when hers just seemed to keep fracturing into pieces.
That night, she climbed into bed, the blissful silence ringing out throughout the house. Lauren had already gone to sleep. She and Maya had watched TV that night while their mom was upstairs on the phone. Maya could hear her voice but not her words, which made it hard to tell if she was slurring or not. Lauren had slumped next to her on the couch and didn’t argue when Maya changed the channel from a wedding show to a cheesy movie, some romantic comedy that they had both seen at least fifty times before.
She had tried to text Claire, too, but she hadn’t responded, and Maya felt that dark vine climbing up around her phone now, almost like it was keeping Claire’s response away. She knew that there were a million good reasons why Claire wasn’t writing back—she had homework, she was grounded, her phone was dead, she was at the movies with her grandmother, anything—but Maya kept checking it anyway, feeling angrier each time her text that read my dad moved out today went unanswered.
By the time her head finally hit the pillow, Maya was exhausted. How nice, she thought, to be able to fall asleep without the muffled sounds of fighting, but after an hour of tossing and turning, she realized that the silence in their house was too loud, too still. Now that it was quiet, Maya could hear almost everything, including every tiny noise that sounded like someone was breaking into their house. It was ridiculous, of course. They pretty much lived in the safest (some people—like Maya, for instance—might say most boring) neighborhood in America. No one would actually break into their house. But Maya hadn’t ever really worried about the potential threat before. Her dad had always been there to protect her. Even when he had been gone on business trips, she’d known he would come back eventually.
Now?
She never thought silence could sound so scary.
She eventually fell into a restless sleep, woken only by the buzz of a text message on her phone. It was Claire. I’m so sorry! it said. I was camping with my family. We just got back to civilization. Are you ok?
Maya had forgotten about the camping trip, and she felt dumb for being upset about Claire’s absence. She held her thumb over the keyboard for a long time. It felt like there weren’t enough letters in the alphabet for everything she had to say, for all the words that wanted to tumble out of her.
Where were you?
I needed you.
I need you.
I’m scared of how much I need you.
Instead she wrote back, I’m fine. Going to bed now. Chat tomorrow. Then she found a song on her phone that she hadn’t listened to in years, one that she had heard even before she had met Claire. She fell asleep to it, the words filling the silence in her room, the sudden cavity that seemed to be steadily growing, burrowing its way into her heart.
JOAQUIN
So how were Maya and Grace?” Mark asked from the front seat. Linda didn’t like driving on freeways, not if she could help it. She said they made her feel jittery. Joaquin thought that when Linda drove on the freeway, everyone in the car felt jittery.
“They’re fine,” Joaquin said, then added, “Maya’s parents are getting a divorce,” because he knew that fine wasn’t going to suffice, not with Mark and Linda. They expected more from him.
“Well, that doesn’t sound fine,” Linda said, turning around in her seat. Joaquin didn’t know how she could do that. He always got nauseous whenever he faced backward in a car.
“I mean, not fine fine,” Joaquin explained. “I just meant that they weren’t missing any limbs or anything.”
“Your standards for fine are pretty low.” Mark laughed as he changed lanes.
“And Grace punched a guy,” Joaquin told them.
“You sure you don’t want to rethink that ‘fine’ statement?” Linda asked, just as Mark said, “Grace punched a guy? She looks like the human equivalent of a kitten.”
Joaquin had no idea what that meant, but he decided not to ask. Sometimes Mark’s brain worked in weird, creative ways. “I guess someone at school said something bad about her family, so she clocked them.”
Later that night, though, when he was upstairs in his room, Joaquin regretted what he had said. Not the part about Grace, but the part where he’d told his sisters that he knew how to punch. Maybe Linda and Mark would think he was