“Of course I know what it’s like to hate myself, Miho. I’m gay! At an all-boys school! On an island! With capital-C Conservative parents! You self-centered bitch! For Chrissakes, Miho. Get over it. He’s just a boy. You didn’t even know him that long.”
“Screw you,” I scream, though it’s hard to flip him off when I’m treading water. “My soulmate, my partner in crime, is GETTING MARRIED at this VERY MOMENT and you want me to get over it?”
“Because he’s a SCUMBUCKET and CONSTANTLY THINKING ABOUT HIM is doing NO ONE any good. And your ACTUAL FRIENDS are all trying SO HARD to make you feel better and you just want to PITY YOURSELF.”
I let myself sink and get a mouthful of water so I can flip him off.
“Oh, mature.”
“Give me my phone.”
“No. You can wallow in wedding pictures and self-pity when you get home. Right now, you’re going to finish this swim so help me god.”
“Give me my phone RIGHT NOW.”
“NO.”
“I will flip the kayak, X, I swear.”
“Go ahead. Your phone will be at the bottom of the ocean.”
“SCREW YOU. SCREW YOU I HATE YOU—”
But I can’t even finish the very long insult I planned.
“Go ahead and cry. You’re still not getting your phone.”
“I’m not crying because I want my phone. I’m crying because I’m sad. X, it’s the happiest day of their lives. I mean, do you think he even thought of me once today? Even for a second?”
“I have no idea, Miho. This is too far. You have to move on. I’ll do anything. Literally anything. What do I have to do to get my best friend back? What is it about him that made it so he could do this to you? I get that he was pretty and he had swoopy hair that you liked and you both liked Van Gogh and some movies and big pretentious words, but honestly, Mi? You could have that with anyone. What made you this mad for him?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“Well, you know what sucks, Miho? What truly sucks? So many of the things that you think of belonging to Scumbucket are things we shared first. Why did you let him ruin all of those memories that are ours? Who introduced you to Nick and Nora? Who gave you that DVD box set? Remember when we watched those? It hurt my feelings when you wholesale shifted that to him. And what you have in common with him has nothing on what you have in common with me. Remember when you said you’d move to San Francisco with me and be my kept woman if I became a Silicon Valley millionaire, and you’d decorate my 1920s house of sin and serve me cocktails in vintage stemware and spend all day painting and reading?”
“Yeah, I do! But we’re too old for these stupid games. You’re leaving me to go to college, and all of that is just make-believe, and you will never really love me.”
He looks like I slapped him.
“I do really love you,” he says at last. “And it hurts my feelings, Miho, that you don’t think I’m your partner in crime.”
And all of a sudden, I can see myself through X’s eyes. I’ve been a real brat. I can see how I have been deaf to anything but the sound of my own sadness for months.
“You are my partner in crime,” I say. “But you’re not my boyfriend. And that means that someone else can break my heart. The same way all those jocks have stomped on yours. I wanted to be your everything. Every time. But even though I couldn’t be, I hope I was enough.”
“You were,” he says. “You are.”
I tread water, and the world is silent as he thinks about it. I can see him building algorithms and options in his head. But there’s no system to crack, no program to build here. It’s not his fault, but X does not have the answer this time.
“It can be your turn next,” I say. “We can just trade off getting dumped every year or so until we find a pair of twin amateur detectives with a large inheritance to take us away from all this.”
“From your mouth to God’s ears. Should we finish the swim, or do you really want to quit?”
I turn toward the shore with a sigh. God I want to go inside and watch old movies with X on the couch.
But then I look at the long stretch of ocean we’ve already crossed. A mile. And instead of slow, I feel strong. There’s no way I could have swum that far in open water before. Maybe I’m not a bad swimmer. Maybe this is just a bad swim. I put on my goggles.
“Miho,” he says. I turn back to him. “Do you think that the training is helping?”
“Real talk? Everything about this race seems completely impossible right now,” I say. “Like, we still don’t have a bike, I’m constantly starving, and I especially suck at running. So I think I’m screwed. Honestly.”
“I meant helping with Scumbucket.”
“Oh,” I say. “For a second, I forgot that he’s definitely not the reason I’m doing all this.”
“So yes.”
“I think so?”
“Good enough for me, partner.”
chapter seventeen
“Aki-chan, knock that off,” Dad calls as we climb into the pickup. “Poor Aki will never find that pink tennis ball.”
Achilles abandons his dig through Mr. Kalani’s flowers and comes running back to us looking as dejected as a Shiba Inu can be. It’s hard to pull off being a dejected teddy bear. He tries desperately to hop up into the truck. He’s too small. Dad picks him up and puts him on my lap.
“You can’t bring the dog to my graduation,” I tell him.
“Nonsense. I’m disabled.”
I sigh. He uses that excuse for everything.
Achilles whines, licking my chin. I reach down under the seat and find a perfectly good tennis ball for him to chew on, but he just looks at it. If he can’t have the pink ball, he doesn’t want anything.
“It’s okay, Achilles, I find it all quite meaningless as well,” I say.
“It is very early for this,” Dad says. “And for the last time, your diploma is not meaningless.”
