you were gone to work,” I said lamely.

“I decided to go in late.” Mom pressed her lips together and drummed her fingers again. “We need to talk.”

Holly and I had been raised by our mother alone. Our dad had taken off when Holly was eight and I was ten; he’d met some other woman, left our mother, and gone off to have a second round of kids. We’d never seen him again. Mom worked as a manager at the