“Want to talk about it?” Mark asked. In the beginning, Joaquin couldn’t even handle Mark being in the room with him after a nightmare. He guessed that this was what Ana would call progress.
“Just . . . I can’t remember,” Joaquin said, rubbing his hand over his face. He needed a clean, dry shirt. He needed a brand-new brain. “It just woke me up.”
That wasn’t true, of course. He had seen his sisters in the dream, Maya and Grace standing on the edge of the ocean, calling for him as the waves crashed harder onto the sand. He tried to get to them, but his feet were stuck in the ground, and he could only watch as they were washed out to sea.
“You were yelling for Grace and Maya,” Linda said gently. “Did you dream about them?”
Joaquin shrugged. “Dunno.”
He didn’t have to look up to know that Mark and Linda were exchanging a look over his head. If he had a dollar for every time they did that, he could move out and get his own place. And a car.
Two more people shoved away.
“Think you can get back to sleep?” Mark asked after a minute of silence. His hand was still steady on Joaquin’s back. Joaquin liked both of them, but he liked Mark’s ability to be quiet, to not always need an answer right away. Mark sometimes realized that Joaquin could say a lot more without using words.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Joaquin said, sipping at the water again. “Sorry I woke you up.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Linda said. “Mark was still awake. Reading something stupid on the internet, I’m sure.”
Joaquin smiled, more because Linda expected him to smile than because he actually wanted to.
GRACE
Adam’s mom decided not to press charges against Grace, which was nice of her. The school had a zero-tolerance violence policy, but it also had a zero-tolerance bullying policy, and since Adam had started all the drama, the school decided that he was technically responsible. (Also, Adam’s mom was a single mom and she was pretty upset with him for taunting Grace with the sound of a baby crying. There may have been some shouting coming from the principal’s office soon after she arrived at the school. Grace may or may not have heard it as her mother signed her out in the office.)
Of course, the school wasn’t thrilled with Grace, either, but she heard her mom say something about “hormones” and “baby” on the phone to them while she stood just outside Grace’s room, and apparently those were words that terrified school administrators. Grace was also fairly certain that she was the first pregnant girl in the history of the school, and she also knew that schools didn’t exactly get great ratings for having a high teen pregnancy rate.
In the end, they compromised. Grace would do home schooling for the rest of the year and then go back for her senior year in the fall. It sounded less like a compromise and more like a present, honestly. Grace would have been fine if she’d never had to walk down those hallways again. She almost hoped that her parents would send her off to one of those East Coast boarding schools that were always in movies. She could start over, surrender her old self, every single wrong decision she had made, and become someone else.
But she knew she couldn’t outrun her past. Or Peach. She would never be able to outrun Peach.
Her mom called Grace downstairs around eleven that Saturday morning. Grace was fairly certain that her mom had hit the limit of her patience for Grace’s stay-under-the-covers-and-binge-watch-bad-TV habit. The day before, her mom had made Grace change the sheets and clean out from under her bed, and “open a window—it smells like a hobbit hole in here.” (Grace’s mom wrote a thesis on Tolkien in college, so she referred to a lot of things as “hobbit holes.” Grace’s dad and Grace had learned to roll with it.)
“Here,” she said when Grace came downstairs. “I need you to return this for me.” She handed her a bag from Whisked Away, a cooking-supply store.
Grace let go of the banister, catching herself before she fell down the last step, and peeked in the bag. “What is it?”
“Something that needs returning.”
Grace poked around at the tissue paper, ignoring her. “What are these?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
Grace ignored her some more. It was a tiny ceramic fried egg nestled in an equally tiny ceramic skillet. “Are these . . . ? These are salt and pepper shakers!” Grace held up the egg. “I can’t tell if these are terrible or amazing.”
“They’re an insomnia purchase,” her mom said. Her insomnia caused her to buy a lot of things online around three in the morning, things that were often returned as soon as they arrived, once she’d seen them in the cold, harsh light of day. (Grace suspected that insomnia was also how her mom had made it through all the Tolkien books.)
“They’re terrible,” Grace finally decided. “Dad will hate them.”
“Dad does hate them!” her dad yelled from the kitchen.
Her mom raised an eyebrow at Grace as if to say, Do you see what I’m dealing with here? “Just please return them,” she snapped, handing Grace a twenty-dollar bill. “You can get yourself a giant fancy coffee or frozen yogurt or something.”
Luckily for Grace’s mom, Grace was easily bribed. She took the salt and pepper shakers. And the money. And the car keys.
Once Grace pulled in at the shopping center, though, she realized that she had made a huge mistake, one much bigger than salt and pepper shakers. It was a Saturday, also known as a nonschool day. The parking lot wasn’t too crowded, and she didn’t recognize any of the cars from her school’s parking lot, but that didn’t make her suddenly nervous stomach feel any better. After all, the last time Grace had seen any of her classmates, she had been punching one of them in the face. She wasn’t exactly looking to repeat the experience.
If Grace’s mother had done this on purpose just to “get her out of the house,” Grace was going to kill her.
Grace put on sunglasses as she skulked across the parking lot, then took the back way to the store rather than go past all the pretty fountains with the splash pads for the little kids. Grace didn’t think she could handle seeing them, hearing them shout about the water, without thinking of what Peach might look like at that age. Just seeing a baby on TV made her change the channel. It was like her heart was being stabbed with the most immense kind of love, and regardless of its source, the pain was still too much to handle.
Whisked Away was pretty much empty when Grace finally made her way there (she guessed browsing for kitchen appliances wasn’t everyone’s ideal thing on a Saturday morning). She got in line behind a woman who was paying with a check. A check.
Grace wondered if the woman’s cart and oxen were double-parked outside.