by Hester Young
“Wow,” I say. “So the age difference between you and Sage, does that get a little . . . weird? Her kid’s practically your age.”
“Weird? Nah.” Brayden peels a strip of dead skin from his sunburned nose. “Kai’s cool. We hang out. I take care of him and his friends, hook them up at parties. His crew’s pretty laid-back. They go to that weird private school in town, the Free Thinkers or whatever.”
“You said you knew that girl who went missing.” Rae leans against the van door. “Lise Nakagawa. I heard she went to that school, too.”
“Yeah, we knew her.” Brayden sighs. “She was one of Kai’s friends. Nice girl.”
“Mo’ nice den her sister,” Frankie says.
“Aw, come on,” Brayden objects. “Jocelyn isn’t that bad.”
“Brah, yeah she is. She so safe, even Kai no can stand her.”
“I met Jocelyn the other day,” I say. “You guys aren’t fans?”
Brayden slows down the van, allowing another car to pass us. “See now, that’s hard. I don’t want to tear somebody down. Jocelyn and I, we just exist in, like, a different space. She looks to control the world, and I look to experience it.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Okay, so . . .” Brayden releases a breath. “The Jocelyn I see, she’s never really present in herself. All she ever talks about is her grades and how she wants to go to Stanford. She’s living for the future. But the thing with the future is, it’s always ahead of you. You never get there.”
Rae slumps back in her seat. “Sometimes you get there,” she says glumly. “You get there, and it’s not all that. You run out of things to chase, and when you finally stop to look around, you realize that chemical engineering degree has landed you in sales, kissing up to a bunch of assholes in suits who will use your products to further pollute the planet.”
“Yeah, exactly.” Brayden casts her a sympathetic glance. “The future is hard on dreams, for sure. I tell Kai, you can spend your time chasing dreams or you can go ahead and live them. And I think he gets it. But Jocelyn? She’s just always looking for another carrot to go running after.” He tilts his head toward the half-open window, lets the breeze play with his hair. “Contentment exists only in the present, that’s what the Buddhists say.”
I have spent too much time with these guys, or else the weed is kicking in, because Brayden is actually starting to make sense.
“You hear dis guy?” Frankie chuckles. “He one philosopher. Me, I dunno what da Buddha say, but I know da world ain’t fair. Da Jocelyns, dey step on other people, dey go to Stanford, make a billion dollars, buy up half our island. But da Lises, da cool girls . . . life shits ’em out.”
“Huh.” I slide down in my seat. “You think Lise’s dead?”
“Ma-ke,” Frankie says with a nod. “Elijah Yoon wen kill her. Everybody knows it, and nobody gonna do shit.”
“You’re wrong, brah.” Brayden shakes his head, and his strawberry-blond locks tumble about his shoulders, slower than I expect, like a shampoo commercial. “We met Elijah a bunch of times, and he isn’t dangerous. He used to run ahead to open doors for all the girls, remember? He wasn’t a bad dude, just . . . quiet.”
Frankie shrugs. “If such a good kid, where Lise stay?”
“Maybe she just ran off,” Brayden suggests. “Got tired of her folks telling her who to be. They were always on her case about the future. Like, her dad got in this whole epic battle with Marvel Andrada about it.”
“With Marvel? Really?” Rae scrunches her nose. “That’s so weird. I just had a reading with her yesterday. I swear, everyone in Kalo Valley is connected.”
“True dat,” Frankie says. “Everybody know everybody and dey business. Especially Marvel. She been around foreva.”
“She and Lise were kind of pals,” Brayden explains. “They had this whole idea to start a restaurant in town, right? Ono Place. So Marvel leases a building, they do all this work together to get it going—even Elijah gets in on it. Then one day Lise goes home, says she wants to work at the restaurant. Like, full time, instead of going to college in a couple years. Her dad totally lost his shit. Then the mom, that professor lady, made some complaint with the health inspectors so Marvel couldn’t get her permits.”
“Really?” I find myself giggling. Sue left out that little nugget yesterday.
Brayden nods. “That mom plays dirty.”
