The wave blocked out the sky. I threw myself forward, a torso exploding from the sapphire wall with frothy fireworks shooting overhead.
My childhood longboard touched down on the wave, faithfully refusing to nose dive. I stood to salute it. From cowering lean, to knee, to crouch. I extended my arms, my left stump pointing the way ahead, while my right arm maintained my balance behind. The sun shone in my eyes as I watched the shoreline grow rapidly larger to greet me.
My stump steered me ahead, to safety. My right hand, I extended back, allowing my fingers to brush the belly of the fourteen-foot-tall behemoth. Its roar still bore down upon my ears, but now its intensity awoke something else within me, something I hadn’t felt since I’d been diagnosed with bone cancer: awe. I was cradled within the wave’s belly, and if I did something stupid, then I would be catapulted to kingdom come. If I didn’t, then for a brief, infinitesimal moment, I would know what it was like to be the ocean: to fly across the earth wild, unbridled, and free. Its slow swell and thunderous touchdown were the only forewarning it sent to the earth—bitch, I’m coming.
And I’m about to fuck you up.
I opened my eyes to see my room.
***
The sunlight was harsh and gray, glaring at me from beneath the windowpane and through palm leaves. I squinted as I stumbled my way toward Rafael’s junky old jeep. A gecko clicked nearby, a sound like Jinho’s fangs emerging, and my pulse quickened involuntarily. I unconsciously scratched my wrist, upon which faded purple bites lay. My fingers moved to my abdomen, to my neck, to my stump, as the old bite sites suddenly blazed to life with itchy, stabbing pain. I swung about blearily, mango trees and rhododendron bushes pouring into one another. The sun’s rays whipped my pale skin again, and I cowered beneath Rafael’s jeep for shade. I needed release. I needed vampyre venom.
“Tica? Are you okay?” I hazily made out Rafael’s dark shape approaching with a set of car keys.
I lurched forward and grabbed his T-shirt. “We need to find Jinho.”
I convinced Rafael to track Jinho down with some ridiculous story about him seeing another girl. Who that girl was, I feared to tell him.
“Alright, fine!” Rafael exclaimed, ramming his foot on the gas. “We follow him once, and then you make up your mind about him. Either he’s a serial cheater, or he’s a flake, but you decide how Jinho is not good for you and then be done with him.”
I sat pacified in the front seat, although my eyes drifted to Rafael’s thin, angular face and lean frame. We both had our mother’s sun-streaked dark hair and golden-brown complexion (well, not me currently), but Rafael’s eyes were liquid and warm as milk chocolate while mine were earthy black soil…like my father’s. Now I knew I was built like him, too: shorter and stockier with thickly padded muscle, the better for charging with.
I smiled and touched my half-brother’s hand. “Thank you.”
Jinho’s silver Hyundai Accent was where it was supposed to be: in the parking lot for the Stop n’ Shop. So were the vehicles of two other employees on shift for the day, and my mother’s van. But as the shadows lengthened, only two telltale cars remained. I tried to stop it, but the cold, ugly hate unfurled in the pit of my stomach again, silencing all of my itchy bites. I jumped from Raf’s jeep and strode toward the florescent lights with detached purpose.
He was feeding on her. I stood in the Stop n’ Shop doorway, swaying for an instant at the torrid sight, and then grabbed the nearest thing I could find.
My mother sat up first in the booth. “Tica! What are—?”
They ducked as I bellowed like a wounded animal and threw the beer bottle.
Rafael caught me by the waist. “Let’s get out of here, Tica. Come on. It’s not worth it. We’ll figure this shit out—”
“His eyes!” I sobbed. “Are his eyes green?”
Rafael stopped and stared at me as if I’d gone crazy. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“His eyes!” I wailed again miserably.
“Whose, Jinho’s? They’re the same color they’ve always been, albeit carrying a lot of extra douchiness. Don’t worry, Tica; I’ll deal with him. But…are you seeing things?”
His concerned expression doubled and then tripled in my spiraling vision. My father’s warning reverberated in my head—“Your mother has too much poison in her veins, too”—but it was pushed aside by violent, crimson-tainted waves:
He betrayed me!
