Far From the Tree

by Robin Benway

  “No, it’s totally good. It’s just like . . .” For the first time since they had been upstairs, Maya seemed at a loss for words. “It’s good,” she finally said, and Grace decided not to push it anymore.

  They exchanged phone numbers and listened to music (Maya’s) and talked about Claire. It was a good thing Grace didn’t want to tell Maya about Peach or Max, because she could barely get a word in edgewise. And by the time she and her parents were driving off in their car, she savored the relative silence of their Toyota Camry (squeaky brakes excepted).

  “So!” her dad said after a minute, clapping his hands together. “Highs and lows!”

  Grace groaned. Her parents used to do Highs and Lows at night after work and school, where they’d each have to talk about the high and low points of their day. That had pretty much stopped after Grace had announced she was pregnant. (Low.) “Dad, please . . .”

  “I’ll start!” he said. “My high was seeing you meet Maya, Grace. That was . . . well, it just meant a lot to me, as your dad.”

  “Dad, please, I can’t cry anymore this month. I’m tapped out.”

  “Okay, okay, fine. But my low was realizing that I might have to wear a three-piece suit every single time we get together with their family.” He sighed. “I felt like a farmer at the table.”

  Grace clapped him on the shoulder from the backseat. “You took one for the team, big guy.”

  He patted her hand in response.

  “Okay, my turn, my turn,” her mom said from the driver’s seat. “My high was listening to you talk to Maya upstairs and hearing you laugh. It’s been a long time since we’ve heard you laugh, Gracie.”

  “Maybe you’re just not as funny as you used to be,” Grace said, but she knew her mom would know she was joking. She was pretty hard to offend.

  “And my low was knocking my chicken off my plate with my knife. I wanted to die.” Grace’s dad started to laugh. “I seriously did, Steve! That entire house looked like a mausoleum—”

  “That’s what I thought, too!” Grace cried.

  “—and who’s the first person to get gravy on the tablecloth? Me.” Her mom groaned. “Diane was very gracious about it, though.”

  “Where’s our tablecloth?” Grace asked. “Do we even have one?”

  “Not since your dad accidentally set it on fire last Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh, yeah.” The highs and lows on that particular holiday had been intense. And smoky.

  “Okay, your turn,” her mom said, glancing at Grace in the rearview mirror.

  “Well, I guess the high was meeting Maya. And she’s normal. I mean, at least she’s not homicidal or anything.”

  “And the low?” her dad asked after a minute.

  “Well, she’s kind of annoying,” Grace said. She hadn’t even known it was true until she said it. “She kept interrupting me, she only talked about herself, and she was sort of rude, too, honestly.”

  “Honey?” Grace’s mom said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Welcome to having a sister.”

  MAYA

  It took Joaquin almost a week to respond to the email.

  Maya was not amused.

  She finally got his response while she was at home. She was always at home these days, since she had gotten grounded for sneaking out to see Claire one night when her dad was out of town on business and she had thought her mom was asleep. And by asleep, she meant passed out, but it didn’t really matter because her mom hadn’t been asleep or passed out when Maya had snuck back in downstairs at two in the morning. They had just looked at each other before Maya’s mom pointed at her and said, “Grounded. One week,” and then went upstairs. Maya suspected that if she had been dating a boy, there would have been a much bigger scene involving yelling and threats and being found dead in a ravine somewhere and teenage pregnancy statistics. Like Maya would have ever been stupid enough to get pregnant, anyway.

  She guessed that dating a girl was a lot less threatening to her parents.

  Lucky her.

  Maya opened Joaquin’s email.

  Hey Grace and Maya,

  Sure, that sounds cool. Let’s meet up next weekend? I’m working that day at the arts center, but I’m free after 1 p.m. Cool to meet up with you and talk.

  “That’s it?” Maya said as soon as she got Grace on the phone. She was using her parents’ landline. Part of her punishment was the surrender of her phone. She felt like someone in an eighties movie. It was humiliating. “‘Cool to meet up with you’? What does he think this is, a date?”

  “God, I hope not,” Grace said. She sounded like she was doing something in the background, which bugged Maya. She had only met Grace once, and Joaquin never, and already her siblings were annoying her. Typical.

  “We’ve got even bigger problems if he thinks it’s a date,” Grace added. “Hey, why are you calling me instead of texting?”

  “What, I can’t call you and talk, voice to voice? Have a human connection?”

  “Nice try. Are you grounded?”

  “Yep. My parents took my phone. I can only use the computer for school.” Maya sighed heavily as her mom walked past the kitchen, then one more time for good measure. “My jailers let me use the landline for five minutes. The fucking landline. Like I’m on the Oregon Trail or something. I told them I had a question about homework.”

  “So how did you get the email from—you know what, never mind. I don’t want to know. So do you want to meet him?”

  “Hell yeah, I want to meet him.” Maya wrapped the phone cord around her finger. It was oddly soothing, being able to do that. The tip of her finger started to turn red, and she loosened the cord, then did it all over again. “You have to drive, though,” she told Grace. “Shotgun.”

