Bumped (17 page)

THE THREESOME BREAKS APART. HIS PARENTS’ FACES ARE
wet and shining with tears of joy. Jondoe is smiling but his eyes are dry.

“It’s okay that I came home without telling you first?” Jondoe says, knowing the answer already.

His father looks up at him with adoration and says, “‘My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.’”

He couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate passage.

“The parable of the lost son,” I say in appreciation.

And for the first time, Jondoe’s parents have pulled their attention away from Jondoe and are gazing upon me with more than mere interest. Awe.

“Mom and Dad, this is Melody,” Jondoe says.

His parents pull me into their group hug with no time to make room for the Holy Spirit between us. My mouth smashes up against Jondoe’s collarbone, my bosom presses against his torso. I let lose a little squeak of shock.

“We’re crushing the poor girl!” his mother exclaims as she loosens her grip on me without letting go entirely.

“I’m fine.” I realize that I don’t know Jondoe’s last name. “Mrs. . . . ?”

This question inspires orchestral laughter from parents and son.

“Mrs.?” His mother whoops when she finally catches her breath. “No need for such formalities! Please call me Shelby!”

Shelby has her son’s fair hair and skin. Or
he
has
hers
, I suppose. Despite it being the middle of the night, her pretty features pop with more makeup than all the women of Goodside will ever use in their entire lives: slick pink lips to match her bathrobe, thick black lashes, a golden shimmer across her cheekbones.

“And I’m Jake.”

His father is a faded version of Jondoe, which is to say that there is a handsome paternal resemblance—warm brown eyes, elastic expressive mouth, strong jaw—and yet he still lacks that mesmerizing quality that makes Jondoe so . . . How did he put it?
Unlookawayable.

“Thank you,” I say, then to be polite, “I was admiring your . . .” I stop myself from saying “idolatry.” “Decor.”

“We truly believe that a joyful heart is good medicine,” says Jake.

I identify the passage automatically. “Proverbs.”

His parents gape at each other, then Jondoe.

“She’s quite special, isn’t she?” Jondoe says.

“
You’re
special!” Shelby cheers, fresh tears springing to her eyes.

“You’ll have to forgive us, Melody,” Jake says. “We are the proudest parents you are ever likely to meet!”

Proud?

“And we don’t get to see too much of our boy these days. Not since he got the call!”

The
call
?

“He has given so much of himself over to his mission.” Jake honks into a tissue and tries to get ahold of himself. “Well, we don’t have to preach to
you
about the joy of doing the Lord’s work. I’m sure your parents are just as proud!”

“I’ll tell you
all
about it,” Jondoe says to his dad before turning to his mother and asking, “but any chance that a prodigal son can get a home-cooked meal around here first?”

And despite the late hour—it’s well past midnight—his mother is all too happy to comply. Of all the grown women and young girls I’ve watched fall helpless to Jondoe’s charms, there is none who is more at his mercy than the one who carried him for nine months in her womb. And his father is equally enthralled by his presence, stopping to turn back and look at him
three times
on the short trip down the hall to the kitchen.

I don’t know what to make of all this. There is no way his God-having parents would so happily welcome their son home if they had any idea he was getting rich from premarital sex and sin! If Jondoe is so famous, how has his devilish vocation remained a mystery to his parents? I have to ask.

“Your parents don’t know about your . . .” I search for the right word.

“
Job?
Of course they know about my job. That’s not a secret. Why do you think they’re so happy to see me?”

“They think you’re a missionary?” I ask.

“I
am
a missionary.” His eyes are twinkling with irrepressible mischief, like one of my housebrothers when he’s rigged a bucket of water to fall onto an unsuspecting head. “Surely by now you’ve guessed my secret?”

I shake my head no, even though I mean yes. I want to hear him say it.

“Gabriel has God too.” He taps his fingertip on my nose. “Just.”
Tap
. “Like.”
Tap
. “You.”

This confession should shock me. But it doesn’t. And not just because of his parents’ showy faithing. His revelation is confirmation of the knowledge I held in my heart all along. Faith is accepting what makes no sense, what we cannot prove, but know down deep in our souls is real.

