by Eric Smith
Since you moved here in February, we’ve only talked a handful of times, and I feel bad about that. I’ve heard a bunch of words whispered around your name—foster care, passed around, rough life. My dad is always asking me if I’ve talked to you, telling me I should invite you over.
After all, you live right across the street.
Last night, Dad and I pulled into our driveway at the same time you were going into your house. He looked at you and said, “Does she ever hang out with anyone?”
I looked down at my nubby fingernails and shrugged. “I mean, it’s summer, Dad. Not like I see her every day.”
“When I was a kid, your Nana and I got kicked out of our house after your grandpa died,” he said. “We wound up moving to a neighborhood where I was the only white kid. This kid, Jamal Crawford, he befriended me. Honestly don’t know what I would’ve done without him.”
I stared at your closed front door and sighed.
“Being new in a place where you stand out is hard enough,” he said, turning to me. “No one should have to go through it alone.”
The photographer calls the next person to take their position against the fake tree.
The flashes begin, and the girl in front of you—she’s up next—whips out her compact to check her reflection for the jillionth time. She pulls her long, blonde hair over one shoulder, runs her fingers through it a few times, and then flings it back.
It almost smacks you in the face.
I lean forward so I can whisper in your ear (which I hope isn’t creepy). “Geez, are we taking senior portraits or meeting the queen?”
You snort, then lean back to whisper a response. “Pretty sure she bathed in Chanel No. 5 this morning,” you say. “You’d think the pictures were gonna be scratch and sniff.”
I laugh too loud, and Miss Priss turns around and glares at us.
She gets called to the tree. You look at me and smile.
“I’m Jenna,” I say. “I, umm . . . I live across the street from you—”
“I know who you are and where you live, Jenna.”
“Oh . . .” I feel my face heat, and I drop my chin. “Nyara, right?”
When you don’t respond, I look up.
You smile again. It’s beautiful. “Call me ‘Ny,’” you say.
Within days, we’re “attached at the hip,” as my dad puts it, and a couple of weeks later, you invite me to dinner. “Mr. and Mrs. J want to celebrate me being with them for six months,” you say as we leave school and walk to the car they bought you last weekend. “Will you please come keep me sane?”
I don’t understand why you’re all weird about this—from the moment I step into the house, it’s obvious Mr. and Mrs. J really love you.
I can tell something’s up by the way Mrs. J fusses over little details. Every few minutes, she asks if the food tastes okay before tucking her hair behind her ears, and she and Mr. J keep exchanging these looks.
I know you feel it too because you keep kicking me beneath the table.
The only sounds during the meal—delicious pot roast, baked green beans, mashed potatoes, and mac n’ cheese—are utensils scraping plates, sweet tea being swallowed, glasses thumping against the table, a grandfather clock ticking in the background, and an occasional throat clearing. No words.
After the empty plates have been taken away, Mrs. J disappears into the kitchen and returns with four dessert saucers. As she sits back down, she looks at Mr. J and nods.
The air in the room is as dense as the cheesecake on the plates.
“So,” Mr. J says. He clears his throat. “Guess I’ll start by thanking you girls for joining us tonight.”
When he clears his throat a second time, I swallow and the tips of my ears go hot. I feel like an intruder. “Maybe I should—”
You kick me under the table.
“Ow!”
“You were saying, sir?” you say.
Mr. and Mrs. J look at each other again. Two tiny nods, then they turn to you. I wonder if you’re sweating as much as I am.
“Nyara, you’ve been with us for six months now,” Mr. J continues, “and having you here has brought us a level of fulfillment we didn’t think possible.”
You hook my ankle with your foot and pull it toward you.
“We know this might seem a little sudden since you’ll be eighteen soon,” Mrs. J says, “but if you’re interested, we’d love for you to become a permanent member of our family.”
The clock ticks. The silence stretches. No one moves.
I look at your face for some hint of what you’re feeling, but there’s nothing there.
Mr. J clears his throat for a third time. “We’d love for you to stay, Ny. To make this your home.”
You look at me, and the spot where our ankles touch explodes. The heat creeps up through my stomach, down my arms to my fingertips, and up into my face. I can’t see anything beyond how beautiful you are, and the fullness of your lips snatches the air from the room as you inhale.
“Home?” you say, and my heart picks up pace.
“Yes,” Mrs. J says. “We want to adopt you.”
Nic Stone was born and raised in a suburb on the outskirts of Atlanta, GA. Growing up with people from a wide range of cultures, religions, and backgrounds fueled her love of stories and insatiable wanderlust. After a few years living in Israel, she returned to the US to write YA fiction with diversity in mind. She has a BA in Psychology from Spelman College and currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and sons.
“Adoption highlights the most beautiful thing about humanity: the transformative power of love and acceptance. Growing up, I had two close friends who were cross-culturally adopted, and spending time in their homes with them and their parents and (adopted) siblings taught me almost everything I know about the power human beings have to hurt and/or heal one another, and what it looks like to use that power for the latter.”
