by Robin Benway
After a few minutes, the door swung open and a boy walked in. Grace had never seen him before, but it wasn’t like she had been super present during her last few months at school.
Either way, it was pretty obvious that the guy wasn’t expecting to see her on the floor.
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know that anyone was . . .” he said, then glanced back at the door. “Wait, is this the girls’ bathroom or . . . ?”
Grace shook her head, still crying. She hadn’t even realized she was crying, but her cheeks were wet and her hair stuck to them when she moved her head.
“Are you . . . ?” The boy backed up, then took a step forward, a slow-motion cha-cha. “Shit, I’m sorry, I’m so bad when people cry. Are you . . . okay?”
“I’m fine,” Grace said, and apparently it was Opposite Day in her head, because fine was definitely not the word to describe her at that moment.
He continued standing by the door. “I’m not calling you a liar or anything, but you don’t look fine.”
Grace started crying again.
“What’d you do to your hand?”
“I punched Adam Dupane in the head three times,” she told him. There was no way to make it sound nicer than that, so Grace didn’t bother trying. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t find out, anyway. There was probably already video online. Grace was going to get expelled, she realized, and was surprised by how nice that sounded to her.
“Wow.” The guy’s eyes widened. “Well, I don’t know who Adam Dupane is, but you seem like a nice person, so he probably had it coming.”
“He’s a dick,” Grace said.
“A total dick,” the guy agreed. She couldn’t tell if he was humoring her or teasing her, but Grace didn’t care.
“Um, you probably need to put something on that,” he said, motioning to her swollen hand, then set his backpack down and pulled some paper towels off the machine and ran them under the cold water. “Here.” He passed them to Grace. “It’s not exactly an ice pack but it’ll help.”
Grace just stared at him. “Who are you?” she finally asked. Her nose was starting to run and she felt disgusting and snotty—and embarrassed for feeling disgusting and snotty.
“Oh, sorry. I’m Raphael. Raphael Martinez. But you can call me Rafe, you don’t have to be, like, formal or anything. I’m very nonthreatening, don’t worry. Well, I mean, since you’re the one who just punched someone, maybe you’re not worried. Maybe I should be worried. Trust me. I’m a total wimp.” He wetted another paper towel as he talked, then passed it to her. “I mean, I faint at the sight of blood, I really do. Not exaggerating. Hey, can I ask you a question?”
This Rafe person was making her head start to spin. “Yeah?”
“What is that terrible smell in here?”
“Formaldehyde.” Grace wasn’t sure when she had stopped forming complete sentences. “Dead cats. Next door.”
“Anatomy class?” he guessed.
She nodded.
“Got it.”
Grace winced as her hand throbbed under the cold towels. Everything hurt now—her head, her arm, the base of her spine—and she tried to keep from tearing up, with no luck.
And Rafe, Hero of the Day, flipped the lock on the bathroom door and came to sit down next to her. Grace could tell that he was being very careful not to touch any part of her, and for some reason, that just made her sad. “So,” he said conversationally, like they were talking about the weather, “Adam’s a dick.”
“Max just sat next to him the whole time and didn’t even say anything,” Grace said, and she wasn’t crying again, not exactly. Her face was just wet and there was a lump of something terrible stuck in her throat.
“I know,” Rafe said with a sigh. “What an asshole.”
“You don’t even know who I’m talking about!” Grace cried. “Why are you agreeing with me?”
“Well, you’re sad,” Rafe said, sounding a bit confused. “Do you want me to argue with you? Because I will if it’ll make you stop crying. Here, okay.” He cleared his throat. “You are so wrong. Adam’s the best.”
“No,” Grace sniffled. “I just . . . I just want to be quiet, okay?”
“Got it,” he said. “Whatever you want.” But Grace couldn’t stop hearing that baby noise, the very first sound that Peach had ever made, a battle cry that had somehow triumphed over everything else, including her heart, and when Grace started crying again, Rafe carefully leaned his body toward hers so that their shoulders were touching.
