Mark, to his credit, managed to eat half the bowl before asking another question. “Nervous about meeting Grace and Maya?”
Two years ago, Joaquin would have answered “Nope” to that question, too, but it wasn’t two years ago anymore. “What if they don’t like me?” he asked before shoveling a huge spoonful of cereal into his mouth.
Mark just nodded thoughtfully. “Well, if they don’t like you, then the unfortunate fact is that you’re related to idiots. I’m sorry. A lot of us are, though. You’re in good company.”
Joaquin tried to hide his smile by eating again, but Mark caught him. “Seriously,” he said. “Meeting people for the first time is hard. But they’re your . . . well, you’re related to them. You all deserve to get to know one another. At least meet them first and then decide who likes who.”
Joaquin wrinkled his nose.
“Not like that, you perv.” Mark reached for the cereal box again, then looked at him. “Did you already finish the box?”
“Night!” Joaquin said, putting his bowl in the sink and taking the stairs two at a time.
He got so busy at the pottery station the next day that he actually forgot about Maya and Grace for a few minutes. He was working with Bryson, a little boy who refused to make anything except vases that would eventually become pencil holders, but his parents seemed to be thrilled with each and every one. Joaquin wondered if they had an entire room in their house dedicated to lopsided pencil holders, and just when he was picturing what that would look like, he looked up and saw two girls staring back at him. One of them teary-eyed and the other one just, maybe, scared.
It was the first time that Joaquin had looked at someone who was related to him.
They were white—he was right—but the shorter one had piles of curly hair that looked a lot like his own, and a nose that leaned to the left like his did. The taller one, the one who was trying desperately to not look like she was crying, had his tight jaw. He could tell just by looking at her that she had a secret. Her posture was too straight, her backbone too rigid. Well, good for her. Joaquin had secrets, too. Maybe they’d respect each other’s privacy and not go around trying to dig things up.
He was the one who said they should go and eat, and he sort of regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. But Maya, the younger and shorter one, didn’t seem to regret any of the words that came out of her mouth. And there were a lot of them.
“So I was totally freaked out at first,” she was saying as they walked, Maya strolling in between Joaquin and the other girl, Grace, who still hadn’t said much other than her initial outburst.
“Because I already have one sister, Lauren? She’s like their miracle baby—they had her right after me, oh joy—and sometimes she’s crazy annoying and I was like, ‘Another one? I don’t know about this.’ But then they told me about you, too? And I was like, ‘Get. Out.’ I mean, it’s like insta-family, right? Just add water. Like sea monkeys.”
Joaquin nodded. It was like listening to a cartoon character talk while sucking helium and he was only really hearing every third word. Baby, miracle, insta-family.
“Maya,” Grace said.
“Sorry, I talk when I’m nervous,” she said. She stuffed her hands in the pocket of her hoodie.
“It’s all good,” Joaquin said, then pointed down the street. “There’s a burger place right around that hill. Fries are pretty good. Unless one of you, um, doesn’t eat meat? Or fries?”
“Bring on the cow,” Maya said.
“Fries sound good,” Grace said, smiling at him. Her nose wrinkled when she did that. Joaquin knew that he did the same thing because his girlfriend Birdie used to love that about him.
Wait. Ex-girlfriend Birdie. He kept forgetting that part.
Which was weird, because he was the one who’d broken up with her.
Joaquin had known who Birdie was for approximately 127 days before they’d actually talked. He wasn’t used to knowing other kids for that long since he moved around so much, but Mark and Linda had gotten him into a magnet high school in his junior year, and on his first day, Birdie was in his math class. Not that she knew who he was, of course.
That year, right before Christmas break, the teacher’s aide in his U.S. history class had pulled him aside and handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “Hey, Joaquin,” she said, smiling at him. Her name was Kristy and she had always been pretty nice to him. Joaquin was sort of a sucker for people who were nice to him. It was his greatest downfall.
“I was wondering,” she said, “could I buy some tamales from your family this Christmas?”
Joaquin didn’t say anything at first. Mark and Linda were the closest thing he had to family, and Mark was Jewish and didn’t eat pork and Linda went to a drumming circle down at the beach every month during the full moon. Neither of them could have made tamales if they’d had an instructional YouTube video and a sous chef at their side.
And then Joaquin realized that Kristy didn’t realize that he was a foster kid. She thought he had a big Mexican family that made tamales on Christmas Eve.
He didn’t bother to correct her. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth.
The next day, he found himself on his computer, researching the best tamale places, and on Christmas Eve, he went down to stand in line with a bunch of other people, Kristy’s twenty-dollar bill stuffed safely in his hoodie pocket. The guy at the counter spoke to him in Spanish and Joaquin had to say, “No espa?ol,” which he had gotten used to saying whenever someone greeted him that way. “You’re too much and not enough,” one of his old foster siblings, Eva, had told him once. “White people are only gonna see you as Mexican, but you don’t even speak Spanish.” It was clear from her tone of voice that this was a huge black mark in her book.
Joaquin hadn’t been able to disagree.
Joaquin eventually carried his tamales home, then stowed them in the very back of the freezer, where he knew Mark and Linda would never see them. When he took them to school the Monday after their holiday break, Kristy had been so delighted—and Joaquin hated her, hated her for putting him in that position.
And that’s when Birdie spoke to him.
“You make tamales?” she said as soon as Kristy disappeared off to the teachers’ lounge. (Joaquin had been in the teachers’ lounge exactly once. It had been hugely disappointing.)
“No,” Joaquin said. He hadn’t even realized that Birdie had been behind him. She had been as quiet as a hawk on a branch, watching, and he suddenly felt like a very small mouse. “I just bought them for her.”
“Well, aren’t you nice?” Birdie said, then smiled at him. “Happy New Year, Joaquin.”
They were together for the next 263 days.
It was the happiest Joaquin had ever been.