Then again, she would have let her mother drink three bottles a night if it kept her calm, complacent. Even, Jesus Christ, sleepy.
But the wine only served to rev her parents up like cars before a race, gunning at each other until someone waved a flag and vroom! They were off. Maya and Lauren had learned to be out of the way by then, safely stashed away upstairs in their bedrooms, or at a friend’s, or even just saying they were at a friend’s and then hiding in the backyard until the coast was clear. It wasn’t that their parents’ fights got violent or anything like that; words could shatter harder than a glass breaking against a wall, hurt more than a fist plowing through teeth.
It was easy to follow their pattern. Maya was fairly certain she could even write out their dialogue for them. Once the yelling began, it was always about fifteen minutes until her mother accused her father of having an affair. Maya didn’t know if it was true or not, and honestly, she didn’t even really care that much. Let him, if it made him happy. Maya suspected that her mother would be thrilled if it were true. Like she’d finally win a race she’d been running for decades.
Would it kill you to be home before eight o’clock at night? Really? Would it?
Oh, well, remind me again who wanted to redo the kitchen? Do you think that just pays for itself?
A knock at her door made her look up. She half expected it to be Claire, even though she knew it wasn’t possible. She had been dating Claire for five months, and her arms were a place safer and better than all the backyard hideouts in the world. Claire was security. Claire, Maya sometimes thought, felt like home.
It was Lauren at the door instead. “Hey,” she said when Maya opened it. “Can I hang out with you for a bit?”
“Sure,” Maya said.
At some point, and Maya wasn’t sure when, their conversations had gone from riotous giggles to whispered secrets to short sentences, and then just one-or two-word responses. The thirteen-month difference between them had spread them apart like a gulf, growing only wider with each passing month.
Maya had always known she was adopted. In a family of redheads, that fact was pretty obvious. At night when Maya was little, in order to get her to sleep, her mom would tell the story of how they had brought her home from the hospital. She had heard it a thousand times, of course, but she always wanted it told again. Her mom was a good storyteller (she had been a radio DJ in college), and she’d always ham it up and do these big exaggerated gestures about how scared they were to put Maya in the car seat for the first time, and how Maya’s parents had bought pretty much every single bottle of hand sanitizer that Costco had.
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.