But I don’t have one, so instead I scour her Instagram. Girls like her take so many pictures, and people take so many pictures of them. I have plenty to look at. A picture jumps out from the rest, like a car swerving out of its lane right at me. It hurts how I imagine getting hit on my bike would hurt: an unexpected jolt, then flying, then impact, all at the slow speed of disbelief.
One of her posts is a Boomerang of two pairs of feet, a giant flat-screen television in the background. The Thin Man is playing on the screen, and William Powell is perpetually raising his glass to his lips and setting it down again. She must have been sitting on his lap to take the picture. The feet dance back and forth as the video loops. The post is captioned “Thin Man binge with The Boy. #nickandnora #partnersincrime.” It was posted two days before my birthday last year. I scroll through my text messages. That night, I asked what he was up to. He texted back, “geology bleh” and a gif of a bored sloth wearing glasses.
I want to cry, but I’m all cried out. The wind over the waves still sounds like it’s crying, and it’s like the world has taken the baton so I don’t have to keep it up. I close her social media. I can’t take any more tonight. I want music, but my phone is almost dead. I text X my GPS location just in case and put my phone in my backpack, putting it under my head. I wrap the big banner over my bench to shelter me from the wind and hopefully the cops if they come by. I curl myself into a ball and fall asleep before I have time to wonder if I will be able to.
chapter three
Someone is calling my name. Light streams through my tent. “Miho! Where are you?” the voice—my favorite voice—calls again.
“I’m here!” I call back, too woozy to sit up. I’m nauseous. I stare up at the ceiling wondering where I found a tent. Then I remember. The banner. The ad on it is facing me. Giant letters read anything is possible®. I’m sure it’s some kind of self-improvement cult banner or something, but right now I think, Yep, anything, including your boyfriend of two years having a kid with someone else at the ripe old age of eighteen, is possible. I want to tear the banner into tiny pieces, but it’s vinyl, so I throw it onto the sand. No point arguing with a banner.
I sit up and groan, holding my head so I don’t do a face-plant into the sand. Blood pounds in my ears. Every muscle in my body hurts. It finally occurs to me: Did I drink any water at all last night? Eat anything? I’m dehydrated and I’m starving and I smell like the gross old gym lockers at school.
X is a few yards away. He walked right past me. He looks over and does a double take.
“Jeez, Miho. I thought that was a drunk or something under there.” He takes off his school shoes, rolls up his uniform pants, and makes his way over to me in the sand. It’s the same uniform that two-timing rat fink wears. He sits down on the bench. “Okay, spill,” he says. My lip quivers.
“He’s getting married,” I say, or rather sob.
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
“You don’t mean—”
“I don’t want to hear his name ever again,” I say, cutting him off. “Even his name hurts.”
“Oh my god,” X says, pulling out his phone. I know he’s texting everyone. Maybe I should have sent a group text, but in every group, there are little suballiances: the people you go to for certain things. I love all my friends, but I knew I wanted X: his shoulder to cry on, his sympathy, his fury on my behalf. X understands heartbreak. He slides his phone away into his satchel.
“How did you find out?” he asks. “I saw you before school yesterday and everything was fine. I saw him at school and he seemed totally normal.”
“He broke it off. Just, out of the blue. We met up after school and he broke up with me.”
“For no reason?”
“No, he told me the reason. But not the whole reason.”
X waits. I try to fit the rage into sentences that go in chronological order, rather than letting loose the tornado of discoveries within me. Where do I even start?
“Okay,” I say. “You remember I told you he used to date that girl at St. Agatha’s? The one he broke up with when she went to study abroad in Japan for sophomore year?”
He nods.
“Well, what he told me yesterday was that he’d done something stupid, gotten drunk at a Christmas party they were both at, and he got her pregnant.”
“What a piece of human garbage.”
“I was real mad.”
“Understatement?”
“Obviously. So he told me he was being forced to marry her, shotgun-wedding style, because she wants to keep it. And he said he didn’t have the strength to see me anymore because he loved me too much to watch me go on without him, when he was being trapped into marrying her.”
“I hope you slapped him.”
“I didn’t,” I say sheepishly. “We did a whole ‘last kiss’ thing. It might have been the most romantic kiss of my entire life.”
“With the guy who cheated on you.”
“With the guy who cheated on me.”
“Miho,” X scolds, shaking his head.
“It seemed so Lancelot, you know?”
“Lancelot was a cheating piece of garbage too,” X says.
“Exactly,” I say. “Anyway, I said I understood, and that I was sorry and happy for him, but that I hoped we could be friends someday.”
“So…okay.”
“Because I was happy, you know? I was happy when I thought he cheated once, maybe because he was drunk, and was stepping up to deal with the consequences.”
“You know that’s messed up, right?”
Of course I know that’s messed up. But I’m pretty sure I was a drunk mistake. I mean, I know I was a mistake, because my mom told me that all the time before she abandoned me, and I assume alcohol was involved because…well, my dad was involved. And even though my dad is great now, I wish it hadn’t taken him ten years to step up and deal with the consequences. I wish it hadn’t taken my mom abandoning me to make him man up and get his life together.
