Part of me believed him. But part of me didn’t. I left his room like a whipped junkyard poi dog. The feet that were moving my body didn’t feel like my own. My hand that touched the knob was not my own. Maybe he would be exactly what Mom and Dad thought, Hawaiian Superman. Fix the islands and protect our family. It didn’t matter. There was no space there for me.
Back in my room, on my desk, pre-algebra and life sciences and English in a stack. It wasn’t the only thing I wanted to do, but it was the first thing I saw. I could get B-pluses just by farting. Not good enough, not anymore.
I started my work.
* * *
TURNS OUT I WASN’T the only one thinking that way, right? Something had changed in Dean after New Year’s, but especially after people started coming around for Noa. Most days Dean would be home just to drop off his backpack, swap his clothes, then he’d be out beating his basketball on the sidewalk, the sound fading away as he went to the court. Sometimes I’d sneak down there, too, follow way behind. On the court he’d be going at high school seniors, guys in college home on break. Him with the basketball bouncing and rocking and shooting under his hand. His dancing knees. He’d take the ball and drive right at their chests, like a bull in a ring, like the pictures I saw of Spain in the summer: browns and reds and knives in the sunlight. I bet everyone else at the park thought he was just a hothead, but I knew what he was really charging at.
He was already good on the court. He got better.
My grades were already solid at school. I got better. Plenty people would probably say I should be happy enough just to be at Kahena Academy. But, okay, it wasn’t enough. Noa was there already. Ahead of me in all the halls and stairways. On the fields and in the textbooks. Everywhere I entered, a breath later, I was Nainoa’s sister, the shark one, they say he can do crazy things.
And I could bring home another perfect score on a test and Mom and Dad would smile, rub my back. But I could see in their eyes it wasn’t the same as when Noa came out of his room, finished taking people for the day. They practically fell over the tables trying to get to him. To touch him and coo and bring him water and snacks before dinner.
I figured it didn’t matter what Dean or me did, then. Turns out I was wrong. By the start of the full school basketball season, Dean was so good he was getting his own sentences, nothing about Noa. “Division One potential” and “guaranteed all-state.” And suddenly the whole family started getting dragged to his high school games. I hated basketball. (“I told you to get ready,” Mom would say, coming into my tiny room, seeing me still on the bed with my books, in my boro-boro clothes. I would say, “He has games like twice a week.” Mom would say, “This is your brother,” like it explained anything. Like I was stupid. I would ugh and ask, “How long is basketball season? I should get extra days to hang out at Crisha’s house for every day I have to go to his stupid games.” Mom would say, “Kaui,” and shake her head, “act right.”) Then sitting up in the woodchip-and-popcorn-smelling upper rafters with the squawking, hoop-earring platform-wedge girls. All that heat from the lights and our butts on the sticky planks of seats, while down on the wood court sweaty boys panted around each other and watched a little ball fall into a little hoop. The horn going off for time-outs or whatever. Grown men with serious faces hollering at teenagers. And each other.
Noa got into it at the games, too, yelling until his voice was sawed apart, jumping and bumping Mom and Dad. I think Noa just wanted things to be how they were before, when him and Dean and me used to get knotted up in the worst wrestling battles you could imagine, us all elbows and sock-stink, trying for arm bars and rear-naked chokes. Angry and laughing at the same time, hurting each other enough you know it could only be love. Back when the sharks were almost just a story and everything looked like it would stay tight. I bet Noa thought if he cheered hard enough he could get that back.
And Mom and Dad, too: I saw. Full of yelling, excitement. They had ideas for Dean the same way they had ideas for Noa. So, yeah: Nainoa was becoming and Dean was becoming and I was invisible besides. But I was still becoming, too. I was. Okay, no one saw but that doesn’t matter. There were all sorts of things inside me (like, when we had to build bridges out of toothpicks as a school project, I stole two extra boxes of toothpicks from the school, researched about truss and span design, built a bridge that could hold two more bricks than anyone else’s … or when we had the school survivalist competition, and I figured out how to turn the tarp into a small tent and guessed at how a shirt could be used to filter water, I was the one that survived the longest from my class … every project like that, I could feel things in me growing strong and steady), and I felt like more and more I could do whatever I wanted. If I wanted it bad enough.
* * *
BUT OH, MAN. Then things started to unlock themselves. This one day, another basketball game. Dean had made the varsity team and it was preseason or something. Us back up in the stands and the clock just barely starting to tick down toward halftime and all I was thinking was, If I have to stand up here and clap for one more hour.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” I told Mom. She hardly even looked my way. Which was perfect, right, because it meant I had plenty of time, and once I was out of sight of the court and down the hall toward the bathrooms I just kept going. To the fire escape and the old-brown-paint steel door that creaked me outside. Far on the other side of the parking lot, a cigarette tip danced orange. A little light laughter.
But then there was something else. Chanting. It was faint, and I turned around and around to try and catch the direction. It was a woman’s voice and there were runs of choppy speaking that started almost like a yelp but then her sounds were more punchy as she said short sentences. Then, at the end of some of the chanted lines, there would be a long-held note, a song and a gut-cry at the same time. It echoed and echoed. It was across the street, what looked like the cafeteria. Cream-colored paint over thick brick and blocky columns. Groaning metal doors propped open against the thick air.
I stopped just outside the edge of the spilling light, where no one could see me. The cafeteria floor wobbled with the reflection of overhead lights. All the chairs and tables were pushed back to the walls. There was a line of three older women, sitting cross-legged on blankets with their hourglass-shaped ipus, right, thumping them against the ground. Slapping and rolling their knuckles and palms across the hollow shells. And in the middle of the room there were three rows of girls—all older than me, it looked like—dancing hula.
Just ordinary girls in ordinary clothes. I had heard hula chants already before. But this was different somehow. I could feel something true and old in it, something that was opening all over me, gave me chicken skin.
I stood just outside the door and watched the whole practice. Sometimes the kumus would stop their ipus and the song and then holler out things like, “Nani, you gotta fix your hela, it’s way off from everyone else,” or, “Jessie, your arms is limp on the kaholo,” and then the song would start over. Three lines of girls, stepping and turning and bouncing. The ipus thumping and finger tapping and the women chanting their song. It got inside me, okay? Deep down. Got me all twisted with something I didn’t know the name of. It went that way and I watched until, behind me, there was the final countdown of the basketball clock. I heard the crowing from the stands and turned, started to walk back down to the gym. Dean and another win, I figured, but it sounded like the game was close. Like maybe everything was unsure, right until the end.