Above the East China Sea: A novel

by Sarah Bird

  “Codie, you don’t know that. You’re so smart. Smarter than me.”

  “Smarts don’t count if you can’t put them on paper.”

  Even though Codie had a classic case of dyslexia, we moved around so much in her early years of school that by the time it was diagnosed when she was in fourth grade, she’d already absorbed the idea that she was a dummy.

  “Cabooskie, I know that you want what you think is best for me, and it’s hard for you to believe that the air force is it, but it is. You just gotta trust me on this. Besides, Mom’s up for a transfer, and if I gotta move anyway …?”

  “But what if you get sent to …?”

  “The Sandbox? No worries. Pretty much all the troops except rent-a-soldiers are already being withdrawn. Besides, I’m a female! In the air force! It’s not like they’re gonna put me out in an up-armored Humvee sweeping for IEDs or something. Statistically, driving I-25 would be more dangerous.”

  I didn’t feel or look convinced.

  “Cabooskie, don’t stress. Mom already said that she’d pull strings to get me a cush assignment.” She looked straight into my eyes and promised, “A safe assignment.”

  “But, Codie, we hate the military. We hate Gung Hos.” Our mother is a Gung Ho. She’s not like us. She’s the anti-us. You can’t trust her. You can’t abandon me.

  Codie shrugged, muttered, “YOLO,” drained her bottle.

  “YOLO? Don’t be all You Only Live Once. This isn’t like bungee jumping or some other onetime dumb-ass thing.”

  Codie pressed her lips together and nodded without saying anything.

  When I saw the finality of that nod, I started blubbering so hard I could barely get the words out. “Please, come on, you can’t do this. Please.”

  “Luz, it’s done.” She went inside and slid the patio door shut behind her.

  I made myself stop crying and tried to swallow the lump in my throat with a chug from my bottle. It tasted like perfume and chemicals. I’ve never drunk Breezers since.

  “Jace, hey, Jace, are you watching this?” Like a kid overamped on sugar, Kirby tries to divert Jacey’s attention away from Zavie Plutino’s vaporizer and big muscles.

  “What?” Jace asks, annoyed.

  “Cooking an egg with my flashlight.”

  Kirby is, indeed, swishing an egg around in a tuna can set atop a flashlight the size of a baguette. Beams of blinding light escape around the rim of the can and throw a halo up into the black sky like Batman signaling. The smells of burning tuna oil and can label blend with cooking egg as Kirby stirs the clear yolk around with a stick until it turns white because, yes, the ultimate Gung Ho flashlight will cook an egg.

  “Hey, look!” Kirby holds the can up to show Jacey, who barely notices because she’s still mostly involved with her short GI and his crafty vaporizer.

  “Jesus!” Kirby drops the hot can and flicks his burned fingers in the air to cool them off. Scrambled egg spills onto the sand. Out of everyone’s sight, tears flood my eyes at the thought of Kirby Kernshaw with his spindly arms and freckle-smeared lips packing an empty tuna can and an egg, an egg, down a cliff just so he can impress his latest batch of new friends with the special trick he can do with his special toy. I know it is totally stupid to be bawling for Kirby Kernshaw, but that knowledge does nothing to slow the stream of tears. Instead they fall harder as I watch the guys windmilling karate kicks and Jacey oozing over her latest interchangeable drug source. We’re nothing but little baby birds in a nest, all open mouths, begging to be fed, to be liked, to have someone sit with us at lunch, to send us a Christmas card when we’re gone, to remember that we were ever here when our two—three, if we’re lucky—years are up and we have to start all over again at a new school with new Quasi-friends. Who’ll also forget us as soon as we’re gone.

  Then, in the way I’ve been doing ever since it happened, I shift straight from sadness to anger, and Kirby’s naked show of need starts to work on me like a dentist’s drill, and I despise him. How has he not had it drummed into him that brats don’t whine? We don’t plead. We don’t need. We require nothing. Not even real roots. We’re air ferns. Kirby Kernshaw annoys me so much that I want to club his head in with a rock. I scrub the black mascara slurry off my face with the back of my hand.

