With his cronies looking on, Kai tried to yank the baton from my hand, but I hung on tight. He loosened his grip and before I could think, I grabbed the baton and whacked him on the head.
Instantly, the laughter stopped.
Novice twirlers get hit on the head all the time and seldom sustain injury. Of course, none of this mattered to Kai. His eyes narrowed as he hissed, “You’re lucky I don’t hit girls.”
I held my baton like a baseball bat, ready to strike again. “Shove it, Kai,” I shot back. “You’re lucky I don’t hit girls, either.”
Kai blinked his long eyelashes as if unsure of who or what I was. Then, he slowly reached toward me. I stood frozen, determined not to flinch. “BJ, you’re all right,” he said, tousling my hair.
His laughter gave the others permission to laugh, too.
As I watched Kai and his pals stroll away, I wasn’t sure what had just happened. In my confusion, I hardly noticed the giant gecko standing nearby. He waddled up to me and in a muffled voice said, “That was really something.”
“Excuse me?” Maybe I was the one who had been hit with the baton. The gecko handed me a brochure. “Auntie Alea’s Authentic Hawaiian Luau?” I read out loud.
The gecko nodded and then said, “Help me get this head off, will you? It’s like Hades in this costume.”
It was a struggle, but finally I was face-to-face with an elderly Hawaiian gentleman. Despite his being in a lizard costume, he had a regal bearing. His skin was dark and smooth and his brown eyes glistened, like he knew a secret. “My name’s Jimmy Chow and I’m Alea’s second cousin,” he said. “I’ve been watching you. You’re amazing. Have you ever twirled fire?”
“I can twirl anything,” I told him.
“We could use someone like you,” Jimmy mused. He was almost as old as Mr. Hunter, only wiry and full of energy. “Help me get my head back on; there’s a tour bus I have to meet. But first, promise me you’ll call Alea. Be sure to say Jimmy sent you.”
On Jimmy’s recommendation, and three auditions later, I became the only female and the youngest baton flame twirler at Auntie Alea’s Luau. Sure it’s a tourist attraction, but aren’t we all tourists at some point? I was also the only haole. Haole. That’s Hawaiian for white person. Shortly after, I had another name change, but this time I didn’t protest. Auntie Alea christened me Kalani. It means heaven and sky.
Auntie Alea’s felt like home. She treated everyone like family. On my first day I was pleasantly surprised to find Danny from my AP English class working as a waiter. “The tips are really good,” he explained. “I’m saving up for college.” His black hair was thick and wavy and he had freckles trekking across his nose bridge. “Plus, Auntie Alea lets me study when it’s slow.”
Danny and I would study together during our breaks, and later on our days off. Eventually we’d just hang at the beach or visit Carl. Danny introduced me to some students at Kahanamoku who I had never noticed before. I guess I had been too busy staring at what I thought were the popular kids, when really they were the jerks.
Not too long ago, Kai and his friends came in for the luau waving their fake IDs. At first they didn’t recognize me in my grass skirt and green bikini top. It had been over a year since I had first landed on the island. I had toned down my makeup and stopped perming and dyeing my hair, letting it go back to its natural auburn color. It’s just easier, plus Danny thinks I look best with my hair straight. I had also learned to chill out, something I was incapable of doing back in Asher.
The boys hooted and whistled when I first stepped onstage, and when Kai finally figured out who I was he shouted, “Hey, BJ, wanna get lei-ed?”
I was about to tell him off when my music cued up. So instead, I glared at him and lit my batons on fire. When I heaved them into the night sky, it silenced any snide remarks that were still floating around. Instantly, Kai and his ilk turned into nothing more than faces in the crowd, with their necks turned upward and their mouths hanging open, waiting to see what I would do next. Finally, when my routine was over, they stood up and cheered with everyone else in the audience.
After the show, as I was downing a bottle of water, Kai strutted backstage. “BJ, you were great!” He swayed when he spoke. Kai reached toward me and twirled my hair as he looked deep into my eyes and whispered, “Wanna join me for a private party at my house?” He was asking me to be with him? There was a time when this would have meant the world to me.