Now that I’ve heard it from his lips, that he too has God, everything that has happened to me since leaving Goodside—even my decision
to
leave Goodside—now makes perfect sense of the sort that could never stand up to the scrutiny of the logic and reason revered by Melody and Zen. I know I’ve done the right thing in leaving Ram behind, even leaving Melody behind, even if my actions have unfortunate unasked-for consequences.

“Come,” Jondoe says. “My mom’s mac-and-cheese is a taste of Heaven here on earth.”

I KNEW ABOUT HARMONY WAY BEFORE SHE KNEW ABOUT ME.

I knew about her because Lib is very good at what he does. The best. So Lib did what any high-stakes broker does: He did a beyond-thorough genetic background check on me, a process made more complicated—and necessary—because of my unknown bioparents.

You know what great lengths I went to to make sure your file was flawless.
He’d remind me at least once during every conversation we’ve ever had.
I put my reputation on the line for you. I pulled strings. I called in favors. I earned my 15 percent.

I don’t know who he paid off or how much he paid out, but Lib gained access to my Good Shepherd Family Placement Services records two years before I was legally allowed to do so myself. And that’s how he—we—found out I was, in fact, a monozygotic twin.

At first this was thrilling news. Imagine! A sister! An identical twin! With no genetic connection to my parents, I was fascinated by the possibility of seeing myself in another person. Even though she was a Churchy, I desperately wanted to meet her. There’s no closer biological relationship between two people and I just knew that this sister would understand me the way no other person ever had.

“You CANNOT meet her,” Lib said. “You CANNOT TELL ANYONE SHE EXISTS.”

“Why not?”

“It’s very bad for business.”

Years later, I’d hear this same line from my parents when they got the news.

“My job is to talk up your unique quotient,” Lib explained. “When I make my pitch to affluential parental units, I must convince them that you are the ONLY GIRL ON EARTH whose DNA is designed so deliciously. ONLY YOU can make the DELIVERY of their DREAMS. I can’t very well do that if there is someone else who is EXACTLY LIKE YOU and can do the job just as well as you can.”

I told him it was unlikely that a Churchy would ever agree to be a Surrogette.

“Hellllooooooo? There are Surrogettes in the Bible,” Lib says. “Genesis, chapter sixteen. Sarah gives her maid Hagar to bump with her husband, Abraham.”

I had no idea that there was anything in the Bible like that. But I was even more stupidified by the fact that Lib knew so much about it.

“It’s my JOB to know things like that, gorgeous. To have the inside angle on any and all competition for my clients. It’s what makes me the best.” Lib tipped his head back and laughed. “If she was convinced that Surrogetting was a way to serve God, she most certainly would COUNTERFEIT YOU in a THUMPY HEARTBEAT. And because her religion rejects material riches, she’d do it for FREE. Now I ask you: How can YOU compete with THAT? I’ll answer: You CAN’T. And that’s why SHE is bad for OUR business.”

My parents had been prepping me—
pushing
me—toward platinum-level Surrogetting my entire life, even before such arrangements were legal. Ash and Ty predicted that market demands would eventually call for the decriminalization of commercial pregging, and who better than their only daughter to put their theories to the test?

Of course, I didn’t think about this when I was fourteen. All I knew then was that I owed my parents for saving me when I was an infant. I couldn’t let them down just because the identical twin they
didn’t
pick underbid me.

“She isn’t your sister,” Lib said. “She is the COMPETITION. The ENEMY.”

I tried to repeat this out loud to prove how committed I was to our commercial venture. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, to betray this person who was quite possibly my only living blood relative. . . .

“I will never speak of this twin again,” Lib said. “And if we are to continue our professional relationship, neither will you.”

So I didn’t tell my parents—they found out for themselves when Harmony contacted me two years later. I only confided in Zen, who knew this was the one topic for which no questions were allowed. He kept his promise and didn’t tell anyone.

Lib, also true to his word, never brought it up again. There was just one hitch: Lib could pay someone off from the Good Shepherd Family Placement Services to expunge Harmony from
my
file, but was powerless to remove me from
hers
.

