“Have you eaten today?” Grandma Young asked.
The question surprised Makani. As she struggled to focus, she touched her arm. The wound was sensitive and sore. “I don’t think I’ve eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours.”
“Oliver, would you get my purse? There should be a twenty in my wallet. I’d like for you to go to the cafeteria and pick up a few things. Something that would be easy for Makani to digest—soup or bread. And whatever looks good to you.”
“Sure, Mrs. Young. I’d be happy to.” He found the twenty and gave a low wave of goodbye to Makani as he disappeared.
“She’s my daughter. And I love her,” Grandma Young said quietly. “But she’s a raging narcissist who married an asshole.”
Makani had never heard her grandmother say the word ass. Under any other circumstance, it would have been hysterical. Right now, it only stung like the truth.
“None of this is your fault,” Grandma Young said.
“I know,” Makani whispered. A lie.
“Do you?”
Makani nodded. Another lie.
Grandma Young patted the space beside her, and Makani sat. She patted closer. Makani scooted, and her grandmother cradled her with a tilted head. They sat like this for several minutes. The affection felt painful. Makani’s whole existence was a mess of secrets and lies and pretending. Her grandmother was the only person in Osborne who knew why she was really here, yet she still loved her. Makani wanted to be comforted, but she didn’t deserve it.
Her grandmother released a weary sigh. “You lied to me.”
Makani stiffened. Terrified by her own transparency.
“You lied to me yesterday, and we’ll have to deal with that. I’m not sure how yet. This is all . . . a lot to process. But I love you, and I want you and Ollie to be safe—”
Oh God. Wait. Was this about staying safe from murderers or safe sex? Makani knew it was wrong, but she hoped her grandmother was talking about murder.
“—in all the ways possible for you to be safe.”
She wriggled out from her grandmother’s embrace.
“We’ll talk about it more soon,” Grandma Young said. “When I’m not in the hospital, and your boyfriend isn’t down the hall.”
A tiny particle of hope shot through Makani’s distress. It did seem like maybe Ollie was her boyfriend now. Or that he would be soon.
Her grandmother continued, “But I wanted to mention it, so that I can also say: I trust you. And I trust that you’ll be honest with me from now on.”
I trust you.
It rattled her. Those three words made Makani want to be more open and honest. They made her want to be the person that her grandmother believed she was.
Just then, a loud exclamation trumpeted down the hallway of the ICU. “You!”
Makani knew that voice. Her pulse quickened.
“You saved her!” Alex said.
“She was saving herself,” Ollie said. “Her grandma and I only helped.”
Makani could almost hear Alex’s grin. “Hell yeah, she was saving herself.”
“We’re just glad that you’re all okay,” Darby said.
They burst into the room, energetic bundles of joy and relief, and threw their arms around Makani in an enthusiastic group hug. She hadn’t realized how badly she’d needed them until this moment. Their embrace rejuvenated her spirits.
“How did you know we were here?” she asked.
“We heard that your grandma was hurt,” Darby said, balancing a box of gas station doughnuts. “Where else would you be?”
Alex leveled a saucy look at Makani. “No help from you, though. Next time, answer your damn”—she glanced at Grandma Young—“dang phone.”
“No next time,” Darby said.
“Amen to that,” Grandma Young said, and they bounded over to hug her, too.
Alex’s hair was woven into a strange and complicated configuration, and a loose braid flew into the air when she spun back around to Makani. “We brought treats.” She opened the lid to show off the sugary rings. “Maple for you, chocolate frosting for Ollie.”
Makani was touched they’d remembered his preference. Perhaps it was only penance for accusing him of being a serial killer behind his back, but she was happy to grant them atonement. Ollie stood near the door. He was holding a tower of Styrofoam cartons from the cafeteria, but he smiled, not in the least upset to be upstaged.
“Mrs. Young, this one is for you.” Alex pointed to a doughnut with orange frosting and black sprinkles. It was a Halloween doughnut.
“Because your house is always so seasonal,” Darby explained.
