My Sister's Keeper Read Free

make getting to him more of a challenge.
    I crawl over the mess and up the stairs, which vibrate with the bass from
Jesse's stereo. It takes nearly five whole minutes before he hears me knocking.
“What?” he snaps, opening the door a crack. “Can I come
in?”
    He thinks twice, then steps back to let me enter. The room is a sea of dirty
clothes and magazines and leftover Chinese take-out cartons; it smells like the
sweaty tongue of a hockey skate. The only neat spot is the shelf where Jesse
keeps his special collection—a Jaguar's silver mascot, a Mercedes symbol, a
Mustang's horse—hood ornaments that he told me he just found lying around,
although I'm not dumb enough to believe him.
    Don't get me wrong—it isn't that my parents don't care about Jesse or
whatever trouble he's gotten himself mixed up in. It's just that they don't
really have time to care about it, because it's a problem somewhere lower on
the totem pole.
    Jesse ignores me, going back to whatever he was doing on the far side of the
mess. My attention is caught by a Crock-Pot—one that disappeared out of the
kitchen a few months ago—which now sits on top of Jesse's TV with a copper tube
threaded out of its lid and down through a plastic milk jug filled with ice,
emptying into a glass Mason jar. Jesse may be a borderline delinquent, but he's
brilliant. Just as I'm about to touch the contraption, Jesse turns around.
“Hey!” He fairly flies over the couch to knock my hand away.
“You'll screw up the condensing coil.”
    “Is this what I think it is?”
    A nasty grin itches over his face. “Depends on what you think it
is.” He jimmies out the Mason jar, so that liquid drips onto the carpet.
“Have a taste.”
    For a still made out of spit and glue, it produces pretty potent moonshine
whiskey. An inferno races so fast through my belly and legs I fall back onto
the couch. “Disgusting,” I gasp.
    Jesse laughs and takes a swig, too, although for him it goes down easier.
“So what do you want from me?”
    “How do you know I want something?”
    “Because no one comes up here on a social call,” he says, sitting
on the arm of the couch. “And if it was something about Kate, you would've
already told me.”
    “It is about Kate. Sort of.” I press the newspaper
clippings into my brother's hand; they'll do a better job explaining than I
ever could. He scans them, then looks me right in the eye. His are the palest
shade of silver, so surprising that sometimes when he stares at you, you can
completely forget what you were planning to say.
    “Don't mess with the system, Anna,” he says bitterly. “We've
all got our scripts down pat. Kate plays the Martyr. I'm the Lost Cause. And
you, you're the Peacekeeper.”
    He thinks he knows me, but that goes both ways—and when it comes to
friction, Jesse is an addict. I look right at him. “Says who?”
    Jesse agrees to wait for me in the parking lot. It's one of the few times I
can recall him doing anything I tell him to do. I walk around to the front of
the building, which has two gargoyles guarding its entrance.
    Campbell Alexander, Esquire's office is on the third floor. The walls are paneled
with wood the color of a chestnut mare's coat, and when I step onto the thick
Oriental rug on the floor, my sneakers sink an inch. The secretary is wearing
black pumps so shiny I can see my own face in them. I glance down at my cutoffs
and the Keds that I tattooed last week with Magic Markers when I was bored.
    The secretary has perfect skin and perfect eyebrows and honeybee lips, and
she's using them to scream bloody murder at whoever's on the other end of the
phone. “You cannot expect me to tell a judge that. Just because you
don't want to hear Kleman rant and rave doesn't mean that / have to… no,
actually, that raise was for the exceptional job I do and the crap I put up
with on a daily basis, and as a matter of fact, while we're on—” She holds
the phone away from her ear; I can make out the buzz of