“Which is better than an Ironman,” Lani says. She shakes the sign cheerily.
“Look at it this way: some people be like, ‘Oh that Gucci, that’s hella tight!’ ” Rei says. “But we’re like, ‘That’s just some ignorant bitch shit.’ ”
No one says a word about Rei’s Kate Spade bag, dangling from the crook of her arm. But I see X glance at it, and I see her follow his eyes. The moment passes, almost like it never happened.
“What do you think?” X asks. I smile, and try to make it look like a real one.
“It’s perfect,” I say, because it’s the best we can do. Trinity pulls out her phone and shows me a map. It’s pretty close to where we live. I’ve biked most of the places she’s showing me. Just not all at once.
“That’s a lot of road,” I say. My brain translates maps into minutes pretty quickly from delivery work. A lot of road is an understatement. I hadn’t let myself think about what that distance would look like on the land I know so well. The whole island is only 114-ish miles around the circumference. They’ve got the path wiggling around what they think are roads without a lot of cars, but that will mean taking turns at high speed, or slowing down. I’ll have to practice.
“What’s the cutoff time again?” I ask.
“For the swim, it’s a maximum time of two hours, twenty minutes. The bike cutoff is eight hours, ten minutes, no problem for you there, and the run cutoff is six hours, thirty minutes,” Wyatt says.
“Seventeen hours total,” X says.
“We have the whole rule book,” Trinity says. “We’re going to make sure it’s exactly, to the letter, to the decimal, to the quark, the exact same race. So no one can ever say you’re not just as good as an Ironman.”
Just as good as, I think. But I won’t be an Ironman.
“Seventeen hours. Christ,” I say.
“You’ll beat seventeen. We’re already taking bets on this, and mine was thirteen and a half hours,” X says. “It’s a twenty-dollar buy-in if you want to play.”
“That seems unethical. What did you bet?” I ask Wyatt.
“I don’t make bets of faith. Once I have an estimate of your VO2 max and lactate threshold, I’ll use your training plan and, anticipating deviations, calculate—”
“You can’t tell her what time she’s going to get, Wyatt,” Rei says. “It’ll ruin the race.”
“I could be wrong.”
“You won’t be. We’ll put all our bets in a secret envelope and open them after the race.”
“Seems fair,” I say.
“Well, I don’t care who knows. I bet nine hours flat,” Trinity says.
“That’s ridiculous,” Lani says. “That’s faster than the pro times. We don’t want to set unreasonable expectations.”
“This whole race is an unreasonable expectation.”
“Fair,” I throw in. “But nine hours isn’t happening.”
“I am so psyched!” Trinity grabs me by the shoulders. “I am going to build the hell out of your bike!”
“Before we trick out our toys, though, we have to tackle the boring stuff,” Rei says.
“Like what?” asks Trinity.
“The actual training part,” says Rei. “And looking at your benchmarks…we’ve got a long way to go.”
I sigh.
“Can’t we upload all of that into my brain Matrix-style?”
“Training montage!” Trinity shouts. She pauses dramatically mid-run, as though she expects the scene to cut.
Lani shakes her head. “This is going to be a long six months.”
chapter eleven
A finger pokes me in the ribs. I keep my eyes closed.
It pokes me again and this time I grab it.
“Trinity,” I growl.
“Ow, beast! Teacher’s looking at you,” Trinity says under her breath, cradling her hand. “Get your head up.”
I manage to pull my face off my drool-coated worktable and set it on my hands so that I can maintain at least a simulacrum of wakefulness.
Simulacrum. A Scumbucket pain shoots through me. Little memories hurt the worst, when they creep up on you like that.
Simulacrum means “a fake version of something.” When Scumbucket was reading this book called Simulacra and Simulacrum, he explained to me that it’s way more complicated than that and we’re all living in the Matrix, but basically, that’s what it means. So: I am a simulacrum of myself today. Even my fingers are tired. Even my blisters have blisters. Yesterday’s training sessions about broke me. That’s sessions. Plural. I have never been this sore in my whole life.
