What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,8
XP.
When they burst through the door, sweating, Mom rushed upstairs to shower. (Mom held the North American indoor record for speed-showering: five minutes from foot on the bottom step to fully clothed.) Gina gave me a kiss and slipped me a ten dollar bill. One of the benefits of having a chronic illness is frequent monetary giftage. I thanked Gina with a hug—but before my mother could slip into the shower stall, she stopped at the second floor landing and eyed my outfit.
“You’re half-dressed, Allie Kim!” she yelled.
I ignored her. That always lit her fuse.
You wouldn’t refer to not carrying an umbrella as “half-dressed,” unless you were my mother. So much crap to wear just to run from my back porch to my mother’s car and then the ten feet into the clinic! You can’t have one inch of skin exposed. Not for a minute. When I go out during the day, I have gloves and veils and goggles on, so that I look like I’m studying killer bees. She dashed back down and pulled the umbrella out of the closet, shaking it at me like a sword.
My mom is good. A good mom. She so believes that I will outrun XP that I sometimes let her believe it, too. If I live to a ripe old age, her reasoning goes, I won’t want to end up looking like I was deep-fried early in life, will I?
“Allie!” she said again. My mom’s natural voice is a less-than-soothing bellow that makes neighborhood dogs howl. “Did you hear me?”
“I’m sorry, Jack-Jack,” I told her. My mom’s name is Jacqueline.
“Don’t call me that,” she said.
“Okay, Jack-Jack,” I said.
“Someone has to take this seriously, Allie Kim!”
“Jackie, calm down,” Gina chimed in. “Allie is a very serious girl.”
“And I’m an adolescent. I’m supposed to feel immortal.”
Mom shook her head. “You have bruises all over you. If Rob Dorn is—”
“He has bruises all over him, too, Mom. We’re doing this … mountain thing.”
“In the dark?”
“How do you think they climb Mount Everest?” I replied. “Fog and storms. No oxygen. You can’t see. It gives you character.”
Gina laughed.
“I’ll give you character,” Mom finally muttered. “And I see everything.”
“That you do,” I agreed.
She hit the shower. Gina bit her lip to keep from smiling back at me.
I JUMPED OUT of the car while Mom was in mid-resumed eruption. She would have to circle around for twenty minutes and (maybe?) park illegally and get a ticket that someone would fix for her because she worked there. By then, she’d have calmed down.
The Tabor Clinic is part of Divine Savior Hospital, which is huge, completely huge, with, like, three hundred doctors. But there were only three Tabors. At the Clinic, they call me Chinese Ginger. Gina is to blame, because she knows I am half-Chinese. But Dad must have been crossed with some hot European way back to leave me with straight auburn hair and weird amber-colored eyes. My mother is fair and Irish, although she kept the name “Kim” after they got divorced, for no reason that I could ever discern—given that I don’t look Asian and she surely doesn’t, either. Maybe it was to pave the way for Angela, my adopted sister from China. I hoped she would last after I was gone so my mother wouldn’t be childless.
Whenever I hinted at something like that, at the inevitability of Angie’s outliving me, it drove my mother savage. It either made her think I hated Angela or that I was “giving up.” Maybe sometimes I was, but only for the moment.
Anyhow: red hair is recessive and so is XP. Both parents have to be carriers—not of the disease, but of the gene. The kind that seems to occur mostly with Asian people, especially the Japanese, was not the kind I had. This was a mercy, again, if you can say a thing like that about a thing like XP, because other strains leave you with an IQ of 50 by the time you’re ten years old. The weirdest part is that the doctors can’t explain why this happens. Sun damage should have no effect on neurology. That’s why the Tabor family is convinced that there is a partner gene involved.
Gina was already waiting for me in the lobby. I wasn’t surprised she’d beat us there. She hadn’t bothered to shower. “Ready to give up a ton of blood and skin?”
“I live for it,” I said.
“Good. Don’t spend that ten bucks all in one place.”