Of course Eli didn’t answer. He never answered when Dad “talked” to him like this.
Dad always answered for him. This time Dad said: “It’s because your truck isn’t good enough, right? Because THIS life, the life I’VE GIVEN you, has NEVER been good enough! And where are all the ******* towels?!”
There had been fights like this before. Over Stacy, over surfing—lots of fights about surfing. Eli would be at Sunset, where he wasn’t supposed to be, or get home late on a school night, or leave at what Dad thought was a “really bad time.”
“I don’t get it,” Dad always says, “Is it ever enough? You’d rather be out there screwing around than doing anything else, like homework, or helping your mom…”
I always look at Mom at this part. She doesn’t want to be dragged into it.
“If you put into school a tenth of what you put into surfing,” Dad starts …
And Eli says he’s passing all his classes.
And Dad says, “Passing? ‘Passing’ is enough for you? Is it being with your friends, is that it, the big draw? That Koa kid, huh? The one who’s going to be the ‘pro’? He literally walks on water?”
Then Dad goes into how he knows a lot of guys—A LOT of guys—here on the island who just never got over surfing, and now they don’t have a life, they don’t have a family anymore because they’re selfish, they never grew up, and they’re never going to. They stay boys forever.
And at the end, Dad tells Eli the same thing: “I just want more of a life for you.”
But that’s not what Dad said the last time, when Eli stood there in his worn-out Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt, that day between bail and the program, not telling Dad why he was driving Koa’s Jeep.
This last time, Dad had said, “I wanted more of a life for you.”
Wanted. Past tense.
Like along with Koa and Tate, Eli’s life was over.
FALL
Prompt: “It’s human nature … people move on.”
(Wanda Ortiz, whose husband, Emilio, was killed in the World Trade Center’s North Tower on September 11, 2001)
This is the prompt we have every year. In every class. No matter what.
For a long time after the planes crashed, Mom stayed home instead of going to work. That’s what Grammie Stella told me. Maybe not everyone moves on. Mom didn’t.
I was too little to remember it, but Eli does. He said American flags were everywhere. In the Tanakas’ yard, even.
If I were old enough back then, I would have done something. I would have helped. I would have gone on those rescue trips to find people trapped under the broken buildings so they could be with their families again.
Like every September 11, today our teachers made us think and write and talk about it. We had the usual moment of silence, like always, and, like always, Tae-sung got detention for laughing.
Every year on September 11, our teachers and parents and CNN and Nightly News and KHON2 all remind us that this is the most tragic event in American history.
The darkest day of our lifetimes, they always say.
WINTER
Prompt: Earth.
Will we get to keep the house? Mom and me, if Dad leaves?
She’ll never want to give up the dirt.
At first, it wasn’t good, the dirt. For months, she planned, plotted, and picked up starts from the farmer’s market. But nothing would grow. It died within days.
“It’s not working,” I told Mom a few months after we moved in. I think she started working at it our very first morning.
“It just takes time,” she told me. Hawaii’s growing season is year-round, and once she got the dirt going, her starts and vines would thrive.
Mom worked and worked at the earth. She turned it, worked in nitrogen, checked the drainage.
“Mom, just rent a plot,” I told her. “There’s a community garden right on Mānoa Road. I saw it. The dirt’s good.”
“The hard thing is the right thing,” she said, tossing a withered kalo start in a heap. “Blight,” she said.
Eventually, she asked Mrs. Tanaka, whose cabbage and cucumber tripled next door, for advice. And when Mrs. Tanaka helped her raise the beds, check the soil’s pH, then add sulfur, Mom’s Mānoa lettuce tripled, her lilliko’i tendrils reaching leeward.
FALL
Prompt: Lockers.
There’s going to be food carts! At Carnivale. Funnel cones, and corn dogs, and caramel corn, and cotton candy. Churros and hot pretzels. And everything else you can’t find on O‘ahu. Sophia already booked them, Brielle told me.
Then, “Hey, Tay,” Brielle said in front of everyone, “we should swap locker combinations!”
When you come to OLR, the first thing they tell you is to never, ever swap locker combinations.
But Brielle and me, we did.
Today in Latin, I drew her a masquerade mask with ribbons and the word Carnivale written at the top.
The door opened the first time. An empty Diet Coke can fell out, and I crammed it back in with all the other stuff. You would think it would be clean in there, in Brielle Branson’s locker, but it was kind of a total mess—peeling wallpaper with pink leopard print, a smudgy mirror with a drooping ribbon and a deep pink smooch in the corner, empty gum packs, fuzzy-topped pens, lots of lip glosses, bangles, and Post-it Notes, some loose pages of math homework, Juicy Couture perfume and a paisley pencil pouch all opened and spilling out on a shelf, a sequined clutch, crusty Bed Head hairspray, an American history book that looked brand-new, a wadded-up twenty-dollar bill, an after-school detention slip from the very first week of school. There was also an iPhone just sitting there, silver and black, with a turquoise case. It wasn’t the one she always used. That one had a pink case with a sequined bow.
You wouldn’t think a person like Brielle would have a locker like that. Out of control. But whatever. All the stuff in there was so great.
I put the note under a magnet with a sparkly crown that said QUEEN OF EVERYTHING on the inside of the door. And after Latin, I went to my locker to see if Brielle had left me a note, too.
She hadn’t.
Yet.
Probably, she couldn’t get out of class. Maybe she had a test or something.
She’ll leave me something soon, though. I know it.
WINTER
Prompt: Why?
Why didn’t the airbag save Koa, like it saved Eli?
Why didn’t the seat belt save Tate, like it saved me?
Why WAS Eli driving Koa’s Jeep?
Does he ever wonder about us? What we’re doing at home? How we’re making it? If we’re making it? Is he sorry about what he’s done? About what he’s done to us? How because of him, now, any second, the Tanakas could call the Five-0, and somebody else could go away?
I could be all by myself. I could have no one. Eli could take everyone away from me. Dad’s voice is pretty much raised all the time now. “This isn’t working.” “The world just doesn’t stop when something bad happens.” “It keeps going.” And “We need to get through it.”
But Eli doesn’t have to hear any of it.