My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

this tirade to put an end to the litigation, to reduce Anna to a
wavering puddle of indecision. But to my surprise, she looks right at me, cool
and collected. “Are you still willing to represent me?” she asks.
    Against my better judgment, I say yes.
    “Then no,” she says, “I haven't changed my mind.”
    The first time I sailed in a yacht club race with my father I was fourteen,
and he was dead set against it. I wasn't old enough; I wasn't mature enough;
the weather was too iffy. What he really was saying was that having me crew for
him was more likely to lose him the cup than to win it. In my father's eyes, if
you weren't perfect, you simply weren't.
    His boat was a USA-1 class, a marvel of mahogany and teak, one he'd bought
from the keyboard player J. Geils up in Marblehead. In other words: a dream, a
status symbol, and a rite of passage, all wrapped up in a gleaming white sail
and a honey-colored hull.
    We hit the start dead-on, crossing the line at full sail just as the cannon
shot off. I did my best to be a step ahead of where my father needed me to
be—guiding the rudder before he even gave the order, jibing and tacking until
my muscles burned with effort. And maybe this even would have had a happy
ending, but then a storm blew in from the north, bringing sheets of rain and
swells that stretched ten feet high, pitching us from height to gulley.
    I watched my father move in his yellow slicker. He didn't seem to notice it
was raining; he certainly didn't want to crawl into a hole and clutch his sick
stomach and die, like I did. “Campbell,” he bellowed, “come
about.”
    But to turn into the wind meant to ride another roller coaster up and down.
“Campbell,” my father repeated, “now.”
    A trough opened up in front of us; the boat dipped so sharply I lost my
footing. My father lunged past me, grabbing for the rudder. For one blessed
moment, the sails went still. Then the boom whipped across, and the boat tacked
along an opposite course.
    “I need coordinates,” my father ordered.
    Navigating meant going down into the hull where the charts were, and doing
the math to figure out what heading we had to be on to reach the next race
buoy. But being below, away from the fresh air, only made it worse. I opened a
map just in time to throw up all over it.
    My father found me by default, because I hadn't returned with an answer. He
poked his head down and saw me sitting in a puddle of my own vomit. “For
Christ's sake,” he muttered, and left me.
    It took all the strength I had to pull myself up after him. He jerked the
wheel and yanked at the rudder. He pretended I was not there. And when he
jibed, he did not call it. The sail whizzed across the boat, ripping the seam
of the sky. The boom flew, clipped me on the back of the head and knocked me
out.
    I came to just as my father was stealing the wind of another boat, mere feet
from the finish line. The rain had mellowed to a mist, and as he put our craft
between the airstream and our closest competitor, the other boat fell back. We
won by seconds.
    I was told to clean up my mess and take the taxi in, while my father sailed
the dory to the yacht club to celebrate. It was an hour later when I finally
arrived, and by then he was in high spirits, drinking scotch from the crystal
cup he had won. “Here comes your crew, Cam,” a friend called out. My
father lifted the victory cup in salute, drank deeply, and then slammed it down
so hard on the bar that its handle shattered.
    “Oh,” said another sailor. “That's a shame.”
    My father never took his eyes off me. “Isn't it, though,” he said.
    On the rear bumper of practically every third car in Rhode Island you'll
find a red-and-white sticker celebrating the victims of some of the bigger
criminal cases in the state: My Friend Katie DeCubellis Was Killed by a
Drunk Driver. My Friend John Sisson Was Killed by a Drunk Driver. These
are given out at school fairs and fund-raisers and hair salons, and it