Our teacher, Mrs. Miller, is not fooled. It’s February and she’s already got each of us pegged: potheads, troublemakers, dumb but earnest, smart but lazy. I see her eyeing me as she talks and talks about Picasso’s blue period and the color wheel.
“And what is it called when we use only one color?” she asks.
“Monochromatic,” the class repeats in monotone. I mumble along, trying to shake her eyes off me.
I should be in AP Art History, not stupid remedial art, but I didn’t have the prerequisites. I bet in AP Art History you get to talk beyond the fact that the paintings are—wait for it!—blue, and into who he was portraying, and why. When Mrs. Miller tells us the paintings are blue because Picasso was sad, my eyes about roll into the back of my head. Yeah, lady. That’s everything that was going on. Blue equals sad.
She’s going to talk for the next ten minutes exactly because that’s what it says on our lesson plan. She’s evil-eyeing the potheads in the corner now as she lists colors and the feelings they magically map onto for literally every human (“Red equals angry!” Well, not if you’re Chinese, Teach), so I slide my phone out.
Nothing. Not even a message from X.
I get it. We’re all in school.
I used to check for messages from Scumbucket a hundred times a day, and I haven’t quite broken the habit. We texted constantly: in school, late at night, even sometimes when I was at work, I’d sneak into the back room and catch up. It was like he was always right next to me, even though he wasn’t there. My entire life and heart was in this phone.
Now that I think about it, how real was it? We only saw each other once a week, sometimes not even that. We only really hung out online. Going to Amsterdam, being together forever…those were only promises.
I look around. Half my class is on their phones, the screens hidden in their laps and beneath their desks. Even Trin next to me is compulsively reloading her in-box, waiting to hear from MIT. Everyone is on their phone constantly now. I’m sure no one would notice him sending off hundreds and hundreds of messages and pictures. He never sent me any of “Byron,” but sexting is so easy. Everyone here could have a secret side chick, and no one would know.
But does that make it “not real”? Was I like an app to him? Something he could delete when he was bored of me? A simulacrum of a girlfriend.
I look at my phone. My fingers hover over the screen.
It’s not that I’m checking. Not that I have this constant voice inside me saying, Maybe you missed his reply! Not like I’m lying to myself, heading into Themria looking for him every night, even though I can see he hasn’t been on since we broke up.
I open our text messages.
Still nothing.
“Give it here,” Mrs. Miller says, and an open palm passes under my eyes.
“What?” I ask. She picks the phone up off my lap, puts it in her apron.
“No phones in class. Now tell me, Miho, since you’ve been paying such keen attention: What does it mean when a painting is yellow?”
She says the word yellow super clear, like I might misunderstand this complicated term. She stands over me, smirking. My mouth won’t form words; it hangs open in disbelief. I hear the potheads guffawing in the corner. Mrs. Miller grins, like she knows she
’s got me, like I’m too stupid to know the answer to this obviously stupid question.
“Class, what does it mean—”
“It depends who you’re asking. I think,” I get out before she can finish. She turns to look at me like she’s astonished I have the capacity for speech, and I rush on before she can stop me. “I mean, like, the question doesn’t make sense. Sometimes it means, ‘Hey wow like yellow paint is easy to make so I’m gonna use it all over this cave wall’ and sometimes it means, ‘I gotta have something to set off all this blue,’ like for Picasso, and yeah, sometimes it means, you know, ‘This painting is optimistic.’ But, like, if you think about it, lots of Van Gogh’s paintings are full on yellow, and I don’t think it means he was happy or that the painting is like happy. Like colors don’t work that way. I think.”
Stupid. Stupid Stupid Stupid. California like. Oh my god I sound like an idiot. Why can’t I talk like the smart person I am?
Teacher pauses, looking me over. I should have let her shame me. It’s more words than I’ve said this whole semester, because usually we spend class repeating what she says so we learn the “vocabulary.” There’s no discussion. Number one lesson I have learned in every new school: you are invisible, or you are embarrassed.
