Sometimes dinner was the hardest.
They’d only just sat down at the table when her phone dinged. Grandma Young aimed a lethal sigh at the heavens. Makani yanked the phone from her pocket to silence its ringer, and a text from an unknown number lit the screen: I could say the same thing about you. Her chest cavity froze into spiny shards of ice.
A second text appeared: What did you mean when you said that?
“How many times do I have to tell you? No phones at the dinner table.”
Makani’s head shot up. “Sorry,” she said automatically.
But her grandmother was taken aback by her expression. “Who was that?”
“Mom,” Makani lied.
Grandma Young examined the bait. She would have never okayed a dinnertime chat with Makani’s father, whom she’d never particularly liked, but she remained hopeful that her daughter would make amends with her granddaughter. “Do you need to call her now or can it wait?”
“I’ll be right back, sorry.” Makani stumbled from the dining room into the kitchen, where her grandmother couldn’t see her, and reread the texts. Her heart floundered, trapped in the narrow space between fear and hope. She couldn’t imagine this was him, but . . . it couldn’t be anyone else. Could it?
who’s asking?
The reply was instantaneous: Ollie.
Her heartbeat exploded into a race. She stared at the screen, waiting for him to say more. Finally, she texted: don’t remember giving you my number
Another quick reply: Tell me what you meant.
It figured that Ollie was the sort of exasperating person who would text in complete sentences and ignore her question.
what do you THINK I meant??
I think you feel slighted, which means there’s been a misunderstanding.
Slighted. Seriously, nobody normal talked like this. But he had her attention. Makani texted back a single question mark. She watched the three dots appear and disappear on her phone as Ollie typed, paused, and then resumed typing.
The text arrived: I thought you were ashamed of me. And I’m guessing you thought that I was ashamed of you.
Makani’s eyebrows shot to her forehead. Directness like this was rare. Admirable, even. The eternal question reemerged from the gloaming. Does he know what I did? It was impossible to tell without more information, but a disconcerting inkling crawled through her gut, prodding her forward. Maybe he knew. But maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe, out of the two of them, she was the one who had cast judgment.
Makani replied: why did you think that?
Well. We never exactly talked, did we?
didn’t think you were the talking type
I didn’t think you were, either.
Makani paused. Her grandmother cleared her throat—a little too loudly—in the next room. Makani texted: so . . . you want to talk
I want to talk if you want to talk.
She should be annoyed, but she wasn’t. Not in the least.
“Makani,” her grandmother warned.
“I’ll be right there. Almost done.”
“You aren’t even talking!”
“We’re texting.”
“That’s not talking. You need to talk to your mama.”
Makani grinned as she sent another message: texting isn’t talking
Her phone rang, and she jumped. “Shit!”
“MAKANI YOUNG.”
Makani winced as she answered. “This isn’t a good time. I’ll call you later, okay?” She hung up before Ollie could respond and slunk back to her dining room chair.
Grandma Young tracked every movement. “That wasn’t your mother.”
Makani shoveled an entire dry meatball into her mouth. Like a child.
“Give me your phone.”
Makani stiffened in alarm. “Why?” she asked, muffled through the ground turkey.
“You heard me. I want to see who you were texting.”
“Fine, it was Alex.” She swallowed. “I was texting Alex.”
Her grandmother held out her hand, palm up.
“Fine! It was a guy, okay? Are you happy now?”
Her grandmother paused, considering her options. “What’s his name?”
“Grandma—”
“Don’t Grandma me. What’s his name?”
“Ollie. Oliver Larsson.” Makani already knew to add his last name. People in this town always wanted a last name.
Her grandmother frowned. “Larsson. Isn’t he that young cop?”
“That’s his brother, Chris. Ollie is in my grade.”
Grandma Young considered this, and Makani prayed that she’d never heard the rumors about Ollie. Prayed that being the brother of a cop was a good thing in this town. At last, her grandmother relaxed. The slightest bit. “He was my student, Chris. A nice young man. It’s such a shame what happened to their parents.”
Makani also relaxed. The slightest bit.
“If you want to continue seeing Oliver, I’ll have to meet him.”
“Grandma. We were only texting.”
“And then your phone rang.” She pointed her salad fork at Makani, a statement and an accusation. “That boy is after you.”
Makani sent the text after her grandmother had gone to bed: is now a good time?
Curiosity fed her anxiety. The prospect of talking to Ollie was the first exciting thing that had happened to her since, well, fooling around with Ollie. She stared at her phone as she paced the carpeted floor, willing it to make a noise. Who didn’t keep their phone beside them at all times? But it stayed silent on her dresser.
The dresser and the rest of the furnishings had once belonged to her mother. Makani had moved into her mother’s childhood bedroom. The matching set of bulky oaken furniture was an unappealing shade of golden orange. The bed was too tall, its bedposts too severe. They spiraled toward the ceiling like sharpened tusks. The dresser was heavy and long, and the mirror was equally large and repulsive. But the desk. The desk was a behemoth. It made Makani’s laptop look avant-garde, as if the wood had been joined together so long ago that it had never before known a personal computer.