“It’s a socially constructed representation of a supposed quantity of work—”
“I appreciate that you are doing this thing you mistakenly find meaningless, but I would appreciate it more if you would spend less time theorizing about it. At least out loud.”
* * *
The gym is about a million degrees, and we have to sit in alphabetical order, so I can’t sit with my friends. We cluster together for a total of thirty seconds. We are then organized by monitors, who line us up to check in at three different stations where we collect something horrifyingly close to cattle tags that will help organize hundreds of bodies as we magically transform from “student” to “graduate.” This whole thing is a joke. Even the certificate they hand us onstage is fake. I find myself being shoved around by a tidal flow of people who are all uniquely suffering this same process from individual perspectives.
My cap and gown were expensive to rent, and they are hot and I’m almost sweating through them. X isn’t here. Our graduation gift to each other was not forcing each other to sit through this twice.
I arrive at my seat. It’s claustrophobic being surrounded by this many people in matching gowns. If you look down the aisle at just the right angle, our knees shifting under our gowns look like the rolling ocean.
Some student gets up and talks. Our class president or valedictorian. An adult gets up, starts speaking. The boy next to me is sexting someone in this gym. His phone lights up with a picture of her crotch under one of these gross blue gowns. The girl on my other side is redoing her makeup, using her phone as a mirror, and the vibration on her phone keeps buzzing every two seconds as she gets message after message. I stare up at the rafters. At least they’re not sexting each other, I guess.
Rei is the first of my crew to cross the stage, to much cheering and snaps from the student body. She’s wearing bright red tights under her gown, because all the t
heater kids are doing that. I look at my feet. I’m wearing a plain black dress and plain black shoes. It’s what we’re supposed to wear. But no one gets in trouble for wearing something weird today.
I kind of wish I had worn something special now, though. Of course I couldn’t have worn my Van Gogh sneakers even if I hadn’t burned them. I still haven’t been able to paint. Drawing is fine, but every time I pick up a brush, my brain wants to wander toward him. It hurts more now than when we first broke up. It’s kind of like the way running hurts: a sprint hurts different than a long run. This is my marathon of heartbreak. I just have to keep going, and eventually it will end.
A cheer goes up from the crowd. It’s one of the kids from the football team. We’re not supposed to cheer, but football exists outside the normal rules.
In my lap, I pull up a picture of that painting. I do like it. Maybe instead of fixing my canvas, I could paint myself some new shoes.
There’s a weird theory about Wheatfield with Crows I read once that contrasts the painful eruption of the actual way Van Gogh painted, all energy and turbulence, with what he was conveying in terms of color and subject.
That’s the thing I can never get from pictures: the way he actually painted. When you see those paintings in person, you can see the way the paint stands up, the whole texture of it. I have seen exactly one Van Gogh painting in person, at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Scumbucket took me there for a date. He said it was a “simulacrum” of a real museum, because it was when he was super into using that word even when it didn’t quite fit. I tried to be kind of too cool for it too, but I loved it. I was surprised that I loved the woodblock prints so much, especially the ones by this guy named Charles Bartlett. He’s this English guy using a Japanese-looking technique making prints of exotic places. Scumbucket thought it was cute how into it I got, how I couldn’t stop talking about the prints and kept scribbling down questions I was going to look up at the library. He called me his “little Stendhal,” which was a reference to a writer he likes who had his mind blown when he went to Italy, and now has something called “Stendhal Syndrome” named after him, which is kind of like the “Double Rainbow” guy but for art. But, I don’t know…I got the feeling that Scumbucket didn’t want to talk about the prints because he didn’t know anything about them, so he couldn’t lecture me.
Anyway, I loved the building, and the courtyard with its pretty colored tile. It’s not grand like the Rijksmuseum or the Louvre, but does everything have to be? It was beautiful in a Hawaiian way. And when we finally got to where the one and only Van Gogh painting was, it felt so important. It’s one of his wheat fields, one of those high horizon ones. I wanted to sit there for hours and sketch it. Scumbucket told me the history about it and kept pointing out facts, but in the moment, I didn’t care. I wanted to see. In the end, he went and got a coffee while I took apart each brushstroke with my eyes. It was magic because it was real. I think, maybe, the texture is important for understanding Van Gogh. We think of images as being flat, because we usually see them on a screen or paper. But I’ve read that Van Gogh’s work was a performance, an outpouring. You can only see that in the treads and tracks of his brush. So in a way, it’s the artist that’s lost in a print of a painting. The idea is there, but the physical act of making a painting is lost. A copy is never as good as the original.
Scumbucket would love that idea. It’s the artist that’s lost in a print of a painting is such a meaningless, pretty thought that he’d be so into. I can picture him writing it down in one of his Moleskines.
I want so badly to take out my phone and text that liar. Not anything about us. Random stuff about Van Gogh. I want to see our in-jokes volleying back and forth in alternating columns across my phone again. I want him to send me pictures of the exact page he’s reading with his finger on the page because a quote made him think of me. I would give anything, literally anything, right now to see his name on the screen that—I look down and notice—seems to have navigated to my text messages.
