Taylor Before and After Page 5

  “This is boring, bugs and guava,” Brielle said.

  Me, I was stupefied. I didn’t know Eli could write like a real encyclopedia. And I wanted to know more about the damselfly—what was happening to it, and why, and why Eli cared about it.

  But Brielle opened Eli’s dresser drawer.

  “Let’s get out of here.” I shut the laptop and said to Brielle, “This room’s a disaster, let’s go look at Vogue.”

  A few pages in, notes of gardenia, wood, and lilies lifted up between us. We looked at each other, her eyes wide, the damselfly completely forgotten.

  Square bottle, silver top … We rubbed our wrists all over the sticky strip, held up our wrists to each other’s noses.

  “That smells SO good on you.”

  “Even better on you.”

  “No, seriously, it was literally, like, MADE for you.”

  The perfume is from London.

  “Candy.”

  “Summer.”

  It sold out after Kate Middleton wore it to her wedding. It’s on back order. But Brielle is getting it. She’ll wait, she said. If there’s one thing she’s good at, she added, it’s at playing the long game.

  WINTER

  Prompt: Should states be allowed to file bankruptcy?

  Bankrupt.

  To me, that means beyond any hope.

  * * *

  “Here’s the thing I don’t get,” Dad ripped into Eli on one of the days he was home between Eli getting out on bail and going to the program. Dad didn’t get why Eli was driving Koa’s Jeep. “So why was it, why were you the one driving?”

  Of course Eli didn’t answer. He never answered when Dad “talked” to him like this.

  Dad always answered for him. This time Dad said: “It’s because your truck isn’t good enough, right? Because THIS life, the life I’VE GIVEN you, has NEVER been good enough! And where are all the ******* towels?!”

  There had been fights like this before. Over Stacy, over surfing—lots of fights about surfing. Eli would be at Sunset, where he wasn’t supposed to be, or get home late on a school night, or leave at what Dad thought was a “really bad time.”

  “I don’t get it,” Dad always says, “Is it ever enough? You’d rather be out there screwing around than doing anything else, like homework, or helping your mom…”

  I always look at Mom at this part. She doesn’t want to be dragged into it.

  “If you put into school a tenth of what you put into surfing,” Dad starts …

  And Eli says he’s passing all his classes.

  And Dad says, “Passing? ‘Passing’ is enough for you? Is it being with your friends, is that it, the big draw? That Koa kid, huh? The one who’s going to be the ‘pro’? He literally walks on water?”

  Then Dad goes into how he knows a lot of guys—A LOT of guys—here on the island who just never got over surfing, and now they don’t have a life, they don’t have a family anymore because they’re selfish, they never grew up, and they’re never going to. They stay boys forever.

  And at the end, Dad tells Eli the same thing: “I just want more of a life for you.”

  But that’s not what Dad said the last time, when Eli stood there in his worn-out Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt, that day between bail and the program, not telling Dad why he was driving Koa’s Jeep.

  This last time, Dad had said, “I wanted more of a life for you.”

  Wanted. Past tense.

  Like along with Koa and Tate, Eli’s life was over.

  FALL

  Prompt: “It’s human nature … people move on.”

  (Wanda Ortiz, whose husband, Emilio, was killed in the World Trade Center’s North Tower on September 11, 2001)

  This is the prompt we have every year. In every class. No matter what.

  For a long time after the planes crashed, Mom stayed home instead of going to work. That’s what Grammie Stella told me. Maybe not everyone moves on. Mom didn’t.

  I was too little to remember it, but Eli does. He said American flags were everywhere. In the Tanakas’ yard, even.

  If I were old enough back then, I would have done something. I would have helped. I would have gone on those rescue trips to find people trapped under the broken buildings so they could be with their families again.

  Like every September 11, today our teachers made us think and write and talk about it. We had the usual moment of silence, like always, and, like always, Tae-sung got detention for laughing.

