Now, it’s everywhere. If that boy was looking for someone to notice that he was fed up, that he was alone, that he didn’t fit in, that he wasn’t making it, well, now the whole world has noticed. It’s on CNN and Fox and ABC and CBS and MSNBC, and it will be on Nightly News tonight, and even People.com. It will be here, on O‘ahu, on KHON2—instead of the flooding, the caved-in roofs, the mold and holes and uprooted trees, the delayed flights and rerouted streets.
Even here at OLR, we had a lockdown drill during second period just because of that boy super far away. Sister Anne’s voice came on over the loudspeaker, saying staff is available in the counseling office. We were reminded to report anyone without a uniform or a name badge. There’s a security guard, one with a hunched back.
Is it just me, or is it all of us who thinks this kind of thing is happening more and more?
That the darkest days of our lives are all stacking up on top of each other.
SPRING
Prompt: Imua!
(“Forward”)—King Kamehameha I
How have those families moved forward?
It’s been three months and seventeen days since the shooting.
How have the sisters lived their lives without their brothers? How have the parents kept on living without their kids? How have the ones who were left behind, how have they moved forward?
Maybe time just went on. Maybe one day turned into another day, and that day turned into another, until the days turned into a month, and a month turned into three.
Maybe doing something good pushed them through. They started groups and movements and triathlons and charities. They organized school safety plans, tried to change laws, and aired PSAs. They worked. They fought so the ones they had lost wouldn’t disappear forever.
I’m doing it, too. I’m fighting. The blueberries, I think they’re finally kicking in.
This morning, before there was any light, the rooster up the road started crowing. And I woke up, and heard while the mynah birds woke up, too. Then from rooftops all around, doves started cooing. It was a chorus of birds, singing together. The sky lightened, and the first shades of red melted the mist over the Mānoa mountaintops, filling my eyes, all my insides, with that light, that glow, that promise that only morning can bring.
I am … awake.
I am healing, but I am hurt.
I am hurt, but I am healing.
SPRING
Prompt: “Once you know … you can’t unknow … It’s a burden that can never be given away.” (Alice Hoffman, Incantation)
I wrote it all down, exactly how it happened. I hated my brother. I couldn’t get how he was still alive. I would never move forward. I would stay stuck forever. I thought I deserved to. Li Lu was right.
Dad said he had put in an application back on the mainland, and I asked him where on the mainland, and he told me New Mexico, and I asked him why there, and he said maybe it would be good for us all to dry out in the desert for a while.
“We already tried the desert,” I told him. Arizona. The desert didn’t work, because we just moved on to Oregon.
“All of us? Mom, too?” I asked him. And he said, “Of course Mom, too.”
“What about Eli?” I asked.
And Dad said he just didn’t know about what was going to happen to Eli, and he didn’t know if he would even get the job, or if he did get the job, if he would take it. He’s just thinking about it, he said.
“But we might just leave him here?” I asked. “We’d leave Eli here, alone? By himself?”
Why do I care about leaving Eli behind? He didn’t care when he changed our lives forever.
“How much percent?” I asked Dad, “One hundred? Or more like ten?”
Dad thought for a second: “Thirty,” he said.
I watched him drive away along the monkeypods. Mom loved them so much. They were like giant umbrellas, trying to protect us in Mānoa.
Way down the hill, Honolulu stood up tall under the sun. It looked clean and quiet and calm from far away. If we move to the desert, we won’t have monkeypods or hibiscus or plumeria. We won’t have Waikiki, or Sandys, or Sunset, or Ala Moana. I’ll get a new school, like I begged Dad for before, only now I don’t know if I want that. I’ll leave Henley behind. And I’ll never meet anyone else like him. But leaving Eli, we just couldn’t.
SPRING
Prompt: What’s in your pocket?
It’s all over. Just like that.
After three months and twenty-seven days, after that night that changed everything forever, no one is looking at me with blame and hate. They aren’t whispering to each other in the halls about me, or pointing at me at lunch. They aren’t judging my life anymore.
It’s like it never happened at all, like Eli never drove Koa and Tate back from Ehukai, like he never rolled Koa’s Jeep off Kamehameha into the pineapple plants, and crushed his best friends, and is in jail because of it.
All of a sudden, all people are talking about is Brielle, who isn’t here today and, now that I think about it, wasn’t here yesterday, either.
Already, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s plastered Brielle’s dad all over the front page. And over and over, the KHON2 morning news has showed him being hauled out of their mansion in Kahala for tax fraud or something.
It’s everywhere—Brielle’s mom, hiding her face with big sunglasses and a hat, hustling out of her lawyer’s office on Kahala Avenue.
The cheerleaders, the sand volleyball girls, the emo group, even—everyone is talking all about it.
But they’re not talking about me.
People move on.
The thing that really wrecked me is the thing that saved me, too.
SPRING
Prompt: No Child Left Behind.
Brielle is back.
People are saying, “Oh my god” and “She looks HORRIBLE” and “They’ve lost EVERYTHING” and “Her whole life was fake.”
