“I mean, I’m not saying no,” he quickly added. “But I just wanted to . . . yeah. I just wanted to know.” Now Joaquin was the one clearing his throat.
“Joaquin,” Linda said, and her voice was as soft as it was whenever he had a nightmare, like it could be a protective barrier between him and any bad thing that would possibly happen. “No matter what you decide, no matter what happens going forward, there will always be a place for you in our home.”
Joaquin nodded and ignored the tightness in his throat.
“Have you talked to your therapist about it?” Mark asked.
Joaquin nodded.
He had not. He knew that Ana would be 100 percent in favor of the adoption, and he didn’t want her to sway him. Joaquin had realized early on that he needed to figure out things in his head before he brought them up to Ana. Otherwise, she just muddled up his thoughts until he wasn’t sure how he felt anymore.
“I told her I needed to think about it on my own for a while,” Joaquin said instead, which he considered a half-truth and therefore not really a lie. “But I just wanted to know what would happen if I said no, that’s all.”
Mark was quiet for a few seconds before asking, “Are you afraid of what will happen if you say yes?”
One of the things about adapting, Joaquin had learned, was that you could get so comfortable in a family that their tells would become your tells, too, and then they would know the things that could scare you before you even knew about them.
“I mean, it’s a change either way, right?” Joaquin said, then started to stand up. “Can I be excused?”
“Joaquin,” Linda said, and he froze halfway up. “We’re not scared of adopting you, if that’s what you’re worried about. Mark and I love you. We know you. We trust you. Implicitly.”
Joaquin wondered if Linda was thinking about the Buchanans, the hospital reports, the X-ray of Joaquin’s broken arm.
“I’m not scared,” he said, then cleared his throat. Goddamnit.
“It’s okay if you are,” Mark started to say, just as Linda said, “We really do want you.”
“I know,” Joaquin said to both of them. “I know that.”
He did know that. That’s what was freaking him out so bad.
Joaquin saw Birdie the next day at school.
Truth be told, the potential to see her at school every day was there. (Joaquin had carefully floated the idea of maybe going to a different high school after he had broken up with her, but Mark and Linda had shot that idea down flat.) Instead, he had changed his routine, going down different hallways, taking the long way to English class instead of the shortcut through the quad, where he used to hold Birdie’s hand before kissing her good-bye. “Gutierrez,” the vice principal would say sometimes if he saw them kissing, glaring warningly at Joaquin.
“Why don’t you ever say my last name?” Birdie had shot back once.
The vice principal left them alone after that.
Joaquin thought he had gotten pretty good at avoiding her, but that morning during their snack break, he went past the back side of the gym, trying to get to calculus early so that he wouldn’t see Birdie while she was walking to her AP Civics class. (He almost wished he had a tracking device on her so that he could know where she was at any given time. He would have wished it, if he hadn’t realized immediately how creepy that sounded.)
But that morning, apparently, Birdie was early to class or late leaving wherever she had been before, because Joaquin rounded the gym just as she did. They didn’t bump into each other—that would have been too perfect, too cute—but they both stopped when they saw each other.
“Hi,” Birdie said.
“Hey,” Joaquin replied, jamming his hands into his hoodie pockets and looking down at his shoes. Looking at Birdie was too hard, too much. She still looked like she wanted to murder him, which made him nervous. He couldn’t blame her, though. Sometimes he wanted to murder himself for doing something so terrible to her.
Birdie didn’t move, and Joaquin started to go around. “Wait, Joaq, no,” she said, putting her hand on his arm. Her hands were always cold; he could feel it even through his hoodie sleeve.
Joaquin froze when she touched him, but Birdie didn’t let go. The very first time she had kissed him, he had panicked at how soft she was, how hot her mouth felt, and he didn’t understand how someone with such cold hands could have such a warm heart. “I have to . . .” he started to say, but he didn’t have anything he had to do.
“Wait,” she said again. “Just . . . I miss you so much, Joaq. I really . . .” Her voice started to drift away, and when Joaquin dared to look up, he saw that she was crying.
In almost ten months of dating, Joaquin had never seen Birdie cry, not even once.
“I miss you, too,” he said.
“Can you just tell me why, please?” she said, her face struggling to smooth itself back into control. “Please—we never lied to each other. I don’t want this to end because of a lie now.”
Joaquin looked down again. He hated this feeling, the feeling that all the words that he wanted to say would just tangle themselves into a giant ball, wound so tight that nothing could manage to escape. The words would just sit on his chest, pressing down on his lungs, pulling the air out of him.
“I didn’t lie” was all he finally said. He wanted to touch her so bad, pull her into his arms, make her stop crying. He knew what it was like to cry by yourself, after all. He didn’t want that for Birdie.
“Then why? I keep going over and over it again in my head, and I can’t understand why!” Now she was getting mad. Joaquin had seen Birdie mad many times. It rarely ended well for the person she was mad at.
“Because I think you did lie to me!” she yelled. “I think you lied and said that you wanted to break up, but I think you just got scared, that you ran away because it was easier than being left again!”
Joaquin kept looking down at his shoes, letting her words bounce off his chest. Nothing could get to him, not even Birdie, who always seemed to be able to untangle the words that he struggled to find.
“Is that what it is?” she asked, stepping toward him. “I’m right, aren’t I? You bailed because you got scared.”
“It’s not—” he started to say, taking a step back from her.
“I don’t care if you’re scared!” she cried, and now she really was crying again. Joaquin hoped none of Birdie’s friends would find out about this. They would murder him in the hallway after school, no questions asked.
“You can be scared!” Birdie was still shouting. “Don’t you get it? That’s what happens when you love someone: they’re brave when you can’t be! I can be brave—for you, for both of us!”
“You can’t,” Joaquin said, laughing a little. It wasn’t funny, though. None of this was funny at all.
“Yes, I can!” Birdie closed the space between them, pulling his hands out of his pocket and holding them in hers. She was freezing. “You can trust me. Don’t you know that?”
Joaquin nodded. He tried to make himself let go of her hands. She clung on, though, and he took another step away.