“Do you really think they made twelve just like a carton of chicken eggs?”
“Well…they keep them in freezers just like chicken eggs.”
Jillian put the Jillian-egg back into the carton beside the Louise-egg. “That proves nothing.” She tapped the remaining eggs. “These eggs might have never existed. These ones though—” She pointed at the empty cups. “Those eggs existed and were used and were successful—otherwise we wouldn’t be leftovers.”
Louise rolled the idea around in her head. Their “genetic parents” created a random number of fertilized eggs because they wanted babies. Once they had one or two babies, they didn’t want more, so they gave the rest to someone that did: their real parents. Jillian was right; for them to be leftovers, their genetic parents got the babies that they wanted.
“We have sisters,” Louise whispered. The possibilities were breathtaking. Two more Louise and Jillian? Did the other Jillian want to create epic movies? Did the other Louise love animals as much as she did? Was she have pets?
“Or brothers,” Jillian said. “They could be boys. It’s not like we’ve been cloned.”
That was true. Brothers wouldn’t be bad; just different. She and Jillian were often mistaken for identical twins because their hair was the same shade of brown and had been the same length prior to the explosion. The fire singed Louise’s ponytail to a short brittle stump that their mother had trimmed even shorter to get rid of the burnt ends. She looked like a boy now.
Louise peered at her reflection in the mirrored side of the toaster. Would their brothers look like her? Were they nine years old too? Or ten?
“How long to you think we sat in the fridge?” Jillian said. “We are leftovers, afterall.”
“I don’t know.” There had been reports of pregnancies of embryos that had been stored up to sixteen years. Their sisters could have been teenagers before she and Jillian were born. They could be really old by now—like twenty-one or twenty-two!
Louise decided she liked thinking that their siblings were two girls, exactly their age. What of the other leftovers? Louise took out an egg, pure white, perfectly formed, and considered the possibilities. The others would probably be younger. “I think I would want at least one brother. A baby brother, just learning to talk.”
“That would be boring.” Jillian picked up one of the unmarked eggs. “I’d rather have a baby sister but one that could talk and walk and act.”
Assuming that any other leftovers had actually been used. Louise eyed the egg with slight unease. She knew that she couldn’t remember that time between conception and implantation. Despite that, it seemed awful somehow to be stuck frozen at the brink of being alive.
“Do you think they’re still in the fridge?” Jillian marked closed eyes on the egg as if it was asleep. A chain of little Z’s came from a tiny slack mouth. “Still-unused leftovers?”
“Maybe.” How many people wanted other people’s Easter eggs, left in the grass after the hunt? Would they stay lost in the darkness, forgotten, until they spoiled?
Louise cradled the egg in her hands. Every Wednesday night their mother would shift through the contents of their refrigerator, sniffing at the suspicious packages, throwing out anything that looked too old. How much time did the unused eggs have left?
Jillian squeaked with alarm and made a wild grab at the egg that had slipped out of her hand. She missed and it dropped to the floor with a wet splat. Her lip trembled as she fought not to cry.
“Maybe we should ask Mom and Dad to make us baby sisters.”
* * *
The most important lesson Louise learned a week before her ninth birthday was the hardest one to keep in mind. Sometimes, what sounded like a good plan, wasn’t.
2: THE BEST LAID PLANS
Their parents had insisted on calling the building in the backyard the girls’ “playhouse” despite the fact it was actually a storage shed. Made of dried lumber and asphalt shingles, it had proved to be quite flammable. All that was left was a skeleton of blackened studs. Their father was dismantling it with a reciprocating saw.
“We want to know more,” Jillian called to him over the growl of the blade.
“More?” Their father echoed. He had soot smeared across his pale cheeks like war paint. On another father, it probably look cool, but it only made him look silly. The strap on his safety glasses worked his straw blonde hair into spikes, standing up at every conceivable angle. His eyebrows were cocked into an extremely puzzled look. Their mother liked to use his expressions as proof that it was possible to get your face stuck in silly-looking poses. He looked like a startled hedgehog.