I’ve been terrified, googling my name every five seconds for hate pages dedicated to ruining my existence. I’ve tried to remember everything I wrote—anything at all that could completely wreck me for the rest of my life.
Miss Wilson didn’t get how it could have happened. She had picked up the notebook after class. She remembered because as she stacked it, she thought how much writing I’ve been doing so far this year—more than she’d expected from an eighth grader—and that at this rate, she’d probably have to give me a new notebook before school ended in June.
“What happened to it?” I asked Miss Wilson. I was panicking.
“It must’ve gone missing the period after yours,” Miss Wilson said. “Sixth.”
She handed me a tissue, said she was so sorry, and asked if I could do vocabulary sheets till the notebook turned up.
That’s what I’ve been doing this whole time. I will never, ever, ever do another vocab sheet again.
And now we all have this prompt. “Privacy.”
There’s no such thing to Brielle.
She’s been acting so normal. All these days my notebook’s been missing, I had had lunch with her and Soo. There was nothing even kind of unusual. I told myself there was no way Brielle took it. She said she would never do that.
And she wasn’t lying.
She read my notebook. But she didn’t take it.
We’re back together, my notebook and me. It’s all bent out of shape, but the words are here. The security guard found it in the courtyard trash can.
Who was in language arts, sixth period, who spent all their time out in the courtyard?
Soo.
WINTER
Prompt: Do you support the proposed railway system in Honolulu?
“I miss you.” Li Lu sprinted onto the #5 after school and sat right down. “This is pointless,” she said, like she had in sixth grade, when we got in the fight about Jasmine Fukasawa and had malasadas after.
But me, I was caught off guard. It was unforgivable, how she bailed on me like everyone else did when Koa and Tate died. And also ashamed over the terrible stuff I had thought and written. I tried not to cry.
“Why isn’t your mom picking you up?” I asked.
Li Lu said she told her mom she was staying for math lab.
“Do you want to go get noodles?” she asked me.
“I can’t,” I said. I had to go home and make Mom toast and tea. “What, your mom is letting you take public transportation again now? Is she letting you drive in people’s cars again, too?”
“You don’t have to be mean about it,” Li Lu snapped. “A lot of parents are more careful now about…”
She stopped there.
“Well, congratulations on your reinstated bus rights,” I went on. “Maybe next, she’ll let you go to Waikiki.”
I knew I shouldn’t keep going, but I did. “Brielle, really? YOU are friends with Brielle Branson now?”
Li Lu ALWAYS said Brielle used people. That she was mean and fake and into herself and thought she was better than everyone else.
“Where’s your locket?” I asked her.
“Where’s yours?” she asked back.
“I don’t have it,” I said. “It was so seventh grade.”
“What are you doing?” Li Lu asked. “Seriously, what are you DOING?”
She could be so dramatic.
“What are you talking about?” I tried to blow it off.
“You aren’t DOING anything,” Li Lu said. “You’re, like, just waiting for your whole life to happen.”
She didn’t know anything.
“You always say how you’re making your life happen,” Li Lu went on, “but you literally don’t do anything. You just let your life happen to you. You’re pushing everyone away, you’re just so stuck, and you’re keeping yourself there. You’re acting like you blame yourself or something. And I know you better than anyone. I know about you. You really don’t. You totally don’t blame yourself, you totally blame—”
I cut her off. I would show her how I absolutely was not just letting my life happen to me, waiting for it to happen. “Did she give you that?” I pointed at the big silver-and-turquoise ring Li Lu wore on her index finger. It had Brielle all over it.
“It’s better than having nobody,” Li Lu said. She got up and went to the back.
WINTER
Prompt: How has your writing changed this year?
Li Lu never knows what she’s talking about.
I’m not just letting life happen. I’m not pushing everyone away. I’m not stuck.
How would she even know?
* * *
In the beginning, back in September, my letters and words started out all round and jumbled and smashed together. But they’re smaller now, those letters and words. They’re smaller, straighter, more spread out.
Also.
Fetua.
Probably, Fetua hasn’t changed. It’s more like what I know about her has.
I went to Bamboo by myself. I couldn’t get it out of my mind, seeing my old group all going in together. And I didn’t want to have noodles with Li Lu. And nobody makes dinner anymore. So I went and got the #4. And I was halfway through it when Fetua came over to my table with a pitcher and asked if I wanted more water. She was: apron with black brushstroke stalks of bamboo crossed together and black pants.
Fetua said she loved my Kokua Market piece from Ticket to Write. She said it was descriptive and accessible. That it had life.
“Are you still going?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Don’t have bus money.”
But the bus was just a dollar.
I asked her, “So you aren’t going to OLR anymore?”
Fetua rested the water pitcher against her hip. She said she was just working now. That she might go back to school sometime, though.
“You mean, you aren’t going to any school?” I asked. “You’re allowed to have a job instead of going to school?”
“Eighteen hours a week.” Fetua topped off my water and added, “That’s the legal amount, anyway.”
I thought how she didn’t have to deal with Brielle and math and homework. “Geez, you’re lucky,” I said.
