by Piper Lennox
Kai
Summer girls leave. And yet here I am, giving one a personal tour of the island.
You. Are an idiot.
It’s not the dumbest thing I’ve done this week, but I can’t say it’s the smartest, that’s for sure.
Still: when Mollie steps out of that water, her swim bottoms shifting just enough to remind me of last night... I can’t exactly blame myself for agreeing to this.
“Holualoa isn’t far from here,” I explain, averting my eyes while she gets dressed in the only thing her friend left behind, a cotton sundress. Thanks to what I’m sure was a purposeful oversight on the friend’s part, there’s no towel, so her swimsuit leaves wet spots in the fabric.
“Are we walking?”
“I’ve got some bikes we can use, back at my house. It’s a little ways up the road.”
We chitchat along the way, mostly school talk: what she was studying, what she plans to do next. She asks where I went to school.
“Took some business courses online. My dad’s idea.” I shrug. “I liked it, but by then, the resort was already underway. So I kind of stopped caring.”
“What would you study now, if you went back?”
Her question surprises me. “I’ve never thought about it, to be honest.”
“Going back to school?”
“Well, that, but...I’ve never thought about what else I’d be interested in.” My surfboard makes a solid clunk sound under my hand. “Other than surfing, I mean.”
“My advisor always told people to think back to when they were kids,” she says, “and use what they liked then as a starting point.”
“So...surfing.”
She laughs. I realize I love the sound of it.
Yep. Idiot.
But so what if I’m an idiot? I’m also jobless, and after Dad gets home tonight—if he hasn’t stopped in already—I might be homeless, on top of that. I can already picture all my belongings strewn on the lawn.
There are worse things to be than an idiot. And right now, I don’t care either way. I like spending time with Mollie. That can be enough, at least for one afternoon.
When we reach the house, she stops on the front stoop and tilts her head, squinting at the door.
“Something wrong?”
“No,” she says quickly, but when we get into the living room, she does it again, this time in front of the sofa.
“I have this déjà vu feeling, or something. Like I’ve been here before.”
I look up from the box I’ve dragged out of the closet, with all our old safety gear inside. “Actually, you have.”
“What?”
“The, uh...the night you....” I don’t know why it’s so hard to say. She didn’t drown. Just...almost. “I brought you here, and my parents called the ambulance.” I toss the bike helmet I’ve found onto the couch. “I set you down right there.”
She picks up the helmet and sits. “Your mom,” she says, her voice soft and slow, pulling the memory up to the surface. “She was whispering to me.”
I pause, just as my hands find the other helmet. “Yeah,” I say, my head bent down towards the box. “She was probably praying over you.”
Mollie turns and looks at me. “I felt a lot better after that. Like, when she said I was going to be okay? I really believed it.”
This makes me smile, even if it’s bittersweet. I shove the box back into the closet and motion for her to follow me to the shed, where we keep the bikes. One of Luka’s shirts is on the porch railing, sun-bleached but clean, so I peel off my rash guard and make the switch. I can feel her eyes on my back while I change.
Once we’re on the road, the tightness in my neck dissipates. There was something unsettling about having Mollie in my house. Like she could see more about me than I wanted her to know yet, if at all.
That’s the weirdest part, though: at least a piece of me wants her to know more. And I want to know more about her.
We talk the entire ride. She tells me about her family, then I tell her about mine. I even relay how I quit, just this morning.
“Wow.” Her pedaling slows. “You told your dad how you felt, and he still let you quit? He didn’t even try to work it out?”
We skirt the side of the road while a shuttle from a different hotel glides past. “That’s a little too well-adjusted for my dad. He doesn’t do the whole ‘talk about your feelings’ thing.”
“My dad does. Guess I always took it for granted.” She pedals faster again, catching up to me. “You could still fix things, though. If you wanted. I can’t imagine he’d refuse to hire his own son back.”
“Oh, he’d hire me back. But that’s the problem—I don’t want to work there anymore. I just stayed because...it was easy. You know what I mean? Humans stick with what they know, even when everything tells them they shouldn’t. Even if it makes them miserable.”
“I actually know exactly what you mean.”
“You do?”
Mollie draws in a breath. “Last night,” she says, “when I told you I wanted to talk?”
“Yeah—that friend who you found out wasn’t a friend, or…something?”
“It’s this guy, Damian. I had a huge crush on him for, like, four years, and I decided this trip was going to be when I finally asked him out and told him how I felt.”
Damian. I remember her saying his name when we met. At least, when I met her.
“But when I did,” she continues, as we come up over a hill and start to coast, “he turned me down.”
“I’m sorry,” I find myself saying, even though I’m not. “It’s never fun, getting shot down.” I realize too late that this comment could come off as snarky. After all, she shot me down barely twelve hours ago.
She doesn’t seem to notice. “Well, it’s even less fun when the person tells you they’re gay.”
“Whoa.”
“Right?”
I can’t help the laugh that escapes. Mollie hits her brakes, hard, just as we get to the bottom of the hill. “It’s not funny.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Anyway,” she stresses, “then he tells me this hookup we had a few years ago was really just him ‘testing’ himself or whatever, because he knew I’d let him.” She starts pedaling again. “Which was upsetting, because....”
