"I am not ready to raise a kid."
"No one's signing you up for a Father of the Year award."
The universe is made of stories. And Maeve Fluer-Reyes had her own.
With pictured misfits in her life, the twelve-year-old was up for anything as long as she...
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MAEVE FLUER-REYES
I love the idea that there are parallel universes out there. Maybe we got it right in some, and maybe we didn't in others.
Somewhere, there might be a planet with two moons lighting up the night sky— my parents never having grown apart. I would be holding my Baba's hand as we gaze up at the celestial wonder, with Mama beside him. The three of us with hot chocolate in our hands, just sharing a peaceful moment together, even if the stars were all wrong.
I smiled sadly, the imagined scene unfolding like a movie reel in my head, a world where everything was a lot predictable, a lot better.
In short, I was daydreaming.
The fork, which I had been twirling all this time, soon felt odd to touch. I had to do a double blink, trying to wave off my floating cloud, the one I had fallen into, only half-alive to the men surrounding me. Kai had asked us to stay for lunch, and Mr. Reyes couldn't exactly resist my doe eyes, thus here we were all crammed around the big ol' table, ready to dig in.
Speaking of Mr. Reyes, he sat next to me, staring right into his lone plate of spaghetti—if one would know better, my nosy side began kicking in. But before I could ask, he pointed at something that made me wonder if I was seeing things.
As I whipped my head over, a slant of daylight filtered through the nearby window, catching the glass of one of the picture frames just perfectly. The glinting reflection danced across the surface, lightly grazing my skin in the process.
"When was that taken?" Mr. Reyes asked flatly.
Kaiden's voice dropped into a whisper. "It was her first day of school," He shared. "She was adamant about not going without one of us by her side. So Maa turned it into an occasion with photoshoots, all of us dressed in uniforms, and the house transformed into a school setting."
Nostalgia broke through, like the soundtrack to a reality show playing just for me. The photo wall, positioned in the heart of the dining area, was a visual diary of our frozen times. There we were—Kai and I, caught in goofy grins, and the one that never failed to tug at my heartstrings, Deeda's radiant smile. All frozen in time. Frozen in happiness. Frozen enough to never let it go.
"That one's from a snowball fight. She insisted on invading my closet...it's safe to say a certain giggling toddler in an oversized hat and boots ended up infecting a lot of tourists with baby fever."
Emotions surged within me like a stormy sea, but I shook my head, shooing the pesky tears, not ready to let them steal my limelight. The two men exchanged dialogues, the topic subtly moving toward other photographs, but my radar could tell that something was wrong.
"You good?"
I smiled at Kai. "Yeah."
I took a generous bite of my spaghetti, chewing slowly, for the sound to ripple through the space, casual above the gnawing feeling that made me want to run. It was weird, honestly, seeing them together like this, both so different yet tied to me in their own ways. "I could totally inhale this," I said in between a mouthful. "Feels like I haven't eaten since the dinosaurs roamed the Earth."