He was very, very quiet.
Grace lost track of how long she sat on the floor and cried, but after a while, there was a knock at the door and someone saying, “Gracie?”
“That’s my mom,” Grace explained, wiping at her eyes.
“Are you in trouble?” Rafe asked. “I’ll hide you in a stall if you want.”
Grace suddenly wanted her mom so bad that it hurt. “No, you can let her in,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“Oh, honey,” her mom said when she saw her. “Let’s go home.”
And that was the last day of Grace’s junior year.
MAYA
After meeting Joaquin, Maya had a hard time sleeping.
Our foster mom found out that she was gay so she kicked her out.
Bio always trumps foster.
And yes, Maya knew that she was adopted, not fostered, that she had been adopted out of the hospital, that her parents had chosen her, wanted her. That’s what they always said, that she was chosen because she was special.
And yet, she wasn’t Lauren.
Three a.m. would come and Maya would lie awake in bed and watch lights from the cars outside pass across her ceiling, lighting her room before it fell dark again. She would look at websites on her phone. (She had done the “Which Hogwarts House Do You Belong To?” quiz at least three times, and got Hufflepuff each time, which infuriated her.)
Then she would scroll through old messages from Claire, emojis and xoxo’s and notes that were so private that Maya would throw her phone into a toilet before she let anyone read them. She would look at the very end of the messages and hope that the little bubbles would pop up that meant Claire was texting her, that she would somehow know that Maya was alone in the world and that the middle of the night felt lonelier than any other time of day.
But of course Claire was sleeping, and it was stupid to be upset about it. Claire needed to sleep. Maya needed to sleep. She could feel the sleeplessness starting to unravel her brain like a kitten with a blanket, pulling at important threads until it wasn’t even functional anymore. She had fallen asleep in history class two times that week, which, to be fair, probably had more to do with her history teacher’s nasal, droning voice than with her exhaustion.
That was what she told herself, anyway.
At lunch, she put her head in Claire’s lap and let her stroke Maya’s hair as they sat in the grass in the sunshine. Maya thought that if everyone had to die eventually, this wouldn’t be the worst way to go, with the sun on your face and your head in the lap of someone you loved.
“Hmm?” Claire asked.
“I didn’t say anything,” Maya said, her eyes closed. The sun made the space behind her eyelids as red as blood, made her think of lineage and dynasties, of rightful places in families.
She opened her eyes and rolled over so she could bury her face in Claire’s thigh instead.
“No, you didn’t say anything,” Claire agreed. “But you’re thinking.”
“I’m always thinking,” Maya told her. “I’m very smart that way. That’s why you love me.”
“Hmm, jury’s still out,” Claire said, but then she put her hand up the back of Maya’s shirt, pressing her palm against Maya’s skin, anchoring her down to earth. “Come back, come back, wherever you are,” she whispered.
Wherever Maya belonged, she was here now.
That was enough.
Maya found the wine bottle a few days later.
She had texted with Grace a few times, mostly re
sponding to Grace’s somewhat awkward sentences. “Hi! How’s school?”
“Sucks donkey balls,” Maya had written back, then regretted it when Grace didn’t respond for a few days.
She didn’t text with Joaquin, but not because she didn’t want to. Maya just didn’t know what to say. It was hard to find words when you were adopted and your brother wasn’t, and it was pretty clear that you had been chosen because of things beyond your control. It was stupid to feel guilty, Maya told herself sometimes when the clock crept past three a.m. toward four a.m., and the lights from the cars hadn’t slowed down. But then she would picture Joaquin as a baby, waiting for someone, a family, a person, and that terrible feeling would push its way past her heart and into her throat, choking her.
In her worst place, in the darkest part of her brain, Maya didn’t want the same thing to happen to her, and just like Joaquin, she didn’t know how to keep it from happening.
