My name is Jasmine Melendez-Hill. I'm 16, and I live in Berkeley, California. I'm writing this because Jennifer, my social worker, said she wanted me to. The scientists and researchers all want to hear my side of the story. The psychologists want to hear it, too. In my own words.

I was adopted. That isn't what I'm writing about. Well, it kind of is, but Jennifer said I should put in the background information so it'll all make sense. The scientists and the psychologists want to get the big picture. They may never meet me in person, so I have to make sure it's all very clear for them. She says I write well, too. I like her. So here it is.

I was adopted by Alison Hill and Maria Melendez when I was two years old. Alison and Maria are lesbians. They had been together like 10 years when they decided to adopt. I think Alison tried to have a baby via the turkey-baster method, with sperm donated by some gay guy friend of theirs, but she miscarried. They tried again. She miscarried again. They tried sperm from another gay guy, their friend Sam, who is like this gazillionaire travel writer. Alison's gynecologist said there were some kind of abnormalities. Her insides weren't up to the job of bringing babies to term, and Sam's baby was going to be deformed if it even lasted past the first trimester. Planned Parenthood took care of that one. Slurp. Maria didn't want to get pregnant, so they decided to do the third-world adoption thing like every other lesbo couple in the Bay Area who weren't conceiving babies on their own with borrowed sperm and a kitchen utensil.

Maria's from Cuba. She has very dark skin, and long hair in these beautiful braids. Because of her Latin origins and fluent Spanish, they decided that she would be the adoptive parent. I guess they got some agency to look for babies. Latin America is always having disasters that leave lots of babies without mothers. Unlucky for them, lucky for me. Maria went to Honduras and got me. The Honduras government officials made her stay there 30 days while all the paperwork went through. Maria showed pictures of Sam's lover Marco, who is from Brazil and looks Hispanic enough to pass off as the adoptive father. Maria said she and Marco were engaged. She fed them some bullshit about him going back to Rio to take care of his dying mother. They ate it up. Back to Lesbo-Land we flew.

I have dark skin too, but not as dark as Maria's. She has African ancestry. Cubans are often very beautiful that way: they are a blend of races, which is how I think everyone will look someday. Me, I am more Indian. My face is kind of broad, you know, but not like a dinner plate. Just enough to give me an exotic look. I have almond eyes and full lips. I think I'm probably pretty, but when your mothers sublimate the whole traditional female beauty thing, and you're not allowed to watch network TV or play with Barbie dolls (because if you do, you'll be convinced your ass is way too big but your boobs will never be big enough), you get kind of murky on what girls are supposed to look like.

They adopted Dmitri three years after they got me. Two kids was enough, they told me. Two was just right. We'd be a perfect little nontraditional family. Not that anyone in Berkeley would give us a second look.

This time, Alison did the traveling. She was born in England and it shows: very fair skin, freckles, reddish hair. She still has an accent. By similar logic to what they used when Maria went to Honduras, the moms decided Alison would have an easier time in Eastern Europe. The break-up of the Soviet Union put lots of babies on the market.

Alison flew to Moldova first. There was a baby there, according to the agency, but when Alison got there, this straight British couple had beaten her to it. She said Moldova was a beautiful country and she'd like to go back later.

Then she flew to Moscow. There were lots of babies in the orphanages there, and lots of little kids. Alison was overwhelmed. Nothing was in English, not the street signs or the restaurant menus or the information in the subway stations. It was hard to know which restroom was the right one. And when she did find the right one, it was like this hole in the floor. Too disgusting. She got really freaked out by the whole Moscow thing and took the train over to Nizhniy Novgorod.

There was this lady from an agency there in Nizhniy Novgorod, a social worker or something, and she acted as Alison's guide. She did translation and told Alison which officials to bribe, and how much to pay them, and everything. Dmitri had just been born. His mother was this poor peasant girl. She couldn't take care of him.

The State Department stuff took a couple of days. Maria handled a lot of it from back here in the US. Dmitri's mother had given him some mile-long Russian name like Sergei Snottoblottski, and of course Alison and Maria lesbianized it right away.

