“You need to stop talking.”
“I’m just saying—”
“In. The. Trunk.”
Maya held up her hands. “Okay, okay. I’ll just sit here. Quietly. Not talking. At all. Maybe I’ll even learn something from NPR. Oh, wait—”
“Five minutes!” Grace cried. “That’s all I ask!”
“But—”
“Maya, I swear to God—”
Maya pointed out the window. “That’s our exit.”
“What? Oh, shit!” Grace immediately pulled the car across four lanes of traffic, swerving past two cars and exactly zero cops. Maya just grabbed onto the handle over the passenger door, hanging on as they zoomed onto the off-ramp, but when she saw herself in the side mirror, she had a wild grin on her face.
“That’s more like it!” she cried. “Those were some straight-up Fast and Furious moves!”
Grace looked at her.
“Shutting up now,” she said, then pretended to lock her lips and throw away the key.
The beach was crowded for a Saturday, and their pace slowed to a crawl as they got closer to the arts center. “Ugh, traffic,” Maya said, but Grace shot her a look and she immediately went quiet again. No one had ever really locked her in the trunk before, and she didn’t quite know Grace’s limits well enough to push them yet. Silence was definitely golden.
It was almost one p.m. by the time they parked, and Maya groaned as they crawled out of the car. “It wasn’t even an hour and a half,” Grace said, squinting into the sun. Maya had no idea why she didn’t just get some sunglasses.
“Whatever, I’m young, I’m still growing. I hope.” Maya was sort of sensitive about being short. (Well, shorter.) She looked around. “Yep. Lots of art.”
“So the fact that it’s called an arts center isn’t just a clever disguise.”
“Hey, sarcasm is my job,” Maya said, tossing her bag over her shoulder as Grace slammed her door shut and checked to make sure that the car was locked.
“What sarcasm? I’m just—” Grace started to say.
Maya lowered her sunglasses long enough to look at her.
Grace sighed. “I’m just stressed.”
“I kind of figured that out when you threatened to lock me in the trunk,” Maya scoffed.
“It’s . . .” Grace took a deep breath and shook out her arms. “You’re seriously not even a little nervous to meet him?”
Maya shrugged, tossing her empty Starbucks cup into a recycling bin. She wasn’t sure what she felt, but it was bright orange, like a warning, like a question. “Not really. The way I see it, if he’s a big weirdo or a psycho killer or something, then we can just be like, ‘Oops, sorry, the lab screwed up the DNA results, later gator,’ and then we just block his calls and emails. Oh, look, they made a whale out of gum wrappers! That’s pretty cool.”
Grace followed Maya’s gaze to see that yes, someone had in fact made a whale out of gum wrappers. “So you’re ready to just bounce on our biological brother. Were you going to do the same thing with me?”
“Well, yeah, but only if you were a weirdo who drove alternately like a grandma and a Fast and Furious extra and listened to NPR.” Grace’s face stayed the same and Maya wondered if Grace’s interest in her sense of humor had been a one-time thing. “Just kidding!” she finally said. “C’mon, let the family bonding begin!”
They paid the admission fee (“Do you have a friends and family discount?” Maya asked the woman at the box office), then made their way into the center. It was hot and crowded, and it took a few minutes to find the information booth. “Hi,” Maya said, sidling up to the window and pushing her sunglasses up on her head. “Do you happen to know Joaquin?”
“Oh, yeah,” the guy said. “He’s over at the pottery tent.”
“Pottery. Ooh, so real,” Maya said, then looked at Grace. “He must take after me.”
Grace moved so that she could block Maya out of the information window entirely. “And where’s the pottery tent?”
He pointed over Grace’s head toward the center of the festival. “Just follow the line of kids,” he said. “You can’t miss it.”
“Thanks,” Maya said. “You’ve been a pal.”
“Hey, wait! Are you his sisters?”
Maya shoved her way back into the window. “Maybe,” she said. “What have you heard?”
The man smiled. “Just that he said that he had two sisters coming to see him today.”
Maya stuck her hand through the window. “Hi! I’m Maya. This is Grace.”
“Hi,” Grace said, but only after Maya nudged her in the side.
“Gus,” the man said. “Lucky ladies, having Joaquin for a brother. Yeah, he’s working in the pottery booth.”
“Would you say he has artistic ability?” Maya asked Gus. “On a scale of normal to Manson family, how would you rate his—”
“Thank you so much,” Grace said, shoving Maya out of the window again. “We’ll go find him now.” She took Maya’s arm and led her away a few feet before she shook her off. “You know, you might not want to share your concern that Joaquin’s a psychopath with people we just met.”
“Whatever, Gus seems cool. We could hang.” Maya readjusted her sunglasses, then glanced around. “And you never know, maybe the whole point of meeting Joaquin is so we can become friends with Gus. You’ve got to look at the big picture, Grace. Now where’s the pot throwing?”
They eventually found the tent, and Gus hadn’t been wrong: there was a huge line of kids wrapped around it, all of them looking in to where there were two volunteers, each with a kid, carefully turning clay on a pottery wheel. One of the volunteers was older looking, like she could have been a grandma, and the other volunteer had dark hair that he had pulled back from his face in a short ponytail. Even though he was sitting down, Maya could tell he was tall.
When he looked up at Maya and Grace, both of them gasped a little.
It was Joaquin.
“He looks like you,” they both said at the same time, and Maya supposed that neither of them was wrong.
The three of them stood looking at one another for a long minute, children and parents carrying clay pots weaving between them. Joaquin was definitely not white like his sisters, that much was obvious, but he had Maya’s brown eyes and curly dark hair and Grace’s tight, set jaw, and Maya felt something in her rib cage catch and pull tight, like a muscle that had never been used before. Her feeling was green, like grass, like a seed coming up through dirt, sprouting and growing toward the sun.
Maya smiled at him and he smiled back. They had the same crooked teeth in front, one front tooth slightly overlapping the other. Well, Joaquin still had his, but Maya’s parents had put her through two years of braces in order to correct it. She regretted that now. She wanted to look like the people who shared her blood. She wanted people to stop them on the street and say, “You must be related.” She wanted to belong to them, wanted them to belong to her the way that no one else in the world could.
Grace was sniffling next to her. “Seriously?” Maya whispered to her just as Joaquin made the international gesture for Give me one minute and I’ll be over. “Do we really need the waterworks right now?”