Juniors

by Kaui Hart Hemmings

  “I didn’t ask to come here,” I say. I relax my shoulders, stepping into myself. “You seemed to like it when I had Danny over. And your mom wants us here because of what my mom can give her. It goes both ways. At least I don’t buy friends.”

  She shakes her head and rolls her eyes, but I can tell this stung. She doesn’t have a comeback, and this makes me feel kind of sick with myself.

  “I don’t even know what we’re fighting about,” I say.

  “I do,” she says.

  “What, then?” I unintentionally make a huge gesture with my hands as if holding a great weight. I let my arms fall to my side. “Why didn’t you invite me to the hotel? I don’t care about you having a hotel, okay, I’m just curious why we seem to get along and then—”

  “I knew you hooked up with Will. I’ve been waiting for you to tell me, and you didn’t say a word. My dad has some crush on your mom and gives her money so you can go to Punahou.”

  “That’s not true,” I say.

  “Whatever,” she says. “Don’t talk about not caring about what I have. Maybe that’s why I didn’t invite you. I’ve been waiting for you to be a friend that’s different.”

  “I am different,” I say lamely. “And why is this all coming out now? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  She closes her eyes for a moment. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what I was waiting for.” She opens her eyes, and they are unfocused and hard. “Anyway,” she says. “You’re just a guest we’re all supposed to be nice to. You can go now.”

  I don’t know what to say. She has her arms crossed, and she’s looking away, tapping her foot in annoyance. She clears her throat, and on that note, I walk away.

  30

  I WALK ACROSS THE YARD, CRYING, THE PALMS ABOVE rubbing their leaves together like hands. Fuck you, palms. Fuck you, Kahala. I have a sudden and intense longing for our old place, our old town, the Ko’olaus, set back and minding their own business. Thirty minutes away, same island, but the soil is different, and that affects everything—what we taste like, how we grow. I roar into the sky. It’s more like an arf, nothing fearless or powerful about it.

  • • •

  I walk into our cottage, our nanny’s quarters, with the same feeling as a hangover, parched and hungry, the things in my head—neurons, electricity, all misfiring. I’m hating my body, and it’s hating me right back. When I see my mother in the kitchen, it’s like I’m looking at myself. She’s sitting at the counter, gripping her forehead like it’s a bat. She straightens when I come in.

  “Where were you?” she says, then registers my face. “Honey, what is it?”

  “I got in a fight with Whitney,” I say and walk to the kitchen, wanting to hide my tears. I get a banana from the fruit basket, which has been replenished, probably by Melanie. I find myself glowering, hating Melanie’s kindness, her selfish selflessness. Charity can be so greedy. Paying for Punahou? I want to die.

  “Lei?” she asks.

  I zero in on the small, whisker-like lines around her eyes, how something that should age her merely makes her look punctuated.

  “What did Whitney mean by her dad paying for Punahou? He has a crush on you still, so he pays for—oh God! And everyone knows this?” I bite the banana and don’t taste a thing.

  She places her hands on the counter, tucking her chin so that her hair covers her face. I chew until my heart simmers down.

  “I want to know everything everyone else knows,” I say.

  My mom takes a deep breath. “Whitney shouldn’t have known that.”

  “What the—? Is he in love with you?”

  “No,” she says. “He’s just confused. He’s trying to say good-bye—being with people who meant something to him once. I don’t know . . . sometimes that’s the only way he knows how to show friendship.” Like Whitney, I think. My mom looks off toward the window with true confusion.

  “What does spending time with you have to do with paying for us? Are we that poor? How can that be possible? Your friends from Law and Order don’t have to do this shit, do they?”

  “No,” she says, frustrated. “Let me begin at the beginning, okay?”

  “Go ahead,” I say, shoving my hand up. I stand at the counter, too riled to sit.

  She shakes out her hands like she’s drying them off and then she launches in.

  “This starts with your dad.”

  “My dad?” I get a sense of vertigo. My eyes feel tired, my head heavy.

