He wasn’t quite sure what had happened. One minute, he had been sitting with Maya and Grace, thinking about Mark and Linda, and then that fucking weasel had come up to Grace, had make her shake in her shoes, had called her a slut, and Joaquin felt himself slip into that white-hot space that he had spent years trying to avoid.
He’d be lying if he said it didn’t feel good to feel that kid’s pulse beating fast against his arm, his breath short, his eyes blown wide open. It was a powerful thing to literally hold someone’s fate in your hand, and Joaquin hadn’t had that sort of power in a long time.
The problem with power, though, is that having it doesn’t always make you a good person. Sometimes, it makes you the bad guy.
Joaquin ran until he hit the edge of the park that bordered the mall, one that was usually used only by toddlers and their attentive parents, and it wasn’t until he stopped that he realized his sisters were hot on his trail. “Joaquin!” they were shouting, dashing after him. “Joaquin, wait!”
Joaquin turned, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath. He hadn’t run like that in a long time. He felt as if he could keep running forever. “Just—go away, okay?” he said to his sisters, holding out his hand as if to keep them at bay. “I’m sorry, I ruined our day.”
“You’re shaking,” Grace told him. She was still trembling, too. Maya was the only one who seemed steady, her eyes wild and alive. “You should sit down.”
“I’m fine,” Joaquin spat out. “I just got upset, that’s all. I’m sorry.”
Grace just shook her head at him. “I’m not,” she said. “He deserved it.”
“Joaquin.” Now Maya was stepping toward him. “Let’s go sit down at least, okay? You don’t look good.”
Joaquin didn’t feel that great, either. “Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” Maya said, holding out her hand to him. “Let’s sit. Sitting is great. Everyone likes sitting, even active people. Do you run competitively or something? Because you were hauling ass across the parking lot. I think you outran a Tesla at one point.”
Somewhere in the back of his brain, where it was fuzzy with memories, Joaquin remembered Maya saying that she talked a lot when she was nervous. He had made her nervous, Joaquin realized, and that only made him feel worse.
By the time the three of them sat down on a bench, Joaquin bookended by his two sisters, his breath was starting to come back a little. Grace still looked pretty shaky, though, and Joaquin noticed that she kept her hands clenched tightly in her lap.
“Okay,” Maya said as soon as they were settled. “What the hell was that?”
“He called Grace a slut,” Joaquin said. He could barely get his voice above a murmur. “He shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, I don’t mean that,” Maya said. “I mean the sprint across the parking lot, Joaq. You ran like a scared rabbit.”
That wasn’t exactly the image that Joaquin had of himself, but maybe Maya was right. He had never seen himself run, after all.
When he didn’t say anything, Grace unclenched her hands and reached over to take one of Joaquin’s. “Joaquin,” she said quietly. “What happened?”
He wrapped his fingers around hers, clenched and unclenched her hand until he felt like he could speak again. Grace was fine, he reminded himself. No one had gotten hurt. He hadn’t hurt anyone.
Maya was pressed against his other side, her hand on his shoulder. “You’re okay, Joaq,” she said quietly. “It’s fine. Just take a deep breath.”
He nodded, trying to get his heartbeat back under control, tried to put the tiger back in its cage. “When I was twelve,” he said before he could stop himself, and then he couldn’t start again. He had only told the story once before, to Ana and Mark and Linda, but that had been in Mark and Linda’s living room, where he was surrounded by people who—well, if not loved him, then definitely cared about him—and the room had been soft with sunlight and specks of dust dancing between the rays.
The sun poured through the trees of the park, and Maya and Grace waited for Joaquin to speak again.
“When I was twelve,” he said again, “this family adopted me. The Buchanans.” Just saying their name made his mouth feel funny, and he paused and waited until he could talk again. “They became my foster parents when I was ten, and they decided they wanted to adopt me.”
“Did you want them to adopt you?” Grace asked when he paused. He wouldn’t have thought that her hand could be so strong, but she was holding on to him, not letting go.
“I thought I did,” he said. “They had a couple of other foster kids who they had adopted, and they had an older daughter and a, um, a baby, later.” Joaquin could still see her, bowlegged with dark curls hanging like a halo around her head. It made him sick to even think about her.
“Were they nice to you?” Maya asked.
“They were fine,” he said. “I don’t know if they were nice. They weren’t not nice, though. Sometimes that’s enough. I had my own room, my own bed. We went shopping and they let me pick out sheets. That was a big deal.”
Joaquin’s heart still felt like it was vibrating in his chest, and he took another deep breath, Maya’s hand still warm on his shoulder. “Living with them was fine, the kids were nice, all of that. They had a baby”—Joaquin could hardly bring himself to say her name—“Natalie, and that was cool. I was like . . . I thought that it was the real thing, you know? I thought that this was my family.”
“What happened?” Grace asked, and Joaquin could hear a deeper kind of fear in her voice, different from when Adam had called her a slut.
Joaquin bit the inside of his cheek, waiting until he could say words again. “I just started . . . I don’t know, I just started having these tantrums. They called them meltdowns. I would just black out with this anger. It felt like my skin was exploding, you know? Like I couldn’t even breathe. And the closer we got to the adoption, the worse it got. I was starting fights with everyone except Natalie and I couldn’t even explain why. The Buchanans still went through with the adoption, though.”
Joaquin wondered if they regretted that, if they sat up late at night and reminisced about that time they’d made a terrible decision by bringing Joaquin into their home.
“I knew something was wrong, though,” he said now. “I couldn’t even call them Mom and Dad. Two years later and I only called them by their first names. It felt like . . .”
“Like what?” Grace asked softly.
Joaquin sagged a little, leaning against both girls. They were strong enough to hold him up, he realized. “Like once the adoption went through, then that was it,” he said. “It’d be final. I just thought that if our mom ever came back, if she actually, finally just came fucking back and showed up at the house and saw that I had a new mom, a new dad, that she . . . she’d think I replaced her. It’s stupid, I know, it’s so fucking stupid. I was such an idiot.”
“No, no,” Maya said, leaning into him. “It’s not stupid, it’s not stupid at all. You were a kid, right? That wasn’t your job to figure all that out.”
Joaquin laughed a little. “Well, I haven’t actually told you the bad part yet.”