“Because your dad hates me?”
She laughed out loud. “No, that’s why I used to like you. Now it’s because you’re just you. You’re not fake.” She brushed her lips against mine. “And you like me, not some bullshit fake me you need me to become.” Her voice tightened. “Nothing is ever good enough for my parents. Last week, they threatened to ground me because I got a C on a calc test. I swear I’d lose my mind if it weren’t for you.” She exhaled deeply. It was like watching a balloon deflate.
“Well, no worries, because I’m not going anywhere.” I petted her soft hair, and she leaned her cheek against my chest again. I wanted to say something more, make her feel better, but in a lot of ways I couldn’t relate to her life. Darla and Ben probably wanted me to go to college, but they’d never pressured me about it. Lately, they didn’t seem to expect much at all, aside from the occasional babysitting shift.
“It’s like sometimes I forget how to be happy,” Parvati said.
Now that I understood perfectly. Except mine was more like I was afraid to be happy. Life had a way of coming in and screwing shit up whenever things started going good. My mother had died in childbirth, but I remembered being happy with my dad when I was younger. He was the one who had taught me to surf. We took trips all up and down the West Coast together. But then he had a heart attack. Age forty-one.
He had never even been sick.
As the paramedics bent over him in our living room, I prayed for the first time in my life.
It didn’t do any good.
There weren’t any relatives who could take care of me, so the state gave me to foster parents who lived in Los Angeles. They were nice, and eventually I was happy again. Right up until the night I heard them talking about how they were going to give me back. I didn’t want to end up placed with some other family who would play with me until they got bored and then return me to the store like a defective video game, so I ran away.
For almost a year, I alternated between living under bridges and living on the beach, begging for change and eating from Dumpsters. Eventually, someone reported me and I got caught. The cops handed me back to child services, who took me to a nearby children’s center. That’s how the Cantrells found me. They were there the day the social worker dropped me off.
Darla and Ben seemed cool from the start, but I never really let myself get close to them, just in case. Sometimes it amazed me that I let myself care so much about Parvati. She owned me, and I was okay with that. I was still trying to figure out how I’d gotten so lucky.
“Do you know why I like you?” I asked her.
She turned to me and arched her eyebrows suggestively. “I can think of a few reasons.”
“Well, there’s that.” I grinned. “And the fact that you’re the hottest chick I know. But mostly I like how you’re different from other girls. You don’t even try to fit in.”
Her smile faltered. “I used to try. It was painful.” She paused. “My mom has told me stories about how ostracized she felt when she started dating my dad, because no one close to her could understand why she would do it. I feel like that too sometimes, not because of you, but because I don’t want the same things as most girls I know.” She shrugged. “I guess I’m just weird like that.”
“You are weird in the best possible way.” I kissed the top of her forehead. “And I think it’s cool that you don’t like all that boring girly stuff.”
She snuggled in close to me again. “I like some girly stuff. I just don’t expect you to like it too.”
“I swear it’s like you have some manual of exactly what to say.”
“Likewise,” she said.
We sat curled together for the rest of our time, listening to the water pound against the rocks, listening to each other breathe. I didn’t even miss hooking up that day. It was a new kind of closeness for us.
After I brought Parvati back to her car, I headed home, still thinking about the way her hair smelled and the heat of her body next to mine. I spun the Escort around the corner and onto my street a little too fast, nearly slamming into a gray SUV that was going the opposite way. I whipped the steering wheel to the left and hit the brakes hard. The SUV glided past. I expected the driver to honk or give me the finger, but the figure behind the tinted glass didn’t even glance in my direction.
Inside the house, Darla awaited me with her usual resigned look. Her hair was pulling loose from her ponytail and she had something green and oozy dribbled down the front of her flowered shirt. At her feet, my eight-month-old, newly adopted twin baby sisters, Ji Hyun and Jo Lee, were busy trying to untie her shoelaces. My other sister, Amanda, was engrossed in an episode of some gory cop TV show.
“I have to go help Ben at the store, Max,” Darla said. “Will you watch the gang for a few hours?”
Darla always said that the bond was strong in our family because destiny had brought us all together. Every time someone asked her about the adoptions, she told the same story. She and Ben had been observing another boy at the group home when the social worker dropped me off. I was tangle-haired and covered with sand. I refused to speak to anyone. Darla was immediately drawn to me, and she and Ben came back a few days later for a visit. The social worker told them I was angry and suffering from PTSD, that I’d been living on the beach, that I would be “a problem child.” I didn’t say one word to anyone during the whole session, but the Cantrells didn’t care. They just asked for the adoption paperwork to be started, and a couple of weeks later they took me home as a foster kid while they waited for everything to be processed. Apparently, it was similar with Amanda and the twins. It was fate, Darla always said. She didn’t choose any of us. Life chose us for her.
It sounded nice, but if you ask me, Darla just liked fixer-uppers. Ben was a decent-looking guy with a laid-back attitude, but he was still a high school dropout with a tacky souvenir shop. I was a slacker with no clue what to do after graduation. Amanda had cystic fibrosis and spent a couple of hours each night strapped into a percussion vest. The twins? Other than being slightly demonic at times? They probably had heart defects or some special Asian illness Darla hadn’t told us about yet.
“I’m supposed to be going camping with Preston,” I said. “Isn’t Mandy old enough to watch Ji and Jo?”
“I’m only eleven,” my sister informed me, as if I had forgotten. “Watching the twins is a big responsibility.” She was no doubt parroting something she had overheard my parents say.
“I really need you here. Just until six thirty, okay?” Darla said. “Thanks, Max,” she added, grabbing for a navy sweater that was tossed over the back of the sofa.