Maya would lie awake in bed and watch lights from the cars outside pass across her ceiling, lighting her room before it fell dark again. She would look at websites on her phone. (She had done the “Which Hogwarts House Do You Belong To?” quiz at least three times, and got Hufflepuff each time, which infuriated her.)
Then she would scroll through old messages from Claire, emojis and xoxo’s and notes that were so private that Maya would throw her phone into a toilet before she let anyone read them. She would look at the very end of the messages and hope that the little bubbles would pop up that meant Claire was texting her, that she would somehow know that Maya was alone in the world and that the middle of the night felt lonelier than any other time of day.
But of course Claire was sleeping, and it was stupid to be upset about it. Claire needed to sleep. Maya needed to sleep. She could feel the sleeplessness starting to unravel her brain like a kitten with a blanket, pulling at important threads until it wasn’t even functional anymore. 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.
That was what she told herself, anyway.
At lunch, she put her head in Claire’s lap and let her stroke Maya’s hair as they sat in the grass in the sunshine. Maya thought that if everyone had to die eventually, this wouldn’t be the worst way to go, with the sun on your face and your head in the lap of someone you loved.
“Hmm?” Claire asked.
“I didn’t say anything,” Maya said, her eyes closed. The sun made the space behind her eyelids as red as blood, made her think of lineage and dynasties, of rightful places in families.
She opened her eyes and rolled over so she could bury her face in Claire’s thigh instead.
“No, you didn’t say anything,” Claire agreed. “But you’re thinking.”
“I’m always thinking,” Maya told her. “I’m very smart that way. That’s why you love me.”
“Hmm, jury’s still out,” Claire said, but then she put her hand up the back of Maya’s shirt, pressing her palm against Maya’s skin, anchoring her down to earth. “Come back, come back, wherever you are,” she whispered.
Wherever Maya belonged, she was here now.
That was enough.
Maya found the wine bottle a few days later.
She had texted with Grace a few times, mostly responding to Grace’s somewhat awkward sentences. “Hi! How’s school?”
“Sucks donkey balls,” Maya had written back, then regretted it when Grace didn’t respond for a few days.
She didn’t text with Joaquin, but not because she didn’t want to. Maya just didn’t know what to say. It was hard to find words when you were adopted and your brother wasn’t, and it was pretty clear that you had been chosen because of things beyond your control. It was stupid to feel guilty, Maya told herself sometimes when the clock crept past three a.m. toward four a.m., and the lights from the cars hadn’t slowed down. But then she would picture Joaquin as a baby, waiting for someone, a family, a person, and that terrible feeling would push its way past her heart and into her throat, choking her.
In her worst place, in the darkest part of her brain, Maya didn’t want the same thing to happen to her, and just like Joaquin, she didn’t know how to keep it from happening.
Maya’s European History class was restaging the French Revolution (which Maya felt was extremely appropriate, given the number of people in that class who she would have gladly beheaded), and because she couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag, she had been assigned to costumes. Easy-peasy, she had thought, and then gone upstairs to rummage through her mom’s closet.
The wine bottle (or bottles, actually, but one of them hadn’t been opened yet, so Maya decided that it didn’t count) was wedged in the back of the closet, nestled into a pair of old boots that Maya thought would look spectacular on whoever played Marie Antoinette. They were heavy when she pulled them out, though, way heavier than any boots should have been, and by the time she’d wrestled them out of the closet and into the bedroom, the bottle of merlot had fallen out.
Maya looked at it for a long minute before reaching into the other boot and pulling out a half-full bottle