I press a hand to the window, examine the fingerprints my greasy digits leave behind on the glass. My head feels strange. Light and slow and calm. The landscape is changing around us, no longer black rock, but fields of golden grass swaying in the wind, each blade sharp against a startling blue sky. It feels like Montana or Nebraska or one of the Dakotas. Or at least what I imagine them to be.
“So what was Lise like?” I ask. “Her dad seems to think she was this bad girl.”
“Bad? No. Kinda moody.” Frankie climbs halfway into the backseat and snatches the bag of dried mango. “She’s all kine fun and den, alla sudden, she pissed off. But dat’s just girls, huh?”
“Did the police call you guys in when she went missing?” Rae asks. “Did you have to make a statement?”
“They had me in one time,” Brayden says. “I told them I didn’t really know her. Don’t need the po-po breathing down my neck, that’s for sure.”
I yawn. “They didn’t give you any trouble?”
“Nah. They were going hard for Elijah, and Lise never really advertised to her folks who she was hanging with. She just snuck out all the time.” Brayden holds out his hand to Frankie and receives a leathery strip of mango. “Sage is really cool about letting Kai’s friends kick it at our place when it’s late.” He takes a bite of mango, and his chewing noises reverberate throughout the van as he continues to speak with his mouth open. “Lise used to come around a lot. Not so much once she started dating Elijah, though. Then they hung out over his way, with Kai and Jocelyn. Like a little couples’ retreat or something.”
“On Wakea Ranch?” The memory of those lights in the night comes drifting back. “Did Naomi know about that?”
Brayden makes a face. “No way. You’ve seen that place. They’ve got a ton of land. Easy for someone to hide if they don’t want to be found.”
“Maybe Lise doesn’t want to be found,” I murmur. “Maybe she is in hiding.”
“She could be hiding in plain sight.” Rae looks up. “Lise’s an identical twin, right? Could anyone tell her and Jocelyn apart?”
Brayden seems a little thrown by the question, as if he forgot that the Nakagawa girls came from the same genetic material. “Okay, so Lise and Jocelyn looked the same. Their voices were the same. But . . . I don’t know. They were really different.”
“Different style, different vibe,” Frankie explains. “You not going mix dose two.”
Rae doesn’t back down. “But what if they wanted you to? What if they switched?”
Frankie looks up from his half-eaten strip of mango. “You think Lise and Jocelyn wen pull a twin swap? Dat’s some conspiracy-level shit.”
“Okay,” Rae begins, “so I’ll admit I read a little too much Sweet Valley High when I was a kid. But maybe, just maybe, Lise got tired of being the bad girl. Maybe Jocelyn wanted to live a little. Maybe they switched. Jocelyn ran away, Lise took her place, and no one’s dead, they’re both just . . . taking a break. Living a different life for a little while until they’re ready to go back.”
I expect the boys to make fun of her theory or at least ask what Sweet Valley High is, but Brayden’s expression in the rearview mirror is surprisingly tender. “That’s nice,” he says softly, the way one might respond to a child who has just blown out their birthday candles and wished for peace on earth. “That’s really nice.”
And it is nice. So much nicer than my visions, all the images I’d happily forget. I set aside my own nagging skepticism, let it
drift away like a cloud. Breathe in Brayden’s calm, which feels warm and all-encompassing, like a blanket in winter.
Love and beauty, I tell myself. Love and beauty.
fifteen
With no paved roads, the green-sand beach of Papakōlea is accessible only with a two-and-a-half-mile hike through highly eroded pasturelands. I’m game to walk or hitch a ride with the enterprising locals who chauffeur visitors in their truck for a fee, but Brayden, bafflingly confident in his old van, insists on driving us himself.
Any other day, I would nix this idea. The chances of our tires getting stuck are much too great. In my current state, however, the prospect of stranding a vehicle that isn’t even mine does not seem particularly worrying. I feel floaty and detached, hovering between the real and the possible. Gazing at the ceiling of the van, I let my body absorb the bumps.
“How are you doing?” Rae studies me. “You feel okay?”
“I’m good.” The words sound strange when they come out. “Really. I feel like . . . everything’s going to be okay.”
Rae bursts out laughing. “You’re high,” she says. “My God, I never thought I’d see the day.” She roots through her backpack. “I’m sorry, but I gotta get a picture.”
