Page 15 of Merciless Prince
I was excited to show my parents because they were regular blood donors themselves. They were out walking our old dog, though, in the park across the street, and they never took anything with them when they did that. Not even their phones. While I waited for them to return, I snooped through their things to find their donation cards. I knew it was wrong, but I was curious to know who I’d inherited my rare blood type from. According to my Google search, only 0.6% of the US population was AB-negative.
My mother’s type was A-negative, and my father’s type was O-positive.
I must have stared at those two cards for ten minutes straight, mind whirling as I tried to figure out what it meant. There was a sick twist in the pit of my stomach, and cold dread was slowly sluicing through my veins. I knew what itlookedlike… but surely it couldn’t be true.
I spent the next couple of hours Googling and using my high school biology knowledge of Punnett squares to arrive at an inescapable truth. My father wasn’t really my father. Not in a biological sense, anyway.
I knew my mother was related to me—we had the same warm brown eyes and the same button nose. Also, an A-negative woman could easily produce an AB-negative child, depending on who she reproduced with. My father couldn’t.
My real biological father had to be a B or AB blood type.
I stayed in my room stewing for hours over the mind-blowing revelation. It just didn’t make any sense. My parents were completely in love with each other. Practically joined at the hip. There had never been any sign of conflict in their marriage.Never.They were definitely married when I was conceived, too. They’d been together for over ten years before I came along.
Mom cheated.
After two days of stewing, that dark, miserable thought was finally joined by other possible explanations. Perhaps my parents had trouble conceiving and decided to use a sperm donor in the process, and then they chose not to share that information with me. Or maybe my mother was assaulted and fell pregnant as a result, and my parents decided not to tell me the truth about my conception because they feared it would psychologically scar me.
In the end, I decided not to ask them about it. I didn’t want to stir up trouble for them or myself, even though I was itching to know the truth.
I never got the chance to change my mind about that particular decision. A week after I made it, Mom and Dad were heading up to visit a friend in Poughkeepsie when a drunk driver ran them and another car right off the road.
If it was a regular road in a flat area, they might have survived, but it was a winding road in a rocky, elevated spot, right near a creek with a large waterfall. My parents’ car was pushed off the side of the road and went straight over the edge of a thirty-foot drop. They plummeted down and hit a huge craggy boulder that sat in the middle of the creek, orphaning me.
My only comfort was that they died instantly. When the police told me that fact right after it happened, it didn’t make a lick of difference to my grief, but a year later, when that grief had finally turned from acute misery and churning rage at the world to a lower-level melancholy, I was glad to know they hadn’t suffered at all.
After the funeral, I pushed the question of my true parentage right out of my mind and vowed to never look into it again. I felt like it would be a betrayal of my parents—that I had gone digging into their relationship, knew things I wasn’t supposed to, harbored ugly doubts about them.
All I wanted was to have them back.
“Shay.” Cori snapped her fingers under my chin. “Hello?”
I looked up. “Sorry,” I said, forcing a smile. “I zoned out for a second. What were we talking about?”
“Blood donation. Do you want to go and do it tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
Faye smiled. “I know I’m not exactly a walking advertisement for it, but you get free juice and cookies at the end, so it’s not all bad.”
“Speaking of free cookies,” Leah cut in, gesturing to the giant cookie she’d bought with her coffee. “Does anyone want a bite of this? I can’t eat the whole thing.”
Cooper’s forehead wrinkled. “Not if it has peanuts. I’m allergic as fuck,” he said. “Like, just one crumb could put me six feet under.”
“Sorry, it’s a peanut butter cookie,” Leah replied with a sympathetic smile. “Remind me not to kiss you on the cheek when we say goodbye later.”
Cooper chuckled as I leaned forward. “I’ll take some,” I said, holding out my palm.
Leah broke off a piece and handed it to me. As I chewed on the buttery goodness, Cooper looked over at me. “Olivia, was it you who was talking about a history class earlier?”
My brows dipped in a frown. “Olivia?”
Cooper gave me a blank stare. Then he slapped a palm against his forehead. “Oh my god. Sorry. I’ve been binge-watching this old show lately, and the main character is called Olivia. I must’ve been thinking about it subconsciously. I meant to say Shay, obviously.”
“It’s okay, I do that all the time,” I said, eyes crinkling with amusement. “Anyway, yeah, I was telling Cori about this paper I have to write for the history class I’m taking. I can’t think of a subject to write about.”
“Why are you taking a history class?” he asked. “It’s not really relevant to performing arts, is it?”
“No, but Bellingham makes everyone take two unrelated classes during their courses, remember?” I said. “They call them broadening electives. It’s meant to widen the scope of our learning, or something like that.”
