But Maya’s favorite part was always the ending. “And then,” her mom would say, pulling the covers up over her and smoothing the blankets down, “you came home with us. Where you belong.”
At first, it hadn’t seemed to matter that Maya was adopted and Lauren wasn’t. They were sisters and that was that. But then other kids had explained it to her.
Other kids could be real assholes.
“They probably wouldn’t have gotten you if Lauren had been born first,” Maya’s third-grade best friend, Emily Whitmore, had explained to her one day at lunch. “Lauren’s biological”—she said the word like someone had just taught it to her—“and you’re not. That’s just facts.” Maya could still remember Emily’s face as she explained the “facts” to her, could still remember the sharp, cutting way she’d wanted to put her eight-year-old fist right through Emily’s smug little mug. Emily had been super into honesty that year, which was probably why she didn’t have many friends now that they were sophomores in high school. (Her face was still smug, though. And Maya still wanted to punch it.)
But Emily had been right about one thing: Three months after her parents brought Maya home from the hospital, their mother had discovered that she was pregnant with Lauren. They had tried for almost ten years to have at least one baby, and now they were blessed with two.
Well, blessed wasn’t always the word that Maya would have used.
“Which one of you was adopted?” people would sometimes say to her and Lauren, and both girls would just blink at them. At first, they hadn’t understood the joke, but Maya caught on a lot quicker than Lauren. She had to. She was the only one who stood out, the only one who wasn’t pale with freckles and amber-colored red hair, the only dark brunette stain in every single family photo that lined the stairs.
When their parents were fighting, Maya sometimes imagined torching their entire house. She always thought she’d spray the most gasoline on those family portraits on the stairs.
By the time she was five, Maya got that she was different. When she’d been Star of the Week in kindergarten, all the kids had asked questions about why she was adopted, where her “real mommy” was, if she had been given away because she was bad. Not one of them asked anything about her pet turtle, Scooch, or her favorite blanket, which her great-grandma Nonie had knitted for her. She had cried afterward. She hadn’t been able to explain why.
She loved her parents, though, with a desperation that sometimes scared her.
Sometimes she dreamed about the ones who’d given her away, and she woke up running from faceless brown-haired people, their arms reaching out for her, Maya sweating from the effort it took to escape. Her parents—minus the wine, the fighting, the suffocating adultness of kitchen renovations and mortgage payments—were good people. Very good people. And they loved her deeply and wholly. But Maya always noticed that the books they read about child rearing were about adopted kids, not biological ones. They spent so much time trying to normalize her life that Maya sometimes felt like she was anything but normal.
She cleared a space off her bed for Lauren. “What are you doing?”
“Math homework,” Lauren said. Lauren was terrible at math, at least compared to Maya. They were only a year apart in school, but Maya was three years ahead in math classes. “What are you doing?”
Maya just waved in the general direction of her laptop. “Essay.”
“Oh.”
To be fair, Maya was working on an essay. It was just that she wasn’t working on it right then. She had been working on it for a week and it had been due three days ago. She knew her teacher would give her a pass, though. Teachers loved Maya. She could wrap them around her fingers, and by the time she was done, she had extra-credit points without even having to do the work. And besides, it wasn’t like the world was waiting with bated breath to read yet another essay about the importance of characterization in Spoon River Anthology.
Instead, she was chatting with Claire.
Claire had been a new student at their school last March. Maya could still remember her walking up the front lawn, backpack slung over one shoulder instead of both, like how everyone else on campus wore it.
Maya liked her immediately.
She liked that her nail polish was always, always chipped, but her hair never had a split end. She liked that Claire’s socks never matched, but she had the best shoes. (Maya coveted her Doc Martens and cursed the fact that her feet were two sizes bigger than Claire’s.)
She loved the way Claire’s hand felt in hers, how her skin could sometimes feel like the softest, most electric thing that Maya had ever touched. She loved Claire’s laugh (it was deep and, quite frankly, sounded like a goose being murdered) and Claire’s mouth and the way Claire would pat her hair like she was something sweet and precious.
Maya loved the way that she had spent her entire life trying to figure out where she fit, only to have Claire snap right into place next to her, like they had been waiting their whole lives to find each other.
Maya’s parents, because they weren’t antiquated dinosaurs, didn’t care that she was gay. Or, more to the point, they weren’t just fine with it. They were proud. Her dad even put a rainbow sticker on his car, which scandalized the neighborhood for a bit until Maya gently explained that a rainbow sticker on your car usually meant that you were gay, and maybe the neighbors were getting the wrong idea?
But still, it was a sweet gesture. They gave money to PFLAG and she and her dad ran a 10K together. Maya had all the support she needed in that particular arena, and she was grateful for it. She just wished sometimes that her parents would pay attention to their own relationship, rather than focusing on hers.
Another door slammed and Lauren jumped. Not too much, but enough for Maya to notice.
Do you even care about seeing your daughters?
How dare you say something like that to me!
You didn’t even ask Maya about—
Both girls looked at each other. “Did you get anything from that girl yet?” Lauren asked after a beat.
Maya shook her head. “Nope.”
The night before, Maya’s parents had sat her down—the first time in months that she had seen them together at home when they weren’t at each other’s throats—and they had told her about a girl named Grace. She was Maya’s half sister, who lived with her parents twenty minutes away. For the first time ever, it seemed, Grace had asked about her biological family. There was a boy, too, a supposed half brother named Joaquin, but no one seemed to know where he was anymore, like a set of keys someone had misplaced. “Is it okay if we give Grace your email address?” her father asked.
Maya had just shrugged. “Sure, okay.”
It wasn’t okay, not really, but she didn’t entirely trust her parents to be strong for her anymore. They could barely keep it together around each other—what sort of energy did they have left over for her? She had no desire to cry in front of them, or ask questions, or give them even the smallest glimpse into her brain. She didn’t trust them with her thoughts, not when they acted like two bulls in a china shop. She would have to keep herself at a remove—safe from that sort of damage.
Last night, she had woken up from a horrible nightmare: the tall, dark-haired people were reaching out for her, trying to pull her through the window of her bedroom, and she had woken up gasping, her hands shaking so bad that she couldn’t even text Claire on her phone. She wasn’t sure what had been scarier: the strangers trying to spirit her away or the fact that she wasn’t sure she wanted them to fail.