violent now. Maybe they would wonder why he was even capable of throwing a punch in the first place.
Joaquin hadn’t actually been in a fistfight before. But he had lived with a family when he was ten—two foster sisters, an older biological one, and Joaquin. The mom was an executive assistant in Long Beach and the dad was an amateur boxer. At first, Joaquin had worried about the potential ramifications of having a fighter in the family, but the dad had been really nice. He would even show Joaquin how to punch the bag that hung in the garage, which was too packed with stuff to park any cars in it.
“Like this,” he said to Joaquin one afternoon, and had tucked his thumb carefully around Joaquin’s small hand so that it was a perfect, solid fist. “Now hit the bag. Hit it hard.”
Joaquin had punched, hard. He suspected that the foster dad just liked having a son to do things with (the girls weren’t interested in punching things in the dusty garage, apparently). The home had been pretty good, too, one of his best, but then one of the social workers had figured out that they had too many kids for the square footage of the house, and because Joaquin had been the last one in, he was the first one to go out.
That’s when he had ended up at the Buchanans’.
Joaquin had learned a lot of things in his seventeen years. One of the things that came from moving from family to family was that he learned how to adapt, how to change his colors like a chameleon so that he could blend in to his surroundings. He always hoped that if he did the correct things, said the correct things, no one would realize that he was a foster kid. Everyone—neighbors, people at school, the person who bagged their groceries—would just think that he was one of the bio kids, as permanent as blood, someone who could never be traded in, swapped out, sent away.
So he had learned boxing from one family. He also knew how to make great chocolate chip cookies and loaves of bread from when he lived with the family whose dad was a pastry chef at a fancy restaurant in Los Angeles. Another mom taught him calligraphy, and then he had an older foster brother who was super into early punk music and used to greet Joaquin at the door holding an album and saying, “Wait until you listen to this.” Joaquin had loved the attention. Not so much the music, though. It jangled his nerves.
He didn’t mind adapting like that. It felt like hopping from stone to stone, picking up tricks of the trade along the way, leveling up on his way to the final battle. He would watch the families to see if they waited to say grace before dinner, if they put their napkins in their laps and kept their elbows off the table. Whatever they did, Joaquin did it, too.
It was when people assumed that he didn’t know things that he got upset. He still remembered one foster mother, an older woman who had smelled like cloyingly sweet powder, like someone had pulverized rose petals and sprinkled them on her clothes. She had crouched down in front of Joaquin upon his arrival at her house, smiled with her yellowing teeth, and said, “Do you know what iced tea is, sweetheart?”
Joaquin knew immediately that she’d asked him that because he looked Mexican. He knew that tone of voice, the slow speech in case he didn’t understand English (like speaking more slowly would somehow be more effective), the assumption behind the question that he had never experienced something as basic as iced fucking tea before. When he had nodded and said, “Yes,” she had seemed almost disappointed, like someone else had planted their flag in Joaquin before she could get the chance.
Since that day, Joaquin had hated iced tea.
That night at dinner, both Mark and Linda kept glancing at each other. Joaquin felt like he was watching a tennis match, glancing back and forth between both of them.
He finally couldn’t take it anymore.
“What?” he said, spearing a piece of broccoli with his fork. (At Mark and Linda’s, Joaquin had adapted to eating vegetables at every meal. Broccoli and spinach were fine; brussels sprouts were death, even when they were cooked in butter.)
“What what?” Mark replied, mostly because that was their routine.
“You keep looking at each other,” he said, gesturing with his fork