  Every year on September 11, our teachers and parents and CNN and Nightly News and KHON2 all remind us that this is the most tragic event in American history.

  The darkest day of our lifetimes, they always say.

  WINTER

  Prompt: Earth.

  Will we get to keep the house? Mom and me, if Dad leaves?

  She’ll never want to give up the dirt.

  At first, it wasn’t good, the dirt. For months, she planned, plotted, and picked up starts from the farmer’s market. But nothing would grow. It died within days.

  “It’s not working,” I told Mom a few months after we moved in. I think she started working at it our very first morning.

  “It just takes time,” she told me. Hawaii’s growing season is year-round, and once she got the dirt going, her starts and vines would thrive.

  Mom worked and worked at the earth. She turned it, worked in nitrogen, checked the drainage.

  “Mom, just rent a plot,” I told her. “There’s a community garden right on Mānoa Road. I saw it. The dirt’s good.”

  “The hard thing is the right thing,” she said, tossing a withered kalo start in a heap. “Blight,” she said.

  Eventually, she asked Mrs. Tanaka, whose cabbage and cucumber tripled next door, for advice. And when Mrs. Tanaka helped her raise the beds, check the soil’s pH, then add sulfur, Mom’s Mānoa lettuce tripled, her lilliko’i tendrils reaching leeward.

  FALL

  Prompt: Lockers.

  There’s going to be food carts! At Carnivale. Funnel cones, and corn dogs, and caramel corn, and cotton candy. Churros and hot pretzels. And everything else you can’t find on O‘ahu. Sophia already booked them, Brielle told me.

  Then, “Hey, Tay,” Brielle said in front of everyone, “we should swap locker combinations!”

  When you come to OLR, the first thing they tell you is to never, ever swap locker combinations.

  But Brielle and me, we did.

  Today in Latin, I drew her a masquerade mask with ribbons and the word Carnivale written at the top.

  The door opened the first time. An empty Diet Coke can fell out, and I crammed it back in with all the other stuff. You would think it would be clean in there, in Brielle Branson’s locker, but it was kind of a total mess—peeling wallpaper with pink leopard print, a smudgy mirror with a drooping ribbon and a deep pink smooch in the corner, empty gum packs, fuzzy-topped pens, lots of lip glosses, bangles, and Post-it Notes, some loose pages of math homework, Juicy Couture perfume and a paisley pencil pouch all opened and spilling out on a shelf, a sequined clutch, crusty Bed Head hairspray, an American history book that looked brand-new, a wadded-up twenty-dollar bill, an after-school detention slip from the very first week of school. There was also an iPhone just sitting there, silver and black, with a turquoise case. It wasn’t the one she always used. That one had a pink case with a sequined bow.

  You wouldn’t think a person like Brielle would have a locker like that. Out of control. But whatever. All the stuff in there was so great.

  I put the note under a magnet with a sparkly crown that said QUEEN OF EVERYTHING on the inside of the door. And after Latin, I went to my locker to see if Brielle had left me a note, too.

  She hadn’t.

  Yet.

  Probably, she couldn’t get out of class. Maybe she had a test or something.

  She’ll leave me something soon, though. I know it.

  WINTER

  Prompt: Why?

  Why didn’t the airbag save Koa, like it saved Eli?
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br />   Why didn’t the seat belt save Tate, like it saved me?

  Why WAS Eli driving Koa’s Jeep?

  Does he ever wonder about us? What we’re doing at home? How we’re making it? If we’re making it? Is he sorry about what he’s done? About what he’s done to us? How because of him, now, any second, the Tanakas could call the Five-0, and somebody else could go away?

  I could be all by myself. I could have no one. Eli could take everyone away from me. Dad’s voice is pretty much raised all the time now. “This isn’t working.” “The world just doesn’t stop when something bad happens.” “It keeps going.” And “We need to get through it.”

  But Eli doesn’t have to hear any of it.

  Li Lu’s parents never fought like this. And Brielle could never, ever have imagined it in a thousand years.

