Far from the Tree(18)

They paid the admission fee (“Do you have a friends and family discount?” Maya asked the woman at the box office), then made their way into the center. It was hot and crowded, and it took a few minutes to find the information booth. “Hi,” Maya said, sidling up to the window and pushing her sunglasses up on her head. “Do you happen to know Joaquin?”

“Oh, yeah,” the guy said. “He’s over at the pottery tent.”

“Pottery. Ooh, so real,” Maya said, then looked at Grace. “He must take after me.”

Grace moved so that she could block Maya out of the information window entirely. “And where’s the pottery tent?”

He pointed over Grace’s head toward the center of the festival. “Just follow the line of kids,” he said. “You can’t miss it.”

“Thanks,” Maya said. “You’ve been a pal.”

“Hey, wait! Are you his sisters?”

Maya shoved her way back into the window. “Maybe,” she said. “What have you heard?”

The man smiled. “Just that he said that he had two sisters coming to see him today.”

Maya stuck her hand through the window. “Hi! I’m Maya. This is Grace.”

“Hi,” Grace said, but only after Maya nudged her in the side.

“Gus,” the man said. “Lucky ladies, having Joaquin for a brother. Yeah, he’s working in the pottery booth.”

“Would you say he has artistic ability?” Maya asked Gus. “On a scale of normal to Manson family, how would you rate his—”

“Thank you so much,” Grace said, shoving Maya out of the window again. “We’ll go find him now.” She took Maya’s arm and led her away a few feet before she shook her off. “You know, you might not want to share your concern that Joaquin’s a psychopath with people we just met.”

“Whatever, Gus seems cool. We could hang.” Maya readjusted her sunglasses, then glanced around. “And you never know, maybe the whole point of meeting Joaquin is so we can become friends with Gus. You’ve got to look at the big picture, Grace. Now where’s the pot throwing?”

They eventually found the tent, and Gus hadn’t been wrong: there was a huge line of kids wrapped around it, all of them looking in to where there were two volunteers, each with a kid, carefully turning clay on a pottery wheel. One of the volunteers was older looking, like she could have been a grandma, and the other volunteer had dark hair that he had pulled back from his face in a short ponytail. Even though he was sitting down, Maya could tell he was tall.

When he looked up at Maya and Grace, both of them gasped a little.

It was Joaquin.

“He looks like you,” they both said at the same time, and Maya supposed that neither of them was wrong.

The three of them stood looking at one another for a long minute, children and parents carrying clay pots weaving between them. Joaquin was definitely not white like his sisters, that much was obvious, but he had Maya’s brown eyes and curly dark hair and Grace’s tight, set jaw, and Maya felt something in her rib cage catch and pull tight, like a muscle that had never been used before. Her feeling was green, like grass, like a seed coming up through dirt, sprouting and growing toward the sun.

Maya smiled at him and he smiled back. They had the same crooked teeth in front, one front tooth slightly overlapping the other. Well, Joaquin still had his, but Maya’s parents had put her through two years of braces in order to correct it. She regretted that now. She wanted to look like the people who shared her blood. She wanted people to stop them on the street and say, “You must be related.” She wanted to belong to them, wanted them to belong to her the way that no one else in the world could.

Grace was sniffling next to her. “Seriously?” Maya whispered to her just as Joaquin made the international gesture for Give me one minute and I’ll be over. “Do we really need the waterworks right now?”

“Shut up,” Grace mumbled, wiping at her eyes. “I’m hormonal.”

“Are our cycles already syncing?” Maya said, her eyes widening. “Because I’m totally going to start my period, like, tomorrow, and—”

“Hey,” someone said. Maya looked over—and up, way up, her hopes of being tall in at least one family dashed—to see Joaquin standing next to them. “Hey, I’m Joaq.” He pronounced it like wok.

Maya tried to hide the fact that her hand was shaking when he shook it. She wasn’t used to touching boys, and she wondered if all of their hands felt this dry. Next to her, Grace was still wiping her eyes, and when Joaquin turned toward her, she reached out and hugged him around his waist. “Hi!” she said. “It’s so good to meet you!”

Joaquin looked like an animal who had just realized that he was prey instead of predator, but he did a good job of hiding it. “Hey,” he said, his hand awkwardly patting her shoulder. “Hey.”

“Why didn’t you cry when you met me?” Maya demanded, putting her hands on her hips and turning toward Joaquin again. “She didn’t get teary even once. You should feel lucky.”

“I do! I mean, totally. I do,” he said, still patting Grace’s shoulder. Finally, Maya yanked her away from him.

“You’re freaking him out,” she whispered. “Pull it together, seriously.”