I offer her a hazy look as she snaps a shot on her phone. I don’t like the sound it makes. I don’t like the feeling of her watching me on her screen. The thought of my own missing phone moves over me like a shadow, harshing my mellow.
Eventually, Brayden stops driving, and we all file out of the van. He leads us on a winding path down steep, layered rock—a volcanic formation, probably, but I’m too focused on the ground, the pebbles shifting beneath my feet, to ask. Below us, the ocean feeds into a small bay. Dark rocks of hardened lava dot the cliffs, and streaks of a greenish mineral gather at the base to form a beach.
“Boogers,” I murmur when I see the color. If the sands of Papakōlea Beach are not the shade of green I pictured, they are still unlike any shores I’ve seen before. I scoop up some sand, rub it between my fingertips, examine its alien color.
“That’s olivine,” Brayden says. “There’s only a couple green-sand beaches in the whole world, and you’re on one of them. This is the cinder cone of an old volcano.” He gestures to the peculiar half circle of rock that encloses the little beach and bay. The waves are unexpectedly powerful.
“Can we swim?” Rae asks.
“I wouldn’t go out deep,” Brayden says. His hair has taken flight in the wind and it makes my own scalp tingle. “That current will sweep you out and you’ll never make it back. We can splash around the shore, though.”
The idea of swimming, coordinating my limbs in an organized fashion, seems quite farfetched at this moment. I sink into the sand at the water’s edge. The wet green silt slurps at my toes. I snatch my feet back, alarmed, and shield my eyes from the blowing sand. Why did Frankie and Brayden bring us here? A looming volcanic cinder cone and an ocean with a deadly riptide—this isn’t where you bring new friends. And there’s no one else on the beach today. Did they know it would be just us? Were they planning for this? I hug my knees, the largeness of the land and sea suddenly overwhelming.
In the shallows, Rae and Brayden dart around with a Frisbee. She looks inexplicably happy chasing after it, although the waves keep knocking her over. I anxiously wait for the water to drag her out to sea, yet she rises, again and again, Frisbee in hand, unconcerned by the sand clinging to her skin.
“You doing okay?” she calls to me, but I can’t tell her no, not with Frankie and Brayden listening. I nod.
Behind me, Frankie lies on his belly reading a slim volume of Pablo Neruda poems. While Rae and Brayden frolic like dogs across the beach, he turns pages, sometimes lingering on one, his lips moving.
“Don’t read that,” I beg Frankie. “You don’t need poetry. This is a poem. The sand is a poem. My toes are a poem.”
“You’re baked,” he says without looking up.
The ocean creeps up the shore beneath my legs, tickling my bare skin with its foam. Too cold. We are in Hawaiʻi. Why is it so cold?
I gesture to the stark white page of Frankie’s book. “Do you really like Pablo Neruda? Or you just want to look smart?”
Frankie smiles and flips me the bird.
“Weird,” I say. “Islands are weird.” I kick at the tide. “There’s water all around us. Everywhere you go, water. Like it doesn’t want you to get away.”
“I like da water.”
“Water is dangerous,” I say. “Brayden said the water is dangerous.”
“Not as dangerous as people.”
My eyes fall on the scar that runs down Frankie’s leg. It’s ugly, the lumpy pink tissue. I don’t want to hear about the dangerous people Frankie has known. I’ve known too many myself. For all I know, he’s one of them.
“She could already be dead,” I whisper.
The pages of his book ruffle in the breeze. “Dead? Who?”
“Everyone. Everyone who’s not alive is dead. And if you’re not dead now, you will be later.” The weight of that startles me. “I’ll be like her. I’ll be like Lise.”
Frankie closes his book, resigning himself to social interaction. “You don’t even know dat girl. Why you thinking about her so much?”
“I have these dreams about her. I think I’m supposed to help her. I think it’s part of the plan, you know? On a cosmic level or whatever. It’s why I’m here.”
He smirks. “Whoa, lady. You wen eat dat whole cookie or what?”
I dig my fingers into the olive sand. “You shouldn’t die if you’re sixteen. You should do lots of other things first. Lise should’ve done the other things. Live first, die later.”