Grandma Young glowed with pleasure, even though it would be a few weeks before she could eat solid food. Everyone was talking at once, lively and loudly, when a nurse that Makani didn’t recognize popped his head around the door.
“We understand these are special circumstances,” he said, “but I’m sorry. Only two visitors at a time are allowed in ICU rooms.”
“Oh,” Makani said as the chatter halted. It was clear that none of them had considered this.
“That’s all right,” Grandma Young said. “Why don’t you go to the waiting room to catch up? I’m feeling a nap coming on, anyway.”
She did look tired, so Makani kissed her cheek. “Ollie and I will be back in a bit.”
Grandma Young thanked Darby and Alex for coming, and then Makani and Ollie followed them out. They were able to find a different waiting room from the main room the previous night. It was smaller, but the seating was more comfortable. Even better, it was empty of other people. Makani and Ollie took separate chairs beside each other, and Darby and Alex squeezed together into a love seat. They exclaimed over Makani’s arm.
“It’s not that bad, really,” she said.
“Not that bad?” Alex was aghast. “A berserk teenage boy broke into your house and tried to stab you to death. Get some fucking perspective!”
Everyone froze as Alex realized that Makani probably already had a decent grasp on the situation. And then she lost it. Alex’s laughter was crazed and contagious, the kind only borne from dark situations. Like giggles at a funeral, it infected them all. Out of the four of them, she seemed the closest to the edge. But perhaps Alex sensed Makani intuiting this fragility, because she grabbed a doughnut and waved it around. Feigning an air of composure. “Looks like we’re real cops today. Think we can crack the case?”
“Hey,” Darby said, licking glaze from his thumb as he took a doughnut for himself. “Stereotype. Brother of a cop right there.”
Alex rolled her eyes, but Ollie gave Darby a smile.
“Speaking of . . .” Darby was hesitant. “What are they saying? The cops?”
With occasional interjections from Ollie, Makani filled them in on the last twenty-four hours. But she tripped up when she reached the part about him being naked.
“Hold up.” Alex’s gaze whipped to Ollie. “A minute ago in this story, you were covered by only a blanket. Did you run downstairs in a blanket toga?”
“Yes,” Makani lied, as Ollie said, “Not exactly.”
Alex cackled. “Ohmygod!”
An inevitable blush spread across Ollie’s face.
“Please confirm, yes or no,” she said. “You, Ollie Larsson, chased after the Osborne Slayer in your bare essentials.” When he nodded the affirmative, Darby and Alex erupted with a fresh round of riotous laughter.
Sorry, Makani mouthed.
Ollie shrugged helplessly. You tried.
Makani understood where her friends’ laughter was coming from, so she wasn’t offended. It was the necessary moment of levity that would get them through the rest of the story. By the time she finished filling them in, their expressions had sobered.
“The part I can’t get over,” Darby said, “is David.”
Alex shook her head in equal disbelief.
“He seemed so normal and boring,” Darby continued. “Like one of those guys who’d fade into the landscape to live th
e same life as his dad—”
“And his dad before him,” she said.
Ollie stared at nothing. The shock of what had happened to them was circuitous; it kept coming back. “I guess you never really know what’s going on inside someone else’s head. His external life seemed dull, but his interior life . . . must be a lot more complex.”
“It must be angry,” Alex said.
He nodded. “Hurt.”
Makani hadn’t planned on telling them, not ever. Certainly not now. But as their words stirred inside her, they melded with her grandmother’s trust, and that powerful undertow of resistance—as familiar as it was formidable—suddenly released its grasp. Her mother didn’t care about her, but her friends did. She wanted them to know.
“He must have been planning this for months, maybe years,” Darby said. “What cracked? What makes a person go from fantasizing to actually doing?” And as he turned to Makani in bewilderment, she knew his next question—the big one—before he even asked. “And why did he go after you?”
Makani took a moment before answering, but her voice was steady. “Because I think he might have learned something about my past.”
Their silence was weighted with curiosity and pressure.
“My name,” she said, “wasn’t always Makani Young.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Alex’s eyes were saucers. “Ohmygod. You killed someone.”