It was the opposite of how her mother lived now. Despite the laid-back beach environment, her house was streamlined and stainless steel. Makani had always felt that her mother’s tastes left something warm to be desired, something comforting, but this wasn’t any better. It was completely void of personality.
Her grandparents must have selected the furniture, and in the years since her mother had left, they’d removed any pictures or posters that might have provided insight into her mother’s teenage years. In their place were framed elementary- and middle school–aged photographs of Makani and bland paintings of prairie lands. The solitary lingering trace of her mother was an old carving inside the desk’s top drawer: SOS.
It wasn’t often that Makani understood her mother, but she certainly understood the quiet desperation behind this lone act of vandalism.
Since moving in, Makani had taken down the photos of herself—hideous—and shoved them under the bed. Only a few items from her former life were on display. She kept a pretty bowl of coral pieces and cowrie shells on the desk, her stuffed bear and stuffed whale on the bed, and her jewelry on the dresser, neatly hung on a stand that looked like a tree. But mainly she kept things in drawers. Hidden away.
Makani checked her phone again, in case she’d temporarily lost her hearing. Still nothing. It was getting late.
A sudden rustling outside disturbed the quiet night.
She moved to her window and peered down into the shadows. The next-door neighbor’s sleek tomcat—not the neighbor who’d lost the tip of his nose, the one on the other side—often hunted in their yard. Makani had never been allowed to have a cat or a dog. Someday, when she had her own place, she’d have both.
More rustling. Makani squinted through the darkness.
The sound was coming from the overgrown viburnum below her window. She craned her neck, trying to see the bush, trying to see through it. A
burst of furious, quick agitation startled her. And then . . . silence. The cat must have found a vole.
Makani pressed her face against the glass, cupping her eyes with her hands like binoculars, shielding them from her bedroom light. She waited for the cat to trot across the lawn with its prize, but the lawn, illuminated by a triangle of orange streetlight, remained empty. It held nothing more interesting than falling leaves.
She returned to her phone. Nothing had changed there, either.
Makani glanced back at the window. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she felt an unsettling tingle of exposure. She crept toward the glass and peeked out from the side.
The neighborhood was still deserted.
Hello, paranoia, my old friend.
She closed the curtains, grabbed her phone, and carried it to bed, where she laid it beside her on the ivory-colored eyelet comforter, another relic from her grandparents. She tried to study for a Spanish test, but she was distracted. Why did Ollie think that she’d be ashamed to be seen with him? Because of those rumors? If that were the case, then he probably didn’t know about her own transgressions, otherwise he would have known that she wasn’t in a position to point fingers.
Maybe they stood a chance. Maybe they’d even have a real date. After all, he’d been desperate enough to hunt down her phone number.
Even though he’d ignored her question about how he’d gotten it.
Her brow was still pinched as she pushed aside her textbook for the latest issue of Rolling Stone. Makani didn’t normally bother with paper magazines, but she’d been unable to resist when she saw Amphetamine on its cover. Their scandalous song about an underage girl who’d broken the heart of the lead singer—supposedly based on someone real, according to the article—was a huge hit. Makani felt both the anger and the ecstasy of the song’s catchy lyrics. She wondered if she’d broken Ollie’s heart last summer. Had he broken hers? Or had it already been too broken to make a difference?
Her phone dinged. She scrambled to pick it up, dropping it twice in her haste and excitement.
It was a picture of an enormous, hairy, white male ass. Makani groaned and tossed the phone aside without replying. She didn’t feel like indulging Alex in one of her favorite games. Alex liked to steal her and Darby’s phones, type “hairy butts” into Google Images, and then slip their phones back to them. When they weren’t at school, Alex texted the pictures at random.
Her phone dinged again at 11:31. It was him.
I was at work, but I’m home now. Are you still awake?
A primal panic flooded her system. Should she wait before replying? No, that would be stupid. Silence got them into this mess in the first place.
Ollie answered after the first ring. “Hey, sorry about that call earlier. I was on my break, but I guess that was a bad time?”
Makani’s voice was cool. “How did you get my number?”
“Oh.” Ollie sounded startled. “Uh, yeah. Sorry. My brother. He can, you know . . . get things. Information.”
It was his second apology in seconds. And he’d asked Chris for help, which meant he’d at least told his brother something about her. A smile grew on her lips, but she said, “That’s a little creepy.”
There was a long pause.
“I’m kidding.” Makani laughed, pretending to be more composed than she actually was. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s still creepy. You should have asked me for my number. But . . . I’m glad to be talking to you.”
His voice loosened on the other end. “Me too.”
“So.”
“So.”
Her fingers picked at the comforter’s eyelets, but she spoke her next line flirtatiously. “So, you still work the Wednesday shift at Greeley’s.”
He laughed once. “I do. Though I can’t help but notice that you don’t come around anymore.”
“Yeah, there’s this real asshole who works there. He acts like I’m invisible whenever I see him at school.”
“Interesting. Because there’s an asshole at school who’s been ignoring me, too.”
