Anniversary Day by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

a teenager since Talia came into his life, but he was still surprised when that research was right. Sometimes Talia was just plain difficult, for no reason that he could see.
“What’s stupid?” Flint asked.
“Anniversary Day,” Talia said. “They’re going to make us listen to dumb speeches, and then everyone’s going to talk about what they did on Anniversary Day, and how they cried or how they knew someone who got hurt or how they were scared when the Dome sections came down. It’s stupid.”
Flint did his best not to nod or mutter ahhhh , although he was tempted. So that was what bothered his daughter about school. Four years ago, she had been living happily with her mother, believing the lies her mother had told her.
Four years ago, Talia had been a normal (if unbelievably bright) child, living with her divorced mother, in the house she had grown up in. Now Talia’s mother was dead, and the day she vanished, Talia learned that not only had her mother lied to her about almost everything, Talia wasn’t who she thought she was either.
She was a clone of the child that her mother had had with Flint. And Flint hadn’t abandoned them like her mother had told Talia. He hadn’t even known about Talia.
Clones had no respect in the Earth Alliance. They weren’t even considered human without proper legislation. When Flint found Talia, he had gone through all the procedures to make her his child under the law—his human child.
Still, neither he nor Talia told anyone she was a clone, and they almost never told anyone about her past.
“Are you supposed to participate?” Flint asked.
Talia still stared out the window, but she nodded.
Flint had hunch she didn’t want him to see the emotion on her face. She hated seeming weak to anyone, which he would have said was something she got from him, except that he hadn’t been around her in her formative years.
He waited for her to tell him more and when she didn’t, he let out a small sigh. The problem was exactly what he thought it was: she didn’t want to talk about her past. Not just because she didn’t want her classmates to know about it, but because she was still ambivalent about the memories it brought up.
She really didn’t know if she should acknowledge how much she missed that life, considering it was based on a lie. And she didn’t want to acknowledge how much she loved her mother, considering what a horrible person her mother had turned out to be.
“Just tell them about Valhalla Basin,” Flint said. “Be brief and don’t talk about much more than school there.”
“I don’t want to,” Talia said with great venom.
“Then pass,” Flint said. “Don’t participate.”
“If I do that, I’ll fail. It’ll have a huge impact on my grade.”
So it was easier to be sick. He wished he had known that before checking her in. She had taken a smart way out.
“Then fail,” Flint said, a little reluctantly. He wanted her to do well at school, but not at the expense of her own identity.
She looked at him. Her eyelashes were wet and stuck together, but that was the only evidence of tears on her face.
“But Daddy,” she said, and his heart lifted. She almost never called him that. “It’ll ruin my grade.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s okay.”
She looked at him, then frowned, clearly working over the angles in her mind. “Can you give me something that says you don’t want me to participate?”
“No,” he said, almost without thinking about it. “This has to be your decision.”
“Why?” Her voice went up slightly.
“You’re going to spend your whole life choosing when to tell people who you are and when to keep that information to yourself. You’re supposed to learn things in school. This seems to me like a valuable lesson.”
“You take all the fun out of things,” she said.
He shrugged a shoulder and let himself smile. “That’s my job.”
She leaned over, kissed his cheek, and got out of the car. “Thanks, Dad,” she said as she