Year of Mistaken Discoveries (14 page)

It felt like my knees weren’t going to hold me, like I might fold up like the old map my dad kept in the car. I leaned against the stall for support. When my eyes closed, I could picture the two of them in the dark theater, their arms wrapped around each other. Everyone in our group whispering. No one had told me about it. I suppose it wasn’t the kind of news anyone wanted to share. Were they planning to break the news to
me in the spring when they went to prom together?

“Say something,” Shannon pleaded. “You can yell at me if you want. I’d feel better if you yelled.”

I couldn’t really be mad at her. She was right; Colton and I had broken up. I didn’t want to go to the movie with them. I didn’t want to get back together with Colton. It wasn’t as if I was staying up late crying into my pillow. It wasn’t exactly fair for me to expect that Colton would sit around by himself, but I hadn’t expected him to get together with one of my best friends, either. I closed my eyes. I’d always known Shannon liked Colton. The way she talked about him or times I’d catch her looking at him. She should have been the one to go out with him in the first place. I concentrated on breathing slowly in through my nose and out through my mouth. I wanted to explain I wasn’t mad at her. I was upset because things in my life kept shifting and changing and I didn’t know what I could hold on to anymore. I didn’t want to get back with Colton, but part of me had liked knowing that I could. Now that door was shut.

“You have to know I’d never have kissed him if you guys had still been going out. Never.”

I nodded, even though I knew she couldn’t see me.

“I don’t want you to be mad at me. We’ve been friends for too long. If you don’t want me to see him again, I won’t. I swear to God. Say the word and that will be it.”

It would be too. Shannon wasn’t the kind to make a promise and not keep it. Her dad had been in the military before
she was born, and he was still really big on things like giving your word. He had a statue of John Wayne in his office and quoted war movies on topics like valor and courage. In junior high Shannon once started crying because she’d promised to sell three cases of Girl Scout cookies and hadn’t been able to do it, and she was afraid of what her dad would do when he found out.

“I feel like shit,” Shannon said. I could hear that she’d started crying. “Say something so I know you’re okay.”

I opened my mouth to tell her I was all right. Or at the very least that what was wrong with me wasn’t her fault, but nothing came out.

I squeezed my eyes shut to keep from crying. The bell for class rang. I unlocked the stall door, but by the time I opened it, the bathroom door was already swinging shut. Shannon was gone.

chapter nineteen

B
rody invited me over so we could try some new options to search for my birth mom. No one had e-mailed me from the adoption groups, and I think we both suspected if it hadn’t happened right away, it wasn’t going to. We needed to try a different plan. I wasn’t sure my parents checked my computer history, but it seemed possible. I didn’t want to take the chance of them knowing exactly what was happening with my search. If I cleared my history, it would all but scream,
HEY! I’m doing something that I don’t want you to know about.
My parents hadn’t asked me a thing about my senior project. It was weird, because normally they couldn’t help obsessing about what I did in school. My mom actually made a list of all the books I had to read in English class so she could read them too in case I wanted to talk about them. All of us avoided the
topic. The Scott family wasn’t great with conflict and unpleasant things. It was like when my cousin Sarah went to rehab, everyone in the family called it “her little break” as if she’d gone off to a spa instead.

I watched Brody as he focused on the screen. He had just gotten out of the shower when I arrived. He smelled like soap, and the hair at the back of his neck was still damp. I fought the urge to snuggle my head into the warm space between his neck and shoulder.

I suspected his room had been a guest room in his aunt and uncle’s house before he and his mom moved in last year. The whole house had clearly been a kid-free zone at one time. Too clean and streamlined, almost hotel-like. Not that his aunt and uncle seemed like bad people. His aunt had greeted me at the door. She was freakishly petite, like an elf. I wondered if she had to buy her clothes in the kids’ section. I had the sense Brody didn’t have many people over and that she was excited to see me. She practically offered to have a parade in my honor as we marched back to his room, and I told her that we had a project we needed to work on for school. I could tell teens made her nervous, like we were some type of exotic creature—interesting, but with the potential to bite.

