five years ago, so he didn’t count. It was the first time that alliteration had made Maya feel like barfing.)
They had smoked in silence for a while, which was one of Maya’s favorite things.
Afterward, they had lain down in the damp grass, Maya’s head pillowed on Claire’s stomach. “I think the stars are moving,” she told Claire. Her own voice sounded syrupy to her, like she could pour it out.
“We’re moving, not the stars,” Claire pointed out. Her hand was soft against Maya’s hair. “That’s how the world works.”
“Do you think Joaquin even wants to meet me and Grace?”
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “He’s the only one who can answer that.”
“I wouldn’t want to meet me,” Maya said. “I’d hate me if I were him.”
“Good thing you’re not him, then,” Claire said, then bent down to kiss Maya, making yellow sparks shine behind her eyes.
Maya’s parents always wanted to talk about her adoption, especially when she had been younger. 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.” She had been to therapists, group sessions with other adopted kids, guided one-on-one discussions with her parents when Lauren was at friends’ houses. “Do you think about your birth mother?” they asked her, and Maya said, “Yes?” because she thought that was the correct answer. But the truth was far deeper. The truth was every single color in a rainbow spectrum, and Maya didn’t have the words to say what she felt.
So she didn’t say anything. It was just easier that way.
Grace picked Maya up just before noon on Saturday. The plan had been to meet at eleven thirty, but Maya had overslept, and when she eventually came downstairs, she felt like a cranky tornado, a swirl of grays. (She was pretty sure there was a Fifty Shades joke in there, but she was too tired to make it.) “Starbucks,” she said to Grace, her Ray-Bans already over her eyes even though they were still inside.
“Okay,” Grace said. Maya was pretty sure she agreed only because she was too scared of Maya’s uncaffeinated state to argue.
“So do you have a boyfriend?” Maya asked once they were in the car, a giant Frappuccino clutched in her hand.
“Nope,” Grace said in a sort of clipped way. There was something there pressing against the surface of her words, but Maya couldn’t tell what it was.
“Girlfriend, then?” she asked. “Did you inherit the same gene as your little sister?”
Grace smiled this time. “Nope. That’s all you.”
“Well, have you, though?”
“What?”
“Had a boyfriend. Or girlfriend.”
“Yes. And no.”
Maya wondered if Grace was lying. Grace seemed like the kind of girl who would wait her whole life so she could lose her virginity on her wedding night, who would read Cosmo articles about how to give him the best blow job of his life! but never actually say the word blow job. Which was fine—Maya wasn’t about to start telling someone what they should do with their body or whatever—but being next to someone that perfect made Maya just want to be messier, dirtier, louder.
For God’s sakes, Maya thought, her posture was perfect even while she was driving.
“But you don’t want to talk about this boyfriend?” Maya asked.
“Who said I don’t want to talk about him?”
“Well, you’re answering me like it’s a deposition.”
‘Well, you’re quizzing me like a lawyer.”
“Touchy, touchy,” she muttered, pushing her sunglasses up her nose. “Bad breakup?”
“You could say that.” Grace laughed again. “You could definitely say that.”
Maya nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I had a bad breakup, too, before I met Claire. There was this girl, Julia? Ugh, she was the worst. I don’t know what I saw in her.”
“Hmm,” Grace said, which is what Maya’s mom usually said to her dad whenever he was talking about something that didn’t interest her.
“I mean, I know what I saw in her,” Maya continued, rolling down her window. “It’s just that I saw the wrong things, you know?”
Grace glanced at her. “She was hot?”
“She was hot,” Maya confirmed. “Hey, speaking of. Can you put the AC on? You drive like my mom.”
“Pretty sure that’s not a compliment,” Grace said.
“You would be right.”
Grace sighed and reached over to turn on the air. “Any other requests?”
“Can we change the radio station?” Maya started pressing buttons on the dashboard. “I don’t know if