Maya looked at Joaquin, who seemed like he’d rather be stuck in a broken-down car on the freeway than between the two of them. “Please back me up on this,” she said.
Joaquin just looked at Grace while pointing at Maya. “What she said.”
“Thank you,” Maya sighed, sitting back in her seat and reaching for her drink.
“No,” Grace said, and now she seemed annoyed. “You tell me why you don’t want to, Joaquin. Don’t just say ‘what Maya said.’ That’s not fair. She’s your mom, too.”
“No, she’s not,” Joaquin murmured. “She stopped being my mom a long time ago.”
Maya raised an eyebrow at Grace as if to say, See?
“If you want to go for it, Grace, do it,” Joaquin told her. “I’m not holding you back. I don’t really care. I just don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to know about her. I know when I’m not wanted, you know?”
“Grace, why don’t you tell us something about your week instead?” Maya suggested. “My parents are divorcing, Joaquin’s parents want to adopt him, so you better have a good story. And don’t say, ‘I want to find my bio mom,’ or I’ll pinch you harder this time.”
Grace’s face changed from annoyed to thoughtful before she finally said, “I punched a guy at school and now I have to be homeschooled until the end of the school year.”
If Grace had said that she had been arrested for running an elephant-breeding program in her backyard, Maya would have been less surprised.
“You what?” Maya said before she could stop herself. “No, you didn’t. I don’t believe you. Joaquin doesn’t believe you, either.”
“I believe her,” Joaquin said gently, then pointed to Grace’s right hand. Her thumb was bruised, Maya suddenly noticed, and one of her fingers had a scabbed-over cut. “You didn’t tuck your thumb. Nice.”
Grace just shrugged. “It all happened pretty fast.”
“You seriously punched a guy?” Maya wished she had known this fact before pinching her just a minute ago. “What’s thumb tucking? Is Grace some secret boxer now?”
Grace laughed in a way that didn’t sound funny, then ran a hand over her eyes. “Definitely not a secret.”
“When you punch someone, you have to put your thumb over your first two knuckles. Here, like this.” Joaquin held up his hand to show Maya. “You can hit better and make more of an impact without hurting yourself.”
“There’s not going to be a next time,” Grace insisted, but next to her, Maya nodded, pleased by this new piece of information.
Maya was impressed that Joaquin knew all that. She wondered if this was what it would have been like to grow up with him, a big brother protecting her, teaching her how to protect herself, someone else to carry the burden, unearth the empty wine bottles from under the bed and inside the refrigerator. Maya had found another one in the bucket of cleaning supplies under the bathroom sink. She hadn’t told Lauren.
“Why’d you do it?” Maya asked instead. “Did he touch you?” If that was the case, Maya wasn’t sure that she could stop herself from finding the guy and punching him again on behalf of Grace. (She’d remember the thumb trick, too.)
“He just . . .” Grace looked as uncomfortable as Joaquin had earlier, squirming and biting her bottom lip. “He just said some pretty terrible things about my family, that’s all. I couldn’t let him get away with that.”
“Family’s important,” Joaquin said.
Maya nodded. She wondered how important it could be, though, when hers just seemed to keep fracturing into pieces.
That night, she climbed into bed, the blissful silence ringing out throughout the house. Lauren had already gone to sleep. She and Maya had watched TV that night while their mom was upstairs on the phone. Maya could hear her voice but not her words, which made it hard to tell if she was slurring or not. Lauren had slumped next to her on the couch and didn’t argue when Maya changed the channel from a wedding show to a cheesy movie, some romantic comedy that they had both seen at least fifty times before.
She had tried to text Claire, too, but she hadn’t responded, and Maya felt that dark vine climbing up around her phone now, almost like it was keeping Claire’s response away. She knew that there were a million good reasons why Claire wasn’t writing back—she had homework, she was grounded, her phone was dead, she was at the movies with her grandmother, anything—but Maya kept checking it anyway, feeling angrier each time her text that read my dad moved out today went unanswered.
By the time her head finally hit the pillow, Maya was exhausted. How nice, she thought, to be able to fall asleep without the muffled sounds of fighting, but after an hour of tossing and turning, she realized that the silence in their house was too loud, too still. Now that it was quiet, Maya could hear almost everything, including every tiny noise that sounded like someone was breaking into their house. It was ridiculous, of course. They pretty much lived in the safest (some people—like Maya, for instance—might say most boring) neighborhood in America. No one would actually break into their house. But Maya hadn’t ever really worried about the potential threat before. Her dad had always been there to protect her. Even when he had been gone on business trips, she’d known he would come back eventually.
Now?
She never thought silence could sound so scary.
She eventually fell into a restless sleep, woken only by the buzz of a text message on her phone. It was Claire. I’m so sorry! it said. I was camping with my family. We just got back to civilization. Are you ok?
Maya had forgotten about the camping trip, and she felt dumb for being upset about Claire’s absence. She held her thumb over the keyboard for a long time. It felt like there weren’t enough letters in the alphabet for everything she had to say, for all the words that wanted to tumble out of her.
Where were you?
I needed you.
I need you.
I’m scared of how much I need you.
Instead she wrote back, I’m fine. Going to bed now. Chat tomorrow. Then she found a song on her phone that she hadn’t listened to in years, one that she had heard even before she had met Claire. She fell asleep to it, the words filling the silence in her room, the sudden cavity that seemed to be steadily growing, burrowing its way into her heart.
JOAQUIN
So how were Maya and Grace?” Mark asked from the front seat. Linda didn’t like driving on freeways, not if she could help it. She said they made her feel jittery. Joaquin thought that when Linda drove on the freeway, everyone in the car felt jittery.
“They’re fine,” Joaquin said, then added, “Maya’s parents are getting a divorce,” because he knew that fine wasn’t going to suffice, not with Mark and Linda. They expected more from him.
“Well, that doesn’t sound fine,” Linda said, turning around in her seat. Joaquin didn’t know how she could do that. He always got nauseous whenever he faced backward in a car.
“I mean, not fine fine,” Joaquin explained. “I just meant that they weren’t missing any limbs or anything.”
“Your standards for fine are pretty low.” Mark laughed as he changed lanes.