  Noelani missed out on everything.

  Getting Cut was probably the best thing that ever could’ve happened to her.

  WINTER

  Prompt: Caught up.

  Macario would be there. At Koa’s service. And his aunties and uncles and tutus dressed in white.

  And Miss Wilson would go. Mr. Montalvo, all the teachers, Sister Anne.

  Stacy would be there, in exactly the wrong thing: tight red dress maybe, off-the-shoulder, choker. And she’d completely forget how she made Eli drive back from Pipeline that night, how she was so sure he’d cheat on her with the line of winter girls just waiting to grab him.

  She wouldn’t be the only one who didn’t fit there. Most of the people who were crying and hugging didn’t know Koa at all.

  Would Li Lu go? She had a thing about borrowing other people’s drama. She lived for it.

  Me, I wish I could go. Me, I would like to say goodbye to Koa.

  But I can’t. I know. It isn’t right.

  If I even needed a reminder, it was the look on Koa’s mom’s face, the look she gave me by the papayas in Kokua Market. She must wonder how I’m alive, standing right there by papayas while her son is only ashes. She must hate me for it.

  Koa, low shorts, hair in his eyes.

  Koa and Tate, they won’t ever go to Kokua Market again. They won’t eat another papaya, or graduate with the rest of their class, or vote for president, or get married, or have kids or cats or their own front yard.

  Koa’s mom must be so unforgivably angry at Eli, at me. Tate’s mom, too.

  I will have to say goodbye to Koa in my own way. I will remember him that first day here at OLR, hair in his face, the first person to say hi to me, warning me about the Detention Convention as he rushed off to get his day over with, so he could catch the lineup at Pipeline.

  WINTER

  Prompt: How many words is a picture really worth?

  From the posts and messages, I could piece together a lot.

  There wasn’t anything about Koa’s actual funeral. But there was information on the wake.

  It was at Moanalua Gardens, so many people spilling out from under the big white tent.

  The pictures were taken from far away—white lanterns hanging from the Hitachi tree, just like over the Okotos’ door.

  I remembered when Mrs. Tanaka’s brother died, a white lantern hung at their door, too. Mrs. Tanaka said it was made from washi paper, fiber boiled out of shrubs, the same used to fold origami.

  What would Koa have thought of all the white? White flowers were everywhere, not ginger ones, like I thought there’d be. Koa’s family was all dressed in black, juzu beads and white envelopes in their hands. Those envelopes were filled up with money for the Okotos. But that money wouldn’t bring back Koa.

  Koa Okoto would never catch the perfect wave at Pipeline.

  He had been cremated. Turned from a human being into char that could have once been anything. That’s where the pictures end, where his life ended. I couldn’t find out what happened to him, to the ashes he had become. Maybe nothing yet. Maybe the Okotos are still holding on to him.

  Sophia was in a lot of the pictures. She was: black dress, knee length, flared hem, scoop neck, probably Stella McCartney, hair in a side part, swept back.

  Brielle was: black wraparound dress, the kind Grammie Stella told me makes her look twenty pounds lighter but definitely not the kind I’d think of Brielle wearing.

  I couldn’t stop myself. I clicked on her FB page. I told myself to be ready for the happy, beautiful Bransons, all four of them together, shopping in Sydney, hiking the Outback, snorkeling the Gold Coast, cozying up with kangaroos.

  But there was nothing about that. The last thing Brielle had put up was from December 10—a repost: “The prettiest smiles hide the deepest secrets.”

  That was random, even for Brielle.

  Sophia didn’t have any Aussie pics, either. Her last post was December 10, too—a selfie at Sandys, her knees pulled up to her chest, no smile. Blue filter.

  FALL

  Prompt: What do the candidates for governor have in common?

  If there’s one thing the candidates have in common, it’s how easy it is for them to fail. One fail, and they’re over. Out forever. For sure. Their past, their policy, their parents’ nationalities, their hair, the affair their assistant’s husband had—everyone’s destroyed till there’s no one left.

