My Sisters Keeper | Page 4

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 I 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 disconnection. "Bastard," she mutters, and then seems to realize I'm standing three feet
away. "Can I help you?"
She looks me over from head to toe, rating me on a general scale of first impressions, and finding
me severely lacking. I lift my chin and pretend to be far more cool than I actually am. "I have an
appointment with Mr. Alexander. At four o'clock."
"Your voice," she says. "On the phone, you didn't sound quite so .. ."
Young?
She smiles uncomfortably. "We don't try juvenile cases, as a rule. If you'd like I can offer you the
names of some practicing attorneys who--"
I take a deep breath. "Actually," I interrupt, "you're wrong. Smith v. Whately, Edmunds v. Womens
and Infants Hospital, and Jerome v. the Diocese of Providence all involved litigants under the age of
eighteen. All three resulted in verdicts for Mr. Alexander's clients. And those were just in the past
year."
The secretary blinks at me. Then a slow smile toasts her face, as if she's decided she just might like
me after all. "Come to think of it, why don't you just wait in his office?" she suggests, and she stands
up to show me the way.
Even if I spend every minute of the rest of my life reading, I do not believe that I will ever manage to
consume the sheer number of words routed high and low on the walls of Campbell Alexander,
Esquire's office. I do the math--if there are 400 words or so on every page, and each of those legal
books are 400 pages, and there are twenty on a shelf and six shelves per bookcase--why, you're
pushing nineteen million words, and that's only partway across the room.
I'm alone in the office long enough to note that his desk is so neat, you could play Chinese football
on the blotter; that there is