The Detention Convention never smiles. He calls you by your last name, and if you do anything—ANYTHING—even kind of wrong, like say one word, or someone texts you or something, he gives you another detention. People say the pink pad is a permanent part of his hand.
The worst part (other than the Detention Convention and sitting in there at the crack of dawn) is that you don’t do anything. Literally.
And that … that is honestly awful.
We sat for a whole entire hour, watching the clock: Myla Marin, who had too many tardies, Ula West, who “talked excessively,” and Riley Watanabe, who dropped an f-bomb in science when he spilled hydrochloric acid on his new Nikes. But Li Lu wasn’t right about the ice heads.
A whole hour of nothing. It definitely wasn’t worth it, wandering around the Ala Moana mall yesterday by myself. Cinnabon didn’t even taste as good as it used to.
“Going to school is your job,” Dad would tell me. If he found out, and if I had to give him a reason—I just needed a break.
He would say he doesn’t get a break. That he’s been back at the college for three weeks already. Then, “There are two kinds of people in the world, Taylor: responsible ones who do their jobs and those who take breaks.”
Responsible people. Ones with a kuleana.
Even now, Dad still hasn’t asked me.
And something like this would just remind him.
And if he asks me, I honestly don’t know the answer. I’ve asked myself a million times.
Why, why, why, why
Why was Eli driving Koa’s Jeep?
If
If he hadn’t, would our lives have stayed normal?
WINTER
Prompt: Compare/contrast.
Tate’s memorial was different.
There were more pictures. People throwing loose shakas, peace signs, arms around each other’s backs.
This was Tate’s mom’s group: black vests, black tanks, black tees (“No man is an island”).
Tate’s mom was: green sundress that tied on the side, her hair in strings, like Mom’s is now. On each side of her were older versions of Tate—his real brothers—holding her up near a vase of handpicked hibiscus.
The memorial was at his mom’s apartment in Wahiawa, where all the pawn shops and check-cashing places are.
Stacks and stacks of Costco muffins piled up high in the kitchen—boxes wrapped in plastic that Costco had probably donated. There were all kinds of different dishes on the tables, stuff people had brought. And there were beer bottles everywhere.
This time Macario, the Wolf Pack, Da Hui even, the guys from Ke Nui Road all huddled together on the little porch. They had red cups, cans of Pabst and Red Bull, smokes. Gabe had a plate of barbecued chicken.
They seemed happy. Like Tate would have wanted them to be.
Me, maybe I could have gone to that. They might not have judged me. I could have said goodbye for Eli and for me.
“Goodbye, Tate,” I whispered to the last picture: shirt off, hat backward, golden retriever smiling beside him.
FALL
Prompt: “When you get caught in the impact zone, you need to get right back up, because you never know what’s over the next wave … Anything is possible.”
(Bethany Hamilton, Soul Surfer)
The next wave.
That’s what Eli lives for.
He balances on his Anderson, dragging his fingers in the water behind him. He gets in the lineup, slices through channels, weaves in and out of the guys from Ke Nui Road.
“Come on, Grom!” he yells to me when he washes up on shore again. “Next wave has your name on it!” He says I could be the next Carissa Moore.
“Not my thing!” I yell back.
Surfing seems cold. Hard. Dangerous. There are currents and riptides. You can get locked in. Or if you get pulled into a closeout, it’s all over, forever. And there are creatures out there. EELS. Sea turtles, jellyfish, tiger sharks, even. In the beginning, Sunset was called Paumalu, which means “taken by surprise,” because forever ago a hunter stole too many octopuses, even though an old chief told her not to, so a shark bit off her legs.
Sunset’s still a surprise. Each swell changes the whole lineup, Eli says. One day he goes left then right then left, and the next time, he goes right then left then right. You just never know.
That’s what Eli loves about Sunset.
Some people say it’s an old man’s wave. That you have to really know it to ride it. And even though Eli’s had some wicked wipeouts from there—stitches, staph, scrapes, stings, and the shoulder I’m not even going to write about—he has Sunset as wired as anyone possibly could. Eli leaves Pipeline to the guys who don’t mind waiting and waiting and waiting for a wave. He doesn’t want to wait. He wants to surf. So he carves out of Sunset’s barrels.
“What do you even like about surfing so much?” I always ask him.
And he tells me that out there, it’s only about the water. The moment. About not thinking anything. About “being with the wave.”
Which to me seems completely boring. Not to mention hard. And dangerous.
If Eli wants to split open his forehead, get reef rash all down his side, stub the crap out of his toes, rip his arm out of its socket while he’s trying to catch the Big One, that’s on him.
WINTER
Prompt: “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)
This is all he is now, I told myself about that picture of Tate—hat backward, golden retriever—This is all he’ll ever be.
The picture may stay in my mind forever. It’s the saddest, saddest picture in the world.
Keep moving.
Keep moving forward.
“Hey, John,” I can almost hear Tate saying. He was always nice to Dad.
“How are you doing today, Julia?” he’d ask Mom when he boxed her up at Costco.
Move forward.
If I can remember Tate living, I tell myself, maybe I won’t think about him being gone.
WINTER
Prompt: How did you meet your first friend?
Keep writing!
That’s the note Miss Wilson wrote to me. It’s on a Post-it, has a star at the bottom. I put it right inside the back cover of this notebook. When I get to the end of all these pages, the note with the star will be there. I’ll know I made it.
Keep writing.
Move forward.
After all this time, I can’t believe Miss Wilson isn’t dying to know what Brielle and Isabelle, Henley, Elau, Tae-sung, and me are all writing about our lives. I can’t believe she doesn’t read these.
Isabelle’s writing and writing and writing. Maybe she’s writing about Hailey. Maybe she hasn’t forgotten her. Maybe she misses her. Maybe she’s sad.
Words are tears.
“Forever.” That was my half of the lockets Li Lu and I bought after we made all those fabric flowers. But I’ll bet anything Li Lu doesn’t have the “Friends” part anymore. That pretty much sums things up now.
But before that, Dad got the job at the college, so we moved. “You can make new friends on O‘ahu.” That’s what Dad had told me.