  Miss Teen USA got voted off Survivor. She only lasted three episodes. At first, she had made a good alliance with Malcolm. But at Tribal Council, he was the one who threw her under the bus and voted her out. FOR NO REASON. And they let Russell stay. They kept the total bully.

  This morning, I was looking everywhere for my math homework, and Brielle came up to my locker and asked what I was doing after school.

  I told her I didn’t have plans yet. And she said we could hang out.

  Out of nowhere, Li Lu appeared. “Tay, seriously,” she spluttered, “did you forget we were going to watch Gossip Girl at my house after school…?”

  Gossip Girl. It was so seventh grade. Okay, we had talked about maybe watching it, not for sure. And we always did that stuff.

  And Li Lu said, “Whatever,” and stormed off to honors algebra.

  “Whatever.” Brielle said it the way Li Lu did. Then, “So, your house, then? Will Eli be there?”

  Eli was never home after school. He was always at Sunset, or hanging out at Tate’s or Koa’s, or working, which I was pretty sure he was doing later. That’s what he told Dad when Dad told him to mow the lawn.

  And that reminded me of Dad. He was going to bust an artery if I forgot my math. I could just hear him: “There are two kinds of people in the world, Taylor—people who keep track of their math homework…” I started looking for it again from the top, told Brielle that Eli would be working.

  “Where does he work?” she asked, and I told her the board shop.

  “Which one?”

  The bell rang. I was trying to think if my math could be in my Latin binder maybe? “Which one what?”

  “Which board shop?”

  “Dave’s.”

  I opened up my Latin binder and flipped through all the loose pages. The math was right there—thank you, mullet baby Jesus. The last thing I can deal with right now is Dad going off the deep end and our whole family falling apart.

  Everybody was on me already—Li Lu more than anyone. She keeps making me choose between Brielle and her. It’s getting so annoying.

  WINTER

  Prompt: If …

  Sophia’s blue filter. What does it mean, her selfie at Sandys?

  And Brielle? “The prettiest smiles hide the deepest secrets.” Today, she is writing and writing. She hasn’t looked at her phone even once.

  If …

  If Dad finds out, he’s going to kill me.

  Or

  If I hadn’t skipped school yesterday, I wouldn’t have had detention today.

  There is nothing even kind of Breakfast Club–y about in-school here at Our Lady of Detention. It is an all-out lockdown, with no life-changing relationships, no solidarity against a common enemy, no essay, even. It’s a room with n
o posters, no plants, no map, no globe. There’s just a clock that’s rigged to move five times slower than normal, a slice of glass that might be technically called a “window,” and the Detention Convention himself.

  The Detention Convention never smiles. He calls you by your last name, and if you do anything—ANYTHING—even kind of wrong, like say one word, or someone texts you or something, he gives you another detention. People say the pink pad is a permanent part of his hand.

  The worst part (other than the Detention Convention and sitting in there at the crack of dawn) is that you don’t do anything. Literally.

  And that … that is honestly awful.

  We sat for a whole entire hour, watching the clock: Myla Marin, who had too many tardies, Ula West, who “talked excessively,” and Riley Watanabe, who dropped an f-bomb in science when he spilled hydrochloric acid on his new Nikes. But Li Lu wasn’t right about the ice heads.

  A whole hour of nothing. It definitely wasn’t worth it, wandering around the Ala Moana mall yesterday by myself. Cinnabon didn’t even taste as good as it used to.

  “Going to school is your job,” Dad would tell me. If he found out, and if I had to give him a reason—I just needed a break.

  He would say he doesn’t get a break. That he’s been back at the college for three weeks already. Then, “There are two kinds of people in the world, Taylor: responsible ones who do their jobs and those who take breaks.”

  Responsible people. Ones with a kuleana.

  Even now, Dad still hasn’t asked me.

  And something like this would just remind him.

  And if he asks me, I honestly don’t know the answer. I’ve asked myself a million times.