“You’re, what, rehydrating or something?” Grant asked, nodding at the XL cup DeShawn was drinking from. “This kid’s always trying to rehydrate, but first thing in the morning he’s drinking Diet Coke.” They was roommates, white-ass Grant with his Stockton wigger thing going on and DeShawn from L.A.
“I need the caffeine,” DeShawn said, like he was apologizing.
“Drink coffee, fool.”
“Tastes like your mama.”
“Come on,” Grant said. “I’m tryna relax, here.”
“You been relaxing all semester,” DeShawn said, “with your history classes and all that. All I can think about is Business Calc. Midterm in two days and I’m supposed to study tonight? My brain feels like I been hotboxing.”
“Like a balloon, right? Like if your neck wasn’t holding it on.”
“Yeah.”
“Grant’s head always feels like that,” I said. “I bet he was the kid eating glue in the back of the class.”
“Him in elementary with his big ears,” DeShawn said. “I can see it.”
“Elementary nothing,” I said. “I’m talking about last week.”
DeShawn and Grant both cracked up, like howling, bending forward over the table, other guys, too.
That was it—that feeling. I was starting for get inside something then, I was part of those guys. We was out on that court bleeding and scraping and working together, the way they’d say, Good, get that next pass a little stronger, thread that here, or when I did finally sink a few jumpers they was like, That, do that again, every time—I knew they believed in me. They saw what I was, what I was gonna be.
What was back home? I was calling Mom and Dad from the start of the semester, usually sitting on the couch we’d shoved under our lofted dorm bed, the couch all avocado checker pattern with cigarette-burn freckles and the wall opposite with the mini-fridge. Chicken-scratch sound of my roommate, Price, writing out his homework—he didn’t get a laptop, just like me, maybe the only two guys at school without computers, it’s like I never get a break from being reminded where I came from—and I would talk with everyone on the phone, Mom Dad Noa Kaui, one at a time.
“So, what, how’s the weather?” I would ask Dad, every time, because I know he loved to laugh at my cold ass and say, “Brah, it’s all good, every day, me and Mom and Kaui and Noa at the beach last weekend, sun in the morning and rain at night, just perfect. How’s the land of shave ice? You lick a pole and get your tongue stuck yet?” And then he’d giggle and say, “Nah nah nah. Tell me how’s it going.”
And he would tell me small-kind something, and then Mom would get on and she’d do the same, but both of ’um pretty quick got to the point where they was all like, You gotta see what your brother is doing back here. Every time, every call, it always got there, no matter what I did. They’d say how even the teachers didn’t know what for do with Noa, he was burning through upper-division Kahena classes whether it was chemistry or Hawaiian language or AP calculus like it wasn’t nothing. How had him in the Honolulu Advertiser for his perfect SAT scores and there was all these fat envelopes and e-mails and calls from colleges storming into the house, how they was trying for get him taking classes at the university already. And they was saying probably Stanford was where he was going.
I hated this part of the call. I wanted for know and didn’t want for know what he was doing. Especially what he was doing doing, his kahuna abilities, right? But still yet, when Mom was talking to me, she’d usually be all about some award Noa was getting, his new special classes or whatever, and yet they never said nothing about that other part of him, the part we all still didn’t fully understand. “Sometimes I wish I knew what was going on inside of him,” Mom would say. “Does he tell you anything?”
First couple of times she did that—asked me about him, like me and him were talking with each other behind her back, the way normal brothers do, I guess—I thought she didn’t understand how things was.
I snapped this one time. “You know,” I said, “maybe I don’t believe in him so much anymore. Not the way you do.”
“There’s nothing to believe,” Mom said. “You’re going to lie about what you’ve seen with your own eyes?”
“I’m not saying what is or isn’t here,” I said. “But how come I never felt anything like that myself? How come if there’s gods they’re not in all of us?”
“Where’s this coming from?” Mom asked. “Haoles getting to you? You never talked this way before.”
“It’s just I figure you’re not seeing the right things,” I said. “Full-ride scholarship, Mom. People that come here go early in the NBA draft. Every year. Maybe you’re not gonna see it until I bring in that first fat check, though.”
“All I asked is whether Noa was talking to you or not,” Mom said. I let her squash it. Maybe I don’t feel anything the way you feel it because I’m the only one paying attention to how the world works, I wanted for say.
“Noa doesn’t tell me nothing special, Mom.” Which was true. When me and him talked on the phone—you could hear Mom and Dad make him take his turn—we’d be all like, What’s up, nothing, heard there’s gonna be some new laboratory at school, yep, I guess you and the team got a road trip coming up, yep, cool, it’s raining here right now, which sucks, I wanted to go to the beach, you got any other news, nah, me neither.
But check it: there was always this pause. That’s how I knew there was stuff happening inside him that he wouldn’t tell no one about. But I couldn’t ever cross over from where I’d gone to where he was. I don’t know why. Take me back there now and I’d jump that gap in a minute, even if it took some mahu-style crybaby speech, some sort of over-the-phone hug. You take me back now and I’d do it like nothing.
On those family calls usually I would get Kaui last. I bet Mom-guys was bribing her, like she couldn’t go Prince Kuhio mall unless she talked to me, but honestly talking with her was the best part. Surprised me as much as anyone.
I remember this one time when she was, like, “Did they do that thing where they start asking you about Noa?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Every time! Why do they always do that?”
“I swear sometimes it’s like they forget I’m here, Dean,” she said. “They tell you how I got on Principal’s List at Kahena? Or the National Honor Society?” She was still, what, fourteen or whatever, but I was always like, whoa, because of how much she sounded like she was already out the house. Almost like I could hear her comparing mortgage rates and checking off a packing list for a New York City conference with a glass of wine and Sudoku in one hand while she’s still talking story with me in the other.
“I dunno,” I said. “I think so.”
“Don’t lie.”
“What about hula?” I asked, anything to have us both not be pissed for a minute.
“Hula’s good,” she said. “I’m in the performance group. We did a thing at Ala Moana last weekend, and we have another performance coming up at the Hilton. Like we even get paid for it, but we have to give it back to the hālau.”