“An accident? What the heck kind of accident ends with his lips on yours?” Izzy shoved her laptop out of the way and snatched my phone before I could stop her. And of course she knew my passcode.
“Iz,” I said, but didn’t really make an effort to stop her. Maybe I needed to talk about this. Maybe I needed to get it out in the open, and then I’d be able to focus like normal.
“Oh. It’s something he sent to everyone. Some hockey thing.” There wasn’t anyone in the world who cared about sports less than Izzy.
“Oh,” I said.
She frowned at me. “Malina Hall, is that disappointment I hear in your voice?” She set the phone down, folded her hands on the table, and leaned onto her forearms, looking more serious than anyone with blue, purple, and pink hair had any right to. “Start from the beginning. Tell me everything.”
So I did. I told her about Jackson coming home and being at my house and how everything was so normal until it was very definitely not normal and things had been weird ever since.
When I finished, I took a long breath because that was something I’d apparently forgotten to do.
“Do you want to get in his pants?”
Seriously. Was it possible to give yourself a fever from embarrassment? Because all the blood rushing to my face made me feel way too hot. “What? No. He’s my friend. Practically my brother. Are you insane?”
She held up her hands in an “I’m innocent” kind of way. “Okay, okay. Had to make sure. But since you don’t, that makes things easier. He’s your friend. Keep being his friend. Keep talking to him like normal. Nothing has to change.”
She made it sound so easy… “But things have changed. He’s being weird.” I didn’t mention that I’d changed and was being weird, too.
“Well, that’s his problem. Not yours.” Izzy ran a hand through her hair, exposing more of the blue than had been showing a second ago. “He’ll get over it.”
Mentally, I let myself flip that statement and think that I’d get over it. “You think we’ll be okay?”
“I think you and Jackson will be fine. Now, you and that scholarship, on the other hand…”
“Right, right,” I said. “Back to work. But let me see that.”
I unlocked my phone and replayed the snap. It was a short clip of the exterior of the local ice arena, with Jackson saying how good it was to be home. How much he missed that rink.
“Are you responding? If you are, tell him I said he better not accidentally kiss me. My next kiss goes to my new girl, not some guy.” She shuddered, as if completely revolted by the thought.
I rolled my eyes.
But I didn’t respond. I closed out of the app, put my phone face down on the table, and got back to work. I’d given up on the possibility that this essay was going to be good, but at least I could make sure it was complete. Izzy was right. Jackson and I would be completely fine.
Chapter Six
Jackson
When I got home from The Melting toP, I made sure I dropped my hockey bag in the laundry room and not some other random place. Mom had a pretty strict “no hockey equipment beyond the washing machine until it’s clean” rule. I didn’t think my gear smelled that bad, but she didn’t seem to agree. I’d used the last of my clean practice jerseys today, so I started a load before heading into the living room.
Mom was on the couch with her phone, so I sat next to her. The leather always felt extra cold in the fall and winter, but it didn’t bother me. I put my feet up on the table in front of me, already feeling the tightness in my quads and hamstrings from those wind sprints.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hi, sweetie.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “How was practice?”
“Fine,” I said. I didn’t really want to talk about the missed shots or the fact that I wouldn’t be starting the next game. “How was work?”
Mom was an event planner, so she tended to work weird hours. I never knew when she was going to be home or at an event, but the flexibility had been great both when I was a kid and when I started getting really into hockey and needed rides to the rink all the time.
“It was good. Working on a few holiday parties, but those are easy.”
“Nice.” The fall and winter were always quieter than spring and summer, which were full of graduation parties and weddings. “Did you happen to go grocery shopping?”
She took a sip of wine from her glass on the end table. “I picked up a few things.” She glanced at the clock. “Why? I thought you said you were eating with the guys?”
“I did,” I said. “But I’m still hungry.”
She sighed. “When you’re gone, I always forget that you eat me out of house and home. But come on, you can’t possibly tell me you didn’t stop at The Melting Pot, too. You’ve only mentioned how much you missed it twenty times in the past week.”