“What?” Makani was taken aback. “No. God, no. If I’d killed someone, how could I even be here? Wouldn’t I be sitting in prison somewhere?”
Ollie and Darby stared at Alex in disbelief.
“Okay,” she said shamelessly. “Overreaction.”
Ollie turned his body toward Makani to encourage her. “Go on.”
Makani Kanekalau startled awake with a terrified gasp as Gabrielle Cruz and Kayla Lum burst into her bedroom. They yanked her to the floor. Makani’s skin smelled like body odor and day-old suntan lotion, and her hair was an untamed ’fro. She was wearing a tank top without a bra, and her pink pajama shorts were an old pair, see-through with age.
The girls pointed at her striped panties and laughed.
Gabrielle’s teeth flashed like razors through the darkness—the last image Makani saw before she was blindfolded. “Tonight’s the night, rookie,” Gabrielle taunted. The blindfold was too tight, but Gabrielle was the captain, so Makani didn’t dare complain.
Kayla hissed in her ear. “You’re coming with us.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex interrupted. “These girls kidnapped you? Were they your friends?”
“Teammates,” Makani said. “Sometimes friends, sometimes rivals. But they were seniors, and I was a junior. This was last October. My first year on varsity.”
Darby seemed startled that she’d been an athlete. “Varsity what?”
The swim team’s hazing rituals were notorious, and they’d been growing worse every year. Escalating. Now their turn, the senior girls of Kailua-Kona High School were hungry for revenge. The power of authority coursed through Gabrielle and Kayla, no doubt blinding them in its own way, as they tugged and shoved Makani down the hall.
Makani stiffened as her mother’s harsh laughter cut through the narrow space. “Sorry again about the locked door, girls.” A familiarity on the word girls indicated that she was on their side—and she wasn’t surprised that they were here. “Glad I was still awake to hear your knock.”
It was well known that parents were informed of the initiation ahead of time so that they could leave the front door unlocked for the older girls to get in. It was understood that the parents would play along, but that they’d also give their daughters the heads-up. That way, the rookies could already be dressed in their cutest pajamas with swimsuits underneath. That’s what parents were supposed to do.
Makani tensed in hopeful anticipation of another apology, this time for her. Or, at least, an excuse. But as she was pushed outside, all she heard was the click—and lock—of the door behind her.
“Umm. Your mom sucks?” Alex was both stating it and asking for confirmation.
Darby looked too sad to berate her.
Makani didn’t want to see Ollie’s reaction, so she kept going.
Gabrielle and Kayla prodded Makani outside and wrestled her into an open-air Jeep. Makani knew it was the captain’s car. Gabrielle swerved wildly, purposefully, down the street as Makani fumbled for a seat belt. The wind blasted her as she jostled from one side of the Jeep to the other, frightening her with the sensation that she was about to fall out. At last, she managed to strap herself in.
“Where are we going?” She tried to sound like she was fine, down for anything. But fear clouded her voice.
The girls just turned up the radio, and Makani’s neighborhood was left behind in a thundering wake of Beyoncé. The air was thick with humidity. The breeze was scented like salt water and sweet plumeria. Recognizing that she was being ignored, Makani lifted her blindfold for a peek. The dashboard clock said it was almost midnight. On the Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway, skinny palm trees were silhouetted by the night sky, the tallest vegetation amid the scrubland that characterized this side of the Big Island.
Only a few minutes later, Gabrielle cut the engine. The music vanished. Ocean waves boomed. “Time to deplane, rookie,” she said, and Kayla laughed at the dumb joke. Kayla was always trying to impress the captain. They grabbed Makani by the upper arms, one on each side, and steered her, barefoot, over a beach of volcanic rocks. Something punctured the ball of her right foot, and Makani hissed in pain.
Their grips tightened around her arms.
A crackling bonfire strengthened into a roar as Makani’s feet touched sand. Peals of girlish laughter swirled and eddied. She knew they were aimed at her.
“Are we the last to arrive?” Kayla called out, reveling in the attention.