The Take Back
by Kate Watson
I can’t stop seeing her dark gray eyes. They staked their claim on me when we picked her up from the hospital thirteen and a half days ago, and they’ll probably never let go. I can’t stop remembering her smell, unlike any smell in the world—almost like sweat, but fresh and pure, somehow. I can’t stop feeling her tiny hand squeezing my finger, like it made her feel safe, like she knew her big brother would always be there to protect her.
I can’t stop thinking about how I don’t get to be her big brother anymore.
Her empty car seat sits beside me in the backseat of Mom’s Subaru, taunting me like it has for the last six hours. Mom’s in the driver’s seat because when she’s sad or hurt or afraid, she has to do something productive. Right now, she’s all those things. Times a million. She won’t break down in front of me again, though. Not like she did when we got the call this morning.
Dad is playing deejay in the passenger seat with his “John Hughes” playlist, as Mom called it. I call it his “catastrophic heartbreak” playlist. He’d never admit it, but something tells me he had it ready before we even left for DC two weeks ago. I wonder what the other playlist would have sounded like.
Dad tried to get me to sit up front when we left the hotel this morning, because he knows how my knees knock into the back of Mom’s seat. But I need to be back here, staring at the spot where Lucy should be.
Bella, some hateful part of my brain reminds me. It’s Bella to them.
Is that why Amber took her back? Because we didn’t give her some stupid name? None of us liked it, and Amber said she didn’t mind if we named her after our Grandma and used Isabella as her middle name. Amber even said she loved our little nickname for her: Lucy Belle. Lucy Belle. Lucy Belle.
Tears burn my eyes, and my throat tightens until I think I’m gonna choke.
“How you doing?” Mom asks, looking at me in the rearview mirror. He
r eyes are ringed with an angry red, eyes that look so much like mine, people stop us in the store to tell us how much we look alike.
Amber said she liked that about us when she saw our profile online. We didn’t look like just any other family, she said; we looked like her daughter’s family.
Liar.
How could she say that and do what she did? How could she dangle so much happiness in front of us and then rip it all away at the last possible moment? Why couldn’t she have changed her mind in the hospital instead of an hour before she was supposed to sign the papers? An hour? After two weeks in that stupid hotel, we were so close to being able to take her home.
I hate Amber. I hate her.
“Cole?” Mom repeats. Her eyes are welling with tears, and the sight of it makes mine do the same.
My mouth twists, and I put my hand on her shoulder. “Not good, Mom.”
“Me neither.”
“If You Leave” starts playing over the speakers. Dad turns it up.
Ten hours. That’s how long it takes for us to drive from DC back to Indianapolis, with stops just to pee and get gas. The snacks we bought along the way lay unopened on the other side of Lucy’s car seat.
Bella’s car seat. I shake my head. No one’s. I wonder if we can return the thing.
When we reach our street, I look outside the window. Somehow in the last two weeks, it has gone from winter to spring. While we were holed up in the hotel waiting for word that Amber had signed the papers, too nervous even to run to the store in case someone sneezed near Lucy, the world just moved on. There’s so much thriving life, yet we’re burning alive in our own personal hell.
The car pulls into the garage, and before Mom can even put it in park, I’m running from my door to the shed out back, where I grab my baseball bat and start beating the shit out of everything in sight. Pots, planters, mason jars, my old bike. Everything. I smash it like it can obliterate every second of the last two weeks. Like it can change Amber’s mind and give me back my sister.
After twenty minutes, I’m sweating and panting, and the rusted old shed is groaning in protest. I admire my handiwork by the light of the setting sun. Emotions seethe inside me, but none of them resembles satisfaction or . . . what’s that word? Catharsis, maybe? Either way, I don’t feel it. Nothing could exist inside me with all the rage and hatred I feel.
Nothing except guilt.
I stare at the bat in my hands. Hands that just this morning held Lucy, fed her, changed her, tickled her face in the way that always calms her when she’s fussing. Gave her back to Amber.
I drop the bat and fall to my knees, shaking with a lifetime’s worth of pain and sorrow, both for me and for my parents. I shouldn’t have pushed them to adopt again. I should have been content with the three of us, like they said they were. But I just knew they were lying. Knew the house would feel empty when I went to college in a few years. The thought of them feeling so alone without me—the child who completed them—was devastating. What if something happened to me? Or to them? I just didn’t want anyone to be alone. Ever.
This is my fault.
If I hadn’t pushed them, Amber never would have contacted us. And we never would have known Lucy. And we wouldn’t all be breaking apart with grief.
But we never would have known Lucy.
Agony rips through me, and I smash my hand against the hard ground over and over again until I feel something hot and sticky run over my fingers, along with a sharp burning. I look down to see a small piece of ceramic pot sticking out of the side of my hand. My stomach turns.
“Mom?” I yell. And again, louder, “Mom!”
Seconds later, the shed door opens, and Mom is there, her cheeks stained with tears. She must have been waiting just outside the door. Something about that makes everything hurt worse.
I hold up my hand for her to see, and she just nods, puts her arms around me, and helps me into the house.
Dad is waiting in the kitchen with Mom’s nurse kit. He pauses, assessing the situation before opening his mouth.
