“That’s it,” Khadeja said, and shook her head, though she still smiled. “That’ll do, Mr. Flores. I didn’t come for a biology-and-holiness seminar.”
I realized how much I’d been talking and was immediately embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t—”
“Just be quiet,” she said, “just for a second.” Then she tilted her head and leaned in to me, our lips finding each other, again and again, until we left the rest of the bottle on the steps and found ourselves wandering back through the damp spring park. We’d made something, just sitting there together, meeting each other over and over, and now whatever it was we’d made echoed off the streets and buildings around us as we walked, our arms hooked into each other and cuddled so fierce that it was almost as if we’d created new bones that joined us at the ribs.
9
KAUI, 2008
San Diego
Summer Break was Coming and there was nothing in me that wanted it.
Summer break in Hawai‘i would be Dean walking around, getting shakas and fist bumps from strangers, high school girls hoping to get him to their beach party, Mom and Dad letting him lie around the house, all because for a few months he threw a ball through a hoop with other boys and got it in more than he missed. Noa, if he came home, too, would have his own room—they’d move me to the couch, guaranteed—and would mostly be in there alone, right, or in the garage like he’d been before, or out and away, seeing what new laws of the universe he could bend.
Summer break in Hawai‘i would be me with a job at a mall or a fast-food place or maybe at a hotel. If I was lucky. Whole ocean between me and climbing. Between me and being an engineer. Between me and Van.
“Come home,” Mom said, on the phone.
“And do what?” I asked.
“Whatever we need you to do,” she said.
Sometimes I don’t know if the fight finds me or I find the fight. Especially with my family.
“You mean sweep up the lanai, get Dad a beer when he wants, maybe even bag groceries?” I should have just shut up. But there was me and there was the rest of the family. “You don’t need me for that,” I said. “Someone already has that job.”
“You don’t ever think before you talk, do you?” Mom said. “You’re the only one that’s like this.”
“Like what? Independent? Guilt-free?” I said. “If this is about money, I can make more here. And spend less. I’ll send you a check every month, if you need it.”
“It’s not about the money,” she said.
“Mom,” I said. “In Hawai‘i? If you’re not making bank like a lawyer or something? Everything’s at least a little bit about money.”
I knew what it was really about. She could see what the mainland was doing to me, okay? What it was giving me. Big-sky space, opportunities, and oxygen to burn and burn and burn bright.
“I talked with a couple of your dad’s friends,” Mom said. “Kyle and Nate–them, you remember?”
I had no idea who these people were. “Sure,” I said.
“They’ve got a few engineering jobs. Some work they’re doing over in Pearl Harbor, one of them has a solar-energy company in the industrial area.”
She had me there. That did sound good, right, at least compared to anything else I’d get, late as it was in the semester. I swear, it was almost like no one in all of San Diego had a job. Offices full of consultants and advisers and part-time-appointment-only business cards for hire.
“You tell them thanks but I got it,” I said to Mom. “I can make it work here. I gotta go. Studying. It’s almost exam week.”
* * *
BUT WITH HAO AND KATARINA AND VAN, when the end came? You’d think there’d be speeches, right. Since it was before summer break and it would be months until we’d see each other again. We’d become each other’s habit, as much a part of the morning and night as brushing teeth. And just like that we’d cut ways for long enough that it almost felt like we wouldn’t be quite the same when we came back. But no one really said anything about it. We just rolled out of the two piles we’d made of ourselves, me Van Katarina Hao, our ripe tangle of denim and brambles of hair and hot-mouth yawning. Around us on the tabletops and counters a few beer cans gone halfsies, grease-freckled pizza boxes, the television remote by our toothbrushes. This was the us left over from the end-of-year parties and the party after those parties. Smearing now our stink all over the room and each other. We had different planes or cars to catch and there were hugs and see you soons. Van was heading home and Hao was heading home and Katarina was heading home. Then the medicated weather of summer San Diego opened up yellow and orange and polite in front of me and me alone.
I found what I needed to stay. Students here always rented their lives out over summer. They went to six-week language school in Nice or volunteer vacations in Oaxaca or wherever else the tear-away flyers in the student union suggested as a glossy possibility. And left behind? Their work-study jobs. Their three-person close-to-campus houses. An easy fit for a short time for the leftovers. Like me.
That was the summer I learned: almost anything becomes tolerable if you get yourself a routine.
One. Wake in the morning after two or three snooze buttons. Sit up in the blue sheets that haven’t seen a wash cycle since the day they were bought. The right mornings I’d pour myself into my running clothes and quick-step down the front stairs and run good splits in the sticky cold fog. Gasping for oxygen through a sucking wet shirt, way before breakfast. Bowl of cold milk and no-sugar cereal, a piece of fruit. Walk to my first job, an office job, fresh and hot clean from a shower, my legs stretching with the afterburn of the run.
Two. Choose between maybe too tight or maybe too low-cut, maybe it’s dowdy or maybe it’s infantilizing. But you have to wear something appropriate to the campus office job, okay? Elevators and office foyers, hallways. Dark, ridged, rounded wood. Me pulling from stacks of printed papers, efficient-fingering the data-entry key combinations. Form e-mails and easy chatter with my office-mates—there’s one other, a haole girl junior who takes smoke breaks every twenty-five minutes. On her return the first thing she always does is gather her textured, fake-leather purse in her lap, crinkle free a piece of gum, and bend it onto her tongue. It’s that smell and the sharp citrus of whatever they put in the bathroom hand soap. And she’ll ask where I got the blouse. The earrings. The necklace I hated but wore anyway. And on and on and on.
Three. Tuesday Thursday Saturday I hop a bus to Romanesque to wait tables for the dinner shift. Four hours of walk-running to the kitchen and back, memorizing and then scrambling and rememorizing the orders of patrons. Remember the specials, the allergen considerations, wine lists, and ironed white shirts and ass-sucking black pants, of course those help me get tips. Even with a body that feels as tita as mine.
Weeks go by, right, me not even knowing what the date was, just the day of the week. Which shifts I was working. Some nights I’d split sides of the couch with one of my dull roommates, the kind of haole girls that were up-and-coming members of the Future Trophy Wives of America. Bland as saimin without the sauce. Other nights I’d get itchy hands and grab my climbing shoes, find a closed-down crafts store or bricked-up condemned industrial block, and climb and climb and climb. Slip my toes into cracks or the ledges and dimples of architecture. Hook my fingers into dime edges, get up off the ground and breathe terror.