“It’s The Melting toP. And it wasn’t twenty times. Probably only nineteen.”
“Mmhmm.” She toyed with a loose thread on the sweater she was wearing. “And what flavor ice cream did they have today?”
“Cherry.”
“Yum. Well, I’m not enabling your second-dinner habit. If you want something, you can make it yourself.”
I put a hand over my heart like I was wounded. “Ouch. And the Mother of the Year award goes to…”
She rolled her eyes and turned back to her phone. Actually, the couch was pretty comfortable. Maybe I was more tired than hungry. It was then that I noticed something on Mom’s phone. There were pictures on the screen, and she was studying each one for a few seconds before swiping left or right.
“Wait,” I said. “What are you doing?”
Mom glanced up before turning her phone away from my view. “None of your business.”
I leaned over so I could see again. “Are you on Tinder?”
“Honey, we talked about this. You know I’ve been doing some online dating.”
My parents had divorced a few years ago. It had happened out of the blue. It wasn’t like they’d been fighting for years, or if they had been, they’d hid it well. But they didn’t fight much during the divorce either, not even over who I would live with or how much time I would spend with each parent, so it wasn’t terrible for me. My dad only lived about twenty minutes away.
“Yeah, but I thought you were on Seniors Dating Seniors or something like that,” I said.
“Hey,” Mom said. “Watch your mouth.”
I leaned over farther to get a better look at her screen. “Are there seriously old people on Tinder?”
“I am not old!”
Okay, maybe my mom wasn’t that old, but the guy on the screen definitely was. The picture was a shirtless mirror selfie, complete with flabby arms, a bald head, and a pudgy waist. He wasn’t even smiling.
“No,” I said. “No, no, no. Get away from that.”
I tried to take the phone from her, but she held it out of my reach.
“Luke! Stop! I’m a grown woman and can do what I want.”
Switching tactics, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and tapped the screen a few times.
“What’s that noise? What are you doing? Are you FaceTiming someone?”
Before Mom could say anything else, the phone connected and my sister’s face appeared on my screen.
“Lukey! Hey stranger! What’s up?”
Lacey was the only human being in the world I tolerated calling me that. She was a junior in college on the other side of the state. Currently, her hair was pulled back in a messy bun and there was a pen tucked behind her ear, like I’d caught her studying. I could tell from the poster on the wall behind her that she was in her bedroom in her apartment.
“Please tell Mom that she cannot be on Tinder.”
“Hey!” Mom said. “No fair ganging up on me!”
“Mom, you’re on Tinder?” Lacey asked. “What? Why?”
“You know the guys your age on there have to be creeps, right?” I asked. “Lace, back me up on this.”
&n
bsp; “Hand me to her,” Lacey said.
I obliged, and Mom gave a dramatic sigh before setting her own phone down and taking mine.
“Hey, Lace,” she said, like we weren’t in the middle of a conversation. “How’s school?”
“It’s fine. Stay on topic. This is a terrible idea. Half the guys on there are married, and the other half are on the sex offenders list.”
Mom scoffed. “That’s not true. I’m on there, and neither of those things is true about me!”
I snatched back both my phone and Mom’s. I flipped the camera on my phone around so Lacey could see the guy on the screen. “Look at this,” I said. “There’s no way this guy is married, so he’s got to be a sex offender.”
“Oh my gosh, Mom!” Lacey cried. “Swipe left! Swipe left!”
“You two, so quick to judge based on looks,” Mom said, shaking her head.
“Uh, that’s exactly what Tinder is,” I pointed out.
“Fine,” Mom said, and took her phone back so she could swipe left.
Only the next guy was even worse. It was another mirror selfie. Thankfully this one was fully clothed, but he was also visibly holding his junk.
“Oh my gosh!” Mom said. “What is that man doing? Why would he make that his picture?”
On my phone, Lacey started cracking up. “Left, Mom. Left.”
