“I heard that!” she said, her voice muffled against his shirt.
Joaquin put on his seat belt, checked his mirrors (the side ones, too), and carefully backed the car out of the driveway. He had driven Mark and Linda’s cars before, but this was entirely, incredibly different.
After several minutes, Joaquin pulled the car over to the side of the road.
His hands were shaking too hard to hold on to the wheel.
GRACE
It had been Grace’s idea to meet at Maya’s house two weeks later.
She didn’t have to say much to talk Maya and Joaquin into it. After the Adam incident, she was pretty sure that none of them would be going back to the mall anytime soon.
“They gave you a car?” Maya said, breaking through Grace’s thoughts. “Are you serious, Joaquin? And you’re just telling us now?”
Joaquin looked both confused and embarrassed by the whole situation as he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought they were sending me away at first. I thought the car was the social worker’s.”
Grace felt her heart sink into her shoes. She hoped Peach never felt like that, never looked as lost as Joaquin sometimes did. She hoped Peach would never be surprised by the kindness of other people.
She hoped, she hoped, she hoped.
“Do you think Mark and Linda would adopt me?” Maya asked. She was sitting with her feet in the pool again. Grace was glad that Maya never suggested she go swimming. She was still trying to figure out her post-baby body, and a bathing suit wasn’t at the top of her list. It wasn’t even on her list. She had tried Googling, but everything online was for grown women, actual moms. There wasn’t anything about what to do with pregnancy stretch marks when you were sixteen, nothing about trying to make your body feel like yours again when someone else had taken up residence in it for nine months and you still hadn’t even finished high school.
“Probably,” Joaquin said. He had his feet in the water, too, but he was at the opposite end of the pool, sitting in the shade. “They’ve got an extra bedroom.”
“Score.” Maya adjusted her sunglasses a little bit.
“But I told them that I didn’t want to go through with the adoption.”
Grace saw Maya’s head spin in Joaquin’s direction almost as fast as her own. “What?” Grace said. “Why? Did they—”
“No, I just thought it’d be a bad idea. You know, because of last time and all.” Joaquin shrugged a little. “Things are good now, like they are. I don’t want to ruin it.”
“Joaquin,” Grace started to say.
“Can everyone please stop saying my name like I don’t know it?” he interrupted her. “Please? Can we talk about something else?”
“Good idea,” Maya said, pulling her legs out of the water and getting to her feet. “Let’s talk about snacks. More specifically, cheese and crackers. Most specifically, cheese and crackers in my mouth.”
Joaquin got up and followed her inside, Grace a step behind them. The heat was on but Grace felt a little chilled. When she had been pregnant, she had felt like everything was twenty degrees hotter than it was, but now she just always felt cold.
She had spent the past week mostly on her computer, going back and forth between researching Melissa Taylor and researching teenage birth mom support groups. Michael, the therapist, had given Grace a list of suggestions, but when she looked them up, they looked too forced, too false, a bunch of strangers smiling at a camera. Grace couldn’t imagine sitting with them, talking about Peach.
The Melissa Taylor research was even more dismal. Even with her parents’ help, there wasn’t much. All the info that the adoption center had was either classified or no longer valid, and Grace was starting to feel the same way she had when Peach had gone home with her parents, like she was losing something that she would never be able to get back again.
“Grace?”
Her head jerked up. “What?”
Maya gestured toward her, holding a sleeve of Ritz crackers. “You want some, Spacey Lady?”
“Of course,” she said, sitting down on the stool at the kitchen island. Joaquin was digging around in the refrigerator, looking for something, and Grace took the crackers from Maya and started to arrange them on a plate.
“New necklace?” Maya asked her, digging out the cutting board from a kitchen cabinet. “Where’d you get it?”
Grace’s hand immediately flew to her neck. She had bought the chain long enough so that she could hide it down the front of her shirt, but it had apparently escaped.
She had found the delicate charms online, a tiny gold M and a tiny gold peach, and used the money from her old clothing boutique job to pay for them. Grace had wondered if they were stupid, sentimental things to buy, but when she put the necklace around her neck and looked in the mirror, it felt right.
“Oh, it’s just this old necklace from my grandma,” she said, slipping it down her shirt again. “My mom found a bunch of her old jewelry.”
“What’s the M stand for?”
Grace just shook her head. “No idea. I guess my grandma had her secrets, too.”
The peach thunked against her heart before settling onto her skin.
Her phone buzzed just then, and Grace glanced over at it.
Hey, are you around next week? I found some straws that need to be disemboweled.
It was Rafe, of course, and Grace tried to swallow back the butterflies she felt when she saw it. “Who’s that?” Joaquin asked.
“Yeah, Grace, who is that?” Maya asked. “You look a little . . .”
“You’re blushing,” Joaquin said.
“I am not,” Grace told them. “He’s just a friend.”
Maya’s eyes lit up. “Oh, he is not just a friend,” she said. “No one ever says he’s just a friend when he’s just a friend. Joaquin, back me up here.”
Joaquin put three wedges of cheese down on the countertop. “She’s right.”
“Is she?” Grace asked him. “Is she, really?”
“I have no idea. I’m just scared to disagree with her.”
“She’s your little sister,” Grace said. “You have seniority over her.”
Maya just preened a little as Grace’s phone buzzed again. “Ooh, is it him? Is it him? What’s his name?”
“None of your business.”
“Well, that’s unorthodox,” Maya said, “but hey, I don’t judge. Let me see!”
“No!” Grace cried. “Oh my God, go away. I thought you wanted cheese and crackers.”
“I can eat cheese and crackers and help you talk to a boy! I’m really good at multitasking!”
“Get away!” Grace said, using an unopened sleeve of crackers to defend herself. “Oh my God, you’re the worst!”
“Get her phone, Joaquin!” Maya screamed, chasing a giggling Grace around the island.
“No way,” Joaquin said, calmly slicing up pieces of cheese. “I touched my old foster sister’s phone once. Big mistake.”
“Listen to him!” Grace said. “Maya!”
“Victory!” Maya said as Grace felt the phone slip out of her grasp.
“If you text him, I’ll kill you.”
“Oh, you will not.”
“I’ll maim you.”