“So? What’s the damage?”
Mom groans. “Seriously? Your son is bleeding, and that’s the best you could come up with?”
“You just don’t get it. See, it’s funny, because Cole was breaking everything. Two meanings.”
Mom is giving sarcastic nods while she takes care of my hand, like this is normal banter on a normal day. And I know what I should do. I should roll my eyes and tease him, say “Not your best work, Dad,” and let him tease me about the shed being my best work or something. But I can’t. He’s trying to lighten the mood, and I hate that he’s doing that when it’s my fault there’s a mood to lighten at all. Well, mine and Amber’s.
Just thinking about her pushes my hatred to the surface past so many other emotions. There’s another one clawing to get out, something I can’t put my finger on with everything else going on inside me.
I don’t know how we’re just supposed to go on without Lucy.
It’s Bella. Her name is Bella.
Mom puts some antiseptic on my hand, and my eyes water.
“I think you should talk to Sammie,” she says.
I watch her bandage me up, and my mouth goes dry. “What would I call Sammie for? This has nothing to do with her.”
“Cole,” Mom says. It’s weird how even though I’m looking down at her, I feel like a little kid beneath her gaze. She always knows too much. It’s one of the things kids usually hate about their parents. Maybe I should, too. “This may not have anything to do with her, but she is a part of you. I know she’d want to be there for you right now.”
“You already talked to her, didn’t you?”
Mom nods. Dad hands me my phone—I must have left it in the car when I ran out. The number is already up in my contacts. “You may want to change your password,” Dad says with a shrug.
“Or not,” Mom says. “But you need to talk to Sammie. And then if you still want to, maybe we can go finish what you started in the shed.”
She gives my shoulder a squeeze before she and Dad leave the kitchen. They didn’t need to. I go upstairs to my room and sit at my desk, staring at my phone for what feels like an hour.
I don’t know why I’m hesitating. My adoption was open—is open. Sammie came to my elementary school graduation—despite how embarrassing an elementary school graduation is. My family went to her wedding a few years ago. She sends us videos of her toddler, Xander. She and Mom follow each other on Instagram.
Why can’t I just press that little phone icon?
I hesitate so long, my screen goes black. I press the home key, and a picture of me holding Lucy flashes on the screen. Pain stabs my heart. Pain and fury and hatred and guilt and . . . and that something I can’t put my finger on. Whatever it is, it pushes me over the edge. I swipe my finger across the screen and call Sammie.
She answers on the first ring.
“Hey, buddy,” she says in that high, clear voice that always tickles my memory.
“Hey Sammie,” I echo, because I don’t know what else to say.
“Your mom called last night and told me what happened. I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how you must be feeling right now.”
It was a perfectly fine comment. Of course it was. But she’s right that she has no idea what I’m going through, and hearing her admit it pisses me off. “Nope. You can’t.”
My tone doesn’t deter her at all. “I just want you to know I’m here if you want to talk or let it out.”
“Let it out?” I grab a pen and start stabbing at a notebook. “What do you think this is, Sammie? A couch session? You’re not my therapist, and you’re not my mom. If I want to talk about how I’m feeling, I’ll talk to her.”
“Of course. If that’s what you want to do, you should absolutely do it.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
She sighs. “I’m sorry that’s how it feels. I just want to be here for you. You can tell me whatever you want.”
I jab the pen down so hard it punctures the notebook. I feel like it should bleed ink. “What do you want me to tell you? How I talked my parents into trying to adopt again, and now they’re crushed? How I hate Amber so bad, I want to physically hurt her?”
“This isn’t Amber’s fault.”
I hurl the pen at the wall. “SHE TOOK BACK MY SISTER! How is this not her fault?”
Sammie’s voice remains low and steady. “She made the decision that was best for her, Cole. She didn’t do it to hurt you guys. How would you have felt with Lucy—”
“Bella,” I interrupt, doing air quotes even though she can’t see them.
“How would you have felt with her in your home, knowing that Amber regretted it every day for the rest of her life? What would that have done to . . . to Bella?”
I grab another pen, this time scribbling fiercely around the notebook’s stab wound. “She’d have been better off with us.”
“That may be how it feels, but you don’t get to make that decision. Amber does. And even though it hurts, I know your parents agree. I think with time, you will, too.”
She’s so damn calm, it makes me want to scream. To throw a baseball next time instead of a pen. “Good to see you’re finally using that social work degree you traded me for,” I spit. Even as I say the words, I can’t believe they escaped my mouth.
“What?” Sammie’s voice sounds like it’s splitting in two, warring between outrage and her need for control.
“You heard me,” I say, because I’ve lost the ability to filter any and all thought. Because if I can stay angry and awful, maybe I can keep out all the other emotions that threaten to suffocate me.
Her words are choppy, her breathing erratic. “Is that what you think I did? You think I traded you?”
“Your life looks pretty good from where I’m sitting.”
I expect her to say something biting back like, “So does yours.” Instead, she pauses before saying, “You’re hurting right now. I wish . . . I wish I could take that pain away from you.”