“That’s a good point,” Mrs. Miller says. Everyone goes back to repeating colors and emotions.
But she doesn’t give me back my phone.
* * *
We finally settle into the “art” part of class: making a color wheel out of a drawing of something we like. Mine’s a pizza with the toppings done in complementary colors. Trin’s is a bunch of rockets taking off, which is cool. I finished mine two days ago, so I put it out in front of me like it’s waiting on finishing touches and pull my own sketchbook out of my backpack and into my lap. I quickly sketch Trin working so hard to paint in the rockets.
“It’s a good likeness,” a voice says behind me, and before she can take it, I shove my sketchbook under my T-shirt, straight-up ripping a hole in the front. Mrs. Miller laughs.
“This is art class. You’re welcome to work on your own art projects once your classwork is finished,” she says. “Where have you been hiding all this talent and insight, Miho?”
“I haven’t been hiding it,” I say sheepishly. “It’s just that no one ever notices.”
“I notice,” Trinity says defensively. She looks at Mrs. Miller and holds up her rockets hopefully. “A?”
“Dripping,” Mrs. Miller points out. Trinity swears like a sailor and tries to right her watercolors.
“See me after class for your phone, Miho,” Mrs. Miller says. “Next time it’s going to the principal’s office, but I think we can let it slide just this once. And Trinity, put that away right—”
“It’s here,” Trin says breathlessly.
She turns around her phone, tears brimming in her eyes.
“The email,” she says. “I’m going. I’m really going.”
“Where?” Mrs. Miller asks.
“MIT,” Trinity says. She looks down at her dripping rockets. “I’m going,” she says. I want to hug her, but she’s not a hugging person. And she doesn’t seem like she’s happy. Her hands are shaking and she’s barely breathing. “I’m going,” she says again. Then she picks up her stuff and leaves, straight-up cutting class in front of a teacher.
“She, uh…has to go collect herself,” I tell Mrs. Miller.
“I didn’t see anything,” Mrs. Miller says, putting a finger to her lips. “As far as I know, she was here until the end of the day.”
“That’s cool of you,” I say.
“Of course. After all, it’s a very special occasion.”
* * *
After class, I waddle my sore butt up to Mrs. Miller’s desk and hold out my hand. My other hand is holding the hole right in the front of my T-shirt closed so my bra isn’t showing. If I flip it around so it’s backward, I can change into one of the logo shirts that got messed up at the screen printers so they say Uncle Tuba’s Pizzeria, which Tua keeps in a box in the break room because they’re hilarious. It’s my last class, and I’ve only got an hour to stop at the grocery store and get to Tua’s, which isn’t normally a problem, but my legs are totally dead from yesterday. Even walking hurts.
“You kids just can’t live without these things,” Mrs. Miller says, my phone on her desk. Given that she’s, like, forty at a stretch, I’m pretty sure she has a phone, and this is just something she thinks she has to say because she’s an adult. She looks at me over her glasses intensely, and it’s kind of weird. I withdraw my hand. I don’t know what she wants.
“Yeah, sorry,” I say. “Won’t happen again.”
“Miho, I was impressed by what you said in class today. I wish you would speak up more.”
“It seems kind of…pointless,” I say. “I mean, no one in class cares about art.”
“I care. And you seem to care.”
I nod. “I’ll try to say things in class,” I say, glancing at the clock. I can get to my locker and out the door in ten minutes, and if I stop for groceries on the way to work and put them in the work fridge, then I can trade laundry duty with Dad and get in that last sprint session after work if I do my homework on my break—
“Listen, Miho. I’m trying to help you. Kids like you, it’s not that you’re not smart, it’s that you’re lazy,” she says.
I stop my mental calculations.
“Huh?”