There were no posters stuck to his walls. Instead there was flocked navy paisley wallpaper. The pictures on the walls were vintage travel posters. They were cool, but they didn’t seem like something he would have picked. The only sign that he lived
there were the stacks of things on the desk and dresser: photography magazines, a couple of fantasy paperbacks, a digital camera, and a few candy-bar wrappers. I wondered how it would feel to live here, if he felt like a guest all the time. Out of place. I wanted to ask him why he never bothered to make the space his own, but I didn’t know how to phrase the question.

There was a giant aquarium against one wall that held a school of brightly colored tropical fish. An air pump made bubbles in the water, and the fish seemed to like diving in and out of them. “This is nice,” I said, tapping on the glass.

“It belongs to my uncle. He used this room as his office. He said the gurgling was relaxing. He thought I’d like it.” Brody didn’t look up from the computer. “My mom talks about how we’ll move out and get our own place. This was supposed to be temporary, but she sometimes works nights, so she feels better knowing my aunt and uncle are around. I think she’s afraid if I was on my own, I’d have wild parties.”

I tried to picture Brody standing on a coffee table, dancing drunk, while people did shots behind him. “She doesn’t know you very well, does she?” I asked.

“Not at all.” He shifted in his seat. “Things better with you and Shannon?”

I sensed he wanted to change the subject more than he wanted to know about my friend drama. “Things are okay. Lydia had a friend intervention.”

He nodded and went back to what he was doing. A large
yellow-and-black fish with lacy fins came up to the glass and seemed to follow my finger. I had the sense the fish was watching me. Like I was the one trapped inside a tank.

“Now, that’s interesting,” he said. Brody leaned back and cracked his knuckles.

“What did you find?” I turned away from the tank.

“Okay, using the info you brought, we know your birth mom was sixteen the year you were born, which would have made her a junior. We know her name was Lisa.” Brody ticked off the facts on his fingers. “In the facts and info sheet she filled out for the adoption agency, she talked about how she loved competitive swimming.”

“So all we need to do is track down every sixteen-year-old in America at that time who liked the water.” I leaned back against his bed. “Are you planning to track swimsuit sales?”

“No, and we don’t have to search all of America. We can almost bet she lived in Michigan too. Your parents picked you up at their lawyer’s office here in Lansing when you were just a couple days old. Now, it’s possible they move babies all around the country, but I’m guessing most of the time they’re in-state adoptions.”

“Fair enough,” I agreed.

“So you were born in May, which means if your mom wanted, she could have returned for the competitive swim season in her senior year.”

“I guess.”

“Now, I don’t know much about your birth mom, but I know a bit about you. You don’t tend to do things halfway, and I bet she didn’t either. So I’m guessing she didn’t just like to swim. She liked to swim and win. So I pulled up the state swim-meet results for the year after you were born, assuming she would have gone back to it.” He turned his laptop to face me.

I kneeled next to his computer chair. There, listed as having come in second in the breaststroke, was a Lisa Moriarty from Southside High School.

Brody scrolled down. “She came in first in the fifty meter.”

My finger lightly touched the screen. Moriarty. It was an Irish name. Maybe that’s why I liked St. Patrick’s Day so much.

“Now, hang on—there’s three more.” He clicked over to another page. Lisa Bucain was listed. “This Lisa was on the relay team that took first. She’s from a high school outside Detroit.” He clicked again. “There’s a Lisa Watkowski from Dearborn who was in the one hundred meter, and a Lisa Blackmoore from Traverse City.”

“Four. That’s not that bad,” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.

Brody leaned back in his chair. “There are three other Lisas who were in diving competitions.”

“But she doesn’t say diving on the interest form,” I argued. “She clearly says competitive swimming.”

“True, I’m just pointing out that it’s an option. She did mention in the letter to you that she did a high dive. She might
not have competed, but there’s a chance she did. The other thing is that there are probably lots of girls named Lisa who swam and didn’t win anything. I’m just making the assumption that she would be a winner.”

My initial rush of excitement was starting to fade.