For a moment I felt flush, until the stench of whiskey and cigarettes on his breath brought me back to reality. Then out of the corner of my eyes, I noticed Danny coming toward us with his fists clenched. I motioned for him to stop and turned to face Kai. “What’s my name?”
“BJ,” he said as he blinked slowly.
“What’s my name?” I asked again.
Kai broke into a lazy smile and winked. “It’s Felicity. You’re Felicity. That’s who you’ve always been.”
I smiled back and leaned in so that my lips were practically brushing his cheek. “You got that right, asshole,” I said. Then I emptied my water bottle over his head and pushed him aside so I could get ready for my second show.
As I walked toward Danny he held up his hand and without breaking my stride we high-fived.
My mother was able to bring Mr. Hunter and Carl to the luau one night, shortly before Mr. Hunter died. Auntie Alea gave them the best table and Danny waited on them like they were royalty. When I was onstage Mr. Hunter cheered so loud that he had a coughing fit and everyone stared. Mom tenderly calmed him down, and I could see how much they meant to each other.
Carl clutched Henry and sat mesmerized during the entire show. If you didn’t know his history, he almost seemed normal. Before he left each of my coworkers took off their leis and placed them around his neck. Barely visible under all the flowers, Carl moaned with delight and we all laughed and clapped along with him.
“You guys are great,” I said, choking up.
Jimmy hugged me and said, “Kalani, your brother is our brother, too.”
Not long after that, I went back to Asher, Ohio. I stayed with Natalie Catrine, who proudly showed me her Miss Pep trophy. Though I had a great time, it just wasn’t the same. Everyone had changed so much. Or maybe they hadn’t. Maybe it was me. I never realized how hard it had been to be so peppy and that all that pep had been weighing me down.
I saw my father while I was in town. Was it true, he wondered, that we had come into a fortune? I told him it was just a rumor. Not once did he ask about Carl.
I was so happy to return to Maui.
It was hard leaving Auntie Alea’s at the end of summer. I had been one of four Kahanamoku Academy valedictorians, the others include Samantha Tsui, a girl I had never heard speak until she gave a killer speech during graduation, Kai Risdale, whose family generously donated the new auditorium, and Danny Kaleho, my boyfriend.
Danny earned a scholarship to NYU, and even though we both knew the time would come when we’d go our own ways, it still hurt. He left first. Danny was eager to get off the island and get on with the rest of his life. I, on the other hand, was reluctant to leave.
“Felicity, you have to go,” my mother insisted. “I’m grounded here and so is Carl, but you can go places. Do this for us.”
Thanks to Mr. Hunter, my education is paid for and I attend Rogers College in Southern California. Even though they have an impressive majorette squad, I elected not to participate. Twirling had taken up so much of my life that I wanted to see what more there was. Besides, I left my lucky baton behind. It was a last-minute decision.
My mother had brought Carl to the airport to see me off. As he slumped in his wheelchair, tourists maneuvered their suitcases around us, pretending we didn’t exist. I knelt down on the sidewalk as I struggled to explain to Carl why I had to leave. But he would hear none of it. He had been increasingly agitated, having lost Henry a week earlier. As my brother began to scream and swat the invisible demons that had been hiding, the people who had been tr
ying so hard to ignore us stopped and stared.
“Carl, Carl, look!” I had to shout to get his attention. “Look at me, Carl!”
I began to twirl my baton and Carl grew quiet. I put everything into my routine—high kicks, trick moves, even stuff I learned from Auntie Alea’s. Everything. When I was done, the crowd cheered and Carl moaned with delight. He held out both hands and reached for my baton, but I held on tight. Yet he kept motioning for it, until we were both on the verge of tears.
Finally, I gave in.
When I handed my baton to him, I knew I was never getting it back.
“It belongs to you now,” I assured my brother as I held him tight. “It’s yours.”
Then I kissed him and waved good-bye.
In high school, Lisa Yee was a member of the varsity debate team, honor society president, and the student rep of the California Scholarship Federation’s State Board. In an act of total geek rebellion, Lisa would cut class to go to the library. And once, during science, she threw her fetal pig over the balcony to see what would happen when it landed on someone. She never got caught and was later named Physiology Student of the Year.