But the way Fetua’s eyes dropped, I could see she didn’t feel lucky at all. She wanted to go to school. And she couldn’t. She was pouring water and wiping tables so her family could have food, electricity, a place to live. Nothing about her life had probably ever been lucky in any way.
I looked down at my #4. The tempura had wilted at the ends.
“Have you been writing?” I asked.
Fetua’s eyes lifted.
She told me about her new story—about a government that’s banned salad dressing from all women, so the women stockpile it right under their husbands’ noses and secretly teach their daughters how to make it.
I’d never heard of anything like that. Maybe the E by Fetua’s name on the OLR X-Posed page was for Exceptional or Extraordinary.
I asked Fetua how she came up with that stuff.
Why hadn’t I tried to be friends with her before? She was so easy to talk to, imaginative, inspiring. She was moving forward, even though her life was really hard. How was that happening?
But she just said, “You can call me Fettie.” That’s what her family calls her.
She said to let her know if I needed a box. Then she went to wipe a table in front.
Me, I wiped down my own table. I picked up every sticky grain of rice and stacked up my bento box, napkin, cup, and chopsticks. I left it all in the neatest pile I possibly could near the edge, and shined up the whole thing with a napkin, which I placed on top.
In a month or two, I’d come back. I’d get the #4 again, and ask Fettie how the salad dressing story was coming along, if the people found a way to overthrow the government.
FALL
Prompt: Natural disasters.
Earthquake, tsunami, flood, crash, the Cut.
But I know the Cut is just the beginni
ng. Like the first rumbles of Kīlauea, before the magma bursts.
How bad is the fallout going to be? That’s what I’ve been wondering. Not whether or not it’s coming.
It isn’t because she thinks I backstabbed her, when I wrote how I wished I’d told Sister Anne she had the tuition list. It isn’t because I never wanted to play the Next Cut, that I only half-looked for dirt on Noelani.
It isn’t even because I saw Brielle for what she really is—as empty, as selfish, as desperate as the rest of us. It’s not that I wrote that she makes EVERYTHING about her. Or when I put it into actual words, permanent record, forever, that she has no idea how to be someone’s friend, that she’s mean, that she uses people.
Somehow it’s not about any of that.
All week, Soo’s been acting like nothing has happened. And technically, as far as she is concerned, nothing really has—there’s nothing in these pages that throws her under the bus. And Brielle’s been acting completely normal, too. Which is terrifying. I think that’s the point. If there’s one thing she has, Brielle said herself, it’s playing the long game.
How long would she keep a lid on all the drama?
It must have been everything to her, how obsessed I was with her life, how desperate I was to be part of it, how pathetic I made myself to get on the Carnivale list.
She must’ve LOVED how spineless I was. How I let her talk me into playing the Next Cut. How I picked her over Li Lu. It must have kept her entertained for at least five seconds.
There’s nothing I can do now to get ready for the wreckage, to prepare—no emergency exit, no food supply, no taped-up windows, no seat belt.
It was phase one, right before language arts today. She turned around. “You’re totally Cut. You know that, right?” Her eyes narrowed. “You brought my family into this.”
WINTER
Prompt: Polls show America is more polarized now than ever before.
There are two kinds of voters, Dad would say—liberals and conservatives.
But it doesn’t make sense to worry about that if you’re dying part by part, cell by cell, if your mom has to leave her dirt forever.
In the fall, for history homework, we had to watch the debate. Gun control, immigration, ice caps, jobs, oil, China …
Mr. Montalvo showed us CNN, which said the Democrats had won. Then he showed us Fox News, which said the Republicans did. No one really knows who wins. It seems to me, from all the fighting, everyone just loses.
Do we have to pick a side? Nobody in Hawaii even votes. We have the lowest voter turnout of all the states, Mr. Montalvo had told us.
It was all so long ago, I can’t remember who really won that debate. A thousand things have happened since then. Besides, it didn’t matter.
Neither candidate would help us here.
* * *
When I got home from school yesterday, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table. Her hands were on the table, but there was nothing else—no mug of lilliko’i tea, no American Journal of Nursing, no hospice newsletter. Did she even have a job anymore? Were we going to lose our house because she wasn’t working? Was Dad going to kick her out? Or would he leave us? Where would we live?
I sat down with her.
She said, “How was school today?” It took a lot for her to get out those words.
I knew how that was. I put my hand on hers. Her skin was soft now. Not like before, when she had blisters and calluses from gardening, or from washing off sickness and death ten thousand times at work.
“Is that us?” she asked me. “The people stapled up on your wall? Is it Eli, and me, and Grandpa Olie? And Li Lu, too?”
“And Hopper, is that Hopper?” Mom asked about the picture of the bunny Auntie Alamea helped me find in Rabbits USA. He was brown and white, medium-sized, with round, black eyes and long, floppy ears.
“Who’s the other boy?” She reached up and smoothed my eyebrow. “The one in the nice shirt?”
“That … that is Henley,” I told her.
FALL
Prompt: Sharp.