  “Just listen,” she says. “After the summer I told him I was pregnant, he left and never talked to me again. No phone calls. Nothing.” She faces me. “But then letters came. Very brief notes with no explanations, no return address. Sending love, they’d say. And they’d have money in them. Once a year, I’d get a note with money.”

  “How much?” I ask. I face away from her and just listen.

  “A very helpful amount,” she says. “It covered rent. When I added it up, it basically covered it all. When you were four, he wrote that he would start paying for school. I just had to tell him which school you went to and bills would go to him. I sent a letter back to him at some PO box, and when he didn’t respond, I figured he just didn’t want me to find him and bother him. It was the only time I wrote. From then on, he contacted the schools directly. It changed where I applied you. He has done that for every year of your schooling. Sort of,” she adds.

  I’ve never known what to think of this. I’ve felt like someone out of a Dickens novel—a child with a wealthy patriarch investing in me. I’m grateful, but why not talk to me instead? Why not fly me out to meet him or take me to lunch? No words, no love, just direct deposits. My eyes water.

  “Will you make popcorn?” I ask, sitting down next to her.

  She puts her hand on my back and must be wondering why I’d ask for popcorn at a time like this, but then she seems to understand that I need to be a little bit alone in my sadness. She gets up to make the popcorn.

  “It was incredibly generous,” she says, her back to me. She pours the seeds into the paper bag, then adds the olive oil. “It changed our lives. I had no work in the beginning. I would have been able to afford private school eventually, but then I wouldn’t have been able to put as much toward college, the classes, the trips, and . . . and you got this amazing education.” Her voice rises. She puts the bag in the microwave, then turns to face me.

  “It allowed us so much,” she says. “It was something I could give you—we could give you—without stress, without stipulations, and I’ve seen you become this wonderful young lady—”

  She cries then, and my eyes start to water. The popcorn fires like a machine gun. She waits, then opens the microwave, always trying to time it so there are no burns and no remnants.

  She pours it into a bowl, brings it back to the counter, and rubs my back. I wait for my throat to unclench, and she seems to be doing the same. She kisses my head, then pinches the place between her eyes.

  I’ve been so absorbed in her storytelling that I haven’t been thinking about what she’s saying. Then the horrible thought occurs to me: “Oh my God, is Eddie my father?”

  “No!” she says. She smiles slightly. “No.”

  “So why does he pay now?”

  “Let me finish,” she says. She lifts her shoulders, then relaxes them, as if easing in for a long ride.

  She sits back down, grabs a handful of popcorn, and takes her time eating it. I wait it out, expecting the worst. My father decided he wants to be paid back in full, so Eddie is helping, or he’s going to sue her or file for full custody, or he’s dead and can’t pay.

  “Did he die?” I ask.

  “What? No.” She looks over at me again, as if making sure I have everything I need to understand her. “When I was making plans for our move here, I talked to Joanne in the office to tell her to stop payments on Ray’s account. I
wanted to handle the rest of the school year on my own. I could have written him or found him somehow, but I was at your school anyway and needed to sign the waivers so they could transfer your forms. I felt a little bad, not telling him. Paying was his way of keeping in touch, sort of, seeing you in a way. But I could handle Punahou for two years, and I guess the switch made me wonder why I kept any connection to him at all. Maybe part of me was hoping he’d reach out to you in other ways. I know how much you’ve wanted that.”

  “I haven’t wanted that,” I say, my head in my hands.

  “Lea, yes you have, and it’s okay.”

  I don’t protest. I give in. I close my eyes and listen.

  “Turns out they couldn’t stop payment,” my mom says. “Ray would need to call them himself, and I knew that once he found out you transferred, he’d follow up with the other school. I still tried to let it go. Forty-four grand. So I told her to contact Ray, and if he insisted on keeping it coming for Punahou, fine. If not, I’d be okay.” She looks at me guiltily, as though she shouldn’t have told me what my tuition is for the rest of high school.