Her voice trails. I wait. When she doesn’t finish her sentence, I offer up the only ending I can think of—how I’d feel, in that situation.
“....because you thought he was your friend, and a real friend wouldn’t have taken advantage of your feelings for his own gain.”
“Exactly.” She looks at me, pleasantly surprised. “See, you get it. But Damian thought, instead of just being drunk and upset, I must have purposely drowned myself because Lord knows I couldn’t go on living if I didn’t have him.”
I laugh.
“Then he made fun of the fact I had a crush on him, calling me ‘obsessed.’ He didn’t even apologize for anything.”
“He sounds like an asshole.”
“He kind of is,” she smirks. “Looking back, I can find all this evidence that he wasn’t a good friend. He never remembered stuff I told him, only called me when he needed my help with a class…. So, yes, I totally understand what you mean, how sticking around just seemed easier. We do stick to what we know. Even if it’s obviously wrong for us.”
I try not to ask my next question, but it finds its way out, anyway: “Is that why you bailed on me last night? Because you still like him?”
Mollie’s quiet for so long, I wonder if she’s mad at me, ready to turn around and call this day—and whatever it might turn into—quits. Instead, though, when I look at her over my shoulder, I see her studying the road.
“No,” she says. “I kind of hate him, actually.”
We brake at the same time, a cloud of dust around our tires. “Then why’d you leave like that? I mean, I’m not trying to sound clingy or anything. It just seemed like we had a....” I pause. “Connection” seems too strong a word
, even though it’s exactly the one I want to use. I settle on “good time.” “But then it was like a switch flipped, and you couldn’t get away from me fast enough.”
“It wasn’t you, Kai.” She picks at the peeling rubber grip on her handlebars. Her bangs fall around her face in wisps as she looks at me. “I had a crush on him for a long time, that’s all. So it was weird, realizing I had one for someone else.”
I can tell, from the way she flinches as she says it, that she didn’t mean to use the word “crush.”
But she did. It’s out there.
“You know what I mean,” she mutters.
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” I smile. “You like me. It’s cool, whatever.”
Her face is pure red. It’s cute, but I do feel a little bad for embarrassing her. “I barely know you.”
Let it go. Don’t admit to anything.
“Well, barely knowing you hasn’t stopped my crush.”
Mollie opens her mouth, but registers my words and stops short. She smiles.
I look away and start to pedal again. Even with my brain now compiling a spreadsheet of why I’m even dumber than I think, I feel myself smile too.
Eleven
Mollie
“I like your tattoo.” I sip my coffee, complimentary with the tour, which Kai insisted on paying for. I resisted until I noticed Tanya had taken my wallet. Probably on purpose.
We’re on the patio off the coffee plantation’s tasting room, at a bistro table just big enough for the two of us. His hands are behind his head as he leans back in his chair, revealing the design on his bicep: a surfboard.
He glances at it, then grabs his coffee. “Thanks.”
“Can I see it up close?”
Cautiously, like he’s embarrassed, he scoots closer. “If you want.”
The surfboard has a vaguely tribal pattern, comprised of rhombuses and tropical flowers. Three letters are inked into the center.
“N-o-e?” I spell, and reach out to touch them. Kai tenses, but doesn’t stop me.
“Noe. My brother.”
“I thought it was just you and Luka.”
“It is.”
It takes me a minute to understand, but when I finally do, the realization hits me square in the chest. “Oh. I...I’m so sorry.”
The table wobbles as he rests his arm there again. He sips his coffee, eyes still cast downward, unfocused. “Thank you.”
I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about it, but it also seems rude to change the subject too quickly. “Can I ask...how?”
The scent of coffee, so calm and inviting the last hour, is overwhelming now, his silence amplifying it.
“He drowned,” he says. His voice is flat, the words stark.
“I didn’t do anything special.” Now I understand why he believed saving me wasn’t a big deal—or why he wanted to believe it, at least. That night wasn’t an amazing feat, in his eyes. It was a reminder.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. The sentiment feels meaningless, but I can’t help it coming out, anyway.
When I was a kid, my neighbor died in a motorcycle crash coming back from a high school football game. I remember his mother crying at our kitchen table long after I was supposed to be in bed. While I sat on the stairs and eavesdropped, Mom brewed coffee and tried to comfort her. It had been at least two months; being seven and not close to the guy, I’d already accepted this new reality and moved on. It was weird to learn other people hadn’t—or couldn’t.
She went from weeping to furious in a flash, snapping, “And everyone keeps saying they’re sorry for our loss. I just get mad at them, every time I hear it. It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t mean anything by now.”
“They don’t know what else to say,” my mom offered, refilling her water glass and coffee mug at the same time. She was a counselor at the high school, and had mastered the soft-but-strong approach: her voice was always easy and kind, but with a quiet authority to it. She just knew things.
