The Adoration Of Jenna Fox by Pearson Mary E

Author:Pearson, Mary E. [Pearson, Mary E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Young Adult, Romance, Dystopia
ISBN: 9781741756401
Google: loPNLQq8MSwC
Amazon: 0312594410
Goodreads: 1902241
Publisher: Square Fish
Published: 2008-04-28T23:00:00+00:00

Details

We sit in the living room. Father builds a fire, even though Mother warns that the top of the chimney is still missing. He doesn’t care. He wants a fire. If the house burns down, he’ll build another. She doesn’t argue.

His time here is limited. He will be missed in Boston. Questions will be asked, and the others can’t cover for him for long. So in this unplanned visit he tries to tell me more of what I need to know. At dinnertime I learned more about the new and improved Jenna. Even though Bio Gel is self-sufficient, I actually do have a primitive digestive system, mostly for “psychological reasons.” No stomach, but an intestine of sorts. It explains my infrequent trips to the restroom and unusual constitution. And the system does utilize the nutrients for my skin. At some point, I may be able to eat some table foods. I tell Father I have already indulged in mustard and he frowns, but he doesn’t say anything. It’s like he can’t take any more drama. Even if it may derail everything he and Mother have worked toward for so long. Mustard. Irrelevant.

Mother has been mostly quiet. Before dinner she apologized for raising her hand to me. She stumbled over her words. I don’t recall her ever hitting me, but even the possibility seems to shake her. Now she sits in the wingback chair near the fire, her head back, her eyes staring at something I can’t see. The past? Is she retracing every moment, wondering what she should have done differently? Always chatty and in control, she is now the opposite, like someone has pulled her plug. Father fills the space she leaves by adding logs in the fireplace and refilling both their brandy glasses. I have never before seen Mother drink anything stronger than cranberry juice.

Father doesn’t address the question I threw at him before I ran out the kitchen door this afternoon. Perhaps, like mustard, it is irrelevant to him. I don’t think it is irrelevant to Lily. She had been conspicuously absent all evening. She helped make dinner but didn’t join Mother and Father in eating it, instead excusing herself and going to her room. “You need some time alone together,” she said.

As he pokes at the fire, Father explains in detail more than I really want to know, the tedious process of saving bits of my skin and growing it in the lab and combining it with other specimens until the required amount was achieved. He moves on to the technology of brain scans, what he and his team have learned just from my experience and the implications for future-patients facing similar problems. As long as he is in doctor-scientist mode, he is talkative and in charge. When he veers into father mode, he stumbles and looks in many ways like a mirror image of Mother. He ages. Who is this Jenna Fox who has so much power over them? I feel like a weak, unsure ghost of her.

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