Far from the Tree(34)

“Really shitty,” he replied, then laughed before he could stop himself. “But at least I’m the only one getting hurt this time.”

“You sure about that?” Ana asked.

Joaquin looked out the window and didn’t answer.

The nightmare woke him up later that night, his sheets and T-shirt damp with sweat, his blood pulsing so hard through his skin that it felt like something was shaking him from the outside.

“Kid, kiddo. Hey, it’s okay.” Mark’s hand was warm on his back, his fingers pressing down and grounding Joaquin. “It’s okay, just wake up a little.”

“’M fine,” Joaquin managed to say. The colors behind his eyes had been too bright, too sharp, like they could pierce his skin.

Linda was standing next to Mark, and she handed Joaquin a glass of water. She always looked softer in the middle of the night, her hair down, her makeup gone.

“Sorry,” Joaquin said. “Sorry, I’m fine. Sorry I woke you up.”

Mark and Linda sat down on either side of him on the bed. Joaquin should have known that they wouldn’t leave him. He had spent seventeen years trying to get someone to stick around for him, and now that they did, he just wanted them to go.

“Want to talk about it?” Mark asked. In the beginning, Joaquin couldn’t even handle Mark being in the room with him after a nightmare. He guessed that this was what Ana would call progress.

“Just . . . I can’t remember,” Joaquin said, rubbing his hand over his face. He needed a clean, dry shirt. He needed a brand-new brain. “It just woke me up.”

That wasn’t true, of course. He had seen his sisters in the dream, Maya and Grace standing on the edge of the ocean, calling for him as the waves crashed harder onto the sand. He tried to get to them, but his feet were stuck in the ground, and he could only watch as they were washed out to sea.

“You were yelling for Grace and Maya,” Linda said gently. “Did you dream about them?”

Joaquin shrugged. “Dunno.”

He didn’t have to look up to know that Mark and Linda were exchanging a look over his head. If he had a dollar for every time they did that, he could move out and get his own place. And a car.

Two more people shoved away.

“Think you can get back to sleep?” Mark asked after a minute of silence. His hand was still steady on Joaquin’s back. Joaquin liked both of them, but he liked Mark’s ability to be quiet, to not always need an answer right away. Mark sometimes realized that Joaquin could say a lot more without using words.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Joaquin said, sipping at the water again. “Sorry I woke you up.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Linda said. “Mark was still awake. Reading something stupid on the internet, I’m sure.”

Joaquin smiled, more because Linda expected him to smile than because he actually wanted to.





GRACE


Adam’s mom decided not to press charges against Grace, which was nice of her. The school had a zero-tolerance violence policy, but it also had a zero-tolerance bullying policy, and since Adam had started all the drama, the school decided that he was technically responsible. (Also, Adam’s mom was a single mom and she was pretty upset with him for taunting Grace with the sound of a baby crying. There may have been some shouting coming from the principal’s office soon after she arrived at the school. Grace may or may not have heard it as her mother signed her out in the office.)

Of course, the school wasn’t thrilled with Grace, either, but she heard her mom say something about “hormones” and “baby” on the phone to them while she stood just outside Grace’s room, and apparently those were words that terrified school administrators. Grace was also fairly certain that she was the first pregnant girl in the history of the school, and she also knew that schools didn’t exactly get great ratings for having a high teen pregnancy rate.

In the end, they compromised. Grace would do home schooling for the rest of the year and then go back for her senior year in the fall. It sounded less like a compromise and more like a present, honestly. Grace would have been fine if she’d never had to walk down those hallways again. She almost hoped that her parents would send her off to one of those East Coast boarding schools that were always in movies. She could start over, surrender her old self, every single wrong decision she had made, and become someone else.

But she knew she couldn’t outrun her past. Or Peach. She would never be able to outrun Peach.

Her mom called Grace downstairs around eleven that Saturday morning. Grace was fairly certain that her mom had hit the limit of her patience for Grace’s stay-under-the-covers-and-binge-watch-bad-TV habit. The day before, her mom had made Grace change the sheets and clean out from under her bed, and “open a window—it smells like a hobbit hole in here.” (Grace’s mom wrote a thesis on Tolkien in college, so she referred to a lot of things as “hobbit holes.” Grace’s dad and Grace had learned to roll with it.)

“Here,” she said when Grace came downstairs. “I need you to return this for me.” She handed her a bag from Whisked Away, a cooking-supply store.

Grace let go of the banister, catching herself before she fell down the last step, and peeked in the bag. “What is it?”

“Something that needs returning.”