“Only in the elementary schools,” I said.
“I like her,” Van said to no one. I was blurred through the fog of four beers and didn’t remember how we’d even left the party together, really. The roar and dogmouth steam of the party and then the quiet night like a sheet thrown over my head, and now we were here. On the concrete embankment of a drainage ditch outside the entrance to a culvert big enough to swallow a truck. Above us, cars blew past on the boulevard. I was three thousand miles from Hawai‘i and anyone who knew anything about my brother, okay, and I’d never again need to be the sister of a miracle. And there was the cocaine, neat on the back of Van’s phone.
“First time?” Van asked.
“Don’t worry,” Katarina said, and she went, a quick dip and sniff. Stood and sucked in all the air like she was surfacing from deep ocean. She leaned her head all the way up to the sky and stretched out on the embankment. Let the crown of her skull rock against the concrete.
Van sliced another line and didn’t say much, and Hao said, “You or me?” and I realized he was asking me. I sniffed up the little mound Van had made and my blood rocketed up into my head and exploded into light. Happiness prickled across my everything. Friendship, I was thinking, right? Love. Feels like this.
Somewhere far away and right next to me Katarina said, “Let’s do the culvert. We can do the culvert. Guys, guys,” her sharp-teeth smile. A laugh from somewhere.
“The culvert.” Was it me or Van that echoed it? “Easy.”
And then we were there, down under the city in the gaping culvert, sprinting and whooping in the blackness. Running our hands along the endless baffle of steel ridges while our feet slapped through the murk. In my head I’d be like: There’s a turn just up ahead, if we go far enough we’ll see light. But the culvert just kept getting darker, the smell of batteries and old laundry. So dark my eyes were making things up: globes of red and blue flittering in my eyes when I blinked. Dry scratching and skittering on the walls in front of us, animals departing in the dark. The feeling that something was always just ahead. It could’ve been a cement wall. A fence of wire coming undone into a sheet of daggers. Didn’t matter, said my beating body. We’d boom through whatever headfirst, all hard bones and hot power. Locomotives. What was this train we’d made ourselves into so quickly? It was roaring me away from Hawai‘i. Then and now. And yes that was what I wanted: San Diego, yes; goodbye, the islands, the gods, legend of Nainoa.
We did this many times that year. We never found the end but we always found our way back.
* * *
I WAS AN ENGINEER AT SCHOOL, or anyway studying to be one. There were books, doorstop books with page-long equations. They chewed into my spine when I set them in my backpack and the titles were profound and sexy, right, like Fundamentals of Engineering Thermodynamics. Plus I was always in the labs: places with wood-paneled walls, old glass beakers, peeling tables of commonly used physics equations taped to the walls and corners of desks. And boys. Always, always boys. Whole classes, boys shaped like teddy bears or tree lizards. Always first to pull out their opinions, shove their knowledge at each other. I guess there’s many ways engineering could feel but mostly it felt like any place feels where there’s twenty boys and three girls. I had to go in with my back like a rod. Be the baddest bitch is what I said, in my head. And then did.
Sometimes I would sit by the other two girls in class—Sarah, Lindsey—but us being together felt like we were all doing it because we thought we needed to. And after a few choppy conversations? They were so haole—Idaho or North Dakota or whatever—it was obvious they’d never even sat that close to a brown person before. Meaning I was on my own, right, but whatever, I liked it. Until a few weeks into class we started group work and since I’d iced out the girls I was grouped with a bunch of boys.
Group work the way I remember: Phillip with his raging boner for the sound of his own voice, always the first to pipe up with the proposed solution. The rest of us sitting around the table as he drove forward with scribbling on the final sheet. I’d do all the homework problems myself separately—the only way I was sure I’d understand everything anyway—so he and I were always getting into it. It reminded me of Nainoa, the way when we talked now he had an answer for everything, just bulldozed whatever I was going to say until our calls degenerated into snark and cheap shots for the weak places in each other’s armor.
In group work it would go something like this: “Wrong frictional coefficient,” I’d say. And Preston or Ed would sigh, and here comes Phillip.
“No it’s not,” he’d say.
“Look,” I’d say, and start to write out the equation again, explaining how the final speed he’d calculated made no sense in the given context.
And if it became clear from arguing that I was right, Phillip would start talking about how what I’d said originally was phrased incorrectly, okay, and so what he was really talking about was this other thing. Or that he meant I’d balanced the equation incorrectly, not that the final answer was wrong. “The math you were doing before was in the wrong order.”
Or sometimes, through just enough grinding him down, I could prove that I was right. But by then Phillip would just come back with, “Calm down.” His hands up like I was pointing a gun at him. “You’re overreacting.” Preston or Ed would shrug and the shrug would feel like a nod and I’d want to fart all over all of them.
“Call of Duty 4 is coming out this weekend,” Preston offered once, as a white flag. Or maybe it was that other kid in the group. Gregory, was it? It didn’t matter who said it. They were all capable at any moment of saying something like that, right. I mean they even smelled the same. Cheese that had been licked by a dog and then left out overnight.
I sighed. “What,” I said, “is Call of Duty 4?”
Quiet for a second. The sense they’d all be happy if only I’d step out of the room and never come back.
“I’m definitely getting it,” Preston went on. “I’m going to stand in line tonight at Best Buy.”
“Who isn’t?” Phillip said, voice full of excitement.
“I’m not,” I said.
Silence again. A chair scraped, the circle closing just a little, me on the outside. As far as I was concerned, just go for it, boys. But not Ed. Ed the courageous one. He took his cue, when the others hunkered together. Came over and sat down at the desk next to me. His weak chin and fruit-punch-red lips. “Kaui,” he said, like it was a word he had practiced in the mirror. He hunched closer and nodded. “I’m not buying Call of Duty, either.”
“Oh God, Ed,” I said. “I’m not going to let you touch my vagina.”
* * *
PLENTY DAYS I’D lift my head from one of my textbooks, some opaque corner of the library. Faint smell of paper decaying into must, wood glue, and cold steel. Me greasy with lack of sleep, eyes charred from too much reading. And I’d realize it had been forever since I’d danced hula.
I figured there would never be hula here, but there was. San Diego had hella Hawai‘i people, closest you could get to the islands without falling in the Pacific, I guess. I went to find them once, I did. All the Hawai‘i kids in the university club. They did hula on the quad in the bright months of the year and it would’ve been so easy to get wrapped in with them. Their hapa Hawaiian, Japanese-Portuguese-Tongan, Spanish-Korean brown skin under pilling hoodies from high schools whose whole reputation I knew. Mynah-bird laughter and Nah for real, got musubi we’re making tonight or You heard the latest Jake Shimabukuro, was nuts, yeah, and barefoot in their dorm rooms, Bocha at night of course, all the other things that were as much a part of me as my bones, but that felt wrong now, somehow.