Lisa’s been a TV writer/producer, written jingles, and penned menus for Red Lobster. The winner of the prestigious Sid Fleischman Humor Award and Thurber House Children’s Writer-in-Residence, her books include Millicent Min, Girl Genius, Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time, and YA novel Absolutely Maybe. Lisa’s Web site is www.lisayee.com, and her blog is www.lisayee.livejournal.com.
Text by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci. Illustrations by Hope Larson.
SECRET IDENTITY
by kelly link
Dear Paul Zell.
Dear Paul Zell is exactly how far I’ve gotten at least a dozen times, and then I get a little farther, and then I give up. So this time I’m going to try something new. I’m going to pretend that I’m not writing you a letter, Paul Zell, dear Paul Zell. I’m so sorry. And I am sorry, Paul Zell, but let’s skip that part for now or else I won’t get any farther this time, either. And in any case: how much does it matter whether or not I’m sorry? What difference could it possibly make?
So. Let’s pretend that we don’t know each other. Let’s pretend we’re meeting for the first time, Paul Zell. We’re sitting down to have dinner in a restaurant in a hotel in New York City. I’ve come a long way to have dinner with you. We’ve never met face-to-face. Everything I ever told you about myself is more or less a lie. But you don’t know that yet. We think we may be in love.
We met in FarAway, online, except now here we are up close. I could reach out and touch your hand. If I was brave enough. If you were really here.
Our waiter has poured you a glass of red wine. Me? I’m drinking a Coke because I’m not old enough to drink wine. You’re thirty-four. I’m almost sixteen.
I’m so sorry, Paul Zell. I don’t think I can do this. (Except I have to do this.) I have to do this. So let’s try again. (I keep trying again and again and again.) Let’s start even farther back, before I showed up for dinner and you didn’t. Except I think you did. Am I right?
You don’t have to answer that. I owe you the real story, but you don’t owe me anything at all.
Picture the lobby of a hotel. In the lobby, a fountain with Spanish tiles in green and yellow. A tiled floor, leather armchairs, corporate art, this bank of glass-fronted elevators whizzing up and down, a bar. Daddy bar to all the mini-bars in all the rooms. Sound familiar? Maybe you’ve been here before.
Now fill up the lobby with dentists and superheroes. Men and women, oral surgeons, eighth-dimensional entities, mutants, and freaks who want to save your teeth, save the world, and maybe end up with a television show, too. I’ve seen a dentist or two in my time, Paul Zell, but we don’t get many superheroes out on the plain. We get tornadoes instead. There are two conventions going on at the hotel, and they’re mingling around the fountain, tra la la, tipping back drinks.
Boards in the lobby list panels on advances in cosmetic dentistry, effective strategies for minimizing liability in cases of bystander hazard, presentations with titles like “Spandex or Bulletproof? What Look Is Right for You?” You might be interested in these if you were a dentist or a superhero. Which I’m not. As it turns out, I’m not a lot of things.
A girl is standing in front of the registration desk. That’s me. And where are you, Paul Zell?
The hotel clerk behind the desk is only a few years older than me. (Than that girl, the one who’s come to meet Paul Zell. Is it pretentious or pitiful or just plain psychotic the way I’m talking about myself in the third person? Maybe it’s all three. I don’t care.) The clerk’s nametag says Aliss, and she reminds the girl that I wish wasn’t me of someone back at school. Erin Toomey, that’s who. Erin Toomey is a hateful bitch. But never mind about Erin Toomey.
Aliss the hotel clerk is saying something. She’s saying, “I’m not finding anything.” It’s eleven o’clock on a Friday morning, and at that moment the girl in the lobby is missing third-period biology. Her fetal pig is wondering where she is.
Let’s give the girl in line in the hotel lobby a name. Everybody gets a name, even fetal pigs. (I call mine Alfred.) And now that you’ve met Aliss and Alfred, minor characters both, I might as well introduce our heroine. That is, me. Of course it isn’t like FarAway. I don’t get to choose my name. If I did, it wouldn’t be Billie Faggart. That ring any bells? No, I didn’t think it would. Since fourth grade, which is when I farted while I was coming down the playground slide, everyone at school has called me Smelly Fagfart. That’s because Billie Faggart is a funny name, right? Except girls like Billie Faggart don’t have much of a sense of humor.