Our neighbor sniffed and nodded, and I snuck back upstairs. I never forgot that night, and thought of it every time I ever told someone “I’m sorry” when they lost a person they loved. Sorry was useless. It couldn’t change anything. But I still understood why people said it: in the end, what else could you say?
Kai must know this, too, because he thanks me again, no offense taken. “It was a couple years ago, so....”
I wait. He doesn’t finish his sentence. I don’t know what he was about to say—“So I’m over it?” Definitely not. “So it is what it is?” “So there’s no point talking about it?”
The silence is unbearable. We were having such a great conversation, and I hate myself for ruining it. For all I know, I’ve ruined the entire date. If this is a date at all, of course.
We finish our coffee and head back to our bikes, chained to a post out front. He kneels and unlocks them. “Where to next?”
I’m surprised he doesn’t want to head back, but happy I haven’t driven him away. “Um...I’m not sure.”
“There’s some art galleries around here,” he says, not looking at me, but instead giving his kickstand undivided attention, “or we can pedal back to Kona and do something there.”
“We don’t have to do anything,” I offer, tentatively following as he pedals to the road. “I mean, I like just hanging out with you. We could ride around and talk, enjoy the scenery.”
For the first time in at least ten minutes, he glances at me. “Okay. If that’s what you want to do.”
We pedal in near-silence now, but at least mild conversation about the weather (sunny, unchanged) or the coffee tour (interesting, fragrant) is better than nothing.
After we’ve ridden at least a mile with this boring back-and-forth, I apologize yet again. “I didn’t mean to open a wound or anything. Bringing up your brother, back there.”
He slows down, the two of us taking up most of the road while I keep a friendly distance between us. “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”
“But now things feel weird.”
“That’s on me, not you.” He pushes his hand through his hair. “My family doesn’t talk about him. Like, at all. So it’s strange hearing someone say his name.”
“You don’t have to tell me about him,” I offer, “but...if you do want to, I’d like to know more.”
“About how he died?”
“No.” I steer my bike closer to his, arms brushing. “Unless that’s what you want to talk about. But I meant knowing more about him.”
Kai does a double take. I brace myself, sure the date’s about to come to a screeching halt.
Instead, though, he smiles. Faint, but there.
Kai
I haven’t talked about Noe in almost two years. I’ve mentioned him, always ignored; everyone else sidesteps him as easily as the hole in the porch we’ve never bothered fixing. But I still think about him, sometimes.
A lot, actually.
So when I start to tell Mollie about him, after we choose a grassy hill in the shade, shrouded in trees that block the sound from the road, I have a harder time thinking of what to say than I thought I would.
“Start with the easy stuff,” she says, lying on the grass beside me. “Was he younger than you, older?”
“Three years older.” My brain clears now that some words, any words, are out. “He loved surfing, too. He’s the one who taught me how.”
Her hand finds mine with a light touch, almost asking if she can hold it. I turn my palm up as an answer and close my fingers around hers.
“He was kind of the golden child. I mean, my parents never played favorites or anything, but everyone knew Noe was the reliable one. He watched out for me and Luka, got straight A’s. Whenever something went wrong, he’d make a joke, just some stupid comment, but it...it made us all feel better, you know?
“Like this one time, the sound system in the lounge just, like, blew up. Actual sparks and smoke. So here we had all these guests waiting on a party, and no music, except for this
crappy little radio from the kitchen. Then Noe says, ‘Hang on a sec,’ goes home, and comes back with this karaoke machine we had as kids. He hooked it up to the only speaker we had left, and just started belting Celine Dion at the top of his lungs.”
Mollie laughs.
“He saved the whole evening,” I finish, and realize I’m smiling again. “And of course he acted like it was no big deal. That’s just the kind of guy he was.”
Her hand squeezes mine. “Sounds like he was really funny, too.”
“Yeah, he was. Guests loved him. And being as smart as he was—plus being the oldest—it just made sense that Dad was going to pass the business on to him. I don’t know if he ever sat us down and told us. It was just something we all knew.” I pause. “Dad had him in training basically his whole life.”
“That was probably hard on him.”
“Yeah. He was excited about the business, but you could tell it got to him, sometimes. He’d wake me up to go surfing really early or late, and I guess…that was his chance to get away from it all, for a little while.”
Mollie scoots closer to me. Her hair tickles my arm, but I don’t brush it away.
“You must miss him so much.”
My eyes sting. It’s the biggest surprise of today by far, topping even my conversation with Dad: that I can still cry at all.
“Yeah.” I swallow it back. Talking is one thing, but I refuse to cry in front of her. In front of anyone. Not for some macho reason—not even because it’s our first date, or whatever this is, and I’d feel awkward.
It’s because, in the end, I don’t deserve to cry over Noe.
We listen to the wind coming through the trees above us, like paper rustling. I don’t know what time it is, but the position of the sun puts us at early afternoon. Dad is probably taking his lunch break right now, or postponing it for a mountain of paperwork. The usual.
Or, more likely, he’s using the time he should be relaxing to clear out my room from top to bottom, like I never existed. Just like he did to Noe’s room.
“So with Noe gone,” Mollie says, “the business will go to you?”