Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page B

if I don't want to be one?”
“You may not have that choice,” I admit.
She takes a step closer to me, and I fold my arms around her. “What if I wasn't meant to grow up here ... like this?” she says, her voice muffled against my shirt.
“What if there was a different cosmic plan for Bethany Matthews?”
“What if there was a different cosmic plan for Delia Hopkins, one that got ruined because of a car crash?” I search my mind frantically for the right thing to say. I try to think of Fitz, of what he would tell me to tell her. “You could have been Bethany Matthews, Delia Hopkins, Cleopatra–it wouldn't matter. And if you'd grown up with a thousand lemon trees in the middle of the desert, with a cactus instead of a Christmas tree and a pet armadillo ... well, then, I would have gone to law school at Arizona State, I guess. I would have defended illegal aliens crossing the border. But we still would have wound up together, Dee. No matter what kind of life I had, you'd be at the end of it.”
She smiles, just a little. “I'm pretty sure I was never Cleopatra.” I drop a kiss on her forehead. “Well,” I reply. “That's a start.” We were fifteen and drunk and in the bell tower of Baker Library at Dartmouth, watching a meteor shower that, the newscasters said, would only be this vivid once in our lifetimes, although that was hard to believe, feeling as we did that we'd live forever.
We played games to pass the time: I Spy, and Twenty Questions. Anyone who didn't get the answer had to chug. By the time our corner of the world turned to face the meteor shower, Fitz was snoring with his mouth open and Delia was having trouble zipping up her sweatshirt. “Here,” I said, and I did it for her, just as a fireball chased the moon across the sky.
Delia watched the midnight show, and I watched her. Sometimes she smiled, or laughed out loud; mostly her mouth just made a wondrous 0 as the night changed before her eyes. When some of the activity died down, I leaned forward until our lips touched.
She drew back immediately, stared hard at me. Then she wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me back.
I remember that we didn't really know what we were doing, that I felt two sizes too big for my skin, that my heart was beating so hard it moved the denim of my shirt. I remember that for one moment, I believed I was hitchhiking on one of those comets, falling so fast that I'd surely burn away before I ever hit the ground. At nine o'clock the next morning, Delia and I take a seat close to the defense table at the Wexton District Court, It is a rotating habitat for public defenders and hired guns like myself, a new one warming the chair each time the judge calls for a new case. Arraignments are a rubber-stamp process, the prosecutor riffling through a big box of files as defendant after defendant is brought in. We watch a woman get arraigned for stealing a toaster oven from Kmart, a man brought in for violating a restraining order. A third defendant, one I recognize as a hot dog stand vendor in town, has been arrested for the felonious sexual assault of a minor. It reminds me that there are people in this world who have done worse things than Andrew Hopkins.
“Do you know the prosecutor?” Delia whispers.
Ned Floritz was the leader of my AA meeting yesterday, but recovering alcoholics are always in the business of keeping one another's secrets. “I've seen him around,” I say.
When our case is called, Andrew is brought in wearing a bright orange jumpsuit that says grafton county department of corrections on the back. His hands and legs are shackled.
Beside me, Delia gasps; her father's incarceration is, after all, still new to her. I stand up and button my jacket, carry my briefcase down to the defense table. Andrew's eyes roam the courtroom. “Delia!” he yells out, and she stands up.
“Sir,” the bailiff says, “please face front.” I can feel sweat breaking out on my forehead. I have been in court before, but not