“Oh, yeah? You think I don’t see how people look at us when we’re out?” Joaquin felt his chest tighten just thinking about it. “These two white people who rescued the poor brown kid?”
“You know we don’t care what people think,” Mark said, his voice low.
“Yeah, of course you don’t, because they look at you like you’re a hero! They look at me like, like I’m . . .” Joaquin forced the words out. “Like I’m trash.”
“Do not say that,” Linda fumed. Joaquin saw that her hands were clenched into fists. “You are not trash, Joaquin. Don’t ever say that.”
“Yeah, easy for you to say,” he scoffed. “You think you can just adopt me and all of that will go away? What, you can teach me about what it’s like to be Mexican? You can teach me to speak Spanish? You can tell me where I’m from?”
“No,” Mark said, and he sounded somewhere between sad and furious. “We can’t do any of that. But we can help you find people who can! We’re not here to take anything away from you!”
They were saying all the right things, but it all felt wrong. Joaquin felt himself stepping toward the abyss with no boundaries to keep him from falling.
So he decided to leap.
“You think I can make up for the fact that you can’t have babies?” he said.
Linda and Mark stood there, stricken, and Joaquin felt himself smash against the ground, shattering wide open. Mark took a step toward him, and then Joaquin was moving, his feet faster than his brain.
He ran out of the house, Mark and Linda yelling after him, and was in the car and halfway down the street before he realized that he hadn’t grabbed his phone. “Fuck,” he muttered to himself, then saw Mark and Linda’s faces again, and he raised his fist and smashed it down on the dashboard.
Mark and Linda would never let him back in their house now. Joaquin wouldn’t have wanted to let him back in, either, not after what he had said.
The dragon had won, and Joaquin was just a pile of broken bones and ash on the scorched ground, out of time and out of lives.
Game over.
GRACE
Grace had never kept such a big a secret from her parents for this long. Even when she’d discovered she was pregnant, she had told them within twenty-four hours. But she knew that if she told her parents about her upcoming trip, how she planned to just go up to the front door of a stranger’s house and knock on it and possibly meet her birth mother?
Grace had a pretty active imagination, but even she couldn’t imagine all the ways her parents would say no to that.
So she told Rafe instead.
“Wait, so let me get this straight,” Rafe said. They were sitting in what Grace had come to think of as “their” booth at the back of the restaurant near the kitchen supply store. “You’re just going to go up to some stranger’s door and knock on it and say, ‘Hi, Mom’?”
“Well, not exactly like that,” Grace said. “You’re making it sound like we’re going to egg her house or something.”
“Grace.” Rafe set down his fork and looked at her. “Look, no offense, but I don’t think this is your best idea.”
“It’s not my idea, it’s our idea,” Grace said. “Me and Joaquin and Maya, we’re all going together.”
Rafe didn’t look convinced. “So what are you going to do if she’s not home?”
“Leave a note?”
“Leave a note?” Rafe repeated. “‘Hi, your three bio kids swung by to say hey, sorry we missed you.’”
Grace rolled her eyes at him. This was not how this conversation was supposed to go. “You know, if I wanted someone to illustrate for me all the ways that this could go wrong, I’d just tell my parents.”
“You didn’t even tell your parents?” Rafe lowered his head to the table and started banging his forehead against the edge. “Grace, Grace, Grace. This has disaster written all over it.”
“You know, you could be at least a little supportive!” Grace said. “This is really scary, okay? You’re supposed to be my friend.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes your friend has to tell you the truth,” Rafe said. “You should tell your parents, at least.”
“They won’t understand.”
“Grace, you had a baby and they seemed to come through that experience just fine. I don’t think you’re giving them enough credit.”
“If I tell them, they’ll just give a million reasons why it’s a bad idea.”