“Did you get any sleep at all?” I ask him.
Will glances over at me, startled. The circles under his eyes are even more pronounced.
He walks over to the van and leans in the open window. “Not much,” he says, giving me a tired smile. “And since I was up, I figured I’d get started on my quest. There’s a coffee place a few miles from here that’s right on the beach.”
“Mahalo’s,” I say.
He drums his fingers on the side of the van, as if noticing what I’m driving for the first time. “Are you still working?”
“No. I’m having car trouble, so the hotel let me borrow the van for a while.”
His fingers start drumming faster. “In that case … do you want to come with me?”
I chew my lip. Marielle didn’t specifically say I couldn’t hang out with Will outside of the time I’m paid to do it, but there’s no way she would approve. However, she’s not here—and what she doesn’t know won’t get me into trouble.
“Sure,” I say. “Just let me park.”
I pull down a side street, hoping that no one from the hotel will spot the van. I wish I’d changed before leaving work—I’m still in my uniform. I take off my name tag and drop it in the cup holder, then shake my hair out from its ponytail so it falls in dark waves over my shoulders. Then I feel silly, because this isn’t a date. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but it’s definitely not a date.
Will’s standing where I left him, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his shorts. He watches me come toward him, rocking back and forth slightly on his feet. His shock of dark hair adds a few extra inches to his already towering height.
He clears his throat. “So I probably should have mentioned that I asked your boss if you could show me and Hayes around,” he says. “I hope that’s okay.”
I smile. “It’s okay. In fact, I should probably thank you—you got me off nights. For a little while, anyway.”
The wind rustles through the palm trees as we start down the wide sidewalk that leads past a row of luxury hotels, each one bigger and fancier than the last. It hits me that the last time I walked down here I was with my dad. When I was a kid, he’d take me on an adventure every weekend. By the time I turned ten, there wasn’t an inch of this island we hadn’t explored.
I don’t want to miss my dad, but when I’m faced with the memory of things we used to do, I can’t help it. When he left, it knocked the wind out of me and I haven’t yet caught my breath.
Will moves close to me to let a jogger pass. “Do you always work the night shift?”
“Yeah.” I don’t tell him that I used to work in housekeeping, because I don’t want him to ask me any questions that might lead to me spilling my terrible secret. I can only imagine what he’d think of me if he found out I stole from guests. Although it can’t be any worse than what I think about myself.
“My mom caught me sneaking out of the house a few months ago,” I say. “She works for the hotel too, and making me work nights was the best punishment she could think of.” But I guess that punishment is over, now that Marielle has reassigned me. At least temporarily.
The jogger is long gone, but Will is still walking close to me. “What happens when school starts?” he asks. “You go back to working the night shift?”
“It won’t matter. I’m taking a gap year.”
Something that looks a lot like envy flashes across his face. I know he probably thinks that gap year equals traveling, not working at the hotel—and not too long ago, that’s what it meant to me, too.
“That sounds a whole lot better than business school,” he says.
“You don’t want to go?”
He shakes his head. “Whether I want to or not, I’m going. Following in my dad’s footsteps has always been ‘the plan.’ His plan, anyway,” he says. “My entire life has already been mapped out for me.”
I don’t think that sounds so terrible. There’s something comforting about knowing exactly what the future has in store for you. Especially when my own future seems a bit murky.
He winces. “I sound like an entitled douchebag, right?”
I shrug. It is hard to feel sorry for him. Plenty of people would kill to be in his place, to have the world laid out at their feet.
“It’s just … sometimes I wish I had the freedom to do what I want, you know? Instead of what’s expected of me.”
“What would you rather do instead?”
“Live in a yurt in Israel. Climb Kilimanjaro. Run with the bulls in Spain. Open a coffee shop on a beach somewhere.”
“What would happen if you told your dad you didn’t want to go to school?”
He lets out a breath. “Trust me, I’ve tried. He doesn’t want to hear it. And I’m not really in a position to argue with him at the moment,” he says. “My grandfather left me some money and I’m supposed to get it when I turn eighteen in a few months, but my dad manages the trust fund. If he doesn’t think I’m able to handle it—and it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t—then he can keep it from me until I’m twenty-five. So I have to behave and follow his direction.” He holds his fist in the air. “Wharton or bust.”
For all that I complain about my parents, they’ve never attached any strings to anything or tried to push their opinions about what I should do with the rest of my life onto me. When I told them I was taking a year off to travel, my dad was thrilled. Unlike my mom, who’s lived on Maui most of her life, he arrived here after college. Hawaii was supposed to be a stopover on his way to Australia, a great way to kickoff the yearlong backpacking trip he’d been planning since high school. But then he met my mom, and Australia became just a dream.
I know he’ll be disappointed when he finds out I’m not going anywhere. But since he’s part of the reason my plans have changed, he can’t say much.
Will and I walk down the stone path that leads to Mahalo’s, a thatched-roofed coffee shop set right on Wailea Beach. It’s a busy place, and almost all of the white wicker chairs are taken by tourists who rolled out of bed extra early to watch the sun come up.