Someone who lives way over in ‘Ewa was saying she saw Five-0 tape all around the Bransons’ iron gate, and all kinds of cop cars, and IRS SUVs, even. And that doesn’t make any sense, because how would she know from the other side of the island? And someone else said, “There goes her mom’s BMW, for sure.”
Somehow, over just a couple days, Brielle had lost a lot of her usual tan. Like Eli did when he came home from rehab. But her hair was still brushed, and her suede shoes were brushed, and her shirt was ironed, and her socks were still pure white.
I couldn’t forget how, in the beginning, when Eli’s accident first happened and Dad made me come back to school, my hair was brushed, too, and my shirt was ironed, and my socks were pure white. In the beginning, you try to pretend that everything’s still normal. You can pull it off for a while.
But me, I saw them—the black half-moons hanging under her eyes.
SPRING
Prompt: Karma.
“I’m not going,” I told Dad this morning. “I’m staying here, with Mom and the dirt. You can’t make us leave Eli.”
Dad stared at me. “What?” He stopped stirring his coffee.
“I’m not moving,” I said. “I’m staying here. I’m not starting over. I’m not like you.”
I felt strong. Free.
Maybe Henley’s family would have us, if we couldn’t keep the house. I could get a job like Fetua. And Mom could help Nisha grow lettuce and lilliko’i.
“I’ll have some of that coffee, too,” I told Dad.
He slid over the pot.
Things were already different. Better. Maybe someday I’d get it, the Beckham tote. Stacy said she’d help me. I just wasn’t sure I wanted it anymore.
“Hey!” Soo called out across the hall before class. “What’s your number again?”
She said she’d accidentally deleted it from her phone, and did I want to have lunch tomorrow?
And I told her thanks, but I’ve been eating with Henley and Ryan Ling, who knows all about the Beatles and draws choose-your-own-adventure graphic novels. And Li Lu’s been sitting
with us, too. She gave me her almond cookie.
Soo sat in the courtyard right in Brielle’s old place, with Puakea in Soo’s old spot. And Brielle sat by herself with an unopened green tea smoothie, and I wondered how that was for her.
I did give Soo my number, though. She’ll IM and PM and text me “hey” and heart emojis, and I’ll have hers and tons of other friend requests when I log back into Facebook for the first time in forever.
It’s not all perfect. My arms still feel longer than they really are, and Mom is under her quilt again, and Eli’s in the O‘ahu Community Correctional Center. The bills keep piling up on the counter near the fruit bowl, and desks rest empty in the back of English 12.
If the omamori works, maybe I’ll pass math, or at least sleep a whole night without bolting awake from dreaming of the Jeep rolling over and over.
But today, after school, I’m going to Li Lu’s house. She asked if I wanted to catch up on Gossip Girl, but I asked if we could actually do our math instead. First, we’ll fight. I’ll tell her, “Brielle Branson? You always HATED her. I was already DYING, and that whole thing WRECKED me.”
And she’ll bring up all the things I had written about her in my notebook.
Then I’ll be sorry, and she’ll be sorry, and we’ll put on the “Friends” and “Forever” lockets we’d told each other we’d gotten rid of but really hadn’t. We’ll pick up our dreams right where we left off—deciding to sign up for the sunrise or sunset horseback riding session at Camp Mokule`ia, getting coconut lime pie at Buzz’s after graduation. We’ll sneak off to Waikiki and take pictures of tourists when they’re not looking and laugh when we show each other, and get $10 manis at Paul Mitchell. Then we’ll start high school. Finally. She’ll take Mandarin, but I’ll take French, and we’ll make matching vases in ceramics. We’ll get back into hula, and we’ll tell each other everything. We’ll act like it’s the way it’s always been, and maybe someday it actually will be.
But for Brielle, it was all just starting.
I saw her.
Standing in front of the locker-room mirror, a T-shirt and polo under the school sweatshirt nobody ever wears. And the skirt, its pleats hanging hopelessly soggy and sad.
She didn’t see me at the other end by the sinks, tossing a tissue into the trash can on top of a ripped-open box of Diurex Ultras. Water pills. She was too obsessed with herself in the mirror by the benches, her sweatshirt pulled up with one hand while she pinched some skin at her waist with the other, mascara tears rolling down her cheeks.
SPRING
Prompt:
It’s the Detention Convention. He’s subbing.
“Yo, watch out…” Koa had told me.
Miss Wilson is sick, the Detention Convention told us. She was too sick, even, to leave plans for class. There’s not even a prompt. He said we’d start by pairing up and sharing what we’d written in our notebooks about yesterday’s prompt.
Miss Wilson would NEVER make us share! She always said our words are private!
And Henley, the ONE person I would share my words with, is gone watching Orchid’s class play.
First and most importantly, I told myself, I am definitely NOT going back to detention. To that room with no posters and no plants, with the rigged clock and the slice of window. There was no way I was going to sit for sixty whole minutes again before the first bell rang and do absolutely nothing with all the ice heads.
So I looked to Isabelle, then to Hannah, but Isabelle was already pushing her desk over to Hannah. Amelia had paired up with Liam. Even Tae-sung had a partner.
In front of me, Brielle wasn’t moving at all.
The Detention Convention came over, the pink pad in his hand, and said, “Harper and Branson, is there a reason you aren’t working together?”