Makani thrilled at the ease of their banter, but her laughter dwindled with an uneasy twinge of regret. “That was pretty lame of us, huh? Assuming.”
Ollie agreed without elaboration. “Monumentally.”
“Could we speak clearly for a moment?” she asked.
“I’d like us to speak clearly for all moments—present and future.”
Makani almost smiled, but the gesture vanished before fully arriving. Her voice hardened. “Look, I only want to keep talking to you if you want this to happen in a real way. If you want to, like, hang out with me. If you only want to fuck me, I’m out.”
“Whoa.” Ollie exhaled. “No. No. That was never only what I wanted. It just happened. I have no idea how that happened.”
“We’re equally to blame. I think that’s been established,” she said wryly.
Their phones filled with another tense silence.
“So,” he ventured, “speaking clearly . . . you like me?”
“Speaking clearly . . . yes.”
A respectful pause. Or perhaps Ollie was catching his breath again. “Speaking clearly . . . I like you, too.”
It had been so long since Makani had felt any amount of genuine, unadulterated happiness that she’d forgotten that sometimes it could hurt as much as sadness. His declaration pierced through the muscle of her heart like a skillfully thrown knife.
It was the kind of pain that made her feel alive.
CHAPTER FIVE
They talked for hours. Until Makani’s hands were cramped from gripping her phone and even the singing crickets had gone to bed. His obliviousness to her past was a relief. They needed to speak clearly, yes. But only about the things that needed to be spoken about.
His parents had been farmers, and the family had been tight-knit. About a month after the accident, the police gave his brother, who’d just been hired, the old cruiser to replace the car that had been totaled. It was a generous gift. When Ollie turned sixteen, Chris had given him the cruiser as a birthday present. Ollie despised the Crown Vic and the loss that it represented, but he drove it out of respect for his brother. And his need for a car. He talked about his relationship with Chris—strained, parental, loving, frustrating—and she talked about her relationship with her grandmother. Which was the same.
“What happened to your grandparents?” Makani’s house was dark and filled with old shadows. She curled up under her covers. “Why didn’t they take you in?”
“Half of them are dead, and the other half are drunks.” The timbre of Ollie’s voice was lower than usual. It was quiet and gravelly with the night. “So, when a guy with a blood-alcohol concentration that was twice the legal limit killed our parents . . . you can see why Chris fought to be my guardian.”
Makani didn’t like her parents. But she did love them, and she could only imagine how shattering it must have been, must continue to be, for Ollie to have lost both of his in the same senseless act. They’d been on their way home from an errand at the Feed ’N’ Seed, the same location where Darby and Alex now worked. Their car was struck in the broad daylight of a random Tuesday afternoon. Something about it being daytime heightened the tragedy in Makani’s mind.
“How did your mom wind up in Hawaii?” Ollie asked.
“She left here right after graduation. She had this grandiose plan—that’s what she always called it—to travel through all fifty states before picking a new home. She even had this foldout map that she’d stolen from a bookstore in Norfolk. She still has it. She showed it to me once, and there was just this big, black X through Nebraska.”
“So, what happened?”
“She used all her savings to go to Hawaii first. She got a job at a resort, enrolled in community college, and then met my dad.”
“A grandiose plan. Maybe that’s what I need.”
Makani made a sound between a huff and a snort. “Only if you can follow through. To me, it’s just another story about
my mom’s failures.”
“It’s not about Hawaii being so great that she didn’t need to see her other options?”
“No.”
“I always follow through on my plans,” he assured her.
He proved it only a few hours later. Makani was slumped inside Darby’s car before school, seething with sleep-deprived irritation. She’d been excited to tell her friends about the call, but they weren’t reacting in the way that she’d hoped.
“Of course he gets you,” Alex said from the backseat. “You’re both poor little orphans.”
“I’m not an orphan,” Makani grumped.
“I still can’t believe you have to introduce him to your grandma,” Darby said. “How did he react when you told him?”
“I didn’t.” Makani tried to ignore the squirming in her gut as she scanned the parking lot for Ollie. A trail of students was heading toward the corner by the road, where a memorial for Haley—flowers and cards and playbills and candles—had appeared overnight in front of the school’s sign. In black changeable letters, its marquee read: WE LOVE YOU, HALEY. YOUR STAR STILL BURNS BRIGHT. “I wanted to make sure everything was okay first,” she said. “You know, in person.”
“It’s every grandmother’s dream.” Alex raised her palms into sarcastic jazz hands. “A social outcast who screws her granddaughter, ignores her for months, and then illegally obtains her phone number!”
Makani winced. “You know it’s not like that.”
“It’s exactly like that,” Alex said.
“It is creepy how he got your number,” Darby said.
“You don’t think it’s romantic?” Makani asked.
“No,” Darby and Alex replied together.
“He should have asked you for it,” Darby continued. “You would have given it to him.”
“Well, I’m just glad I didn’t wake up my grandma. You’re right that she wouldn’t have liked discovering me on the phone with a guy in the middle of the night.” Makani paused, detecting the ideal opportunity for a subject change. “Although, a part of me wishes I actually had woken her up. I think she’s sleepwalking again.”