Catcalls and whistles rose above the laughter. The blindfold was ripped from Makani’s eyes, and she squinted, holding up a hand against the sparks from the fire.
The whole team was there. The other rookies’ blindfolds had already been removed. They were laughing at her, too.
Even Jasmine was laughing. She and the other three rookies were dressed in bikini tops and board shorts. Their hair was done—Jasmine’s straight hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail—and some of them were even wearing makeup.
Mortified, Makani crossed her arms over her chest. She felt ugly and exposed. She’d swum with most of these girls since childhood. They’d seen her thousands of times in swimsuits, but it didn’t matter that her ratty tank top and pajamas covered more skin; she was the only one wearing the wrong thing. The private thing.
A rush of anger washed through her humiliation. Clearly, Mrs. Oshiro, Jasmine’s perfect mother, had warned her. Why hadn’t Jasmine said something? She was her best friend. They texted each other first thing in the morning and last thing before bed. They’d texted less than two hours ago, and Jasmine hadn’t given any indication of anything unusual. And she knew Makani’s mom couldn’t be relied on for things like this.
Gabrielle gestured at Makani’s pajama shorts. “Might as well take those off.”
Makani didn’t move.
“The captain said strip!” Kayla screamed into her ear. “Strip!”
“Strip! Strip! Strip! Strip!” the other girls chanted.
The intimacy of her underwear made Makani want to cry. Shivering, she pulled down her pajama shorts and folded them neatly on the sand.
The captain snatched them up and waved them triumphantly like a flag. “Let the games begin!”
Cheering broke out as the girls split into five teams, with two veterans to every rookie. The rookies’ veteran teammates were the same as their kidnappers. In block-lettered Sharpie, the captain wrote SLUT, NYMPHO, SKANK, and WHORE on the other rookies’ foreheads. The marker pressed against her skin, and Makani was informed that she was BITCH. If she responded to any other name, she’d have to take a shot.
Four vodka bottles were produced, tw
o in each of Kayla’s hands, and she waved them like pom-poms. Kayla swam freestyle. She had insane endurance, and her muscles rippled in the bonfire’s light. “What’s your name, Bitch?” she yelled.
“Bitch!” Makani said.
“I said, what’s your name, Bitch?”
“BITCH!”
“Okay,” Gabrielle said. “Makani, your spot is between Hannah and Jasmine.”
Makani took off.
“Wrong! Who’s Makani?”
She couldn’t believe that she’d already forgotten. Divers were precise. They performed well in the spotlight. Makani did not make mistakes. Everyone cracked up again as she downed the first repugnant shot, trying not to gag. She’d never liked vodka. It reminded her of nail-polish remover.
Gabrielle’s best stroke was butterfly. The captain had the team’s strongest arms, so when she clapped Makani’s back, it stung. “Take your place, Makani.”
Makani stood her ground. Swallowed her tears.
“Hey! The rookie bitch has learned her lesson,” she said.
“Great job, Bitch.” Kayla ruffled her curls. Few things grated Makani more than someone touching her hair. “Now get your ass in line.”
Makani jogged to the area between Hannah (SLUT) and Jasmine (NYMPHO).
“Are you okay?” Jasmine asked, placing a pitying hand on Makani’s arm.
Two days ago, they’d gotten matching gel manicures of alternating silver and blue. School colors. Now Makani wanted to shove Jasmine to the ground and cram her mouth with dry sand until she choked. Makani fixed her with a livid glare. Jasmine seemed surprised by the intensity, but she removed her hand in silent surrender.
They were not a team tonight. She would not lose to Jasmine.
The games involved running and performing their usual dry-land calisthenics—lunges, jumping jacks, push-ups, and sit-ups—only they had to do twice as many reps and with two veterans yelling in their ears, forcing them to repeat pledges of team loyalty and tricking them into responding to their real names. It was the veterans’ job to make their rookie finish last in as many rounds as possible.
Between each round, the rookies had to drink a shot of vodka. The last rookie to finish had to drink two. The veterans could drink as little or as much as they wanted, and they all took swigs before stalking toward their rookies with brown-paper grocery sacks.
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