  “There’s not even going to be anyone else in the car. Why do you have to call—”

  Maya felt bad for Grace sometimes. Imagine being raised without a sibling and not understanding the importance of yelling “Shotgun!” at every single opportunity. Grace was really missing out. Maya wondered how she played Slug Bug on car trips.

  Maya’s mother came back through the kitchen this time, and Maya immediately put on her most innocent face. (She had practiced it in the mirror. It was sort of necessary when she snuck out as much as she did.)

  “Oh, is that the quadratic equation?” Maya’s voice suddenly changed into a sweet and dopey imitation of herself. “Oh, that makes sense. Okay.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Are you having a mathematically based stroke?”

  Sweet, innocent, naïve Grace. Maya was definitely going to have to toughen her up.

  Maya’s mother widened her eyes at her, then pointed at her watch. “One minute,” she mouthed.

  “I know, I know,” Maya said, and her mom gave her a warning glance before she left the room.

  “Do I even want to know why you’re grounded?”

  Maya could hear Grace tapping on a keyboard in the background. How dare she? “I snuck out last week to practice devil worship with these kids I met in a cornfield.” Maya wrapped the phone cord around her whole fist this time. “They’re not the best conversationalists, but they’re pretty nice once you get past all the ritual sacrifice.”

  Grace laughed this time, which made Maya feel pleased. Her family was so used to her weird brand of humor that they had stopped acknowledging it a long time ago. Hearing Grace laugh made Maya feel like a comedian who had finally found her perfect audience.

  “Okay, I’m going now,” Grace said. “I’ll pick you up at noon on Saturday. Don’t be late. Good luck with the ritual sacrifice.”

  It warmed Maya to hear Grace tell her not to be late. She felt like she had spent her entire life watching out for Lauren, herding her from place to place, telling her to hurry up. It was nice to have another person take the reins, even if that person was still basically a complete stranger.

  “I’ll put in a good word for you with the cornfield kids,” Maya said, then hung up befo
re Grace could respond.

  Maya didn’t tell her parents much about going to meet Joaquin, mostly because she didn’t want to answer questions about it. Her parents were super into discussing everything. It made Maya feel anxious, the way she was supposed to put her emotions into words, like it was an easy thing to do. Lauren was good at it, being able to say whatever was on her mind so that other people could understand, but for Maya, it was like describing colors: the sunset pinks and reds of first love, the stormy blues that clouded her brain when she was hurt or angry.

  Claire had always seemed to see the palette of her brain, had been able to sort the colors through a prism so she could understand how Maya felt without Maya having to say a word. The night she had gotten caught sneaking out, she had met up with Claire in the park, smoking a joint that Claire had stolen from her older brother, Caleb. (They also had two younger siblings, Cassandra and Christian. Their parents were Cara and Craig, but Craig had taken off five years ago, so he didn’t count. It was the first time that alliteration had made Maya feel like barfing.)

  They had smoked in silence for a while, which was one of Maya’s favorite things.

  Afterward, they had lain down in the damp grass, Maya’s head pillowed on Claire’s stomach. “I think the stars are moving,” she told Claire. Her own voice sounded syrupy to her, like she could pour it out.

  “We’re moving, not the stars,” Claire pointed out. Her hand was soft against Maya’s hair. “That’s how the world works.”

  “Do you think Joaquin even wants to meet me and Grace?”

  “I don’t know,” Claire said. “He’s the only one who can answer that.”

  “I wouldn’t want to meet me,” Maya said. “I’d hate me if I were him.”

  “Good thing you’re not him, then,” Claire said, then bent down to kiss Maya, making yellow sparks shine behind her eyes.

  Maya’s parents always wanted to talk about her adoption, especially when she had been younger. Maya suspected that they were doing a lot of preventative work to make sure that they hadn’t monumentally screwed her up. That if one day she suddenly went berserk and slaughtered a roomful of people, they could hold up their hands and say, “We tried, really we did.” She had been to therapists, group sessions with other adopted kids, guided one-on-one discussions with her parents when Lauren was at friends’ houses. “Do you think about your birth mother?” they asked her, and Maya said, “Yes?” because she thought that was the correct answer. But the truth was far deeper. The truth was every single color in a rainbow spectrum, and Maya didn’t have the words to say what she felt.

  So she didn’t say anything. It was just easier that way.

  Grace picked Maya up just before noon on Saturday. The plan had been to meet at eleven thirty, but Maya had overslept, and when she eventually came downstairs, she felt like a cranky tornado, a swirl of grays. (She was pretty sure there was a Fifty Shades joke in there, but she was too tired to make it.) “Starbucks,” she said to Grace, her Ray-Bans already over her eyes even though they were still inside.

  “Okay,” Grace said. Maya was pretty sure she agreed only because she was too scared of Maya’s uncaffeinated state to argue.

  “So do you have a boyfriend?” Maya asked once they were in the car, a giant Frappuccino clutched in her hand.

