Far from the Tree: List 2: Maya (2) – Maya (3)

Sweet, innocent, naive Grace. Maya was definitely going to have to toughen her up.

(They also had two younger siblings, Cassandra and Christian. Their parents were Cara and Craig, but Craig had taken off five years ago, so he didn’t count. It was the first time that alliteration had made Maya feel like barfing.)

Maya suspected that they were doing a lot of preventative work to make sure that they hadn’t monumentally screwed her up.

Maya suspected that they were doing a lot of preventative work to make sure that they hadn’t monumentally screwed her up.

That if one day she suddenly went berserk and slaughtered a roomful of people, they could hold up their hands and say, “We tried, really we did.”

The truth was every single color in a rainbow spectrum, and Maya didn’t have the words to say what she felt.

“Well, you’re answering me like it’s a deposition.”

“Touchy, touchy,” she muttered, pushing her sunglasses up her nose.

“I kind of figured that out when you threatened to lock me in the trunk,” Maya scoffed.

“Hi,” Maya said, sidling up to the window and pushing her sunglasses up on her head.

By lassoing himself to these girls, he might pull them down from the sky and out of their perfect elliptical orbit, throwing everything off-balance.

Sometimes he felt like someone’s parent at a school recital whenever Mark and Linda did that, like he should be giving them a thumbs-up and whispering loudly, “Good effort!” the way he had seen other parents do for their kids.

These photos were her map, and Joaquin knew then that he was rudderless, that he would only lead her astray.

Grace’s posture was making him feel like a slouch.

There was a steeliness in Grace’s smile, like it had been forged in a fire.

His therapist called it a coping skill, but Joaquin just thought it was polite.

Joaquin nodded, suddenly aware that he had maybe picked the wrong anecdote to tell Maya.

It wasn’t until after they were finished eating (and all three mayonnaise sides decimated) that the question came.

Their curiosity always got the best of them, making him feel like a science experiment, a cautionary tale.

People always thought they wanted the sordid details, Joaquin thought, until they actually had them.

“Bio trumps foster,” Joaquin told her. In a world where the rules kept changing from house to house, there was one hard-and-fast one.

His foster mother at the time had tried to placate him with candy from the vending machine, but he had just cried under the table until she dragged him out and they went home.

Then she blinked and her face smoothed out into a steely veneer.

Grace could barely say their names without wincing.

Grace had meant it literally, but it was pretty clear from her mom’s face that she took it metaphorically, and Grace could see her eyes fill with tears behind the sunglasses, even as she leaned in to kiss her good-bye.

Her best friend, Janie, used to even make fun of her for all of her mnemonic devices.

She stopped short, her reverie broken.

She looked up. Mrs. Mendoza was smiling down at her, the way priests do when they’re visiting sick people at the hospital. Benevolent, but also silently wishing for hand sanitizer.

She acted normal through English and second period (AP Chem), but third period was where it all fell apart. If, by fell apart, you meant crumbled into oblivion.

As if this period was suddenly the new episode of a soap opera, and the long-thought-dead evil twin had just sauntered back into town.

Mr. Hill was still up at the whiteboard, apparently writing out an entire soliloquy, so Grace turned to look at Max.

She stumbled toward the bathroom at the end of the quad, the one that no one ever used because it was near the biology classroom and the smell of formaldehyde sometimes leaked into the vents.

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.

The sun made the space behind her eyelids as red as blood, made her think of lineage and dynasties, of rightful places in families.

Easy-peasy, she had thought, and then gone upstairs to rummage through her mom’s closet.

“It’s nothing,” she amended.

“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.”

When she said, “Come in,” her parents were both standing there, looking apprehensive and nervous.

She felt like a character in a movie running away from an explosion, with the road crumbling into gray ash just steps behind her, struggling to stay ahead of the abyss that pulled at her like hands, sucked her in like a tar pit, like a black hole that only wanted to absorb the light.

“Hey,” Claire said, and when Maya ran into her arms, she stepped back only a little bit, Maya’s momentum throwing both of them off.