But Linda wasn’t saying the lines in the script that Joaquin had come to know by heart.
Mark leaned forward then, putting his hand on Joaquin’s forearm and squeezing a little. That didn’t bother Joaquin—he knew Mark would never hurt him, and even if he tried, Joaquin had three inches and about thirty pounds on him, so it would be a fast fight. Instead, he couldn’t help but feel like Mark was trying to keep him steady. “Buddy,” Mark said. “Your m— Linda and I wanted to talk to you about something important. If it’s all right with you, and you’re okay with it, we’d like to adopt you.”
Linda’s eyes were shiny as she nodded along with Mark’s words. “We love you so much, Joaquin,” she said. “You . . . you feel like our son; we can’t imagine not making it permanent.”
The buzzing in Joaquin’s head almost made him dizzy, and when he looked down at the skateboard wheels in his hands, he realized that he couldn’t feel them. He had only felt like this once before, when Mark and Linda had (casually, oh so very casually) told him that he could call them Mom and Dad if he wanted. “Only if you want to, of course,” Linda had said, and even though she had been turned away from Joaquin at the time, he could still hear the tremble in her voice.
“Your call, buddy,” Mark had added from the kitchen island, where he had been staring at his laptop. Joaquin noticed that he wasn’t clicking through websites, though, just scrolling up and down on the same page.
“’Kay,” Joaquin had said, and pretended to ignore their disappointed faces that night at dinner when he called her Linda, like nothing had happened that morning.
Joaquin had never called anyone Mom or Dad. It was either first names or, in some of the stricter homes, Mr. and Mrs. Somebody or Other. There were no grandparents, no aunts or uncles or cousins like other foster kids sometimes had.
And the truth was that he wanted to call Linda and Mark Mom and Dad. He wanted it so bad that he could feel the unspoken words sear his throat. It would be so easy to just say it, to make them happy, to finally be the kid with a mom and dad who kept him.
They weren’t just words, though. Joaquin knew, in a way that he knew every true thing, that if he spoke those two words, they would reshape him. If those words ever left his mouth, he would need to be able to say them for the rest of his life, and he had learned the hard way that people could change, that they could say one thing and do another. He didn’t think Mark and Linda would do that to him, but he didn’t want to find out, either. He had once dared to call his second-grade teacher Mom one afternoon during their math lesson, just to feel how the word felt in his mouth, how it sounded in his ears, but the resulting embarrassment from the other kids had been so sharp and acute that it still burned hot when he thought about it all these years later.
But that had been just a mistake. To call Linda and Mark Mom and Dad on purpose would mean that Joaquin’s heart would form into something much more fragile, something impossible to put back together if it broke, and he could not—would not—do that to himself again. He still hadn’t managed to pick up all the pieces after last time, and one or two holes remained in his heart, letting the cold air in.
But now Mark and Linda wanted to adopt him, and Joaquin felt the skateboard wheels rumble under his feet as he took a hard right past the library. Mark and Linda would be his mom and dad whether he called them that or not. He knew they couldn’t have children (“Barren as a brick!” Linda had once said in that super cheerful way that people do to hide their worst pain), and Joaquin wondered if he was their last chance to finally get what they wanted, if he was just a means to an end.
The library had a sign for a Mommy & Daddy & Me Storytime! on one of its windows as he sailed by.
Joaquin had long gotten over not having parents. He wasn’t as dumb as he had been when he was little, when he’d tried to be charming and funny like those kids he saw on sitcoms, the ones with the stupid laugh tracks and the parents who just sighed when their children did something idiotic like drive a car through their kitchen wall. He changed foster homes so many times when he was five years old that he went to three different kindergartens, which meant he managed to dodge that brutal Star of the Week bullet, where kids talked about their homes and families and pets, all the things that Joaquin was already painfully aware that he lacked.
Once, in tenth grade, Joaquin had had to write an essay in his English class about where he would go if he could travel back in time. He wrote that he’d go back to see the dinosaurs, which was probably the biggest lie he’d ever told in his life. If Joaquin could go back in time, of course, he’d go find his twelve-year-old self and shake him until his teeth rattled and hiss, “You are fucking everything up.” That’s when he had been really bad, when he would give in to the fury that bubbled up under his skin. He would writhe and scream and howl until the monster retreated, satiated for the time being, leaving Joaquin wrung out and exhausted, beyond comfort, beyond punishment. No one wanted a kid like that, Joaquin knew now, and they especially didn’t want one who wet the bed nearly every night.
By the time Joaquin turned eight, he knew the game. His straight baby teeth had given way to buck teeth and gaps, his chubby cheeks had thinned into his approaching adolescence. He wasn’t baby-cute anymore, and it was a hard-and-fast rule that prospective parents wanted babies.
He understood that there probably wouldn’t be anyone at his parent-teacher conferences at school, listening as the teacher told them what a good artist he was. There was no one to take a picture of him standing under the blue ribbon that someone had pinned to his drawing at the school’s art fair in fourth grade, or to drive him to that one birthday party across town in fifth. Some of his foster parents had tried, of course, but it wasn’t like there was a ton of money or time to go around, and Joaquin had long ago figured out that if he didn’t expect people to be there, then he wouldn’t be disappointed when they didn’t show up.
He still had that blue ribbon, though. He kept it buried at the back of his sock drawer, its edges frayed from the eighteen months that Joaquin had slept with it under his pillow.
He hadn’t had that many strokes of good luck in his life, but Joaquin knew he had gotten lucky by not having any siblings. He had seen what that had done to other kids, how hard they fought to stay together and how destroyed they were when they were inevitably pulled apart. He had seen the older brothers try desperately to be adopted by families who only wanted younger sisters; he had seen older sisters wrenched away from younger brothers because there wasn’t enough room for three kids in a foster home, and social services sometimes separated siblings by gender. It was hard enough for Joaquin to keep himself together, keep his heart and mind above water in a tide that wanted only to drown him. He could never have kept someone else afloat, too. He was glad he didn’t have to, that he was untethered, even if he sometimes suspected that without that tether, he could just float away and no one would even know he was gone, that no one would ever look for him again.
Mark and Linda would probably look for him, Joaquin realized as the arts center came into view, as the sun broke through the clouds. But they would not adopt him, he had decided.
Joaquin had been adopted once before.
And he was never going to let it happen again.