  “And then what?” I ask, imagining Ray in his Ray-Bans, taking care of me from a distance. I tuck my hair behind my ear, foolishly envisioning him watching us from a satellite feed.

  My mom continues: “And then Joanne asked, ‘Who’s Ray?’ So I said his full name, Ray Piston, and she had no idea who I was talking about. So I said, ‘Lea’s father, who pays the tuition,’ and she looked at me like I was senile. She scanned the computer, pressing keys, and I was getting impatient and a little embarrassed, so I just told her to stop payments from the person paying your tuition.

  My mom seems to harken back to the state she was in, physically changing—becoming flustered, bewildered.

  “Joanne looked at her computer, looked at me and said, ‘You mean Edward West?’”

  I stop breathing and imagine she must have back then too.

  “I could have won a damn Oscar for my performance, Lei. I did a full-on monologue explaining away my mistake and confusion, blamed it on an actor I was in the middle of a scene with, who looked just like Eddie, blah, blah, blah.”

  “This is crazy,” I say.

  “I know,” she says. “Believe me I know. It took practically, what, twelve years for me to find out it had been Eddie this whole time?”

  “But why?” The faceless image of Ray Piston gets usurped by Eddie. I see him on the lanai, shaking his cocktail glass, basking in a moment of peace. What was his reasoning? What’s the investment? A crush?

  “He introduced me to Ray,” my mom says. “He felt guilty.”

  “He felt guilty?” I’m holding my handful of popcorn like it’s a stress ball. “That’s expensive guilt.”

  “I know.” Making herself explain this to me is either confusing Mom more or forcing her to reconsider or rearrange the facts. “He felt guilty about Melanie. Then he felt guilty because he really thought Ray liked me, that he was changing, even though he wasn’t. Ray was seeing Melanie’s best friend at the time, and other girls too, apparently.”

  My mom slumps her shoulders. Everything about her seems to cave in. “God, it was such a mess. So much drama.” She shakes her head. “This was when Melanie did not like me one bit. I was nobody. Some wannabe actress from Kailua. I was teaching step aerobics.” She laughs. I wait while she sorts it all out, letting her ramble to see where it leads.

  “Eddie tried to take me under his wing after Ray left,” she says. “I wouldn’t accept his money, I thought that was absurd—I mean, he wasn’t the one who did anything wrong, but I took him up on his friendship. He was there when you were born.” I see her going somewhere else in her head, remembering something nice, but then her face hardens.

  “Friendship didn’t work, though,” she says, and looks my way for a moment, then chews her popcorn thoughtfully, as if reflecting on something so simple. “Melanie banned him from me. Her friends too—it was like I didn’t exist. I didn’t even deal with it. I got out. I just did what I was going to do anyway, continued on my course. But with you.”

  I can’t believe she went back to LA with me, no job, no inkling that her desires and work would pay off. I see her vividly as a young adult, how she felt like I probably did with Will, out of her league, yet liking it there. She probably felt used even before she knew she was getting used. Still liking it there. Then: desertion, shame. The feeling of being plundered.

  And then me, a reminder, the result of it all.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  I consider the spread she has laid out before me, sorting the pieces by intensity, but it’s all intense. It all pops. I guess the shiniest thing out here is the fact that Eddie’s been with us all these years. My dad has settled back on his old shelf where I had him, and Eddie is spotlit on a podium.

  “Does Melanie know?” I ask. “About the tuition?”

  “No,” she says. “Not that I know of, at least. If she knew, the world would know. I don’t think Whitney really knows for sure, either. I’ll work it out so that she thinks he’s confused or . . . I don’t know. I’ll do something.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Let her think it. It’s the truth. This is just so crazy.” I lean forward on my chair, making it balance on two legs. “God, Mom. Don’t you think he’s loved you all this time?”

  She shakes her head, truly bewildered. That’s how I feel too—mystified, stunned into silence—as if I’m an observer of something happening to someone else. I bring my chair back down.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t think so. I think he did when he first started paying and then it just became a habit.”