I guess Dmitri and I grew up in a more or less normal way, all things considered. I mean, there wasn't much normal about our lives, by the standards of the rest of America. Plenty of trashy right-wing religious people would faint if they could have seen Maria's goddess icons, or Alison's meditation room, or the box they kept their vibrators in. I wasn't supposed to know about those, but come on, kids get into everything. So our childhood was all very open and natural. Alison and Maria wanted to make sure their kids didn't get stuck with needless, unhealthy hang-ups.

They went through all kinds of trauma when they started to suspect something was wrong with Dmitri. He was two. At first they thought he was retarded. He wouldn't respond when they talked to him. Like if he was looking the other way, and one of us walked into the room, he wouldn't turn around to see who it was. He sort of jabbered and cooed, but they said his baby noises didn't sound right. I don't know what babies are supposed to sound like, and I don't think I ever want to have one, but that's what they said. They took him to a specialist at Children's Hospital over in Oakland. The specialist checked his hearing.

"He's just deaf," the audiologist said. "I doubt there's anything seriously wrong with him, other than that."

Alison fainted. Neither of them is really butch, you know, they're not those big burly women that ride motorcycles and look like football players, but Maria is the more durable of the two. After Alison had come to, and Maria had driven us all home from the hospital in her old Volvo station wagon, she called a friend of hers who was dating a teacher at the deaf school down in Fremont, which is close to San Jose. The teacher, this fortyish deaf guy, came over to visit us with his boyfriend, Maria's friend. The teacher could talk, even though he was deaf. When he talked, he also signed at the same time. His voice was pretty clear.

We had a Family Conference. The teacher, whose name is Jason, and his boyfriend Jeff, had tea with us in our living room. I remember it pretty well. I had just turned six, and I was already in school. They included me, which made me feel very important. I kept quiet and paid close attention to everything they said, although I couldn't understand all of it.

Jason, the teacher, said it was OK to grieve and worry about Dmitri for a little while, but not to spend too long on that because they had work to do. In other words, get over it. (If they only knew.) Jason said the moms should start learning sign language right away. Me too. Don't put off teaching him language, he said, unless we didn't want him to be able to think for the rest of his life.

So it was like this Dyke Power crusade after that. They went to classes. They taught me signs. Of course Dmitri was better at it than we were, and I picked it up faster than the moms, but you know, they did a pretty good job. When he got older, they let him go to school down in Fremont, which was kind of weird. Students live there. Even really young ones, like in the sixth grade. The school has dorms. Cottages, they call them. Some of the kids come from too far away to commute. And I found out a lot of their parents don't know sign language to begin with, so at home there isn't anybody for the kids to talk to. When they do go back to school again on Sunday nights, they're pissed off about having been left out all weekend. Do you blame them? The moms didn't want that to happen to Dmitri.

So that's the deaf thing. He went to school down there during the week, and on Friday afternoons, when he was a little older, he rode BART--the train--home. Alison or Maria would pick him up at the station.

Me, I was just like any other kid with interracial lesbian mothers at Berkeley High. My best friend was this Chinese girl named Elizabeth. Her moms had adopted her in Shanghai. We had all this stuff in common. Like Maria would speak Spanish to me so I would know my so-called native language. And Mei, one of Elizabeth's moms, would speak Cantonese and Mandarin to her.

Elizabeth and I were like, whatever.

One time, Elizabeth said, "Maybe we should be girlfriends." So we kissed each other some and didn't get anything out of it.

"Maybe we're straight," I said.

Elizabeth shrugged. "I guess so. So let's keep being best friends, then."

"OK."

So the Bible-bangers would probably think I was raised in this den of sin, but it all felt pretty normal at the time.

Turns out nothing was as normal as I thought, but it wasn't because Dmitri and I were being raised by a pair of lezzies in Northern California. Alison had her job at the university, in the psych department. She was a full professor, and she wrote this book that sold a zillion copies, and that was cool. Maria opened a tai chi studio over in Oakland, and it did pretty well. I was on the yearbook staff in middle school, and by high school they appointed me to be the editor. I had a crush on this Filipino boy named Justin, but he was kind of a loser. Then I had a crush on this red-haired white girl named Candace. She looked like a boy and had a dirty mouth. We kissed once under the bleachers and then she got mad at me and wouldn't talk to me anymore. But this was all pretty normal compared to Dmitri.