“You are a talented artist and a smart girl, Miho.” She smiles. “It’s just a cultural thing. That’s not your fault, it’s just a fact. So you’ll have to work a little harder to overcome that and learn how successful people behave. Successful people don’t phone in their assignments. They don’t give the minimum effort. They give it their all. Like Trinity. Think of everything she’s overcome.”
“Okay,” I say, my face getting red.
“I want you to succeed, but you need to show me that you want that too. You can be better than this.” She finally hands me back my phone. “I’m here for you.”
“Thanks.” I shove it in my pocket.
I speed-walk to my locker, as fast as my sore legs will carry me. I open the door, grab my stuff, slam it hard.
Teachers are all like that. Think I’m lazy. Think I don’t try. Do they have any idea how I live? No. Well, sorry I didn’t “give my all” to your stupid color wheel for kindergartners. Maybe I was busy giving my all to the job that lets me have clothes to wear, and the chores I do to keep my house running, and all the other ways I have to work harder than people who get to be in AP Art History classes.
You know what I’m going to work hard at? The things I actually care about. Like my art. Screw her color wheel. And you know what else? I’m going to work hard at swimming, and biking, and running. I am making the time to work hard on that, on top of everything else I work hard at. Because if you work hard, at the end of all that work you can race 140.6 miles in a single day, and no one can ever doubt that you know how to put in the work ever again.
chapter twelve
I’m up early on Saturday. I’m meeting Rei in the afternoon, and I need to get in my bike-run brick, which is a five-hour workout. I also need to get the groceries, do all my chores, and work on my midterm problem set for calculus.
I swear under my breath as I leave the house when I see the chair. Today, of all days?
Haircutting day is once a month. Mr. Kalani wakes up, gazes at the sky with a sailor’s intuition, and feels in his bones that the day has come. He makes the coffee and, with an instinct equal to the compulsion felt by migratory birds, drags the haircutting chair out onto the lawn. He finds the navy surplus bag he uses to store his nice scissors in his massive cabinet of art supplies and ceremonially sets out his tools. Then, he drinks his coffee and waits, meditating on the transitory nature of existence and the eternal battle of man against growt
h that haircutting represents.
That last part I’m not sure about. He’s probably thinking about football games that happened ten years before I was born.
“Miho, I’m ready,” Mr. Kalani says, gesturing to the chair. I sling my stuff up onto the porch and sit down.
“Any requests?” he asks.
“Don’t mix me up with my dad and give me a buzz cut,” I say. Our running joke. He laughs, like he always laughs, then dumps water over my head so that my hair won’t be too crooked.
Scissors snip. I glance at the time on my phone. Maybe if I don’t say anything, this will go quickly.
Mr. Kalani’s haircuts aren’t bad. They’re neat and military grade. Still, I’ve always kind of wondered if maybe getting my hair cut by a real professional would make me look pretty, if maybe that’s the difference between me and those girls with shiny, flowing locks. But Mr. Kalani’s haircuts are free, and when I looked at the price of a “real” haircut, I vomited a little bit. Even if I could pay for it once, I couldn’t afford to keep going back over and over. So I just have to live with feeling ugly.
I know I’m supposed to say I love my “curly” hair. But I don’t. My hair is what the internet calls “3C curls.” My dad has a buzz cut and is a man; he has no idea what I’m supposed to do with it. When I was a kid, my mom let it go, put it in two little frizzy balls when I went to school, and told me to focus on math instead of on my appearance.
No matter what I do, my hair is a frizzy mess. I have followed so many YouTube videos, and nothing makes a difference. I hate having curly hair more than anything else about myself. I would be okay with being chubby, with having a funny nose, with my weird eyes, with my thunder thighs, if I could just have shiny hair like Rei does, like every girl I see in a magazine.
I am who I am, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And all of this is a part of who I am: the haircuts at home, the curly hair, the girl attached to it. And what sucks is that I love getting my hair cut by Mr. Kalani. I wish I were beautiful, but I can’t have it both ways. I can’t be me and be beautiful. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way it is.
Fierce as the Wind Page 8