Before my brain can intervene, my fingers pull up his number. I erased his contact, but I know his number by heart. I type in “Hey” and stop. My finger hovers above the send button.
What am I doing?
Erase it, I am telling my hands, but my fingers won’t listen.
Leave it alone, I tell my hand. He is one click away in my sweaty palm. “Hey” is still ready to send beneath my hovering finger. I’m trying so hard to make myself not send that message that I’m hyperventilating.
ERASE IT. NOW.
My whole row stands up.
“Go,” says the sexter.
“Huh?”
He points ahead. The row is filing out to wait closer to the stage. I look at my phone, erase the message, and shove it into my pocket. The monitor is gesturing to me wildly. I’m holding up the line. I jog toward her, holding my cap against my head. My heart is racing. My brain is in a field watching the crows. The world is silent. Before I know it, I’ve got an empty diploma cover in my hand, and I’m back in my seat.
* * *
I smile in my graduation pictures. There are lots of them. But I’m lost in my thoughts.
What is wrong with me? Why did I almost text him?
Van Gogh loved hard, like me. When he was in love with a woman who wouldn’t have anything to do with him, he held his hand over a candle and begged her father to let him speak to her for as long as he could hold his hand over the flame. He needed to see her, even if it was pointless. He needed it so badly it felt like pain. I get that.
With everyone around, I don’t have time to be sad. Later, Uncle Tua comes to my family’s dinner and brings an ice cream cake. Dad smokes fish, which is the fanciest thing he can make outside. It comes out either blackened or burnt, depending on your outlook. After dinner, he cleans up and my neighbors try to teach me and Uncle Tua to play Go, which is really them playing by proxy.
“Not there!” Mr. Oshiro says, snatching my move away from me. He places my stone in the “correct” place. Mr. Kalani and Mr. Bu confer, then point out a move to Tua.
“Are you sure?” Tua asks. They nod in unison. Mr. Oshiro raises his eyebrows. His students are getting more clever. He has to think before we move.
“We must play with kiai, Miho,” Mr. Oshiro says. “Not just in Go, but in life.”
“What is kiai?”
“It is…” He thinks, looking for the right English word. “It is aggressiveness. It’s the wind.”
I put my stone down, and Mr. Oshiro shakes his head. “You let the world move you. Do not let his moves dictate yours.”
“But we’re playing each other. Of course his moves dictate mine,” I say. Mr. Oshiro picks up my stone to change my move, but then puts it back down where I left it.
“If you are so passive, you will always lose in Go,” Mr. Oshiro says. “But that is a lesson that can only be taught by experience.”
I should have listened, because we lose.
Mr. Kalani and Mr. Bu link arms and do a full end-zone dance routine, complete with imaginary football. Mr. Oshiro scolds them, but they dance even harder. Uncle Tua shrugs his shoulders. “I have no idea what just happened,” he says.
“The usual nonsense. Thanks for coming,” I say, and he laughs.
“It’s your graduation. Of course I came. It’s a big accomplishment.”
“Yeah.” I shrug.
“When you graduate from college, I’ll do the catering, though,” he says, eyeing Dad’s fish suspiciously.
“If,” I mutter.
“When,” he says.
The party falls apart pretty early. I sit in a lawn chair watching the sky after everyone has gone.
“Training day tomorrow?” Dad asks, sitting down beside me.
“Every day,” I say. “Now it ramps up, since I only have work and training.”
“And college applications
.”
“Yeah. Eventually.”
Dad is quiet for a while.
“I am so proud of you for graduating,” he says. “It’s a big accomplishment.”
“People keep saying that. I mean, it’s high school. I feel like I showed up and it just happened.”
“What will ever make you feel accomplished?” he asks.
I turn back to the sky. He doesn’t want to hear it.
With a great sigh, he continues: “Did I ever tell you I ran a race once?”
“No.”
“It was a long time ago. Before my leg. Not anything near as ridiculous as what you are doing, or even a marathon. Just a ten-mile race. I wanted to do it with some buddies, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to. I was macho about it. Didn’t want to be embarrassed. So I trained pretty hard.”
“And?”
“And what? I ran the race.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d been hoping it would be a better story than that.
“I shrugged it off at the time. Just a race. But much later, after the dark years”—that’s what he calls the twenty years when he was an awful person, which just so happens to include me being born—“when I was recovering from my leg, I thought of it from time to time. I thought about how hard five miles had seemed when I was starting with one. I thought about how hard ten miles had seemed when I could only run five. And I think it was good, to have done it. Even if I didn’t care at the time.”
“There’s a lesson here.”
“Well, if not a lesson, a pearl of wisdom,” Dad says.
Just then, something flies across the sky. Dad points to it.
“A crow!” he says. He jumps out of his seat, unusually nimble, and walks across the lawn after it.
“No,” I say. “Hawaiian crows are basically extinct. There are like five, and they’re all in a nature preserve, and that nature preserve is not even on this island.”
“Birds fly, don’t they? Maybe that was one of the five.” He squints into the distance. “I think it was a lucky sign. Get your phone out in case it comes back.”
Fierce as the Wind Page 13