  I edge away from the fire. No one notices when I leave. I didn’t expect them to. There’s a myth that, because we move so much, military kids are geniuses at making friends. That we’re social chameleons who can blend in anywhere. And for a few freaks, it’s true. There are a minute number of brats who can strut into any school, anywhere in the world, get the social scene wired by second period, assemble an entourage by third, work their way up to the cheerleaders’ table by the end of lunch, be elected president of student council by the last bell, and reign over homecoming court that night. There are mutants like that in any group. Maybe we have a few more than average because all the moving gives us more practice and turns some of us into ingratiation whores. In the end, though, what all military kids are truly gifted at, the social skill we’ve mastered better than any other, is unmaking friends. We’re geniuses at leaving people behind.

  And I was better at it than most. Why shouldn’t I be? Codie was the one who mattered. A few days after she received her diploma from Pueblo Heights High, then Frisbeed her mortarboard across Tingley Coliseum, Codie left for Basic at Lackland. For the first few weeks the air force held her and all the other new recruits incommunicado. Then we got a preprinted card telling us where we could send mail, and even a time when Codie would be allowed to call us and talk for exactly three minutes. The card warned us not to worry. “Your recruit is adjusting to a new way of life and will sound scared, unhappy, and uncertain about whether he or she has made the correct decision.” But when we finally spoke, Codie was confident, happy, and utterly certain that she had made the correct decision.

  “I was born to do this,” she’d crowed. “There’s always someone to tell you what to do, and it’s always a succession of random, unrelated tasks that you’re not expected to understand. And best of all, there are never any papers to write and you almost never have to read. Dyslexia with a touch of ADHD is like having a superpower in the military. I’m such a rock star here.”

  “You were always a rock star, Kimchi.”

  “You can’t call me that anymore. The big deal now is that we’re pivoting our forces into Asia.”

  “ ‘Pivoting’ our forces?”

  “Yeah, don’t you love that? Like we’re just gonna do a sweet little pirouette and vanish from Afghanistan, then pop back up in Yongsan, South Korea. No, listen, the Middle East? Yeah, it’ll always be hot, but not cool like the Far East is gonna be. China, Korea, Japan. It’s gonna be all about the Pacific Rim now, baby. How perfect is that? I even look the part. Hey, I’ve got a whole career ladder and everything.”

  “A career?” I thought that I could just about hang on by my fingernails for two years until she got out; then I had it all planned: We’d go to college together. With her SF experience, Codie would be a shoo-in for law enforcement. “You mean you’re not coming back when your hitch is up? You’re staying in?”

  “Don’t say it like that. Luz, I think I can get commissioned.”

  “An officer?”

  “Yeah, why not? Because we were raised noncom?”

  “No. Of course not. Absolutely you could be an officer. I just never in a million years thought that—”

  “What? I’d be a lifer? I can hardly believe it myself. But, Luz, listen, for real, for once in my whole existence, I am seriously good at something. I am seriously good at being a soldier. I guess I just needed the structure or something.”

  “Like we didn’t get enough structure growing up? Like our lives weren’t run by Mom’s Duty Rosters?”

  “At home, sure. Sporadically. When she wasn’t falling in or out of love.”

  “In and out of bed, more like. Mom had to have the military for structure or she’d be so far off the rails it wouldn
’t be funny. But you? Codie, you don’t need it.”

  “Luz, you don’t know that. You don’t know what it’s like in my head.”

  “Tell me, Codie. Make me understand.”

  “I got people in line behind me waiting for this phone. They won’t give us back our personal ones for another month. Can’t you just accept that this is my choice? It’s what I choose to do.”

  “Or maybe you’re just doing what Mom programmed us to do.”

  “You got the same programming and I don’t see you rushing out to enlist. Come on, Luz, be happy for me. For the first time in my life I don’t feel like a retard loser.”

  “That’s the thing; you never were. You said it yourself so many times. It was because we moved so much. By the time a teacher figured out that—surprise!—even if you spelled ‘stop’ ‘pots,’ you were really fucking smart, and even if, maybe, next year, they’d get you assigned to the right class with the right teacher, we’d be gone by then.”