Maya’s European History class was restaging the French Revolution (which Maya felt was extremely appropriate, given the number of people in that class who she would have gladly beheaded), and because she couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag, she had been assigned to costumes. Easy-peasy, she had thought, and then gone upstairs to rummage through her mom’s closet.
The wine bottle (or bottles, actually, but one of them hadn’t been opened yet, so Maya decided that it didn’t count) was wedged in the back of the closet, nestled into a pair of old boots that Maya thought would look spectacular on whoever played Marie Antoinette. They were heavy when she pulled them out, though, way heavier than any boots should have been, and by the time she’d wrestled them out of the closet and into the bedroom, the bottle of merlot had fallen out.
Maya looked at it for a long minute before reaching into the other boot and pulling out a half-full bottle of red zinfandel. It was cheap—Maya could tell by the label—which for some reason upset her even more. If her mom was going to hide wine in the closet, she could have had at least bought the good stuff, rather than this convenience-store shit.
“Hey,” someone said, and Maya whirled around so fast that she almost dropped the bottle. Lauren stood in the doorway, tugging on her lower lip. Maya hated when she did that. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Maya said, which was easily the dumbest thing she could have said, considering that she was standing in her parents’ bedroom, going through her mom’s closet without permission, and holding a bottle of half-drunk wine. “It’s nothing,” she amended. Somewhat better.
“Why are you holding wine?” Lauren asked. “Are you drinking?”
They were only thirteen months apart, but Lauren was younger. Maya knew that in her bones, the way she knew that Grace and Joaquin were older than she. It didn’t matter if they were related by blood or not: Maya was responsible for her little sister. She had to protect her.
“Get out,” she said to her. “Get out, Lauren, I’m serious.”
“But why are you—”
“Get out,” Maya said, gesturing with the wine bottle (bad idea) toward the door. “This isn’t about you, for once in your life.”
Maya would remember the look on Lauren’s face for a long, long time after that. Three a.m. would get a whole lot lonelier the next time she saw it against the backs of her eyelids.
“Is that . . . is that Mom’s?” Lauren asked.
Maya tightened her grip on the bottle and said nothing.
“Did you find it in her closet?” Lauren pressed on—and then dropped a bomb. “Because I found a bottle in the garage.”
Maya felt so stupid, standing there listening to her, holding the evidence while trying to hide it at the same time. Lauren finished, “It was in an old shopping bag. I think she drank most of it yesterday.”
The two sisters stood across from each other for a long few seconds before Lauren finally walked into the room. “There’s another bottle downstairs in that old Crock-Pot,” she said.
Maya sank down onto the bed because she wasn’t sure if her knees were going to support her. “How long have you known that she . . . ?”
“A month, I guess? Maybe longer? I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Lauren shrugged. “Because I knew you were meeting Grace and Joaquin, and—I don’t know—I didn’t want to burden you. You’ve got a lot going on.”
Lauren sat next to her, their shoulders slumped together. “You should have told me,” Maya said after a minute.
“Why?” Lauren asked, and Maya didn’t have an answer to that.
“Do you think Dad knows?” Maya asked.
“No,” Lauren replied. “Dad travels. He’s not looking in Mom’s boots during his free time.”
“Do you think she’s driving?” she asked. “You know, after?” She shook the bottle in her hand. Maya wasn’t used to asking Lauren questions like this. Usually she was the sister who knew everything, the one who was in charge, who made up the rules for the games and decided who won or lost.
“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “I don’t think so. She picked me up from school yesterday and she seemed okay.”
Mom could drink at lunch, though, Maya thought. Two glasses of wine with a salad and some bread from the bowl. That would be pretty easy to hide.
She was still holding the bottle of zinfandel and she carefully set it down on the floor, like it could suddenly shatter and stain the carpet with all of their secrets.
“Should we put it back?”
