You Remind Me of Me Read Online Free PDF

told him.
God brought us right to you and put us together as a family.
He’d known this from an early age, and he’d been taught that it didn’t matter at all, that he was no different from anyone else. His parents—Earl and Dorothy Timmens—were just as real as anyone else’s parents. But still, it bothered him that Bruce had told this girl about it, and he felt uncomfortable imagining the two of them discussing him. He shrugged, eyeing her suspiciously. “It’s not a big deal,” he said. “Nobody cares about it.”
    “Huh,” she said: a short laugh. “Oh, sure they do. You just don’t know it yet.” She made a wry face, her eyes glancing sideways slyly, as if someone might be listening, and she was going to tell him something secret, or dirty. “Don’t
you
think about it? Don’t you wonder about your mother?”
    “Not really,” he said. And what else could he say? He looked down, thoughtfully, tracing the fake wood-grain patterns of the counter’s Formica surface. What could he tell her? Could he say that he’d always believed his mother when she told him that he was special—chosen, selected, his mother said. When he was little, he used to listen to a record “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” He would play it over and over, and in some ways he supposed that he’d always thought his adoption was something like that—that his parents had wandered through a corridor of glass cases containing babies, and that they’d suddenly halted, struck with certainty, in front of a bassinet that contained his infant self. They’d pointed, and a nurse had brought him bundled in a blanket into their arms, a clean and uncomplicated transaction. He’d never much considered what came before that. He knew about sex, about how babies were born, but the idea of being inside someone’s stomach—of being expelled wetly from some woman’s body—seemed grotesque and unreal. In his mind, that person was like a skin he’d shed, a cocoon husk he’d left behind.
    “I guess,” he said, “I guess I always figured that it wasn’t very important.” And he shrugged, shifting uncertainly. He was aware of the inexplicable and almost oppressive heaviness of her attention. It was an ability some girls had, he recognized, a power they could draw upon simply by focusing themselves on a single person. His skin prickled as she leaned closer, as her forearm brushed lightly against his and he could see the pale hairs just above her wrist, the rosy smell of lotion and moist, soft pressure of skin brushing against skin, the way her hair grazed his shoulder.
    “Oh, well,” she said. She let the pad of her forefinger touch the back of his hand, briefly, smiling at him in a way that wasn’t really a smile at all, but something else—a swallowed sadness, a shudder. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m just weird. I’m, like, probably sort of crazy or something. But . . . I think about it a lot. I think, you know, what is she doing now? Like, maybe she’s a singer or a famous actress or something. And what does she look like? And what would have happened if she’d kept me? Do you know what I’m talking about? You could have had this whole other different life, and maybe you’d be different, and, well,
happier
. I mean, I know that I don’t belong in the family I’m living in now, that’s for sure.” She made a face. “Maybe I’m the only one, I don’t know. But do you really think your parents wanted to adopt a baby? Don’t you think that if they’d had the choice they would have had a real baby? I mean, one of their own.”
    He didn’t know what to say to this, and so he was silent. From the next room came the sound of thick male coughing, a throat cleared of phlegm. “Fuck,” a sleepy voice muttered sharply, and her eyes shifted toward the sound.
    “I feel sorry for you,” she said. “You’re a kid. You shouldn’t be hanging out in a place like this.”
    And then, without warning, she kissed