For one thing, he never got sick. Never ever.

He was down there in Fremont at the residential school, and in a school like that where everybody lives in close quarters, if one person gets something, then everybody gets it. Of course all the kids were vaccinated for things like chicken pox and rubella and mumps, all the childhood shots you have to get. And they got the newer shots, hepatitis and E. coli. One kid in Dmitri's class got chicken pox anyway, and it was like the end of the world. Maria and Alison sent him all these worried e-mails: Take care of yourself! Wash your hands! Don't touch your face!

He didn't get sick.

All the other kids got colds and he didn't. Sometimes Alison and Maria took me down there to see him, and during cold season you'd see these kids with green snot coming out of their noses. Not Dmitri. He never got sick to his stomach, even though the food was pretty bad. The flu went around one year, and like everybody got it, even me. Alison had all the gross symptoms and spent a week lying around the house. Maria fought it off. I had to stay home from school for a week, myself, and take extra vitamins.

When Dmitri came home, Maria started fixing dinner in the kitchen. Veggie lasagna, my favorite. Lots of fresh oregano and basil. Extra minced garlic to help our immune systems.

"Are you sick too?" he asked. He didn't actually ask it by talking to me, he used American Sign Language, which doesn't have a written form, but that's still what he asked. Does that make sense? Like, if he'd asked it in English, that's how he would have said it.

I nodded. Maria and Alison had rented a bunch of videos. I was watching the new Brad Pitt movie. It wasn't very good, but he took off his shirt a lot, which made it worth watching. I felt like shit.

"All the kids at school are sick," I signed back. "I have this headache that won't go away, and no energy, and I feel like shit."

He used this sign that means, "Oh, I see" but with this sympathetic look on his face that added the idea "that really sucks" to what he was saying. Then he reached out and took hold of my wrist. My headache went away, just like that. I was used to the headache, so for a minute my system was confused. It's like I thought I still had the headache, and then I didn't, but it was supposed to be there, and then it wasn't. No headache. And I had energy again. I remember taking a deep breath.

"Did you do that?" I asked him in sign language.

He nodded. "Don't tell anyone. I'm going to fix Alison too, but it's a secret."

Have I mentioned we called the moms by their first names?

Dmitri wouldn't tell me how he fixed Alison, but the next morning, she looked healthier than she had all week.

"My fever's broken!" she announced.

We celebrated with a trip up to Marine World, in Vallejo.

I got nauseated from one of the rides, and Dmitri very carefully took hold of my wrist when Alison and Maria weren't looking. The nausea subsided just like I had taken some Rolaids or Tums or something, only better, because there wasn't that gross chalky aftertaste. Suddenly I didn't have to throw up. For about 10 minutes I had been feeling like I was about to blow chunks, and the sunlight was too bright and too hot, and I wanted to lie down, but then all at once I was fine.

"Fixed," Dmitri said, looking very satisfied with himself.

So, I mean, really--what are you supposed to do when your little deaf adopted brother heals you like one of those evangelists you see on TV late at night sometimes, but without all the Jesus crap and the big hair? If you tell your best friend, she'll think you're nuts. I didn't think Elizabeth would spread it around school that I'd gone psycho or whatever, but I just didn't think I should tell her. It wasn't like this awful Thing that kept me up all night worrying. I just kept it in mind for future reference. Next time I got really bad cramps with my period, I asked him to make them stop, and offered to do his math homework in return. I researched his social studies project for him, and he got rid of my acne. It was very convenient, and it didn't really bother us or anything.