There’s another girl at school, Jennifer Groendyke. Everyone makes jokes about us. About how we’ll move to California and marry each other. You’d think we’d be friends, right? But we’re not. I’m not good at the friends thing. I’m like the girl equivalent of one of those baby birds that fall out of a nest and then some nice person picks the baby bird up and puts it back. Except that now the baby bird smells all wrong. I think I smell wrong.
If you’re wondering who Melinda Bowles is, the thirty-two-year-old woman you met in FarAway, no, you’ve never really met her. Melinda Bowles has never sent late-night e-mails to Paul Zell, not ever. Melinda Bowles would never catch a bus to New York City to meet Paul Zell because she doesn’t know that Paul Zell exists.
Melinda Bowles has never been to FarAway.
Melinda Bowles has no idea who the Enchantress Magic Eightball is. She’s never hung out online with the master thief Boggle. I don’t think she knows what a MMORPG is.
Melinda Bowles has never played a game of living chess in King Nermal’s Chamber in the Endless Caverns under the Loathsome Rock. Melinda Bowles doesn’t know a rook from a writing desk. A pawn from a prawn.
Here’s something that you know about Melinda Bowles that is true. She used to be married, but is now divorced and lives in her parents’ house. She teaches high school. I used her name when I signed up for an account on FarAway. More about my sister Melinda later.
Anyway. Girl-liar Billie says to desk-clerk Aliss, “No message? No envelope? Mr. Zell, Paul Zell?” (That’s you. In case you’ve forgotten.) “He’s a guest here? He said he was leaving something for me at the front desk.”
“I’ll look again if you want,” Aliss says. But she does nothing. Just stands there staring malevolently past Billie as if she hates the world and everyone in it.
Billie turns around to see who Aliss is glaring at. There’s a normal-looking guy behind Billie; behind him, out in the lobby, there are all sorts of likely candidates. Who doesn’t hate a dentist? Or maybe Aliss isn’t crazy about superheroes. Maybe she’s contemplating the thing that looks like a bubble of blood. If you were there, Paul Zell, you might stare at the bubble of blood, too. You can just make out the silhouette of someone/something inside.
Billie doesn’t keep up with superheroes, not really, but she feels as if she’s seen the blood
y bubble on the news. Maybe it saved the world once. It levitates three feet above the marble floor of the atrium. It plops bloody drops like a sink faucet in Hell. Maybe Aliss worries someone will slip on the lobby floor, break an ankle, sue the hotel. Or maybe the bubble of blood owes her ten bucks.
The bubble of blood drifts over to the Spanish-tiled fountain. It clears the lip, just barely; comes to a halt two feet above the surface of the water. Now it looks like an art installation, albeit kind of a disgusting one. But perhaps it is seeing a heroic role for itself: scaring off the kind of children who like to steal pennies from fountains. Future criminal masterminds might turn their energies in a more productive direction. Perhaps some will become dentists.
Were you a boy who stole coins from fountains, Paul Zell?
We’re not getting very far in this story, are we? Maybe that’s because some parts of it are so very hard to tell, Paul Zell. So here I linger, not at the beginning and not even in the middle. Already it’s more of a muddle. Maybe you won’t even make it this far, Paul Zell, but me, I have to keep going. I would make a joke about superheroic efforts, but that would just be me, delaying some more.
Behind the desk, even Aliss has gotten tired of waiting for me to get on with the story. She’s stopped glaring, is clacking on a keyboard with her too-long nails. There’s glitter residue around her hairline, and a half-scrubbed-off club stamp on her right hand. She says to Billie, “Are you a guest here? What was your name again?”
“Melinda Bowles,” Billie says. “I’m not a guest. Paul Zell is staying here? He said he would leave something for me behind the desk.”
“Are you here to audition?” Aliss says. “Because maybe you should go ask over at the convention registration.”
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