bites her lips, and I know she wants to say that I’m exceptionally annoying. She meets my eyes for just a second. “I guess,” she says.
Dr. Hodges sighs, no doubt frustrated by the lack of con-viction in Cami’s voice. It’s not like she’s a sheet of paper with lab results typed on it. She can’t, or won’t, confirm or deny his diagnosis about my looks.
“How tall is your mother?” Dr. Hodges asks.
“I don’t know. Around five foot five.”
“And you, Mr. McAdams. You can’t be more than . . . five foot seven?”
Dad nods.
8 4
Copyright © 2015 by Debra Dockter.
FOR REVIEWING PURPOSES ONLY--NOT FOR SALE
“It’s odd, not impossible, but odd, for a boy to be—what, six two?—when his parents are well below that. And your hair. You and I, Mr. McAdams, seem to share a genetic predisposition for male pattern balding. But you.” He brushes my hair from my forehead to better see my hairline. “Your hairline would seem to suggest that you will always have a nice full head of blond hair. And you have blue eyes, brilliant blue eyes, while your father’s are brown. Could be that you inherited recessive genes from both your mother and your father, but if her eyes are brown, there would only be about a twenty-five percent chance of that happening. Does your mother have blue eyes?”
“Hers are brown too,” I say. “But we all have blue eyes—at least Connor, Alexis, and Triagon did.”
Dr. Hodges looks at my dad. “Did Mueller, or whoever he really was, did he ask you what color you wanted your child’s eyes to be?”
A shadow crosses my father’s face, making him look guilty.
“What about how tall you wanted your child to be? How intelligent? How about athleticism?”
“He asked us a lot of questions,” Dad snaps. “But all we wanted was a healthy baby. My wife had already had six miscarriages. Then when we thought we had a healthy baby, we were told we both carried the gene for a type of muscular atrophy.
We watched our son, our baby, die a slow, horrible death. We just wanted a healthy child. We didn’t care if it was a boy or a girl. We didn’t care about height or eye color. We wanted a child who would live. Is that so much to ask?” His voice cracks. “Dr. Mueller started asking us all of these questions.
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Copyright © 2015 by Debra Dockter.
FOR REVIEWING PURPOSES ONLY--NOT FOR SALE
We kept saying that none of those things mattered. We just wanted him to take out the gene that could kill our child and let nature take care of the rest. But I’ll never forget what he said.” Dad looks at me as if he’s trying to explain why he did something wrong, like he’s about to offer an excuse, a defense.
“He said that nature had killed our first son, and there was a one-in-four chance that nature would kill any child we ever had. He said we didn’t owe nature anything, so why not take advantage of his skills and show nature what science could do.
With all we’d been through, why not give our new child all the advantages we could? Yes, we said we’d prefer a boy, but I swear, we were just hoping and praying he could get rid of the gene that might kill our child. We didn’t believe Dr. Mueller could really do all those other things.”
“Things like making your child tall and handsome and intelligent?” Dr. Hodges asks.
Dad looks at me, and suddenly he doesn’t seem so ordinary, so average anymore. He’d hired a doctor to not only make his son healthy, but to make him superior. And Connor had been.
So had Alexis and Triagon and Hannah. But Hannah sucked at school. Not because she wasn’t smart—she just didn’t try because she didn’t like it. What about me? Could I get the highest GPA in my class like Connor had? Could I break records and win games? I’m superior at video games. What else could I be superior at?
“Dr. Mueller was manipulating genes,” Dr. Hodges says.
“Do you know how certain traits are selected today? Traits like having blue eyes or having a boy or a girl?”
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Copyright © 2015 by Debra Dockter.
FOR REVIEWING PURPOSES ONLY--NOT FOR SALE
No one answers.
“Fertilization takes place in the lab. Once the cells in the fertilized eggs begin to divide, cells are taken out and tested.
The embryos with the undesired traits are discarded, and the ones with the desired traits are implanted or frozen. As you