Instead of swiping left, Mom swiped out of the app completely. “I swear, the first couple of guys I saw seemed completely normal.”
“Can’t you stick to meeting guys at the library or something?” I asked.
Mom quirked an eyebrow at me. “When was the last time you were at the library?”
Lacey sighed. “Online dating is fine, but maybe stick to a different site?”
“Fine, fine. If you two insist.”
“Good. Hey, let me talk to Luke, okay? I want to hear how hockey’s going.”
“Okay. Love you, hon. I’ll talk to you later,” Mom said.
I headed upstairs with my phone. “Thank you. Seriously. I didn’t think she was going to listen to me, and that…can’t happen.”
“Absolutely,” she said. “Glad I could help.”
“So how’s school?”
“Meh. Hard. Boring. Exhausting. Maybe I don’t want to do this ‘lawyer’ thing anymore.”
I laughed. Lacey had learned to argue before I was born and never looked back. Though there weren’t any lawyers in our family, it was still practically in her DNA. “Yeah right. Been to any good parties lately?”
“There are no parties in college,” she said, completely straight faced. “That’s a bunch of rumors you see on TV and in movies.”
I rolled my eyes. “You don’t have to lie to me. I’m not going to college. Even if I were, that lie wouldn’t be enough to convince me.”
“Damn,” she said. “I’ll have to work on that. How’s hockey?”
“Good. I’m home for a couple of weeks.” I didn’t tell her about practice today. I couldn’t tell her why I’d been so distracted. Couldn’t admit to her that I’d kissed Malina. Like most people, Lacey had given me a hard time about Malina when we first started hanging out, thinking I’d liked her, but when a year or two passed with us just as friends, she gave up.
“What are you thinking about?” Lacey asked.
Oh, crap. I’d been staring blankly at a wall. I snapped my attention back to the screen. “What? Nothing. Sorry.”
She quirked one eyebrow in a classic Lacey gesture. “I’m not buying that. Spill.”
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“It’s a girl,” she said.
Why did everyone automatically go there? Was it written all over my face? “What’s that? You’re breaking up. Our connection must be bad. I gotta go.”
Lacey laughed. “Fine. Don’t tell me, asshole. I gotta get back to studying. Feel free to FaceTime me sometime when you don’t need something, okay?”
“Deal.”
“Love you, Lukey.”
“Love you, too.”
I ended the connection. Even though I was tired and wanted nothing more than to collapse onto my bed, I needed to do my weight lifting for the day. Thankfully, it was an arm day, so Coach’s wind sprints wouldn’t affect me. I changed into sweats and headed down to the basement, where I had a small gym set up.
I turned up the music loud enough to distract me from thinking about old people on Tinder or bad hockey practices. Even then, it wasn’t loud enough to keep thoughts of Malina from slipping through. I was in deep and had no idea how to dig myself out.
Chapter Seven
Malina
“Aloha kakahiaka,” I said, placing a kiss on the top of Tutu’s head. The conditioner she used smelled like honey.
“Aloha ʻauinalā,” she said.
There was a slight smile on her face and teasing tone to her voice as she responded “good afternoon” to my “good morning.” I glanced at the clock. It wasn’t afternoon, but it was pretty close. I’d worked on that scholarship essay and application until the last possible second, submitting at 11:59. Thanks to my distraction, it was far from my best work. I’d felt so guilty about submitting something subpar that I couldn’t sleep, and ended up tinkering with my planet project for another hour or two, which was almost as unsuccessful as the scholarship application.
I took a seat next to Tutu at the kitchen table. A box that had arrived from Hawaii was open on the floor, and several cylinders of tightly wrapped dried leaves tied with yarn sat on the table. Tutu had opened one of the cylinders, so a pile of loose, curly dried leaves was also on the table.
“Kuka’a?” I asked, touching one of the still-wrapped cylinders of lauhala.
Tutu smiled at me, wrinkles deepening around her eyes. “Kuka’a,” she said, correcting my pronunciation of the term ever so slightly.
