DID YOU EVER WONDER how we all got here? On Earth, I mean. Forget the song and dance about Adam andEve, which I know is a load of crap. My father likes the myth of the Pawnee Indians, who say that the stardeities populated the world: Evening Star and Morning Star hooked up and gave birth to the first female. Thefirst boy came from the Sun and the Moon. Humans rode in on the back of a tornado.

Mr. Hume, my science teacher, taught us about this primordial soup full of natural gases and muddy slop andcarbon matter that somehow solidified into one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates…which sound a lotmore like a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary chain, in my opinion. But evenonce you get there, it’s a huge leap from an amoeba to a monkey to a whole thinking person.

The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what you believe, it took some doing to get from a pointwhere there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.

More amazing is how even though that’s become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.

On Saturday morning, I am at the hospital with Kate and my mother, all of us doing our best to pretend thattwo days from now, my trial won’t begin. You’d think this is hard, but actually, it’s much easier than thealternative. My family is famous for lying to ourselves by omission: if we don’t talk about it, then—presto!—there’s no more lawsuit, no more kidney failure, no worries at all.

I’m watching Happy Days on the TVLand channel. Those Cunninghams, they’re not so different from us. Allthey ever seem to worry about is whether Richie’s band will be hired at Al’s place, or if Fonzie will win thekissing contest, when even I know that in the ’50s Joanie should have been having air raid drills at school andMarion was probably popping Valium and Howard would have been freaking out about commie attacks.

Maybe if you spend your life pretending you’re on a movie set, you don’t ever have to admit that the wallsare made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren’t really yours.

Kate is trying to do a crossword puzzle. “What’s a four-letter word for vessel?” she asks.

Today is a good day. By this I mean she feels up to yelling at me for borrowing two of her CDs withoutasking (for God’s sake, she was practically comatose; it isn’t like she would have been able to give herpermission); she feels up to trying this crossword.

“Vat,” I suggest. “Urn.”

“Four letters.”

“Ship,” my mother offers. “Maybe they’re thinking of that kind.”

“Blood,” Dr. Chance says, coming into the room.

“That’s five letters,” Kate replies, in a tone that’s much more pleasant than the one she used with me, I mightadd.

We all like Dr. Chance; by now, he might as well be the sixth member of our family.

“Give me a number.” He means on the pain scale. “Five?”

“Three.”

Dr. Chance sits down on the edge of her bed. “It may be a five in an hour,” he cautions. “It may be a nine.”

My mother’s face has gone the color of an eggplant. “But Kate’s feeling great right now!” she cheerleads.

“I know. But the lucid moments, they’re going to get briefer and further apart,” Dr. Chance explains. “Thisisn’t the APL. This is renal failure.”

“But after a transplant—” my mother says.

All the air in the room, I swear, turns into a sponge. You’d be able to hear a hummingbird’s wings, that’s howquiet it gets. I want to slink out of the room like mist; I don’t want this to be my fault.

Dr. Chance is the only one brave enough to look at me. “As I understand it, Sara, the availability of an organis under debate.”

“But—”

“Mom,” Kate interrupts. She turns to Dr. Chance. “How long are we talking about?”

“A week, maybe.”

“Wow,” she says softly. “Wow.” She touches the edge of the newspaper, rubs her thumb over the point at itsedge. “Will it hurt?”

“No,” Dr. Chance promises. “I will make sure of that.”

Kate lays the paper in her lap and touches his arm. “Thanks. For the truth, I mean.”

When Dr. Chance looks up, his eyes are red-rimmed. “Don’t thank me.” He gets up so heavily that I think hemust be made of stone, and leaves the room without speaking another word.

My mother, she folds into herself, that’s the only way to explain it. Like paper, when you put it deep into thefireplace, and instead of burning, it simply seems to vanish.

Kate looks at me, and then down at all the tubes that anchor her to the bed. So I get up and walk toward mymother. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Mom,” I say. “Stop.”

She lifts her head and looks at me with haunted eyes. “No, Anna. You stop.”

It takes me a little while, but I break away. “Anna,” I murmur.

My mother turns. “What?”

“A four-letter word for vessel,” I say, and I walk out of Kate’s room.

spaceLater that afternoon, I’m turning in circles on the swivel chair in my dad’s office at the fire station, with Juliasitting across from me. On the desk are a half-dozen pictures of my family. There’s one with Kate as a baby,wearing a knit hat that looks like a strawberry. Another with Jesse and me, grinning just as wide as thebluefish balanced between our hands. I used to wonder about the fake pictures that came in frames you buy atthe store—ladies with smooth brown hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling’sknees—people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a talent scout to be a phonyfamily.

Maybe it’s not so different from real photos, after all.

I pick up one picture that shows my mother and father looking tanned and younger than I can ever rememberthem being. “Do you have a boyfriend?” I ask Julia.

“No!” she says, way too fast. When I glance up, she just sort of shrugs. “Do you?”

“There’s this one guy, Kyle McFee, that I thought I liked but now I’m not sure.” I pick up a pen and start tounscrew the whole thing, pull out the skinny little tube of blue ink. It would be so cool to have one of thesebuilt inside you, like a squid; you could point your finger and leave your mark on anything you wanted.

“What happened?”

“I went to a movie with him, like on a date, and when it was over and we stood up he was—”I turn brightred. “Well, you know.” I wave in the general vicinity of my lap.

“Ah,” Julia says.

“He asked me whether I’d ever taken wood shop at school—I mean, God, wood shop?—and I go to tell himno and bam, I’m staring right there.” I put the decapitated pen down on my dad’s blotter. “When I see himnow around town it’s all I can think about.” I stare up at her, a thought coming at me. “Am I a pervert?”

“No, you’re thirteen. And for the record, so is Kyle. He couldn’t help it happening any more than you canhelp thinking about it when you see him. My brother Anthony used to say there were only two times a guycould get excited: during the ............