She betrayed me!
I need…more!
Fangs sank in and released. I exhaled in ecstasy. Then I turned into my mother, her full lips slightly parted in sigh. Frantic to escape the rising tide of images, I reached out and latched onto the one thing that could quell the need for more vampyre venom: hate.
I snuck back at night to plant mold in the Stop n’ Shop storage room and then called the health inspector. When my mom came to my room later to confront me about it, I waited on the bed with fiendish glee. We yelled and shrieked at each other until our lungs tore open, spilling out like the blood we had freely given, the venom craze in our eyes a mirror image of each other’s.
Chapter 16: A Storm Spent
~Tica~
Two weeks later, I felt like my head was beginning to clear. The longer I lay on the cot at Ryoko’s house, the more I didn’t want to leave it. Gradual realization sunk in about the wake of destruction I had caused during the throes of vampyre venom, and I huddled alone and scared with the blinds tightly drawn. Ryoko’s grandmother told me that my mom had come by at least five times, begging to speak with me, but I couldn’t face her. I couldn’t face any of them.
When the house intruder alarm went off, I realized I didn’t have a choice. Ryoko was at school and her grandmother was out attending physical therapy. Eyes narrowing, I crept up the stairs and peered out into the family’s backyard. Someone had broken into the lanai by the pool.
The phone rang. It was the security company, telling me the police had been notified.
“No, it’s okay,” I told them, my own voice sounding low and weird in my ears. I hadn’t heard it for days. “It’s just a friend who tripped the alarm. Yes, here’s the code.”
I slowly walked outside. Aolani looked up at me from the lawn chair and tipped down her sunglasses.
“So you are still alive after all,” she said.
I sagged against a colonnade. Dull pain had reemerged in my stump after the vampyre venom detox, but I welcomed it back after that mind fuck.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in Montoya’s class?”
She shrugged. “I skipped it. He started being a judgy ass toward me after I quit working at Kalani Resorts.”
I went very still. “He said he could understand why I would have to turn down the internship, given my relapse, but you—”
“Have no excuse.” Aolani rolled her eyes. “I guess listening to the CEO spout a bunch of bull about the inferiority of your people is part of the job description. Screw it. That’s not what I want to spend my life doing. Sometimes a job isn’t just a job anymore.”
I sat down on the lawn chair opposite, realizing just how long it had been since Aolani and I had talked, really talked, to each other.
She blew out a pent-up sigh, fists clenched on her lap. “It just sucks when you grow up sitting in a history classroom that tells you about how your queen ‘let your people be conquered’ and how you ‘lost’ the islands. It’s like every mainlander just expects you to be this ‘defeated’ person who’s ready to play along like everyone else. But I’m not defeated, Tica. I don’t want to go all separatist, either. I want to be both.”
She looked down at her hands, and I reached out to grab hers. “Then you can be. That classroom history isn’t the only history. Yours is just as valid. Share it with everyone you know.”
Aolani sniffed. “Saint Tica. How’d you get so wise?”
“When you’re dying of cancer,” I said, “and one of your best friends asks you for advice, then you don’t waste time being thoughtless.”<
br />
She stared at me for a moment. “I was so nervous going up against you in that internship interview. I know, it’s stupid: to be jealous of your cancer. I’m sorry.”
My mouth went dry. “And I’m sorry I spread those rumors about you. What I said about you was just so fuckin’—evil.”
“I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that you insinuated Crispin and I fooled around, or the fact that they believed you,” Aolani muttered. She glanced away toward the teal pool, blinking furiously. “We didn’t do anything, Tica,” she blurted. “I thought Jinho just wanted to hang out, but he seemed—off. When he tried to kiss me, I pushed him away.”
I smiled sadly. Ryoko claimed Aolani’s Jinho had weird green eyes, but how did I know for sure if it had been a dark mo’o masquerading as a vampyre prince? I couldn’t be certain of anything, except for my friends.
“I know. I should have known.”