“Everybody gotta die one time or another,” Frankie says, and suddenly his own losses hover in the space between us. I can feel them, the people he’s known, now gone. I study his pockmarked face, his greasy hair, the line of tattoos going down his skinny arm. He’s just a kid, really. A kid hauling around too many shadows. Somebody should’ve protected him from whatever bad things he has seen, from whatever sliced up his leg like that. Somebody should’ve protected Lise, too. Not just Victor and Sue. Everybody.
I want to tell him all I know of death. My father. My son. The mother and the sister I lost before I even knew them. And the children, all the children that I see, the ones who speak to me in dreams. I am on intimate terms with death, but I can’t explain that to Frankie. Maybe he can feel it, though, feel the losses I carry the way I feel his.
“It isn’t fair,” I say, stirring the sand with my index finger. “Not for Lise, or her family. She was going to have . . . a life.”
“What kinda life she gonna have here?” Frankie scoffs. “She just stuck on dis island wit da rest of us.”
“Not stuck. This is paradise.”
“Oh yeah, some kinda paradise.” Frankie laughs, but without bitterness. “Unless you some rich asshole from da mainland, you poor as shit. Nobody Puna side got money, ’cause how you gonna get ’em? We got no jobs on dis island. State, tourists, and Walmart, dat’s da big employahs. Bright fuckin’ future, huh? And da local school’s crap. You like your kid get ahead, you gotta pay for dese private schools, but how you gonna pay when you poor as shit?”
“Sage sends Kai to private school,” I say. “Is she rich?”
“You got any clue da crap Sage gotta sell so she can afford dat school? Not just weed, huh. And Kai, you think he grateful?” Frankie shakes his head. “Get what you pay fo’, I guess. Send your kid to a school wit little bitches, bumbye your kid going turn to a little bitch.”
Like Jocelyn, I think, brushing sand from my lashes. Like me, maybe, too. I didn’t attend a private high school, but at eighteen, I went to Columbia. Surrounded by students who seemed wealthy and urbane, I learned to dress like them, talk like them, be one of them. I became a little bitch, New York style.
“Nah.” Frankie lies back on the beach, elbows splayed above his head. “Not Lise. Her parents try fo’ polish her up, but she nevah bought in. Her sister now, she jump through every hoop like one circus dog. But not Lise. She da real deal.” He closes his eyes, either to shut down our conversation or to take a nap.
Something snakes through the back of my mind, an unformed idea I can’t lay my hands on. What if Rae is right? Not about the twins switching identities—that would last about ten minutes before someone figured it out—but about Lise wanting to escape her life. Perhaps something was happening to her, something she wanted to get away from. She could’ve gone into hiding. Or attempted to, and run into trouble along the way. True, Lise didn’t bring any of her belongings, but maybe the situation was so desperate she was willing to leave everything behind. Maybe she wanted people to believe her dead.
But why? Who was the guy watching her in the night? What did he do to her?
Unable to hold the thought, I stare at my feet for a while instead. The longer I look, the stranger my toes appear, like deformed fingers incorrectly arranged. I wish the sky were not so big. I wish the sea were not so loud.
“Frankie?”
“Unh?” His grunt is almost lost to the crashing surf.
“You ever see anyone following Lise or Jocelyn around? Like, a weird guy with a creepy crush?”
His head rolls slightly in my direction. “Nah.”
“Maybe he was normal on the outside,” I say, “but inside, he had these secret pervy thoughts. Did you ever see a guy like that hanging around?”
“‘Secret pervy thoughts’?” Frankie snickers as he turns away from me, grains of green sand stuck to one cheek. “Dat’s every dude, lady. Every. Single. One.”
* * *
• • •
IN TIME, a time I can no longer measure, the wind and waves and weed pull me under. I dream of Pele and her sister the ocean goddess. The dream is as flat as Sue’s painting, lacking the sensory detail of my visions, but the images are vivid. Pele stands upon a gushing volcano, molten hair flowing to the sea. Her sister springs from the waves, frothy and graceful, hands outstretched. Then the lava pours. The sea begins to churn. Suddenly I realize that these aren’t goddesses at all, but Jocelyn and Lise. Smoke billows from one girl’s head. Her hands glow yellow and melt away; her body is consumed by flames. Below her, the other sister sinks slowly into the sea, silent, drowning.
