“You want to break up with me?” Claire said, her voice suddenly low and quiet.
“Well, it sounds like you want to break up with me.” That wasn’t what it sounded like at all, not to Maya. Who was this stranger inside her who kept speaking on her behalf? Whoever she was, she was really fucking things up in a colossal way.
“Is this what you do?” Claire said, and now her voice was dangerous. “Just poke and poke and poke?” She stepped toward Maya, poking her in the shoulder. “Make yourself meaner and meaner until you make me break up with you because you don’t have the guts to break up with me?”
Maya had nothing to say to that. Instead, she just stared at Claire. Maya had learned this trick a long time ago, the art of staying quiet and letting the other person dig themselves into a hole. She had just never thought that she would use it on Claire.
“Are you seriously not even going to say anything?” Claire said. “We’re basically breaking up and you just go silent?”
Maya shrugged. Lauren would do that to her sometimes when they were fighting, her impassivity sending Maya through the roof.
“Oh my God,” Claire said, starting to laugh. “You’re such a fucking baby.” She took a step away, then circled back. “You know what? Never mind. You want to break up, you’re going to say it to me. I’m not saying it to you.”
It was a dare, Maya knew, and she was so mad and so frustrated and so furious at herself that she took the bait.
“I’m breaking up with you,” she said to Claire, then watched as Claire seemed to wither right in front of her eyes.
“Are you serious?” Claire whispered. “Goddamnit, Maya. Why do you have to burn down the house with everyone inside it?”
Maya had no idea what Claire was talking about. She was too busy trying to keep her mouth still, her eyes dry. She could cry once she was home, but there was no way she was going to fall apart in front of Claire.
She wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
“You know what?” Claire said. “Find your own ride home. I’m out.”
“Fine,” Maya said. Her house was only a couple of miles away. She would have somersaulted home on bare gravel before she got back into Claire’s car.
Claire laughed again, short and sharp and bitter, and then spun on her heel. Right before she turned the corner, she threw her empty coffee drink in the trash with such force that Maya half expected it to bounce right back out, but it stayed put.
Claire was the one who kept going.
Maya had been right. She had a hell of a sunburn.
Her shoulders were bright pink, and her nose was an interesting shade of rose. “Hey, Rudolph,” Lauren said later that afternoon, when she found Maya examining her face in the bathroom mirror.
“Shut up. Do we have any aloe?”
Lauren came into the bathroom and reached past her into the medicine cabinet. “Here,” she said. “I think there’s some Noxzema in Mom and Dad’s—I mean, Mom’s bathroom, too.”
“Noxzema is disgusting,” Maya said, ignoring Lauren’s slip-up.
“Why are you so sunburned?” Lauren asked, sitting down on the closed toilet.
“Flew too close to the sun,” Maya muttered, trying to spread the goo on her nose without it dripping on the rest of her face.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just went outside and forgot sunscreen. Did you get Dad’s text?”
Lauren nodded, resting her elbows on her knees.
“Question,” Maya said. “Why are you hanging out in the bathroom with me?”
“Because there’s nothing on TV.”
Maya glanced at her in the mirror. “Where’s Mom?”
Lauren shrugged again.
“Laur,” Maya said.
“She’s asleep,” Lauren said quietly.
Maya sighed to herself. Asleep at five thirty in the afternoon. More like passed out. Fantastic. She had been “asleep” the day before when Maya came home from school. There had been more empties than usual that week, and both Maya and Lauren had started recycling them without even saying anything to each other. Their mom must have noticed.
Right?
“What do you want for dinner?” Maya asked Lauren instead.
“Pizza.”
“Pizza’s boring.”
“You asked me what I wanted. And the Greek place doesn’t deliver.”
Maya sighed. She had already had one disastrous fight with someone that day. She wasn’t up for another.
“C’mon,” she said to Lauren. “Let’s just walk to the Greek place. Mom can sleep it off. We’ll bring her back something.”
“You’re not going to invite Claire, are you?”
Maya froze. “Why?” she asked, her voice sounding strangled to her own ears.
Lauren didn’t seem to notice, though. “Because then you’re just going to be all lovey-dovey and canoodly with each other and I’ll have to sit there and watch—like a big weirdo.”
The fracture in Maya’s heart split a bit wider. “No canoodling,” she said. “Claire’s hanging out with her family tonight.” None of that, Maya thought, was actually a lie.
Lauren went to find her shoes while Maya tiptoed into their parents’—their mom’s—bedroom. The room seemed even bigger now that their dad wasn’t there, the bed emptier. Her mom was curled up on the far side of the mattress, her breaths deep and even, and Maya watched her for a minute before reaching down and pulling the blanket up over her shoulders.
Then she went over to the dresser and opened the top drawer, finding the wad of twenty-dollar bills that she knew would be there. She took out two, then counted the rest. Assuming her mom planned on sleeping through the rest of the week’s dinners, she and Lauren could eat out at least four more times. Five if Maya gave in to the pizza idea.
At the Greek restaurant, she and Lauren sat side by side at the counter facing the windows, eating pita and tzatziki and kabobs. (Steak for Maya, chicken for Lauren. Neither of them would even consider the lamb. It just seemed too mean to eat a baby lamb.) Maya wondered if it would ever be like this with Grace and Joaquin, the ability to just sit quietly side by side, content in the knowledge that no matter what happened with your parents, or your girlfriend, that your siblings will still be there, like a bookend that keeps you upright when you feel like toppling over.
When they got home, the house was still dark, and Maya turned on lights as she made her way into the kitchen, then stashed her mom’s takeout chicken souvlaki in the refrigerator. “Mom?” she yelled. The car was still in the driveway, at least. Her mom wasn’t that stupid.
“Mom!” she yelled again. “Wake up! We brought you food!” Secretly, she hoped the idea of Greek food would make her hungover mom nauseous. Then she wondered when she had become such a mean person. “Mom!”
There was silence from upstairs, and then she heard Lauren scream, “Mom!”
Maya was running up the stairs before she even realized she had left the kitchen.