  “Boo-fuckin’-hoo. It is what it is.”

  It is what it is? I can’t believe she uttered the ultimate Gung Ho statement of idiocy in any way except making fun of our mother, who says that exact thing way too often.

  “Is Mom around? I need to ask her if she knows my DI.”

  Though I knew what a DI is, I tried to shake her out of Gung Ho mode by asking, “Your what?”

  “Drill instructor. Is Mom there?”

  I put our mother on and she barked, “What’s the sit rep?”

  She meant “situation report.” Mom was still wearing her camo BDUs, her hair pulled up tight into a French braid that didn’t extend more than the three inches in bulk that the air force authorized. They talked to each other in the foreign language that I’d resisted my whole life and my sister had secretly become fluent in, and it was all MTIs and MEPs and BMC.

  “Forget that HUT! Two, three, four, shit,” my mom advised. “It’s HUT! Twop! Threep! Fourp! Put that ‘puh’ in and you’ll get the cadence right.” Talking to Codie, my mom was happy and animated in a way I could barely remember her ever being with us. A strange mix of jealousy, sadness, and revulsion forced me to leave.

  After Basic, Codie went into Security Forces training, where, besides learning to direct traffic and what to do about barking dogs in base neighborhoods, she studied capture and recovery of nuclear weapons, IEDs, and military operations in urban terrain. Codie was good at everything, but utterly excelled at BEAST, Basic Expeditionary Airmen Skills Training, the week when they all went Lord of the Flies, lived wild in the field, and made war on one another. Codie was elected leader of Reaper Zone, and, in spite of being half the size of most of the guys on her team and still wearing full body armor and humping a pack containing three MREs, all her MOPP gear—chemical warfare suit, gloves, boots, and gas mask—and carrying two canteens and an M-16 rifle, she was officially credited with the most kills. Because she was not only an honor graduate but got a ribbon for highest small arms marksmanship, and made Warrior Flight, Codie was rewarded with the assignment that everyone dreams of, Hickam Air Force Base, right next to Honolulu and across the bay from its sister base, Pearl Harbor.

  Meanwhile, I was surviving my junior year at Pueblo Heights as best I could. Which, without Codie, was not too sparkly good. Codie had always been the filter between me and the world. Doing school without her was a root canal minus the Novocain. I killed two birds—social group and numbing the pain—with one group of Quasis, the stoners, when I discovered how easy it was to hang with the slouchy kids who liked to get high. How open and welcoming they were. How essential and mood-elevating their drugs were. My favorite of this crew were the kids who were bused in from the rez. The sweet-faced Navajo girls who carried their weight in their tummies and favored low-rise jeans on their skinny legs and baby-doll tops with ties in back over their barrel chests. I liked them because they had even less interest than I did in getting acquainted. As soon as a brief, initial giddiness was over, we’d all clump together, say nothing, and kill time in as painless a way as possible. None of us was under the delusion that these were the best years of our lives or pretended that we’d “stay in touch.”

  When Mom got her orders for Kadena, “Keystone of the Pacific,” the largest U.S. air base in Asia, near the end of my junior year last April, my reaction to her was, “No! You can’t do this to me. There is no fucking way that I’m transferring my senior year. Period. End of discussion. I’ll live on the street before I move again.”

  “Why? So you can stay here with a bunch of loser dopeheads? That is not going to happen. Besides, this is going to be different. We have family there.”

  “What family?”

  “Your grandma’s family. I have some names.”

  “Why haven’t I ever heard about this family before?”

  “You have. Your grandma used to talk about them a lot.”

  “I was eight when she died.”

  “I remember lots from when I was eight.”

  “She barely spoke any English.”

  “So? You should have learned Japanese.”

  “So! You should have taught me.”

  “Why is everything always my fault? When are you going to step up and take responsibility for your own life? Where would I be if I’d had your attitude? I’d be sitting around in Bumfuck, East Jesus, waiting for the world to hand me something. You can think whatever you want about the air force and your sister’s decision, but at least she’s doing something with her life.”