Not long ago, Dmitri told me he fixed some kid's broken ankle on the playground. He had to do it before the teachers got there. Dmitri knelt down and held the little girl's hand. He said she was writhing in pain and crying. It was really hard to understand her signing. So he fixed her. It was like picturing a broken stick unbreaking itself. Her shoes and socks were on, and she was wearing jeans, so it wasn't like anybody could see what happened. The bone unbroke itself, and the pain went away. If the bone went crunch, or I guess anti-crunch, when it unbroke, nobody there could hear it anyway. The teachers carried her to the infirmary on campus, and they took her for an X-ray, and everything was fine. They decided the little girl had fallen and just gotten a bad shock. Aren't kids resilient. Blah blah blah. (If they only knew.)

That same school year, Dmitri came home one weekend missing the mole on his left cheek. He had this mole there, like Madonna's only not as pretty.

"What happened to your mole?" I asked him when we were alone.

"I peeled it off," he said. "Like a sticker."

Maria and Alison were fixing dinner. Ethiopian food. Lentils and things. We were going to sit around on the floor and eat the food with the big circles of bread, to make it seem more authentic.

"I could have sworn he had a mole," Alison said that night. "Why did I think you used to have a mole, Dmitri?"

Dmitri shrugged and scooped up more tangy Ethiopian vegetable stuff with a torn piece of circular bread.

"I know I haven't been sniffing paint fumes," Alison said, signing and talking at the same time.

Dmitri looked puzzled. Sometimes different things are funny for hearing people and deaf people, and I don't think he got the joke about paint fumes. He looked at me to explain. I tried, and after a while he either got it or pretended to. He responded with that same "oh I see" sign and a look on his face that suggested us hearing people were really weird sometimes.

Looking back, I think this kind of thing pissed him off. I mean, the moms did a good job compared to most of Dmitri's friends' parents, like they could actually communicate with him, but they left stuff out. He could get tantrummy.

He never has had much of a temper, you know, but I guess I should have thought about what I'd do if he lost it. Really lost it with somebody.

Maria didn't say a word the whole time. She kept looking at him. I think she knew there was something going on, deep down inside.

I have to say, Maria was (is, whatever) the smarter of the moms. Alison may have been the professor, with the Ph.D. and all, but Maria is sharp as a fucking tack. She does not miss a thing.

Later that weekend I asked him why he didn't fix himself. At first he didn't get it.

"You know, your deafness. You could make yourself hearing." I felt a little awkward for saying that, but it was the obvious thing. Maybe it was so obvious he'd overlooked it.

"Oh, that. I tried that." He made a face. "Awful. Too loud. I thought hearing people could close their ears, like closing your eyes. But I was wrong. You're stuck with all that noise. All the time, too much noise. It's awful. I didn't like it, so I fixed myself again. Deaf is better."

I had to take his word for it.

Then there was the roadkill. Gross, I know, but I can't leave anything out. I got a little nervous when Dmitri told me he tried bringing some roadkill back to life and it worked. That was like 6 months ago. It wasn't like this Stephen King Pet Sematary thing where the dead cat comes back to life and wants to eat you. The cat he brought back from the dead just got up, peed a little, and walked away. Dmitri followed it for a little while to see if it would keel over again, but it didn't. It groomed itself, then ran off into the bushes to catch a bird or something.

Dmitri tried a few experiments. His school is in this suburban area with lots of houses, near a couple of main roads. Fido and Fluffy sometimes get out, and try to cross the road at the wrong time of day. Splat! So anyway, if it was fresh roadkill, then he could bring it back. He just had to touch it (God that is so gross, I may not be able to finish the sandwich I'm eating) and concentrate for a second on making it well. Fixing it. And the dog or cat or rabbit or whatever would kind of twitch, and get up and go about its business. He said they always had to pee when they woke up. There's probably some explanation for that, but I don't think I want to know why. Maybe it's like when you wake up in the morning, you have to go. I don't know. Dmitri said his experiments on old roadkill, the mushy kind that's like bones and fur and surrounded by flies, those stayed dead. Now and then one would kind of twitch some, but it wouldn't come all the way back to life. He'd have to step on its head to make sure it was dead again.