X knows exactly what I’m thinking, because he’s my best friend. “Sorry, Mi,” he says. “It’s not messed up that you were happy. You’re a good person for wishing them the best. But seriously. What a scumbag.”
“Double seriously,” I agree. “But that’s not the story.”
“Wait, what?”
“That’s only half the story. Because in my heart I knew. I just knew it wasn’t like that.”
“And so—”
I sigh. My heart hurts even thinking of this.
“And so I looked her up. He was careful to never say her last name, but I knew where she went to school, a few things about her. And I found everything. A whole gallery of lies he told me. When he and I hooked up, she was studying in Japan, but I don’t think he ever broke up with her. At least, she didn’t think they were broken up. And then when she came back, he kept it up with both of us. Except apparently, she was his real girlfriend, the one who came to dinner with his parents, and I was on the down low.”
“Oh, baby, I didn’t know.”
“Well, he’s always been—”
“A very private person,” X finishes for me, in a perfect imitation of that rat fink’s smug, conceited, totally dialect-free voice. Even white people here have an accent, but he speaks the most non-Hawaiian English of any human on this island, like a Midwestern newscaster. When he heads to college, no one will even know he was born here.
X shakes his head in disbelief. “At school he mostly snobsplains. I don’t think I’ve heard him say anything to another human being that didn’t start with, ‘Well, actually…’ I mean, not to be a jerk, but we put up with him mostly for your sake. He was a pretentious little cardboard snob just begging to get knocked down.”
My face burns as X goes on.
“I particularly love how he holds out his books just
so to make absolutely sure everyone can see the Very Important Dead White Men he was reading. Like, we get it. You’ve read Proust. When people like that are around actual smart people, you can see right through them. And it kind of makes you cringe. He was fun, and he was cute, but god, didn’t you just hate him sometimes?”
No, I think. No I didn’t.
I know X is trying to make me feel better, the same way I’ve deconstructed every single football-loving dimwit who wouldn’t give him the time of day. I know he would never, ever think those things about me. But that’s because he’s my friend. You never think those things about your friends. But if my ex-boyfriend was so obviously a poser, then what am I?
“I’m not blaming you for not reading his mind,” I say.
“I still feel bad,” X says. “So you found out, and then what?”
“I was pissed. So I rode my bike to his house, and I tried to calm myself down, and I walked right up to his door. But when I got there, I saw her sitting on the porch. He must have been inside.”
“And?”
“And I was going to walk up to him and tell him what I thought of him, right in front of her. I came up to the door. I said, ‘I’m Miho.’ And…she had no clue. She had no clue who I was.”
X squints questioningly. “How do you know?”
“She asked if I was delivering something.”
“Wow. Stuck-up.”
“To be fair, my bike rack does say ‘pizza’ on it.”
“Even so. You’d think she would have seen someone our age and thought ‘a friend’ and not ‘a service worker.’ ”
“Why would she? I honestly don’t think he ever mentioned me. Not once. Girls remember things like that.”
“So you told her?”
I pause.
“You didn’t tell her?” X whisper-shouts. “Why? Why not out him?”
“I was in shock,” I say defensively. “It never occurred to me that anyone could tell a lie this big.”
“So what did you do?”
“I said I must be at the wrong house for my imaginary delivery and rode off.”
“And that was that?”
“That was that. Except for the series of increasingly furious voice mails and text messages I sent him. But he hasn’t responded. So I guess that was that.”
We’re quiet then. The only thing I hear is my stomach growling.
“Thanks for getting me,” I say at last.
“You should have called last night.”
“I was busy.”
“With what?”
“Pyrotechnics.”
He snorts. “Drama queen.”
“Closet queen.”
“Meanie,” he says, but he’s laughing. “So what do you want to do?”
“Curl up here and die in your arms.”
“Yes to the first part, no to the second.”
“Fine,” I say. I lie down and put my head in his lap. I’m so tired. X leans forward, looking me over, looking all around.
“Miho,” he says slowly. “Where are your shoes?”
* * *
The rest of our crew shows up one by one. While I was dozing, X texted them the basics.
Lani is first, because she tries to hit the breakfast crowd before school in her food truck. She pulls up on her scooter, slides onto the bench, and puts my feet in her lap. I hear the faint click of the beads braided into her cornrows when she moves. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her mouthing “Shoes?” to X. He shrugs. She hands a breakfast sandwich to X, who greedily unwraps it. Crumbs start falling on my face, but I don’t move. Lani tries to hand me a sandwich, but I shake my head. I was starving a minute ago, but now I’m horribly nauseous. Lani hands something in a thermos to me, but even the idea of putting something in my mouth makes me queasy.
“Drink it, Miho,” Lani orders.
I sit up. Lani has been my friend since the first day of middle school, when she and her best friend, Trin, let me sit at their table. A group of boys made up a song called, “Fat Girl, Nerd Girl, New Girl” that fall and serenaded us with it every day at lunch for weeks. I didn’t mind: I’d been the new girl before. But Trinity—“Nerd Girl”—may or may not have very shortly thereafter caused “severe testicular trauma” to one of those boys, coincidentally at the same time that Lani spilled her milk on the monitor. I didn’t see anything. No one did.