She glared at me. “Damnit, Tica. You may live on an island, but that doesn’t mean you are one. We all depend on each other; what affects one affects us all. You need to tell us what the hell is going on with you. Ryoko’s too respectful to ask, but I will strangle the answer out of you if I have to.”
See, there’s this spirit world in trouble and the Hawaiian gods and vampyres are real, and they asked me to help save it. Or how about: I caught Jinho with my mother. Yes. In that way.
Yeah, and I should start out by telling her that my father was the boar god. Great way to spend out my remaining days: in an asylum. And the scary thing was….I didn’t know if I hadn’t cracked. Maybe Eve and everything else was just my overactive imagination’s way of helping me be okay with what was to come.
So what I said instead was: “You know about the relapse, Aolani… This time it is terminal. I was improving steadily for a while”—just a daily dose of vampyre venom to see me through the day—“but I got test results back from the doctor yesterday. There are…malignant tumors in multiple locations. I could either go the surgery-chemo route and deal with the pain and recovery steps again…but my survival rate’s been downgraded to fifteen percent. Or I could live out my last six months peacefully”—my eyes blurred with tears—“with the people I love.”
She launched off her lawn chair and hugged me so tightly, I couldn’t cry. That was how Ryoko found us when she returned from school. We talked about my upcoming birthday and decided to hold it at Bellows Beach Park. I smiled to myself. Where the wild boars were.
“Tica,” Aolani said before we parted ways, “I finished translating that old manuscript Rafael gave me.”
My head shot up as she pulled it out of her bag and placed it my hands, along with her notes.
She smiled broadly at me. “It’s a really beautiful story. It tells the tale of how to find Kuaihelani, the land of the gods.”
Chapter 17: A Camping Trip
~Tica~
The waves began to pick up toward late afternoon, the legion of teal white caps bombarding the sparkling Bellows Beach with mounting intensity. The soft wet sand was the color of gingerbread dusted with powdered sugar, while the dry sand dunes above were white flour. Aolani, Lono, Mason, and Mason’s friend Paul exited the waves with boogie boards tucked under their arms and hair dripping, laughing at something Paul had just said.
Paul Chi was a hot half-Chinese, half-white paddler Mason had met while rowing for the Hui Nalu Canoe Club over the summer. He jokingly threw his arm over Mason’s shoulder, and Mason shrugged out of the embrace, glancing worriedly at Lono.
“Yummy,” Ryoko said from where she squatted next to the grill, and I didn’t think she was talking about the teriyaki burgers. She shrugged at me. “Hey, if Mason doesn’t want him, then I’ll take him.”
I added a slice of juicy pineapple on top of my sizzling burger patty. “Mason doesn’t really expect Lono to figure out what’s going on, does he? Lono’s the type who says things bluntly and expects the same in return.”
“The guys are all sharing a tent together tonight. I’m sure he’ll figure it out then,” Ryoko said with a sly wink. “Ooh, I would pay to be there.”
I laughed, setting aside a plate of pineapple and onion slices to wrap in foil. I had a trip of my own to take later tonight, and it involved traveling into the spirit world to warn my father about Crispin and the Plague Lords’ plan to gain access to Kuaihelani. My time under the vampyre venom was hazy, but I still remembered Jinho’s rules about entering Eve: if he wasn’t with me, then I should leave out food offerings so hungry ghosts wouldn’t attack.
Ryoko’s eyes narrowed on the plate of food set aside. “Who is that for?” she demanded.
I knew my brother had appointed Ryoko to watch my every move since he’d been scheduled to work my Halloween-birthday weekend. “Extras for later,” I said. “The doctor says I have to keep my weight up, but it’s hard to fight off the nausea at times.”
Usually the moment I nudged the conversation toward cancer, my friends clammed up, but not Ryoko this time.
“How are things between you and your mom?” she asked softly. She knew how ugly our fight had been, but not the contents. Rafael wasn’t jumping to spill the details, either. How could I explain to him, or to anyone, that our mother had fallen prey to the seductive charms of an evil monster?
“There’s still a lot I need to talk to her about,” I said, “but trust me, it’s better if I’m not there right now.” It’s better for the vampyre venom to have left both of our systems before we face what happened.