  “I need a drink,” I say.

  My mom looks at me sharply.

  “What? I’m just kidding.”

  “Good,” she says. “I could use one, though.”

  “So hypocritical.” I bonk her on the leg with my fist.

  “No, no, no,” she says. “Adults appreciate the flavor of wine, its nuances and such. And we have major problems and stress. You don’t know how good you have it.”

  “Yeah, real good. This hasn’t been stressful at all.”

  She gets up, kisses me on my temple, then pours herself a glass of wine. I’m relieved for a bit of a break, an intermission before the rest of the show.

  We talk into the night. Mainly I let my mom talk. We have moved to the couch, put the TV on to provide some other noise, and I watch her reflect and remember, unraveling herself.

  “Why are we here?” I ask, such a simple question.

  “Honestly,” she says, “I thought it would be nice. It makes Eddie happy. Melanie has been great, too, bringing me to things. She’s all into her Housewives clips, and it’s hard to pay people like the Wests back. So I’ve gotten permission for her to film at the premiere. It’s just something I could do.”

  I understand, yet it’s not anything I don’t already know, really. I can’t help but feel that we’re working for them, they’re working for us, and this isn’t how friendships are supposed to be.

  “Why did you keep it a secret once you found out?” I ask. I feel I’ve given my mom a shakedown and everything’s clanging to the floor as if she’d stuffed it all up her skirt.

  She lies down, her eyes heavy. “Because I knew you’d go to school with Whitney and Will and I didn’t want you to feel ashamed.”

  She was right to tell me and right about the way I’d feel if I knew.

  “Whitney doesn’t know about the other schools, though,” she says.

  This doesn’t make me feel any better. I want to ask her if we can make it stop, but don’t want to know the answer. I have an urge to tell Danny—nothing seems real until I tell him. I lie down, resting my feet in her lap and imagining our conversation, how Danny will make it right. Thinking of him seems to lay a kind of foundation for me—like no matter what, here is the g
round, here is this thing I can stand upon.

  I look at my mom’s hands rubbing my feet, her veins and pores, her sand-colored nails, her turquoise ring, the thin wrinkles at her wrist, the small scratch on the knuckle of her thumb.

  We fall asleep on opposite sides of the couch.

  31

  EVERYTHING SEEMS SO SMALL TODAY. IT’S WEDNESDAY, another day in paradise. It shouldn’t be this hard. I look out my bedroom window toward Whitney’s house, and my mind races with comebacks and insults. Why couldn’t she just tell me what was on her mind instead of putting me through a test? Why does she care about me and Will, anyway? We can all be together.

  Then there’s me—the things I’ve kept from her. Do I tell her about her dad, the entirety of his help? Do I tell her I’m hurt when I’m left out? Do I make her admit that I am different from her other friends and she and I both know it? New problems keep popping up like the heads in Whac-A-Mole at Chuck E. Cheese’s. I need to talk to her.

  I see Melanie walk out the front door, gabbing on the phone, dressed to go somewhere, probably a club. What’s with the clubs—the events? Camping clubs, beach clubs, golf clubs, always something to sequester themselves from whatever they think they need protection from. Ugliness? Chance? Things unforeseen? People not from their club?

  “Mom!” I call and walk to the kitchen.

  “Yeah?” she calls back from her room.

  “I’m going to go to Whitney’s.”

  She walks out of her room, brushing her wet hair. “Are you okay with everything?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “I’m going to run to the mall with Melanie. She needs a dress for Monday night. I’ll look for one for you too, all right?”

  It’s my mom’s premiere, and she needs to help Melanie?

  “Whatever,” I say. “Thanks.”

  • • •

  I knock on Whitney’s door, but she doesn’t answer, so I go around back. I stop and want to run when I see Will and Lissa on the daybed, but it’s too late. They see me. Will’s face is close to hers, and he looks at me over her head.