“So,” Maya said, Joaquin and Grace sitting across from her at the coffee place. “My parents are getting divorced.”
She had practiced saying that sentence in the shower that morning. At first it had been hard to get the words out, but then she just turned off the hot water, and the cold water shocked the words out of her. By the time she had gotten through the sentence, her teeth were chattering and her lips were blue.
“Whoa,” Joaquin said, but he didn’t seem too amazed. Maya thought that, objectively, her half brother was a pretty handsome guy, but his eyes watched everything in the room, constantly flitting from person to place to thing. It reminded her in a way of those cats who followed the laser point on the ground, trying forever to trap it between their paws, but she didn’t tell Joaquin that. She wasn’t sure he would see the humor in it.
“Wow, really?” Grace said, and okay, she looked pretty taken aback. She hadn’t stopped chewing on her iced-coffee straw, and now it was stained with her pink lip gloss, the top starting to fray into pieces. “When did they tell you?”
“Last week,” Maya admitted. “My dad just moved out this morning.” She shrugged, then reached for a piece of the cookie that they were ostensibly supposed to share, but Maya had eaten most of it already.
“Yeah, he got a place that’s about ten minutes away, or that’s what he said. I guess he was pretty eager to leave.” She had practiced saying those words out loud, too, but no amount of icy water had been able to pull them from her. Even now, they hurt coming up.
“Is your mom freaking out?” Joaquin asked, just as Grace said, “Does that affect the adoption at all?”
“What?” Maya screeched. “Why would that affect the adoption? For fuck’s sake, I’m fifteen years old! The deal is done!”
“I just meant—” Grace was wide-eyed with guilt, not innocence. “Like, that doesn’t invalidate it, right? Your parents can get divorced and it doesn’t mean anything in the long run.”
Maya rolled her eyes skyward. “Joaquin, help me out here,” she said, pointing to Grace. “Tell her that it doesn’t affect the adoption.”
Joaquin glanced from one sister to the other. “It doesn’t affect the adoption,” he said. “At least, I don’t think so. But I’m not exactly the best person to ask.”
Both Maya and Grace looked away. It was too easy to forget sometimes that Joaquin hadn’t always lived with Mark and Linda, his foster parents. They were the ones who had dropped Joaquin off at the coffee place that afternoon. They had said that they needed to do some shopping nearby, but Maya was 99 percent sure that they just wanted to scope her and Grace out for themselves.
Still, they had been really nice. Mark was tall, way taller than Maya had ever even imagined her dad being when she was little. He had shaken both girls’ hands and smiled like you would expect someone’s proud dad to smile. Linda had seemed warm and kind, squeezing Joaquin’s arm a little just before they left the three of them alone. “Stay as long as you like,” she had said, and Joaquin had nodded. They seemed like parents. Joaquin seemed like their kid.
Now, though, he was methodically shredding his napkin into evenly square pieces. Maya wondered if she was the only sibling to escape these disgusting habits. Dodged that bullet, she thought, as Grace stuck her straw back in her mouth and continued to chew it to oblivion.
“I’m sorry,” Grace said to her, and in her defense, she really did look contrite. “I just wanted to make sure that you were okay, that’s all.”
“I’m fine,” Maya said, and watched as Joaquin looked up and raised an eyebrow. “I am,” she said. “They fought like crazy. It’ll be nice to have a night when people aren’t screaming at each other so loud they shake the walls. I might actually sleep again.”
Grace nodded but didn’t look convinced, and Maya threw a glance at Joaquin, desperate to have the subject changed. “So how are you?” she asked. “What’s new?”
“Mark and Linda want to adopt me,” Joaquin said.
Maya choked on her cookie.
“What?” Grace said, yanking the straw back out of her mouth. “Are you serious? Joaquin, that’s amazing!”
Joaquin just shrugged, though. “Yeah. They’re cool. They’re nice.”
“They’re really nice,” Maya said, leaning forward a little. She had the urge to wrap a blanket around Joaquin for some reason. He always looked cold, hunched in on himself. She wondered what he had been like before Mark and Linda, then quickly realized that she didn’t want to know.
“Seriously, Joaq, they’re crazy nice,” Maya said again.
“You like them, right?” Grace added. “Like, they’re good to you and all of that?” She looked like the fate of the entire world hung on his answer.
“No, yeah, they’re great,” Joaquin said. “It’s just . . . yeah. It’s a lot. Still trying to process it.”
“Seventeen years is a long time to wait for a family,” Maya said, trying to sound encouraging, the way Claire always did when Maya felt down or ragged, and Joaquin’s mouth curled up into a smile that didn’t make him look either happy or sad.
“It is,” he agreed, then laughed. “It’s a fucking long time.”
“So do you have to do all the paperwork?” Grace asked. “Can we come to the ceremony?”
“Grace, pump the brakes,” Maya told her.
“Sorry.”
“I don’t know that I’m going to say yes,” Joaquin admitted. “They asked me a month ago, but it’s my decision.”
Grace and Maya exchanged a glance between them. “Why . . . wouldn’t you?” Maya dared to ask. “You just said that they’re great.”
Joaquin shifted in his seat, opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “Not sure,” he said. “Just a lot of things to figure out.”
Maya wondered whether, if she shook Joaquin, all the thoughts he’d been holding in would fall out of him like candy out of a pi?ata. It was a tempting image.
Grace was the first to speak. “Why wouldn’t you want them to adopt you?” she asked. “It’s not . . . You can say anything. I’m not judging, I’m just curious.”
Joaquin looked like he wanted a car to drive through the shop window and interrupt the entire conversation. “It’s just hard to explain,” he said. “It’s a lot. There’s a lot.”
Maya could see Grace starting to open her mouth again, so she gave her a tiny pinch, the same way she used to pinch Lauren when they were kids.
“Ow!” Grace yelped.
“My hand slipped,” Maya said.
“It did not. You pinched me!”
Maya shrugged. “You’re verbally assaulting Joaquin. Leave him alone already.”
“Oh,” Grace said. “Sorry.” She was still biting her lip, though, and Maya knew that she was about to say something else—something equally delightful.
“I still think we should meet our bio mom,” Grace said.
There it is, Maya thought wearily.
“Fuck. No,” she told her. “Absolutely not. Stop bringing it up—it’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not ridiculous,” Grace shot back. “It’s totally reasonable.”