When he told me that, I was eating then too. I spat out chunks of food to make it look like I was throwing up. I mean, does it get any more disgusting? I could just see him trying to bring the sushi back to life at the restaurant the next time Alison and Maria took us out. I pictured these pink cubes of fish jumping around on the wooden tray and knocking over the soy sauce. Ugh.

Two things started happening at the same time, and I guess everything worked out the way it did because I lived with Alison and Maria in Berkeley during the week, and Dmitri was down in Fremont at school. In literature, that's where a writer would say "unbeknownst to," or something like that.

Unbeknownst to us, Dmitri would sometimes play doctor with the other students. He was getting kind of, I don't know, adventurous. I don't mean pulling down other kids' pants to compare pee-pees, although he probably did that too. I mean like if somebody got sick or hurt, he would very quietly fix things in a way that hid who the real doctor was. He'd offer to walk them to the infirmary. One weekend when he was home, he made me promise to keep a secret.

"Of course, you dumbass," I told him. "Who would believe me, anyway?"

"You know my friend Juan?"

I nodded. Cute little guy from Nicaragua. I remembered him.

"I took his appendix out."

"What?" I didn't believe him at first. Silly me.

He nodded. "Honest!"

Juan was going to have to have an operation and was scared shitless. He told Dmitri that the doctors said there was something wrong with his appendix. It wasn't an emergency but it had to come out pretty soon. Dmitri thought operations were a bad idea. Those doctors and their stupid knives and shots and stitches. He could do a better job. He got an encyclopedia from the library and looked up appendix so he'd know what to pull out.

One night when Juan was asleep, Dmitri snuck into his bedroom and fixed him so he wouldn't feel anything, or wake up. He reached in (don't ask how, I have no idea. I don't think he stuck his hand up Juan's butt or anything. I just don't know) and went snip and pulled it out. All better.

"I don't understand why you had to take it out," I said. "Why couldn't you just fix his appendix for him?"

Dmitri shrugged. "Because I was curious," he said. "The encyclopedia said he didn't need it. If I took it out it could never get infected again. And I wanted to see what it looked like. And it worked. Juan's healthy now. He doesn't have to go to the hospital."

"Cool."

Now for the unbeknownst to Dmitri part.

Maria and Alison were having problems. I lived with them, so I could see everything going to shit, but Dmitri was away during the week, and when he was home on weekends, they hid it from him. Or tried to. Duh. He's deaf but his eyes work. Any idiot could see the moms weren't getting along as well as they used to.

So this went on for a while. They wouldn't talk about it. Just kept going in circles, acting like the problem wasn't there, like nothing was wrong. They hardly touched each other. Dinner was getting to be more and more tense. I would ask one or the other what was going on, were they splitting up, and they wouldn't say. That was so not like them. So much for open and natural. I started finding reasons to get out of the house more often, because I couldn't stand to watch the disintegration.

On weekends, it was like they staged a play for Dmitri's benefit. Poor little deaf boy, can't handle reality, let's make like everything's just as sweet and nice as it ever was. I mean, come on, he's probably smarter than all three of us put together. Did they really think he wasn't going to see through their act?

And what about me? Why weren't they trying a little harder?

Finally, last weekend, when Dmitri came home from Fremont, we had a Family Conference. A really awful one.

Alison's face had this flushed look, like she'd been crying. Kind of puffy. Maria didn't say much, and I got the feeling she was mad and trying not to show it. But I couldn't be sure. Maybe I'd ask later. Much later. Talking and signing at the same time, Alison said that she and Maria had been having problems for a while now, and they didn't think they could work them out. They had been to see their counselor, and she thought Alison and Maria should consider a trial separation.

A trapdoor opened up underneath where I was sitting, and I fell through. That's what it felt like.

I looked over at Dmitri and could tell he didn't quite get what Alison had just told us. That happens sometimes, when you talk and sign at the same time. English grammar is different from ASL grammar. So I explained it to him again, more clearly: They're breaking up. Dmitri looked stunned for a second, then looked like all the pieces suddenly fit.

"Why didn't you tell us a long time ago?" he asked. "Why now, when it's already too late?"