I nodded toward the knife and leaf in her hands. “What are you doing?”
Instead of responding, she held the knife to one end of the long, dry leaf and pulled in a quick, confident tug. She was left with two long pieces—one thicker and darker, but smaller than the other. She held that piece up. “The bone. It’s not used in weaving.” She placed it on the floor, where “bones” were accumulating in a pile. Then she held up the other. “The lau is used in weaving.”
I held up one of the whole leaves. The difference between the bone and the lau was obvious. “Can I try?” I always wanted to learn anything I could from Tutu.
She smiled and handed over the knife. She made a slight tear at the top of the leaf and adjusted the knife in my hand. I’d been holding it like I was going to cut a piece of steak, but she turned it more like I was going to curl a piece of ribbon. “Go,” she said.
I tried to mimic the move I’d seen her do, to slide the knife like butter down the leaf, but something went wrong, and I ended up cutting through the leaf instead. “Oops.”
Tutu flipped the leaf over so I was holding the other end. She made the same tear and lined the knife up for me, adjusting the leaf in my left hand. Her hand shook slightly. It was a constant reminder of the stroke she’d had a couple of years ago, but clearly it didn’t hold her back too much.
“Keep it straight,” she said.
I focused on holding the knife straight, and managed to remove the bone, if a little slower and sloppier than Tutu.
“Good,” she said, adding the bone to her pile and handing me another leaf. “Again.”
This time, I made the tear and lined up the knife. When I pulled the knife down, it felt more natural. It would take me a while to get up to Tutu’s speed, but it was a start.
Tutu patted my hand and got up from the creaky old chair. She walked over to a drawer near the kitchen sink, and when she returned, she held another knife. She sat, and we started working with the lauhala side by side.
“What are you going to make?” I asked.
There were various woven items throughout our house—beautiful baskets and placemats and trivets—some from when Mom and Dad were in Hawaii,
some mailed to us from Tutu when I was little, a few made by Tutu since she’d been living with us. Her friends mailed her rolls of leaves, or Kuka’a, so she could make whatever she wanted.
“We’ll see,” Tutu said with a shrug. The few times I’d been able to watch her weave, it almost seemed like she didn’t know what the leaves were going to be until she started working with them. It was such a foreign concept to someone like me, who always knew exactly where I was going and how to get there.
We worked quietly side by side, the piles of lau bones building at our feet.
“You were up late last night,” Tutu said.
I frowned. I’d been listening to music, but I thought I’d kept it quiet. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”
Tutu waved off my apology before reaching for another leaf. “I saw the light.”
I knew Tutu had trouble sleeping. Whether it was another side effect of the stroke or from getting older was up in the air, but I’d gotten used to hearing her making tea at odd hours of the night.
“I was working on a scholarship application and my project.” The particular leaf I’d grabbed was a little thicker and tougher than the rest, so I concentrated on it while I talked. “I stayed up too late, but I wasn’t tired.”
Tutu cupped one hand around my cheek. “You work too hard,” she said.
I smiled. “I like working hard.” I nodded toward the pile of leaves. “Just like you.”
With that, she smiled back and returned to the lauhala. My phone buzzed in the pocket of my jeans. I removed it and saw Jackson’s name on the screen. The butterflies that appeared in my stomach every time I thought about him could fly away anytime now.
Jackson: Are you home?
That was odd. I thought he was supposed to be at a daytime practice for the NTDP players who didn’t have school. Heaven forbid they get a day off. I set my knife down and thumbed out a response.
Me: Yes. Why?
While waiting for another message, there was a knock at the front door.
“I’ll get it,” I said. I headed over and peeked through the curtain covering the tall, narrow window next to the door. I froze. Even my heart froze, skipping a beat or two or seven before pounding frantically against my ribs, trying to make up for lost time. What was Jackson doing there? I tried to stay calm and collected as I opened the door. “Hey.”
Tied Up in You Page 5