Aolani always accumulated endless amounts of energy on the beach. Even after enduring the pounding surf for two hours, she still ran up to us with two old stakes in hand.
“HORSESHOES!” she cried. “Let’s play horseshoes!”
“There are six of us,” Lono said, scoffing down a teriyaki burger in four bites.
“We can do it in three teams. Partners stand opposite each other and try to loop the stake for points. I have pink, silver, and gold horseshoes, all properly bedazzled with fake rhinestones.” Aolani beamed at us. “I think my baby sister got into them.”
“Well, if I’m going to be chucking pink horseshoes around a beach, then I’ll need another drink,” Lono reported, “and you on my team.”
Aolani flashed him a knowing smile and hurried to set up the stakes.
“I’m with Tica!” Ryoko hugged me.
Paul toweled off his spikey black hair. “Are you feeling up to it, Tica?”
“Are you kidding?” Ryoko shot back. “Tica’s right arm is freakishly strong.”
I smiled at Paul. “I’m fine. Thanks for your concern.”
“Nice. You’re a fighter, girl.” Paul grabbed a teriyaki burger and sashayed backwards down the beach after Aolani and Ryoko. “Guess that means I get Mason! Not bad, not bad at all!”
Mason’s lips quirked. “For you. You better not screw this up, Chi.”
Paul winked. “That’s not the type of screwing I do with Jars.”
Mason’s mortified red face said it all, and even I blushed.
Aside, he muttered, “He thinks my last name is ‘Jar’ because—”
“Yeah, yeah, ‘Mason Jar’; I get it. Damn.” I tried to keep from giggling. “Be careful with that one.”
Lono elbowed Mason on his other side. “Dude, I think he has a crush on you.”
Mason was quiet for a moment, watching the first of the horseshoes, Aolani’s pink one, come sailing through the air. Then he said with sudden fervor: “He does. And the thing is, Lono, I think I like him, too.”
Lono laughed, slapping Mason on the back, until he noticed neither of us had cracked a smile. Then he got quiet.
“Dude,” he said slowly, “am I the only one you didn’t tell?”
When Mason nodded, he scowled and crunched his beer can. “That’s fucked up, man.”
“Is it?” Mason’s voice was high and strained. “The other day you stole money from Rafael, Lono. I think we can all guess for what! You’d rather do meth with those construction guys and l
ive in the past when Kai was still alive, instead of fighting for your friendships with us. So why the hell would we tell you anything?”
The silver and gold horseshoes landed with thumps in the sand. Aolani’s was the closest. It touched the stake and earned her and Lono two points, but Lono was oblivious.
“Fine.” He heaved the pink horseshoe, and it struck the far-off stake with a rough clang. Aolani cheered and danced around while Ryoko and Paul yelled encouragement to us.
Mason was next, but he was having trouble focusing. “Fine? That’s all you have to say?”
“What, do you expect me to give a Nobel Peace speech or something?” Lono growled. “Apparently you like dudes now; I’m the messed-up drug addict you couldn’t trust to tell. Fine.”
Mason threw the silver horseshoe with an extra amount of rage, and it bumped Lono’s out of the way. Paul spread his arms wide in triumph and Aolani shoved him.
“Do you know how much shit we’ve had to go through to stay friends?” Mason snapped, his heat ringing in my ears as I stepped up to throw. “First we had to take all that crap from our families: ‘Oh, why is that haole boy hanging around?’ from your folks and ‘Lose the moke’ from mine. Then you went off the deep end after Kai’s death—”
“Mason, I’m warning you: don’t fuckin’ talk about him—” I lost the strand of conversation as I threw, my golden horseshoe whistling through the air to loop the stake. Ryoko sat back like a smug cat to celebrate our lead, while Aolani and Paul shouted scoring advice at the feuding pair behind me. I was too numb to feel glad.
“I want to talk about Kai!” Mason bellowed. “Don’t you tell me I can’t because I’m not a great surfer like he was, or I need to respect his memory! How are you respecting him by going off and getting high all day and not giving a shit about living?”
Year of the Boar- Tica Page 10