tamales if they’d had an instructional YouTube video and a sous chef at their side.
And then Joaquin realized that Kristy didn’t realize that he was a foster kid. She thought he had a big Mexican family that made tamales on Christmas Eve.
He didn’t bother to correct her. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth.
The next day, he found himself on his computer, researching the best tamale places, and on Christmas Eve, he went down to stand in line with a bunch of other people, Kristy’s twenty-dollar bill stuffed safely in his hoodie pocket. The guy at the counter spoke to him in Spanish and Joaquin had to say, “No espa?ol,” which he had gotten used to saying whenever someone greeted him that way. “You’re too much and not enough,” one of his old foster siblings, Eva, had told him once. “White people are only gonna see you as Mexican, but you don’t even speak Spanish.” It was clear from her tone of voice that this was a huge black mark in her book.
Joaquin hadn’t been able to disagree.
Joaquin eventually carried his tamales home, then stowed them in the very back of the freezer, where he knew Mark and Linda would never see them. When he took them to school the Monday after their holiday break, Kristy had been so delighted—and Joaquin hated her, hated her for putting him in that position.
And that’s when Birdie spoke to him.
“You make tamales?” she said as soon as Kristy disappeared off to the teachers’ lounge. (Joaquin had been in the teachers’ lounge exactly once. It had been hugely disappointing.)
“No,” Joaquin said. He hadn’t even realized that Birdie had been behind him. She had been as quiet as a hawk on a branch, watching, and he suddenly felt like a very small mouse. “I just bought them for her.”
“Well, aren’t you nice?” Birdie said, then smiled at him. “Happy New Year, Joaquin.”
They were together for the next 263 days.
It was the happiest Joaquin had ever been.
Birdie liked people, liked when they did embarrassing things like talk too much when they were nervous, or act shy because they didn’t know how to hide it. She laughed a lot, but never in a mean way, and sometimes if she didn’t sleep enough, she got really snippy and cranky, which only made Joaquin like her more.
He hadn’t realized how much he had missed liking something, anything. He had numbed himself, according to Ana, the therapist who Mark and Linda sent him to, so that he wouldn’t feel any future pain. But it wasn’t until Birdie came along that Joaquin realized he had stopped feeling happiness, too, that the small curls of warmth that wound up his spine when she smiled at him burned and felt good at the same time. Like holding ice in his hand and having it melt against his skin. Joaquin wasn’t used to that.
He fell in love with Birdie a step at a time, going from one stone to the next until he made it safely into the shore of her arms, and he had thought that maybe now he could understand what people meant when they said that home was a person and not a place. Birdie was four walls and a roof and Joaquin would never have to leave.
But Birdie wanted things, things that Joaquin couldn’t get for her. She was going to move to New York and work in finance, she said. She was going to get her MBA from Wharton. She wanted to learn Italian and live in Rome for at least one year. She said all these things to him like she knew they would happen, and that he would be right there with her when they did. But when Joaquin looked forward, he could barely see anything at all.
One night, he had gone to dinner at her parents’ house. They were always really nice to him, and Joaquin called them Mr. and Mrs. Brown even though they kept asking him to call them Judy and David. After dinner, Mrs. Brown brought out some photo albums, and even though Birdie kept saying, “Oh my God, Mom,” it was obvious that she was pleased.
Joaquin looked at every baby photo, every first day of school, every Christmas morning, every Halloween. Birdie with her top two teeth missing, Birdie dressed like a cheerleader one year, a scientist the next. Birdie, whose smile never looked fake, who never wondered if anyone would show up at her academic decathlon, who never woke