chance to finally get what they wanted, if he was just a means to an end.
The library had a sign for a Mommy & Daddy & Me Storytime! on one of its windows as he sailed by.
Joaquin had long gotten over not having parents. He wasn’t as dumb as he had been when he was little, when he’d tried to be charming and funny like those kids he saw on sitcoms, the ones with the stupid laugh tracks and the parents who just sighed when their children did something idiotic like drive a car through their kitchen wall. He changed foster homes so many times when he was five years old that he went to three different kindergartens, which meant he managed to dodge that brutal Star of the Week bullet, where kids talked about their homes and families and pets, all the things that Joaquin was already painfully aware that he lacked.
Once, in tenth grade, Joaquin had had to write an essay in his English class about where he would go if he could travel back in time. He wrote that he’d go back to see the dinosaurs, which was probably the biggest lie he’d ever told in his life. If Joaquin could go back in time, of course, he’d go find his twelve-year-old self and shake him until his teeth rattled and hiss, “You are fucking everything up.” That’s when he had been really bad, when he would give in to the fury that bubbled up under his skin. He would writhe and scream and howl until the monster retreated, satiated for the time being, leaving Joaquin wrung out and exhausted, beyond comfort, beyond punishment. No one wanted a kid like that, Joaquin knew now, and they especially didn’t want one who wet the bed nearly every night.
By the time Joaquin turned eight, he knew the game. His straight baby teeth had given way to buck teeth and gaps, his chubby cheeks had thinned into his approaching adolescence. He wasn’t baby-cute anymore, and it was a hard-and-fast rule that prospective parents wanted babies.
He understood that there probably wouldn’t be anyone at his parent-teacher conferences at school, listening as the teacher told them what a good artist he was. There was no one to take a picture of him standing under the blue ribbon that someone had pinned to his drawing at the school’s art fair in fourth grade, or to drive him to that one birthday party across town in fifth. Some of his foster parents had tried, of course, but it wasn’t like there was a ton of money or time to go around, and Joaquin had long ago figured out that if he didn’t expect people to be there, then he wouldn’t be disappointed when they didn’t show up.
He still had that blue ribbon, though. He kept it buried at the back of his sock drawer, its edges frayed from the eighteen months that Joaquin had slept with it under his pillow.
He hadn’t had that many strokes of good luck in his life, but Joaquin knew he had gotten lucky by not having any siblings. He had seen what that had done to other kids, how hard they fought to stay together and how destroyed they were when they were inevitably pulled apart. He had seen the older brothers try desperately to be adopted by families who only wanted younger sisters; he had seen older sisters wrenched away from younger brothers because there wasn’t enough room for three kids in a foster home, and social services sometimes separated siblings by gender. It was hard enough for Joaquin to keep himself together, keep his heart and mind above water in a tide that wanted only to drown him. He could never have kept someone else afloat, too. He was glad he didn’t have to, that he was untethered, even if he sometimes suspected that without that tether, he could just float away and no one would even know he was gone, that no one would ever look for him again.
Mark and Linda would probably look for him, Joaquin realized as the arts center came into view, as the sun broke through the clouds. But they would not adopt him, he had decided.
Joaquin had been adopted once before.
And he was never going to let it happen again.
GRACE
After Grace’s parents had found out that she was pregnant, they had met with Max’s parents. “It’s a discussion,” her dad had said. “We just want to discuss our options.” But at