Outside, the plumeria and the palms bend backward and forward and backward in the squall.
The trade winds have come, and they are brutal—knocking over trash cans, ripping branches from flame trees, and shaking the monkeypods.
The rains came along with the winds, slapping hibiscus blooms, even mangoes, into puddles, pushing banyan tree leaves through streets, raising up the waves.
I don’t even care that I’m the Next Cut.
But of all the things I could have been Cut for, it doesn’t make any sense what Brielle’s talking about. That I brought her family into it.
I went all through my notebook.
And all there is is just the most insignificant thing, on October 15. It was how her dad wouldn’t take her to Australia and what a baby she was being about it.
THAT’S why I was Cut.
Brielle called her own dad a jackhole. And I got Cut for it.
Half of me wants to laugh like the wind in the palms.
It’s like Top Chef.
You wait and you wait. And then you get Cut. It’s kind of a relief, actually, when you’re finally told you’re out.
The pressure’s off.
You pack up your knives and go home, and everyone knows you’re a loser.
But at least you’re not just waiting anymore.
WINTER
Prompt: Loyalty.
“She gave you something, right?” Isabelle said. “In the beginning?”
Miss Wilson paired us up to do a vocabulary worksheet. We were trying something new, she said. At first, all the blood drained out of my head and through my body and into my feet. I absolutely could not get paired up with Brielle. But the Queen of Everything was gone. Again.
I really hoped I’d get paired up with Henley. But Miss Wilson put him with Tae-sung. It came down to Isabelle and me.
And we were on number one: taciturn.
“She gave you a ring, a phone, a lip gloss.” Isabelle swirled the definition into the blank.
I couldn’t believe it. Isabelle knew about the start of everything with Brielle.
“For me,” she went on, “it was a phone. Silver and black, with a turquoise case. She said she was ‘trading up’.”
I wondered if Isabelle still had that phone, or if Brielle took it back, like she took back All My Purple Life.
“She came over to your house,” Isabelle continued, “but she never had you over to hers.” Isabelle paused, looked me right in the eyes. Then, “She told you her big secret.”
This part sank my stomach. I was sick at how spineless, how desperate I’d been, how special I’d thought I was, how special I’d wanted to be, how I’d thought I’d mattered.
I didn’t want to hear the words aloud. But Isabelle said them. “Chance Cameron.”
She swirled the definition for pedantic onto line 2. “She made you feel like you were part of some big, amazing, mysterious thing. Something important, exclusive … And if you were small, insignificant, if your life was little and boring, Brielle Branson was the answer.”
Isabelle stopped swirling. “She pretended to let you decide if you were In or Out. Only it wasn’t really a choice, because you knew that if you didn’t play, even though she never said it, she’d completely ruin your life.”
Isabelle had this whole thing exactly right. It was unbelievable, how it had all happened to her, too. And to who else? I looked around the room.
Tae-sung saw me, wiggled his tongue between his fingers. By the time school was out, thanks to him, everyone would hear that Isabelle and I were lesbians together.
I looked at Isabelle. She didn’t care. “First I played along,” she said. “With the game, with her. I didn’t think it was a big deal, I guess. I really didn’t think about it at all.”
Who had Isabelle been talking to, watching, waiting on? I didn’t ask. I was afraid if I asked, she’d stop talking, and I’d never know how the whole thing ended. How it was going to
end for me.
“But all of a sudden, I was in pretty deep. And Brielle gave me a challenge, a choice.”
It was painfully familiar. “She had something on you,” I managed to say.
“Not on me. On Hailey,” Isabelle said.
That made sick sense. Brielle was smart. She knew Isabelle didn’t care what people thought of her. So she used what mattered to her.
“The challenge, though, there wasn’t much on her,” Isabelle said. She’d told Brielle there was really nothing to know.
I knew it was Isabelle’s best way out. She thought she could save Noelani and Hailey both.
“Except”—Isabelle got quiet—“there was one tiny little stupid thing. And Brielle knew I knew it.”
I knew the rest.
“I wouldn’t tell her,” Isabelle said. “I wouldn’t give her the dirt she was looking for. It didn’t seem right to ruin someone’s life over basically nothing. But then…” Isabelle stopped, stared down at the worksheet. “I didn’t think she’d really pull off wrecking Hailey.”
“So,” Isabelle started swirling in the blanks again, “she Cut me. Which was no big deal. But she posted things on Facebook and Instagram about Hailey and me. She told everyone we were together, that we gave each other mono, that Hailey’s parents took her out of school and put her in a conversion camp.”
It was sickening. Heartbreaking. Horrible. Wrong.
I stared at Isabelle, I couldn’t help it. She lost her friend. She missed her, and she felt responsible. She was such a good person, an even better person than I’d thought. Why hadn’t I ever tried getting to know her?
Because she would never be friends with someone like me, that’s why, someone who’s selfish and awful. Isabelle and I had gone through the same exact thing and ended up the same exact way, but she hadn’t meant to wreck anyone.
All along, me, I was just trying to save myself.
Taylor Before and After Page 16