  “Nope,” Grace said in a sort of clipped way. There was something there pressing against the surface of her words, but Maya couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Girlfriend, then?” she asked. “Did you inherit the same gene as your little sister?”

  Grace smiled this time. “Nope. That’s all you.”

  “Well, have you, though?”

  “What?”

  “Had a boyfriend. Or girlfriend.”

  “Yes. And no.”

  Maya wondered if Grace was lying. Grace seemed like the kind of girl who would wait her whole life so she could lose her virginity on her wedding night, who would read Cosmo articles about how to give him the best blow job of his life! but never actually say the word blow job. Which was fine—Maya wasn’t about to start telling someone what they should do with their body or whatever—but being next to someone that perfect made Maya just want to be messier, dirtier, louder.

  For God’s sakes, Maya thought, her posture was perfect even while she was driving.

  “But you don’t want to talk about this boyfriend?” Maya asked.

  “Who said I don’t want to talk about him?”

  “Well, you’re answering me like it’s a deposition.”

  ‘Well, you’re quizzing me like a lawyer.”

  “Touchy, touchy,” she muttered, pushing her sunglasses up her nose. “Bad breakup?”

  “You could say that.” Grace laughed again. “You could definitely say that.”

  Maya nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I had a bad breakup, too, before I met Claire. There was this girl, Julia? Ugh, she was the worst. I don’t know what I saw in her.”

  “Hmm,” Grace said, which is what Maya’s mom usually said to her dad whenever he was talking about something that didn’t interest her.

  “I mean, I know what I saw in her,” Maya continued, rolling down her window. “It’s just that I saw the wrong things, you know?”

  Grace glanced at her. “She was hot?”

  “She was hot,” Maya confirmed. “Hey, speaking of. Can you put the AC on? You drive like my mom.”

  “Pretty sure that’s not a compliment,” Grace said.

  “You would be right.”

  Grace sighed and reached over to turn on the air. “Any other requests?”

  “Can we change the radio station?” Maya started pressing buttons on the dashboard. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m not fifty-five years old. I don’t exactly want to listen to NPR, Grandma.”

  Maya had no idea why she couldn’t stop talking. She liked Grace. Grace was fine. She had done nothing but drive Maya to meet their brother and buy her Starbucks on the way. But Maya had done the same thing when she and Grace first met at Maya’s house, her words coming out rapid fire, talking and talking, making fun of Lauren and her parents, never letting Grace get a word in edgewise. Please like me was what she had wanted to say. Please be my friend.

  Maya didn’t have a lot of friends. There were girls she knew at school, but they mostly just said hello in the hallways, sometimes talked before class began and the teacher hadn’t yet arrived. Her old school had been kindergarten through eighth grade, and that was back when she and Lauren were inseparable, even dressing alike when they were really young. She hadn’t needed many friends because she had Lauren.

  That had changed on the first day of ninth grade, when they were suddenly in two different schools and Maya found herself the odd girl out, surrounded by girls who had been learning together since preschool.

  And having a mom who drank made it hard to bring anyone home after school, or to invite them over for pool parties or slumber parties. Maya hadn’t brought a friend over in years. Claire was the exception, but even she was rarely there.

  Maya had eaten a lot of lunches alone those first few months. The sound of other girls giggling would make the hair stand up on the back of her neck. Are they making fun of me? she would wonder.

  It turned out she wasn’t the only gay kid at school, and she was never harassed or teased—but she found she didn’t know how to be affectionate with friends. Would they think she was hitting on them if she just hugged them hello? Would she make it weird just by being herself? It hadn’t mattered with Lauren, but at her new school, Maya found herself holding back, using sarcasm as affection until it became habit, until it became who she was.

  “Are you always like this?” Grace said, interrupting her thoughts. “Seriously, are you? Because I swear I’m going to pull over and put you in the trunk if that’s the case.”

  Maya just sipped at her drink. If Grace thought she was the first person who had threatened to put her in the trunk for being a brat on a car trip, she had another think coming. “Am I like
what?”

  “Annoying,” Grace said.

  Maya shrugged, turning her face toward the passenger window. “Yes.”

  “Maybe you should cut back on the caffeine.”

  “You’re just not used to having a sister,” Maya told her, then sat back in her seat and put her feet up on the dashboard. Grace swatted them down.

  “Did you hear yourself?” she said. “You just called me your sister.”

  Maya pretended to sigh happily. “Next thing you know, we’ll be going to Sephora and talking about boys—well, you will, at least—and sharing clothes. It’ll be like a movie.” She sipped at her drink again. It was getting to the perfect stage of meltiness, where the sugar and caffeine came together in a glorious adrenaline spiral. Another five minutes and Maya could probably launch herself to the moon.

  “Are you serious?” Grace said.

  “About the clothes sharing? No, I was just exaggerating.” Her eyes moved from Grace’s shoes (flip-flops from Target; Maya had the same pair, but in blue) to her jeans (way too big, what the hell?) to her sweater (the beigest color of beige that Maya had ever seen). “But if you ever want to go clothes shopping, I can help you. I helped Lauren. Changed her life.”

  “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!”