“Ugh, I have to go back to school on Monday,” Grace said, using two fries like chopsticks to pick up a piece of pickle.
“Were you on break or something?” Joaquin asked. He was also really good at asking open questions, making other people talk about themselves so he wouldn’t have to say anything about himself. His therapist called it a coping skill, but Joaquin just thought it was polite. They agreed to disagree on that one.
Grace’s face became one big “Oh no!” Like something had slipped past the drawbridge at the castle, but then her forehead smoothed out. “I was out for over a month,” she said. “Mono.”
“Lucky,” Maya said. “I’d kill for a month out of school.”
“Yeah, super lucky,” Grace said. “It was just like going to Hawaii.”
Maya rolled her eyes. Joaquin couldn’t believe how easy it was for them already. It was like they had a rhythm. Maybe it was because they were girls? Or maybe it was because there was something broken in him, something that everyone could see except him and—
His therapist called that negative thinking. Joaquin thought that was a pretty obvious term.
“Well, I’d still kill for a month off.” Maya shrugged. “School’s the worst. I mean, the only saving grace is that my girlfriend goes there.”
Joaquin knew his cue.
“How long have you been dating?” he asked. He could tell that Maya was ready for a fight about it, but she wasn’t going to get one from him.
“Around six months,” she said, shrugging a little even as her cheeks flushed.
“And your parents are . . .” Joaquin swirled what was left of his Coke in his cup. “You know, they’re cool with it?”
Maya sat up a little straighter. “Oh. Oh, yeah, they’re totally fine with it. It’s, like, made them the cool parents in our neighborhood.”
“One of my favorite foster sisters ever was gay,” Joaquin said. “We did time together for about six months in this one placement, but then our foster mom found out that she was gay so she kicked her out and took her back to the agency.”
Maya looked smaller in her seat. “Because she was gay?”
Joaquin nodded, suddenly aware that he had maybe picked the wrong anecdote to tell Maya. “She was cool, though,” he said. “I still miss her. Meeka. She left her iPod behind and I still listen to it sometimes. Good playlists. She wanted to be a DJ.”
Maya just nodded, her eyes round like pennies. “Oh. Cool.”
“Tell Joaquin how you and Claire met.” Grace said, and Joaquin turned back to his drink.
He could see Maya’s cheeks flush as she talked about Claire, the way she bit her lip and smiled almost to herself, even though the restaurant was packed and Joaquin and Grace were sitting right there. He wondered if he had looked that goofy, that sappy, when he talked about Birdie. “Oh, you’ve got it bad,” Mark had said to him the night after his and Birdie’s first official date (they’d gone to the movies and then gotten frozen yogurt afterward), and Joaquin had wondered how Mark knew because he hadn’t even said anything.
Watching Maya talk about Claire now, he understood what Mark meant.
And it hurt so bad that Joaquin wished he had never let that ice cube melt.
It wasn’t until after they were finished eating (and all three mayonnaise sides decimated) that the question came. They were down on the beach. Joaquin knew it was inevitable. That’s why he didn’t tell people that he was a foster kid. Their curiosity always got the best of them, making him feel like a science experiment, a cautionary tale.
“So what’s it like in foster care?” Maya asked as they walked. Maya and Grace had left their shoes back by the steps, but Joaquin carried his. He didn’t have a lot of things and he wasn’t in the habit of leaving them for other people to take.
“Maya,” Grace groaned.
“It’s okay,” he said, shrugging a little. He knew that’s what they wanted him to say, that it wasn’t as bad as the news always made it out to be, that no one had ever hit him or hurt him, that he had never hit or hurt anyone. People always thought they wanted the sordid details, Joaquin thought, until they actually had them. “I like my foster parents now, Mark and Linda. They’re pretty cool.” That part, at least, was the truth.
Maya looked up at him, her eyes worried. “I feel bad that you didn’t get adopted,” she admitted. She had her camera app open on her phone, snapping a photo every so often as they walked. “Is that bad to say? Because it’s true.”
“No, it’s not bad,” he said, and it wasn’t. No one had ever actually said that to him before. “I was almost adopted when I was a baby. They put me with this family right after I went into the system and they were going to adopt me, but right before the paperwork went through, the mom got pregnant, and they only wanted one kid, so.”
Joaquin shrugged again. He didn’t really remember the Russos, but he had seen the case file.
Maya, though, looked horrified. “But weren’t you practically, like, their kid already?”
“Bio trumps foster,” Joaquin told her. In a world where the rules kept changing from house to house, there was one hard-and-fast one. Joaquin could still remember the placement where the oldest biological son would greet each foster kid by saying, “I decide whether you stay or go.” He hadn’t been wrong, either. Joaquin had only lasted a month there.
Maya didn’t look comforted at all, though. “Well, that’s . . . Wow.”
Joaquin wasn’t quite sure when he had crossed that invisible line of too much information, but apparently he had. “I mean, that was just one home. There were others. They’re mostly fine.”
“Then why haven’t you been adopted? You’re nice.”
Joaquin made a decision to lie to them. Joaquin didn’t think of himself as a liar, not really, but he was good at knowing when to hold back information. “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably just too old. Most people want babies. Or girls.”
“Like us,” Grace murmured.
“It seems to be that way,” Joaquin said. “But your homes are good, right? Like, people are nice to you and stuff?”
He hadn’t even realized it until he said it, but Joaquin thought that if anyone had ever hurt either one of these girls, he would grind them into dust.
“Oh, we’re fine, we’re fine,” Grace said, Maya nodding at him from his other side. “Our parents are nice.”
“Well, mine are probably getting divorced,” Maya said, kicking at the wet sand a bit with her toe. “But they’re still pretty nice. When I came out, my dad actually put a rainbow sticker on his car for a few days. The whole neighborhood thought he was the one who was gay until I explained it to him.”
Joaquin couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to swing with that kind of net waiting to catch you. He thought of his foster sister again. She had cried when she had been kicked out of the home, had begged to stay. No one ever liked being sent back to the agency, of course, entering into the Russian roulette of a brand-new home. Maya had really gotten lucky, but Joaquin wasn’t going to say that to her. Sometimes it was better to not know how lucky you were.