“What can I get you?” Will asks me, joining the line. The café smells strongly of roasted coffee beans and baked goods, thanks to a platter of cinnamon rolls on the counter.
I’m not sure where him buying me coffee falls—date or not date?—but I tell him I’d love an iced vanilla latte.
While he’s ordering, I notice an elderly man preparing to leave his table in the far corner. I race across the restaurant to grab it, plunking down in one of the wicker chairs. I kick off my slippers and bury my feet in the cool sand. Wailea Beach is postcard perfect, an unobstructed view of pink-and-gold sky, and blue waves crashing against the shore. A few boats—mostly yachts—bob in the water.
It’s a view that people pay a lot of money to come and see, but I’m more interested in watching Will. He’s chatting with the girl behind the counter, seemingly unaware that he’s holding up the line with his questions. He finally decides on which coffee to order and pulls out a black credit card, the kind that’s only available to the extremely wealthy. Those cards are a pretty common sight in Wailea, and I’m not at all surprised that he has one. After the girl punches in his order, he walks over to wait for our drinks at the end of the counter.
I study his profile, his strong, almost hawklike nose and those full lips, that tornado of dark hair. The corner of his mouth curls up slightly as he smiles at the barista. He asks him about the big silver espresso machine, craning his neck around to watch the guy prepare his drink.
A few minutes later he carries our drinks over to the table.
“Hard to choose, but I went with the macadamia nut latte,” he says, setting my boring vanilla latte in front of me.
“Thank you.”
Will settles into the chair across the table from me and gazes out at the endless stretch of water. “So what do you do when you’re not working?”
“The usual stuff,” I say, which I know is not really any kind of an answer. “What do y
ou want to do while you’re here? Besides hit up every coffee shop?”
“Surfing, for sure. I’d also like to check out the volcano at some point.” He narrows his eyes. “By the way, I see what you did there. You somehow turned the conversation back to me.”
My cheeks start to heat up. Deflecting personal questions is my superpower—no one ever calls me on it. For some reason, Will seems genuinely interested in getting to know me.
I fiddle with my straw. I know I shouldn’t compare him to Kahale, but it’s hard not to think about the last time I let someone in. And what happened when I did.
Will takes a sip of his latte, waiting for me to respond, but the words are stuck in my throat. There’s nothing exciting about my life, no way to spin working at the hotel forever into an interesting story. I wouldn’t blame him if he gave up on me altogether, but instead he puts down his mug and leans toward me.
“Okay, how about we play a game?” he says. “Would you rather be covered in scales, like a dragon, or have whiskers, like a cat?”
I blink at him. “Um, neither.”
He smiles and shakes his head. “You have to choose. That’s the game.”
“And what, exactly, is this supposed to tell you about me?”
“Well, I guess … whether you’d rather have scales or whiskers,” he says. “And who wouldn’t want to know that?”
“Okay,” I say, smiling back at him. “Whiskers. At least then I could pluck them out.”
“Nope. They’d grow back instantly. You’d never be rid of them.”
“I stand by my answer,” I say. “My turn. Would you rather wear a clown costume every day for a year or clown makeup every day for an entire year?”
“Would I have to wear one of those red noses?”
“Of course.”
“Technically that’s not makeup,” he points out.
“If my whiskers grow back, then you definitely have to wear the nose.”
He lets out a deep breath. “I’m going to have to go with the clown makeup.”
I start to laugh.
“You’re picturing me in the nose, aren’t you?” he asks.
“Maybe.”
He laughs too, and I start to relax. This conversation makes no sense—this game makes no sense—but it’s fun.
“Okay,” he says. “Would you rather only be able to listen to polka music for the rest of your life or one song—any song you like—over and over again, forever?”
“The same song.”
“Well, now I have to ask what it is.”
I frown. I should have known he’d ask a follow-up question. I could give him any song, other than the one I’m thinking of, but I feel like that would be cheating in some way, so I decide to take a chance and go with the truth.
“‘Africa,’” I say.
“It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you,” Will sings in a terrible, off-key voice. “There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever doooooooo.”
I laugh.
He gives me a goofy smile that makes my heart turn over. “And now it’ll be in my head for the rest of my life,” he says. “Why that song, by the way?”
“My dad used to sing it to me when he’d put me to bed.” Even when I got too old for him to tuck me in at night, he’d stand at my door and sing me to sleep. “It always made me feel so safe. Like nothing bad could ever happen.”
Like he’d never leave.
“I can see why you’d pick that over polka,” Will says.
“My turn,” I say. “Eat a plate of sushi that’s been left out in the hot sun or drink a glass of spoiled milk?”
He wrinkles his nose. “Is the goal of this question to make me throw up? Because I think I’m about to.”
“It’s strictly hypothetical. You don’t have to actually do it.”
“I guess I’ll go with the sushi,” he says. “If I drank rotten milk, I’d never be able to have cereal again and then what would be the point of living?” He leans back in his chair, stretching his legs under the table. His knee nudges mine and I’m pretty sure it’s not an accident.