Neither Brielle nor I said anything back. There were a billion reasons the two of us weren’t working together.
He held out the pink pad so we could see it. “Well, if there’s no reason, let’s get to work.”
Slapping the pad against his thigh, he walked to the front of the room and glared at us from there.
I flipped my notebook to yesterday’s prompt. Still, the Detention Convention was up there glaring.
Almost painfully, like she had a broken back or neck or something, Brielle turned around. Her notebook rested on her knees—lines and lines and lines of nothing.
She looked up, and though I expected her eyes to be as empty as her notebook, they were filled up instead with a thousand arms reaching out.
Her heart, it was barely pumping.
It was everything I thought I’d hoped for. For Brielle to hurt as badly as I had because of her. It was all right in front of me, what I thought I had wanted so much, even more—KHON2’s picture of the Brazilian bikini model who’d had Mr. Branson’s baby on December 10. The night before Brielle Cut me. The last day Brielle posted that random quote on Facebook.
That was the real reason there was no Carnivale. Because things were completely unraveling. Brielle was never in Australia. She made up that rumor herself and was probably just home, in her house, suffocating, waiting for the trade winds to breathe life back into her.
I never thought it would go this far—with the cheerleaders whispering about how her mom stayed out partying till three in the morning, even on Tuesdays, with football players from the college. People Brielle never talked to are saying the pineapple people kicked Mrs. Branson out of the `Ohana for paying off the bikini model to keep the baby a secret, and that she and Brielle moved into an apartment in `Aiea, where they slept on mattresses on the floor. People said that Sophia had her acceptance taken away from USC and was couch surfing with friends and had gotten gonorrhea. Some of it was probably true, and a lot of it was made up, but all of it would feel the same to Brielle.
Brielle was dying. Part by part. Cell by cell. Even a pinprick would be the very end of her. All I’d have to do was something tiny, invisible, passive-aggressive. Like tell her that her khakis seemed kind of tight, ask her if they were Sophia’s.
The Detention Convention loomed over Tae-sung, then cast a This-Is-Your-Last-Chance glance at Brielle and me.
“I can’t go back there,” Brielle rasped, the thousand arms reaching out from her eyes. “To detention. I can’t.”
I remembered that day in January when Brielle bragged to Isabelle about how fun detention was. I wanted to make myself believe that she was two-faced, a liar, that she should be sent back to detention. I remembered her telling me about Chance Cameron’s chapped lips and the lifeguard stand at Sandys.
“I can’t,” Brielle said again.
The air between us was thick—gardenia, wood, and lily.
I mumbled, “Karma…”
What was I doing?
“Karma…” I said again, super slow. Was I really doing this? Helping her after she lied to me, stabbed me in the back, used me, said Eli should have died, told me I’d never move forward.
The Detention Convention was still watching. Isabelle and Hannah were chatting away. So were Amelia and Liam, Tae-sung and Evan.
Brielle rubbed the notebook’s spiral between her fingers, nails chewed down, cuticles rough.
I couldn’t help remembering being in Sister Anne’s office, smoothing my skirt pleats, my own nails red and raw.
The hard thing is the right thing, I heard Mom say from far away.
And Dad: There are people who get through things, and people who give up.
What if Brielle couldn’t get through? What if she couldn’t save herself? Or what if she gave up, and I was the last person on Earth who could have done something about that?
“I wrote…” I said, “… about Gossip Girl … and getting manis … and high school next year.”
“I can’t,” Brielle said in a small voice, not even really to me. Staring at the blank page on her knees, she said to no one, “My life … is over.”
“Free time now, folks!” the Detention Convention yelled out from the front. “We can ei
ther write in our notebooks, or there’s a nice stack of vocabulary worksheets up here.”
I thought I’d be relieved to move forward from this enormously awkward situation with Brielle. To move onto anything but vocab. Brielle and me, if we had one thing in common, it’s that we had both done the maximum amount of vocab worksheets a person could do in a lifetime.
Brielle’s eyes were heavy. She was so tired.
You can’t unknow. I thought about how writing had helped me since winter break. How my notebook was here when no one else was.
“Could you…” I started. For some reason, it flashed in my brain, that one day in September when Brielle crammed her notebook pages with capital Is, with letters that didn’t touch each other at all, standing separately, apart, each alone. “Could you maybe … just … make a list?” I asked her.
Brielle blinked, like she saw me sitting there for the first time. “What do you mean?”
For a second, I wished I could take it back, that I hadn’t said anything. I was backstabbing my own self. I had promised myself I’d never get over how Brielle said my brother should have died, how she brought my family into it and stole my best friend and my notebook and used me and Cut me. I swore I’d never get over how she labeled me and lipsticked my locker and erased me and wrecked my whole life.
And there I was, giving her a lifeline.
This whole thing wasn’t playing out at all like I thought it would, where I watched Brielle hurt like I had.
I could hate myself for talking to her. Outside, the hibiscus blooms and drops and blooms again, like it always has. But something is different. Something has changed.
“Just a list,” I said. “Of anything, of … like … the things right in this room, even?”
Taylor Before and After Page 19