Chapter 5: Real Name

The consent form was ten pages long.

The line for my name was on the last one.

The coordinator put a pen beside it and left the room, because she had kids too and she could see my hands.

Erik stayed.

"You don't have to do it like this," he said. "I've got lawyers. We could get a judge to let you sign as Kate, or I sign alone, or something."

"How long would something take?"

He didn't answer.

The doctor had said it plainly.

Ingrid's leukemia was moving.

Conditioning had to start before New Year's.

"Once I write it," I said, "it's in the system. Somebody types my name into a computer, and it pops up next to a warrant."

"I know."

"Your dad already knows where I am."

"I know."

"Now you're saying it."

He almost smiled.

I picked up the pen.

I hadn't written my own name in seven years.

My hand did it anyway, the old loopy B, the curly S I used to doodle in the margins of my notebooks.

Britta Skoglund.

It looked like a stranger's.

Erik signed the donor consent under it.

His signature took up half the page.

"Show-off," I said.

"Hockey cards. You sign ten thousand, it gets big."

I set the pen down.

"Okay," I said. "Now they can come."

He moved us into his house that night.

I said no.

Jodie said yes, loudly, before I'd finished saying no.

"You're sleeping on a vinyl couch under a fish tank," she told me. "I'm sleeping in my car. The man has a house. Take the house."

The house was gray stone on the edge of Lake Harriet, ten minutes from the hospital, with a porch and a dock and a frozen lake beyond it.

He gave Jodie the guest room with its own bathroom.

She lay down on the bed in her parka and declared she was never leaving.

He gave me the room across the hall from his.

It had a window seat and a hockey net in the closet.

"I was going to make it a kid's room," he said. "Someday. I bought the net and then I just. Didn't."

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