The Worst Thing I've Done Read Online Free PDF

as we are, it has not occurred to your to wonder? I bet you—”
    â€œIt’s not something I wonder about,” you interrupted. But your eyes lied, Annie.
    I knew because I watched your lips: they were restless, while your eyes stayed calm. And I bet against you. Because your mother taught us both to read people by separating their mouths from their eyes, to study their lips without letting their eyes distract us. And your eyes, Annie, did not match your lips.
    â€œI bet you a hundred dollars,” I said, “that you’ve both wondered about making love.”
    â€œQuit it,” Jake said, uneasy as hell.
    â€œIt’s what you really want,” I said. “Why not admit it?”
    I didn’t want it to happen, Annie—

Two
    Annie
{ A Thousand Loops }
    T HE DAY I married Mason, my mother’s belly was enormous. Ankles swollen, she danced with my new husband—her strawberry hair wild; her purple dress not a mother-of-the-bride dress—and when she cut in on my father’s dance with me, she mocked tradition, led me in a tango like a big-bellied man pressing into me, her ring flickering where her hand guided mine. As my sister kicked from within her, she filled all space between us as though the three of us were intended to fit together, like this.
    On the drive home from the wedding reception, a truck jackknifed into my parents’ Honda, swatting them aside, killing my father. My mother lived just long enough to have my sister cut from her in the ambulance.
    Whenever I imagine my mother and sister still joined by the cord in those minutes between birth and death, my sister’s mouth is sucking air, seeking my mother. My sister is pink—not yet the bluish-white of thin milk; not yet inert and scrawny; not yet attached to wires and tubes inside the incubator where I would see her that night, and give her the name my parents had chosen when the ultrasound had revealed a girl: Opal.
    Mine to keep?
    To raise, then?

    T HE MORNING Mason and I brought Opal home to our apartment at UNH, we propped the hospital’s car seat on our bed and sat on either side of her, scared to speak or move, watching over her as she slept, her tiny body one pulsebeat like that of a bird, if you cup it in your palms to see if it’s injured.
    When she awoke, screaming, arms flailing, I swept her against me. Her legs scrambled, and her screams ripped into me till she became my sorrow, knees kicking my breasts as if she were trying to climb through my skin and into my womb.
    â€œI feel like such an impostor,” I said.
    â€œWe’re both impostors.” Mason stepped behind me, brought his arms around me, around her.
    â€œYou think her body remembers the accident?”
    â€œShe wasn’t born yet.”
    â€œStill…” I molded my back against him, and he rocked me…us…while she kept screaming. I was terrified of her.
    â€œSince we are impostors and since she is ours now…”
    Her snot and tears hot against my neck.
    â€œShe will be ours…right, Annie?”
    My parents’ lawyer had mentioned adoption. Unthinkable. “We can’t just give her to someone else,” I told Mason.
    â€œThen we may as well be the best damn impostors we can dream up.”
    â€œLike playing house?”
    â€œLike being awesome parents.” So much hope in his voice.
    â€œI miss them so.”
    â€œI miss them too.” He kissed me between my shoulder blades.
    â€œYou think she’s hungry?”
    â€œWe could try feeding her.”
    â€œI’ll go read the instructions on the formula.” Supporting Opal’s head, I laid her into Mason’s arms.
    He stroked her tummy with his thumb. Murmured to her, “What are we going to do with you?”

    W HENEVER O PAL burst from sleep—screaming, hair matted with fear—I was sure her body remembered the accident. We would take turns walking with her through the