Lani is our “Mom” friend. So I don’t make her tell me twice. Once I start drinking—pineapple sweet tea, her newest hit—I can’t stop, even though it’s too cold. My brain knows I need to slow down, pace myself, but my body is so thirsty that I can’t make myself take the bottle away from my lips.
I drop the empty thermos into the sand, my eyes squeezed shut.
“Are you okay?” Lani asks me. “Are you crying?”
I shake my head again. “Brain freeze,” I tell her.
Trinity arrives next, mysteriously on foot. We never know how Trin gets around. She magically appears places, transported by an extended network of brothers and cousins, motorcycles and trucks. Hawaiian Muni, I think of it. Trinity slides onto the bench between me and Lani. X shouts as we almost push him off. There’s barely room for the four of us.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She reaches out to me, and I instinctively throw my arms up to block the punch. She rolls her eyes, insulted. “It was a hug.” Then she punches me in the shoulder. “For flinching,” she clarifies.
Trin takes her breakfast from Lani, stuffing it into her mouth like the garbage disposal she is. “So it’s, like, official?” Trin asks with her mouth full.
“She’s knitting baby socks on Instagram,” I say.
“She might miscarry,” Trinity says. “Why exactly are they going through with it?”
“With what?”
“The baby.”
“The baby is non-optional for some people,” I explain. “She is one of those people.”
“It’s weird that they’re not trying to hide it until after they’re married, then,” Trinity says. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do if you get knocked up? Get married real fast and hide it?”
“No one is ever fooled by that,” Lani says, pointing to herself, a not-quite-in-wedlock baby. “Besides, she looks like a bridezilla. She probably wants flowers and a cake and a bridal shower and all that, even though everyone knows this is a major screwup.”
“But then, if she miscarries, does it get called off?” Trinity asks.
“It doesn’t matter now,” I say. I know that this is what I am supposed to feel, so I add: “He’s a cheater, and he lied to me for two years. Why would I want him back? He’s dead to me.”
“I’m glad,” Trinity says with her mouth full again, another paper wrapper in her lap. Did she steal my sandwich? I look in panic at Lani, who laughs. Two. She brought Trin two. Playing favorites, the jerk. But then Lani hands me my very own, and we’re golden.
“I’m glad too,” Lani says. “He was such a pretentious waste of oxygen.”
X nods in agreement. “I mean honestly, who wears a Harris tweed blazer in Hawai’i?”
“I mean honestly, who can point out Harris tweed?” Rei asks from behind us. We all turn around. She strides up, looking like a living Anthropologie catalog. Her boyfriend, Wyatt, is hanging back by her whisper-silent silver Prius. Rei puts her arms around me from behind the bench and kisses the top of my head. X pulls me onto his lap so that Rei can sit down.
Lani leans over the back of the bench and gestures to Wyatt, food in hand, like she’s trying to lure in a scared dog. Wyatt and Rei haven’t been dating that long. He’s always a little awkward, and a little afraid of us. Understandably.
“Hey,” Wyatt says. “Sorry about—”
“Don’t say his name,” I shout, covering my ears. “I never want to hear it ever again.”
> “Okay,” Wyatt says. He sits on the sand, observing from a distance.
“I can’t believe she’s cheating with your boyfriend,” Rei says. “What about the girl code?”
Rei’s a big believer in the “girl code.” In middle school, Rei was my dance partner in PE because there were more girls than boys. She was a good sport about it, even though it meant she didn’t get to dance with the coolest boy in school, who clearly wanted to dance with her. “Sisters before misters,” she says whenever it comes up.
“Technically, I’m cheating with her boyfriend,” I clarify. “She came first. I’m the side chick. I just didn’t know it.”
“I still think you should tell her,” X says.
“I don’t even know where she lives.”
“X could find out,” Trin says. “Hell, I could find out. Give me two seconds—”
“No,” I cut them off. “It won’t fix anything.”
“Not for you. But maybe for her,” Rei says. “I’d tell her because I’d want to know myself. When she finds out—and she will find out because a cheater is a cheater—she’s going to feel like everyone in the universe is laughing at her. It will hurt way worse later on.”
Lani nods. “Think of my mom. That’s what my dad did to her. Same deal: rushed wedding, baby on the way. Think of finding that out when you’re in your thirties. At thirty you’re basically dead, guys. Dead. Your life is over. I can’t even imagine being thirty. Imagine finding out that the father of your kids has been screwing around with other girls since before you got married. That every time he picks up his phone or uses a computer, it’s to cheat on you. My mom took my dad’s cricket bat and smashed our home computer into computer salad. Every once in a while I still find microchip bits under the furniture. But then she didn’t get off the couch for two whole years, and now I think she’s addicted to her Prozac. You could save this dumb girl from that before it’s too late.”
I know they’re right, but my mouth goes dry because I’m not thinking of her as Lani’s mom, I’m thinking of her baby as me. And when I think of it that way, I just can’t.
Fierce as the Wind Page 2