father far away, glinting like a shard of mirror; my mother so close and urgent. If it was true that I chose my parents, I would choose them again, I thought.
At school, I wasn’t supposed to mention my father.
“You could be kidnapped,” Ron said.
In high school, my mother knew of a girl abducted in a windowless white van, her hands and legs tied up. After they’d driven her outside the town, they’d stopped at a gas station and the girl had managed to open the door and get free. I understood in some vague way that I could be kidnapped because of my father; but because he wasn’t part of my life in a daily way, the idea seemed far-fetched and glamorous.
At Ron’s urging, my mother and I went to the police station, where they took my fingerprints. A man dipped my finger in thick black liquid, pressed it down on paper from one side of the nail bed to the other, hurting me a little each time as he tried to grip my small fingers and roll them, leaving a pattern of lines on the paper my mother said were unique to me. Whorls, she said they were called. She showed me how hers resolved in a perfect circle, like a topographic map of a hill.
“I have a secret,” I said to my new friends at school. I whispered it so that they would see I was reluctant to mention it. The key, I felt, was to underplay. “My father is Steve Jobs.”
“Who’s that?” one asked.
“He’s famous,” I said. “He invented the personal computer. He lives in a mansion and drives a Porsche convertible. He buys a new one every time it gets a scratch.”
The story had a film of unreality to it as I said it, even to my own ears. I hadn’t hung out with him that much, only a few skates and visits. I didn’t have the clothes or the bike someone with a father like this would have. My last name was different from his.
“He even named a computer after me,” I said to them.
“What computer?” a girl named Elizabeth asked.
“The Lisa,” I said.
“A computer called the Lisa?” she said. “I never heard of it.”
“It was ahead of its time.” I used my mother’s phrase, although I wasn’t sure why it was ahead. “He invented the personal computer later. But you can’t tell anyone, because if someone finds out, I could get kidnapped.”
I brought it up when I felt I needed to, waiting as long as I could and then letting it burst forth. I don’t remember feeling at a disadvantage with my friends who had fathers, only that there was at my fingertips another magical identity, an extra thing that started to itch and tingle when I felt small, and it was like pressure building inside me, and then I had to find a way to say it.
At some point I also heard that he’d been named Playboy‘s “Sexiest Man of the Year.” I bragged about it selectively because I wasn’t sure whether it was true or exactly what it meant. I had gathered that there was a Playboy, and also a Playgirl, so I didn’t know if he was featured in a magazine of naked women meant for men, or if he was nude himself in a magazine of naked men meant for women. From this I concluded that my father might be naked in Playboy, and when I thought of it, I got a terrible shiver, and I thought part of growing up would be to take this fact in stride.
One of the girls at school, Kirsten, started following me around outside class, chanting, “Your dad is Steve Jobs, your dad is Steve Jobs.”
“Stop it,” I said.
She didn’t stop. She said it sometimes tauntingly, sometimes in a monotone like a robot. It was annoying, but the advantage to her harassment was that it advertised the very fact I wanted known. She did the brag-work for me, and I seemed innocent, even put-upon, as she did it.
“What’s wrong with that girl?” my mother said when I told her. “I bet it’s her parents—they care. I wonder how she found out?”
I told her I might have been the one to tell her, accidentally.
“You told her?”
“It slipped out.” I braced for her anger, but instead she was only confused.
“That makes even less sense,” she said. “You told her, and now she goes around telling you? Tell her to stop. What a strange girl.”
One afternoon when