“What are you—” Maya started to say.
“What’s she going to do?” Lauren said. “Get angry at us for dumping out her contraband? She’s not going to do that. She can’t. Because then she’d have to admit what she’s been doing.”
Maya watched her for a long minute, then went upstairs and brought back the second bottle. Lauren opened it and they dumped it out, watching it swirl down the sink before turning on the faucet and rinsing it all away.
When their parents finally made their big announcement, it really wasn’t that much of a surprise. Maya later thought that it was more like ripping off a huge bandage—inevitable, but you still knew it would hurt like hell.
She had been doing physics homework when the knock came at her door. It had been quiet that night, way too quiet, and Maya had done the same problem four times and still hadn’t gotten the right answer. She wondered how fucked up it was that she worked better when her parents were fighting. If she was ever going to make it through high school, she’d probably need a nuclear explosion every night.
Great.
When she said, “Come in,” her parents were both standing there, looking apprehensive and nervous. Like children, in a way. Maya had never seen that kind of look on their faces before. Lauren was behind them, and Maya didn’t need to look in a mirror (or at a birth certificate, for that matter) to know that her own expression was similar to her sister’s.
“Your dad and I want to talk to you,” their mother said, and Lauren pushed past her parents and went to sit on Maya’s bed. Maya, who had actually been doing homework at her desk for once, got out of her chair and went to sit down next to her sister. She suddenly found herself wishing that her other sister was there, too, and her brother. And Claire. She wished for an army of people to stand behind her, swords at the ready.
Of course, no one actually came.
“We’d like to talk downstairs?” Their mom’s voice sounded a bit strangled, and Maya felt like someone was pushing down on her throat now, too, that three-a.m. feeling creeping back in. “It’s okay,” her mom said quickly. “We just need to have a family meeting.”
They hadn’t had a family meeting since Maya was eight and Lauren was seven and accused Maya of killing her goldfish. (Maya would still swear on a stack of Bibles that she hadn’t touched that creepy, scaly thing. Lauren was paranoid and a terrible fish parent, that was all.)
“I’ve got this homework,” Maya started to say. She suddenly prayed for inertia. An object in motion stays in motion until acted upon by an outside force, the words said in her physics textbook. She wanted things to keep going the way they had. For all the terrible fights, it was still familiar. Maya wasn’t ready for that to change, and she wasn’t ready for what would potentially take its place.
“Maya,” her mother said. “Please.”
She didn’t need to say anything else.
Downstairs, Maya and Lauren sat next to each other on the couch while their parents explained things.
You know we haven’t been getting along.
It’s going to be so much better this way.
You get to spend time on the weekends with Dad now, just you and him.
You girls will be so much happier.
Lauren cried, of course. She had always been the emotional one (see: family meeting about a dead goldfish), the one who had to be taken out of the movie theater during sad scenes because she would sob too loud and disturb everyone else.
Maya, though, just sat there quietly while her parents explained that Dad was moving out, that they loved both of their girls so, so much, that it had nothing to do with them at all, that it wasn’t her or Lauren’s fault.
“Of course it isn’t,” Maya muttered, because that was the stupidest thing she’d heard in a while. “We’re not the ones who have been fighting for the past ten years.” And hiding wine in the closet, she almost added, but thought better of it. Lauren was still crying and Maya didn’t want to hurt her sister any more.
Her mother blinked while her father cleared his throat. “That . . . is true,” her dad finally said. “That’s very true.”
“You girls will stay here with me, in the house,” their mother said. “But you can visit your dad whenever you want.”
“What if we want to live with Dad?” Maya asked. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to, but she felt the overwhelming need to put herself in between them, to see which one of them would tug her closer. To know if either of them would fight to keep her after trying so hard fifteen years ago to get her.
“We can figure that out,” her dad said. Maya’s mom couldn’t answer; she was too busy blinking back tears and moving to put her arm around Lauren. She tried to put her arm around Maya, too, but Maya moved down on the couch so that there was space between them. She didn’t want anyone touching her.
“We’re going to try and make this as easy as possible for you two, don’t worry,” her dad added.
Maya laughed, short and sharp and bitter. She couldn’t help it. “I think we sailed past easy a long time ago,” she said.
“Maya,” her dad started to say, but she held up her hand.
“No. I don’t—” The words suddenly got caught in her throat, the walls were too close to her, the air too thin. She felt like a character in a movie running away from an explosion, with the road crumbling into gray ash just steps behind her, struggling to stay ahead of the abyss that pulled at her like hands, sucked her in like a tar pit, like a black hole that only wanted to absorb the light.
“I have to go,” she said, and then she was grabbing her phone and running out the front door, down the grass and their driveway. It wasn’t until she reached the end of the street that she realized she was barefoot, and that her feet were throbbing even from that short a distance, but it didn’t matter.
She texted Claire. Meet at the park? I need you.
Her heart pounded through her body as she waited for the response bubble, and then Claire was there, as steady and sure as she always was. On my way. Everything ok?
Maya didn’t bother answering. She just ran. Once she hit the park, it felt like green, sharp and cutting against the soles of her feet. Her lungs burned like gray, like smoke that she couldn’t breathe out.
She just ran faster.
Claire was just climbing out of her car when Maya rounded the corner and into the parking lot. “Hey,” Claire said, and when Maya ran into her arms, she stepped back only a little bit, Maya’s momentum throwing both of them off.
“Hey, hi . . . hey, hey,” Claire said, and then Maya was crying and she couldn’t say anything, not because she didn’t know what to say, but because there was too much of it. She could have every dictionary in the world and it wouldn’t be enough to begin to explain the darkness of that space, the fear of being alone like Grace, unwanted like Joaquin.
Claire held her for long minutes in the parking lot. “Don’t go” was the first thing Maya managed to whisper when she could speak again.