  “What? She’s doing exactly what you raised her to do. She grew up on air force bases; she joins the air force. You grew up on air force bases; you joined the air force. Maybe if either one of you had been given some other options—”

  Mom jumped in at that point and went off on how my attitude was what was wrong with this country and how, at my age, she was working two jobs, and America was for winners, not whiners. When I tuned back in, she’d returned to promoting Okinawa. “The point is, I have names. Aunts, uncles, cousins. You said you were always jealous of people with big extended families. Now you’ll have one. Okinawans are good about family. Tight. Your grandma always told me that. You’ll probably have a huge gang of cousins waiting to party with you.”

  Someone to party with was sort of the goal of my mom’s life. Eventually I agreed to go. Cousins and a big extended family sounded good, but that wasn’t what changed my mind. What changed my mind was that, after almost a year at Hickam, after almost half of her hitch was over, Codie got deployed. I don’t know whether Mom’s strings didn’t reach to Hawaii or she just stopped pulling them, but Codie’s orders came in a month after ours, and they were for Afcrapistan.

  The only string Mom actually was able to pull was to get a buddy of hers to work some magic with our orders, so that we had a five-day layover in Hawaii right before Codie was scheduled to leave. So going to Okinawa was the price I had to pay to see my sister before she deployed.

  When Codie picked us up at the airport, I almost didn’t recognize her. She was taut and tan. Every soft place on her had been hardened into muscle. She had her hair skinned back in the same French braid Mom was wearing. When I hugged her it was like my sister had been compressed into a dense antimatter version of herself. I felt shy around her and hung back while she and Mom went into their pod-person Gung Ho routine.

  “What’s your tempo band?” Mom asked.

  “A,” Codie answered.

  “Suh-weet!” They high-fived. “And what’s your max deployment time?”

  “Hundred and twenty days.”

  “Piece of cake. You can do that standing on your head. Just don’t leave base. For anything. Never go outside the wire.”

  “No worries, I’ll be the best little fobbit ever.”

  They laughed while I figured out that a fobbit had something to do with being stationed on a forward operating base away from the action.

  Listening to them bond over “ABUs” and “CST reporting instructions” made me want to stow away in the lugga
ge compartment on the next flight straight back to Albuquerque. Then suddenly, miraculously, the Gung Ho talk was over. Ever the party girl, Mom had us drop her off at the NCO club, where she knew half the noncoms and planned on speed-dating the rest. Once I had her alone, Codie turned back into my sister. As we walked across the NCO club lawn, I took the first full breath I’d inhaled since she left. After New Mexico, the moist air was a plumeria-scented miracle.

  “What did I tell you?” Codie asked, twirling around beneath a tree that showered us with brilliant red flowers when a breeze rippled through the high branches far over our heads.

  “You were right,” I admitted, grinning up into the rain of crimson petals. I wanted to remember everything about the moment when I got my sister back, so I pressed one of the blossoms into the copy of The Hunger Games I had bought to read on the plane. Later I looked up the name of the tree that had rained red happiness on us and found out that it was called a coral tree. And Erythrina variegata became my favorite botanical specimen.

  That’s when Codie unhooked the opal pendant necklace she was wearing, fastened it around my neck, and we fell back into sync so completely, it was as if the past year had never happened. As if she’d never told me she’d enlisted and we’d gone straight from counting lightning strikes to dancing beneath a shower of petals. We were so mind-melded that neither one of us had to say out loud that we weren’t going to even mention her deployment. With the full force of our combined sister power, we would keep it outside of our charmed circle forever and it would never be able to touch us.

  Codie drove us to a secret cove she’d found. Unlike the cove where my fellow waste cases and I gather every night now, which is mostly pebbles and crushed coral, this one had soft powder-white sand. The water was the aqua of a movie star’s swimming pool, and it was encircled not by jagged black cliffs, but by royal palms with straight, ringed trunks and a starburst of fresh green foliage geysering from the top.