“It won’t matter,” he said blithely at the time, the last time we talked about her. “By the time she’s old enough to take a looky look, you’ll have bumped twice already!”

Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way. And now that my secret twin has taken off with my RePro, laying waste to two years of string-pulling and favor-calling and reputation-risking, I’m waiting for Lib’s face to combust in a toxic conflagration of synthetic skin.

“So it’s your identical
twin
, the Churchy who has God who’s bumped pretties with Jondoe.”

Ram suddenly comes to.

“Hey, that’s my wife you’re dishonoring like that!”

The outburst takes me by surprise, and him too, I think. He just as suddenly thuds backward onto the couch as if he’s expended his last milligram of energy. Tocin drop.

Lib cackles and claps with delight. “She’s
married
?”

“My wife is
not
an adulteress,” Ram moans.

Lib is smiling in an unpleasant way. “You all HIGHLY misunderestimate Jondoe’s gifts. . . .”

Lib’s whatever attitude about this fiasco is giving me a squelchy feeling in my stomach. And it doesn’t help that word has gotten out that I’m on the MiVu right now. The screen is filling with 1Vu pop-ups on mute: Celine Licht-
blau, Tulie Peters, even Ventura Vida herself mouthing away with her abundant gums. All these bubbleheads think I’m still with Jondoe and hope I’ll go into @Vu mode so they can all get a glimpse of the world’s hottest RePro for themselves.

“I had NO IDEA I was talking to HER this morning,” Lib says.

“You
talked
to her this morning?”

I woke up to what I thought were the sounds of Harmony talking to someone on the MiVu and she denied it. She was on her knees and claimed she was praying. My reproaesthetical ass, she was praying. She was plotting to counterfeit me. Is that really why she came all the way out to Goodside? I assumed that she had wanted to thump me into becoming like her. Is it possible that she really wanted to become more like me?

Lib is still chucking to himself. “It all makes SO MUCH SENSE now. Why she was wearing that TERMINAL nightdress . . . And the freckles!” He leans into the screen to get a closer look at me. “YOU DON’T HAVE FRECKLES AND SHE DOES!” He goes into a whole new fit of giggles.

I’m trembling with fury. And the happier Lib gets, the more off-the-spring crazy I feel. Zen has tightened his grip around my waist, as if to hold me together, to keep me from disintegrating on the spot.

“Where are they now?” Zen asks Lib.

Lib sucks on his polymer veneers.

“WHERE ARE THEY NOW?”

Lib is annoyed that someone as lowly as Zen thinks he can speak to him like that.

“We don’t know,” he says casually.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“No one knows. They’ve gone off grid. I’m SURE they’ll turn up after she tests positive.”

Holy piss on a stick.

He pauses and quickly shifts to business mode. “So you and . . . what’s her name?”

“Harmony,” I say.

“Harmony,” Lib says, almost as if he’s having a private conversation with himself. “She has the same DNA as you? So there’s really no difference between you and her? She could be you.” Another high-pitched hoot. “Right now she
is
you! Only frecklier!”

It’s exactly what Lib had warned me about. We are the same. Interchangeable. Which makes me utterly expendable. And before Lib even gets around to asking if she has representation, I know that he has already given up on me. I am bad business. A worthless investment. But if he plays this right, there’s still a chance that he could recoup his losses with the product of Harmony and Jondoe’s union. He’s already winking and blinking and eye rolling his way to finding my twin before I do. If he has any clue as to where they might be, there’s no way he’ll let me get to her before he does.

I cannot for another second look at his fake approximation of a face.

“Fuck you, Lib,” I say, blinking him out of my view. “And this whole business.”

There’s a moment of stunned silence before Zen explodes with excitement.

“I always knew you had it in you!”

Zen is still carrying on, clapping and congratulating me for finally standing up for myself, when one of the 1Vu bubbleheads catches my eye. It’s Shoko, the only one smart enough to know that I’ve probably turned off the volume. She’s waving a handwritten sign to get my attention. I tap her pop-up to enlarge. It reads:

WATER BROKE! BIRTH CENTER! NOW!