Brody nudged my shoulder. “Don’t give up so easy. It might not be the answer, but it’s a place to start. It gives us something to chase down. It’s more than we had an hour ago.”

“So, do we call the schools they went to and see if they remember if the Lisa that went there eighteen years ago was pregnant the year before she won? It doesn’t seem likely they’d remember. There might not be anyone working at the school who was even there back then.”

“I was thinking we go to the schools and check out the old yearbooks. I figure we may get really lucky, and one of the Lisas will obviously not be your mom because she’ll be Chinese or something, or you might look just like one of them,” Brody said.

My heart pumped overtime. Growing up I used to hate when people met my parents for the first time. They would look at my mom and then my dad, trying to figure out where my looks came from. Then they would hear I was adopted and you could almost see the
ah, that explains it
on their face. The idea that there could be someone out there who looked like me was intoxicating. Another idea popped into my head. “If we check the yearbook for the year before, we might be able to
tell which is the right Lisa. If she wasn’t on the swim team in her junior year, for example. Or she might have dropped out altogether and been homeschooled.”

“Exactly. So what do you say? We’ve got Christmas break coming up. Road trip?”

“Nothing says adventure like a trip around Michigan in the winter. I’ll pay for snacks, and we can take my car,” I offered.

“I never turn down an offer of pork rinds.”

“You like those things? They’re disgusting.” My nose wrinkled.

Brody placed his hand over his heart as if mortally wounded. “You would trash-talk a man’s pork rinds? His go-to salty snack?” He shook his head sadly.

“Will the schools be open?”

“Our break starts a bit early because of the professional development day the teachers are taking. I’m betting most schools don’t start their vacation until the following Monday. If we’re lucky, we’ve got a couple of days when we’re out and they’ll still be in school.”

“A couple of days isn’t a lot of time.” I started to try and sort the route in my head.

“Would your parents let you stay the night someplace?”

A sliver of excitement ran down my spine. Did he want to stay somewhere with me? An image of lying next to him in bed flashed in my head. Then in the next instant I pictured telling my folks I wanted to take a road trip with a guy. I flopped over
on the floor.
Shit
. “No. My parents will freak out. They don’t like me driving around town in the winter, let alone on the highway. And staying over? No way.”

“Don’t get so bummed. We’ll think of something.” Brody nudged my leg with his foot. “You didn’t strike me as the type to give up easy.”

“I guess I don’t know what type I am; that’s the problem,” I admitted.

Brody got down on the floor and sat next to me. I was hyper aware of the feeling of his leg against mine. “Is this because we’re looking for your birth mom?”

“No. Yes. Maybe a little.”

Brody chuckled. “Well, that narrows it down.”

“The thing is, growing up, Nora was the one who was really obsessed with finding her birth mom. I was curious, but I didn’t feel like I had a good reason to be interested. She had no history, not even a hint. Why my mom gave me up wasn’t too hard to figure out. She was still in high school. Nora had nothing.”

“It could be that you felt your mom made the best decision she could, that she wanted you to have a good life and that you didn’t need to find her.”

I listened to the gurgle of the fish tank. “I think that’s what I wanted to believe, but what if I didn’t want to find my birth mom because I was afraid of what I might find out?”

Brody seemed to think about it. “I’m pretty sure if she was a
serial killer, that’s the kind of thing that would have been listed.”

I poked him with my elbow. “Thanks for reassuring me that I’m not likely to start keeping dead people in my freezer.”

“Hey now, I didn’t say that. You might like to dress up like a clown and peel kittens, for all I know. I’m just pointing out it’s not likely genetic.”

“I sometimes think I didn’t want to look for my birth mom because I didn’t want to highlight the fact I’m adopted. Like I’m trying to convince everyone that I am who I’m always pretending to be. Fake it until I make it kind of thing.”

“What’s wrong with who you are? Why do you have to fake anything?”

I felt myself flush. “Are you saying that you don’t ever wish to be someone else?” I asked him.

“You mean other than Batman?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Caped Crusader, other than being Batman, don’t you sometimes feel like you’re falling short of what people expect of you?”