Not bad for a 13-year-old.

"We thought the problem would go away, and we wouldn't need to burden you with it." Maria this time, finally opening her mouth. When she saw that the talking-and-signing thing wasn't working (again), she just signed. We could all understand that, anyway.

"So, like, is one of you going to move out? Are we going to have to find a new home?" I addressed them both. My hands were shaking so much I could hardly sign, but Dmitri seemed to follow me OK. "Alison adopted Dmitri, and Maria adopted me, so does that mean Dmitri and I have to split up too?"

Thunderstruck is the word to describe what Dmitri looked like then. He hadn't thought of that yet. Once that look passed, then you could tell he was really pissed off.

I was just crying.

These thoughts were running through my head: Did one of them have an affair? Was there another woman in the picture? Or did they just not like each other any more? Was it money? Was it us? It was all too horrible to deal with. I wanted to run upstairs to my bedroom, slam the door, and hide under the bed, but I told myself to be mature and set a good example for Dmitri. At least one member of the family needed to be sane.

Maria spoke up: they hadn't made final decisions yet, she said. But they had put off telling us as long as they could, and things between them just hadn't gotten any better, and please try to be brave and bear with them as they found their way through this.

After she said that, the Family Conference seemed to be over. This time, I did run upstairs to my room. I couldn't help it. I hid under the covers of my bed and cried myself silly.

I must have fallen asleep, because next thing I knew, Dmitri was waking me up. He was tapping me on the shoulder, a little too hard, like he was impatient.

"It's not fair. They should have told us a long time ago," he said.

"Maybe they were trying to help us," I answered. "I don't think they wanted us to be upset. What's wrong with that?"

Dmitri didn't answer. He sat on the bed next to me.

"You live here during the week. I'm away at school. Did you see this? Did you already know?"

I shook my head No. "If they were trying to hide it, they did a good job."

He thought about what I said. For a long time, he was quiet. After a long time, what seemed like forever, he said he believed me. "Go back to sleep," he said.

I didn't wake up again until the next morning, Saturday.

The house was unusually quiet, and the usual breakfast smells--the coffee Maria and Alison could not live without, the eggs and veggie sausages--weren't there. This already felt funny.

After I went to the bathroom, I went downstairs to see where everyone had gone. Had somebody already moved out overnight? The idea made me sick to my stomach, because it sort of made sense, at least for a little while. Alison and Maria weren't like that, but still. They say in a divorce people's personalities change. I hadn't seen this coming. So, like, who really knew what was going to happen next?

Downstairs in the kitchen: no Alison, no Maria. No sausages, no pot of Guatemala Antigua made from fresh-ground beans and smashed through a French press, no scrambled eggs or oranges or grapefruit halves because they have fewer calories or even a fucking bowl of Raisin Bran with vanilla soy milk. Nothing. The birds were tweeting outside. The jacarandas on the other side of the kitchen windows were as opulently purple as usual.

I had this feeling of Something's really fucked up here in my gut.

When I went to take a look in Maria and Alison's bedroom, I found out why.

At first I didn't know what I was looking at.

Dmitri sat in a chair by the bed, rocking and kind of talking to himself in sign language. I couldn't tell what he was saying, and anyway, the brownish thing on the bed, what the hell had he gone and dragged in here?

It was like this big lump of clay or something, with sheer gauzy patterned fabric covering parts of it and sort of pressed in between other parts, like the clay had been pushed together to make one solid thing, and the fabric was caught in the middle. One side of it was kind of pink, and the other side was brown, the exact same color as Maria's skin.

Oh my fucking God!

I don't remember if I said it out loud or thought it or signed it or what.

It moved. The lump moved. It was like a jellyfish or a sea anemone or something, like one of those creatures you see at the aquarium down in Monterey. It was breathing.

I looked closer and saw one blue eye looking at me.

The eye blinked. A tear slid out of one corner of it.

The lump was breathing. Half pink and half brown.

Dmitri smiled up at me.

"Fixed," he said. "Now they won't break up."

I guess I fainted then, because I don't remember a goddamn thing after that.