“Give it to me,” Lauren said instead, and Maya handed it over. When Lauren went downstairs and didn’t come back, Maya followed her and found her standing in the kitchen, one hand holding the cork and the other hand dumping the bottle down the drain.
“What are you—” Maya started to say.
“What’s she going to do?” Lauren said. “Get angry at us for dumping out her contraband? She’s not going to do that. She can’t. Because then she’d have to admit what she’s been doing.”
Maya watched her for a long minute, then went upstairs and brought back the second bottle. Lauren opened it and they dumped it out, watching it swirl down the sink before turning on the faucet and rinsing it all away.
When their parents finally made their big announcement, it really wasn’t that much of a surprise. Maya later thought that it was more like ripping off a huge bandage—inevitable, but you still knew it would hurt like hell.
She had been doing physics homework when the knock came at her door. It had been quiet that night, way too quiet, and Maya had done the same problem four times and still hadn’t gotten the right answer. She wondered how fucked up it was that she worked better when her parents were fighting. If she was ever going to make it through high school, she’d probably need a nuclear explosion every night.
Great.
When she said, “Come in,” her parents were both standing there, looking apprehensive and nervous. Like children, in a way. Maya had never seen that kind of look on their faces before. Lauren was behind them, and Maya didn’t need to look in a mirror (or at a birth certificate, for that matter) to know that her own expression was similar to her sister’s.
“Your dad and I want to talk to you,” their mother said, and Lauren pushed past her parents and went to sit on Maya’s bed. Maya, who had actually been doing homework at her desk for once, got out of her chair and went to sit down next to her sister. She suddenly found herself wishing that her other sister was there, too, and her brother. And Claire. She wished for an army of people to stand behind her, swords at the ready.
Of course, no one actually came.
“We’d like to talk downstairs?” Their mom’s voice sounded a bit strangled, and Maya felt like someone was pushing down on her throat now, too, that three-a.m. feeling creeping back in. “It’s okay,” her mom said quickly. “We just need to have a family meeting.”
They hadn’t had a family meeting since Maya was eight and Lauren was seven and accused Maya of killing her goldfish. (Maya would still swear on a
stack of Bibles that she hadn’t touched that creepy, scaly thing. Lauren was paranoid and a terrible fish parent, that was all.)
“I’ve got this homework,” Maya started to say. She suddenly prayed for inertia. An object in motion stays in motion until acted upon by an outside force, the words said in her physics textbook. She wanted things to keep going the way they had. For all the terrible fights, it was still familiar. Maya wasn’t ready for that to change, and she wasn’t ready for what would potentially take its place.
“Maya,” her mother said. “Please.”
She didn’t need to say anything else.
Downstairs, Maya and Lauren sat next to each other on the couch while their parents explained things.
You know we haven’t been getting along.
It’s going to be so much better this way.
You get to spend time on the weekends with Dad now, just you and him.
You girls will be so much happier.
Lauren cried, of course. She had always been the emotional one (see: family meeting about a dead goldfish), the one who had to be taken out of the movie theater during sad scenes because she would sob too loud and disturb everyone else.
Maya, though, just sat there quietly while her parents explained that Dad was moving out, that they loved both of their girls so, so much, that it had nothing to do with them at all, that it wasn’t her or Lauren’s fault.
“Of course it isn’t,” Maya muttered, because that was the stupidest thing she’d heard in a while. “We’re not the ones who have been fighting for the past ten years.” And hiding wine in the closet, she almost added, but thought better of it. Lauren was still crying and Maya didn’t want to hurt her sister any more.
Her mother blinked while her father cleared his throat. “That . . . is true,” her dad finally said. “That’s very true.”
“You girls will stay here with me, in the house,” their mother said. “But you can visit your dad whenever you want.”
“What if we want to live with Dad?” Maya asked. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to, but she felt the overwhelming need to put herself in between them, to see which one of them would tug her closer. To know if either of them would fight to keep her after trying so hard fifteen years ago to get her.