My stomach flutters. I want to be friends with Will, but all this getting-to-know-each-other feels like more than friendship. It feels like something bigger, which is the exact opposite of what I need right now.
I shift my leg so our knees are no longer touching. Will takes a sip of his latte, his eyes never leaving my face.
“Okay, me again,” he says. “Would you rather live two hundred years in the past or two hundred years from now?”
“Two hundred years from now, for sure.”
“I don’t know, I think it would be interesting to live in a time before technology,” he says. “Before everyone’s noses were stuck in their phones.”
“There was also polio and slavery and women didn’t have the right to vote.”
He makes a face. “I never thought of that. I change my answer.”
“Too late.” I swirl my straw in my cup, knocking the ice cubes together. “You’re stuck in the 1800s now. Working as a blacksmith, worrying about getting cholera.”
“Why would I be a blacksmith?” he says. “Can’t I be a gentleman farmer or run the general store or something?”
I smile. “Nope.”
“All right, well, the good news is if I ever time travel back to the 1800s, my tenth-grade metalworking skills will finally be put to good use.”
I haven’t laughed this much in … I don’t know when. A long time, anyway. So when Will’s knee touches mine again, I don’t move away. Even though this is a bad idea. Probably the worst idea.
“Speaking of the future,” I say. “Would you rather be able to see everything that’s going to happen in your life or go back and change one thing in your past?”
Will stiffens. His face tightens and he glances away from me and out to the ocean.
I swallow. Why did I ask him about the future? He already told me that his life has been laid out for him—he can already see what’s going to happen. I know he feels trapped, but it’s hard to feel bad for him, all things considered.
Still, I want to take back the question and restore the lighthearted mood, but I don’t know how. I wish we’d never started with this stupid game.
“Change one thing,” Will says finally. His eyes return to mine and he smiles, but it seems forced.
I wonder what it is about his past that he’d change, but it’s pretty clear from the way he’s tapping his fingers against his coffee mug that he doesn’t want to talk about it. And so we talk about the best place to get tacos on the island instead.
And that’s pretty much how it goes, with small talk about hot sauce, until I put us both out of our misery and tell him that I need to get home.
Seven
I’ve been holed up in my room ever since I returned from my coffee date, or whatever that was, with Will. I’ve spent most of the afternoon with Libby in my lap, combing through the long list of shifts Nalani and I worked together. I know I took the sunglasses the first time we worked together—which happened to be the week after my dad left—but I’m not sure which of the ten rooms we cleaned that day is the correct one. Right now the idea that I’ll be able to return this stuff feels impossible.
I need to give my brain a rest. I set Libby on the floor and head upstairs.
“Did you unload the dishwasher?” Mom calls as I pass by her room.
“I was just on my way to do it,” I say. This isn’t true—I was actually going to get a snack—but why poke the bear?
I peek into her room. My mom is standing behind a mountain of clothes piled high on her bed.
“What are you doing?” I ask as she grabs a worn gray cardigan—my dad’s favorite sweater—from the pile and shoves it into an already overstuffed black rubbish bag.
“I’m finally getting around to cleaning out the closet.” She snatches up a fistful of my dad’s ties, including the burgundy-and-yellow striped one I gave him for Father’s Day the year we discovered we b
oth belonged in Gryffindor, and deposits them in the bag.
Tears sting my eyes. Giving away his stuff feels so final. He’s been gone for almost half a year; I should be ready for this. But while I haven’t forgiven him for leaving, I guess a secret corner of my heart is still hoping this is all just a bump in the road and that he’ll change his mind. That he’ll wake up and remember the family he left behind and come back to us.
I walk into the room and pick up one of his shirts. It’s a plain blue T-shirt, nothing special, but it still smells like him. “What are you going to do with all of this?”
“Toss it.” She sniffs, which is when I realize she’s been crying. I feel a stab of sympathy. She’s normally so stoic, keeping a tight reign on her true feelings about the divorce hidden from my brother and me. It’s easy to forget that she’s heartbroken, too.
I think about keeping the shirt, but in the end I change my mind and shove it in the bag. No point hanging on to stuff he didn’t want.
“Any word about your car?” Mom asks. Her dark hair is woven into a thick braid that swings over her shoulder like a pendulum when she leans over to grab a Kleenex from her night stand.
“It’s totaled.” The garage where Marielle had it towed called me this morning. As I suspected, the cost of fixing it is much more than it’s worth. I have the hotel van until insurance pays up, and I can only hope that the settlement is enough to buy another car. It’s pretty difficult to get around the island without one.
I hold open another rubbish bag so my mom can drop an armful of boxer shorts inside.
“Seriously, he didn’t even take his underwear?” I say.
She grimaces. “He was in a pretty big hurry to get out of here.”
My chest tightens. I knew that my parents weren’t happy—it was impossible to be around them and not know that. They fought all the time. But I guess I figured that, happy or not, they’d find a way to make it work. After all, we were a family. So when the end actually came, it was a shock. To everyone but my dad, I guess. By the time he left, we were already in his rearview mirror.
Just My Luck Page 4