The sound of the blender next door pulled me out of my thoughts.
“Chad,” I mumbled under my breath, steam venting through my ears.
Every morning, like clockwork, Chad’s NutriBullet roared to life, and given that the wall separating my neighbor and me was as thin as a seaweed wrap, I got to be right there for the action. Living next to Chad was like interactive live theater. If he was watching sports, I heard the cheers. If he was taking a shit, I heard the plops. And if the muscle man next door was making a protein shake, I heard the high-powered crushing. What the hell was he grinding in that thing anyway—a sliding glass door?
When I first moved in, I’d tried to give Chad the benefit of the doubt, even slipping a reverse-psychology ‘good neighbor’ contract under his door promising to keep my noise levels down for his comfort when in reality he was, and always had been, the problem. Not that the strategy worked. If anything, the contract only made him louder and more difficult. The guy had an ornery side to him that I found nearly as off-putting as the shaggy black carpet covering nearly the entire landscape of his face. But why stop there? Since I was currently on the subject of Chad, I’d be bereft not to mention the weird shit he did, like avoiding all face-to-face contact. Look, I was all for maintaining some distance, but this guy’s aversion to eye contact bordered on obsessive, especially when he covered his face with his hand as I walked by.
Um…okay, weirdo. You do you.
I’d originally just shrugged off Chad as one of those antisocial video gamers who’d been weaned off the teat not with a pacifier but with a controller in hand. I imagined the poor guy had only recently discovered the outside world. It was a plausible theory, for sure, but it didn’t account for the muscles I spied every time he came home from the gym. Nor did it explain the tattoo sleeve that traveled up his arm and over his broad shoulder. Or those striking golden eyes that occasionally peaked out from under a feather duster of lashes.
Wait. Why was I thinking about my hairy, jacked-up neighbor? Chad was nothing like clean-cut James—my possible genetic twin. Oh man, I had to stop thinking of him in those terms.
Repeat after me: James is not your brother.
I mean, come on. Get a grip, girl. There were four million people living in Los Angeles. What were the odds I was related to a good percentage of them? Deflating at the thought, I realized for the average girl, the odds were very slim; but for me, Danielle Evelyn Malone, the probabilities were surprisingly high.
See, I was the offspring of a woman who was too picky to settle down with ‘just any man,’ so instead, she hand-picked the perfect one—Sperm Donor 649. Don’t get me wrong, I’d never had a problem with my artificially inseminated beginnings. On the contrary, I was proud to share my story, even playing the papa game with the other kids in school until the principal called my mother into the office and put a stop to it. My dad’s a doctor. My dad’s a fireman. Yeah? Well, my dad’s a test tube.
Yep, it was all fun and games until I got an email from a lawyer two years ago warning me that, just as my mother had found Sperm Donor 649’s profile unbelievably attractive, so had lots of other women—one hundred and eleven of them, to be exact. To date, I had twenty-four confirmed half-siblings. Plus, thanks to the rise of the DNA testing sites and our accompanying Facebook page, The Lucky Sperm Club, numbers were continuing to rise. And because three quarters of us had yet to be identified, that made James guilty until proven innocent.
Certainly, my life on the dating front would have been so much easier if my dear ol’ test tube dad hadn’t financed his college education one ejaculation at a time. I don’t want to brag or anything, but my father was a bit of a rock star in the semen-seeking world. Who knew in the mid 90’s that blond, blue-eyed med students with above average intelligence and six-foot-one frames would be all the rage? My prolific pop’s ‘contributions’ were so sought after, in fact, that an unscrupulous doctor kept his seed in rotation long after it should have been retired, making Sperm Donor 649 the unwitting commander of a small army.
Sometimes I imagined my father and wondered if he knew he’d had a part in bringing so many humans into the world; but more specifically, I wondered what he’d think of me. My whole life, I’d tried to live up to his ideals, excelling at school and getting a degree. Would he be proud? God knows, my mother never was. It really didn’t matter what I did in life, it was never good enough for her. Hell, I could bring home Neanderthal Chad to meet the fam and that still wouldn’t come close to the disappointment she’d felt when I failed to get accepted to medical school.
But then I went and totally ripped her heart out by refocusing on another profession—teaching. I swear my mother would probably have preferred I slide up and down a pole rather than have to tell her friends I taught first-graders Common Core curriculum and modeled for them how not to hold their crotches when they had to go pee pee. See, if I was going to disappoint, Mom wanted it to be something grand, something she could then blame on my father’s side of the family. Obviously, Danielle got her severe acne from her father’s side of the family. Or, Of course Danielle is a stripper. What did you expect when her great-great grandmother, on her father’s side, liked the feel of metal between her legs?
Don’t get me wrong—my mother could be sweet and loving. If the sun and moon aligned just right. But it was her disappointment in all things ‘me’ that had led to our mini estrangement and my accepting a job in Los Angeles, where the inflated rents forced me to seek out cost-effective housing and live next door to a dunderhead like Chad.
The blender continued to whirl. Jesus, how long did it take to grind up kale and broken dreams? I got up from my chair, made a fist, and pounded on the wall. In true meathead fashion, my neighbor defiantly switched the blender setting to high and let that baby churn. Such a colossal jerk. Why couldn’t he just fall in line like all thirteen of my sperm brothers?
My phone buzzed on the kitchen table. I picked it up and raised a brow. Well, I’ll be damned. Speaking of sperm brothers, a text had just come through from possible number fourteen: James.
Had a great time last night, he wrote.
Really? How? If my excessive incestuous sweating hadn’t turned him off, I was sure the Ancestry.com survey request of his mother’s sex life just before his conception would have done him in. Wow, James was a hardy fella—like a drought-resistant weed.
Yes, it was fun
Can’t wait to see you again. How about tonight? Does a movie sound good?
Tonight? Huh, let me think. I did have plans to practice knuckle-knocking Morse code on the wall I shared with Chad, but I supposed I could put it off for one more day.
Um, okay that sounds fun, I typed. What theater? I’ll meet you
Are you sure I can’t come and pick you up?
That was not going to happen. If we were still together at the end of the year, sure, maybe; but no way was I inviting him to my place after the considerable amount of time James had spent detailing his high-end apartment. The last thing I wanted was for him to come here and see how the other half lived.
No. I prefer to just meet you there
The two of us exchanged theater information before he wrote out his last text:
I dig you, Dani. Haven’t stopped thinking about you since last night