The Queen of Tears (22 page)

-5-

Normally, I hate PE. It’s so stupid. Jumping jacks in the
gym. All of the cool kids, both guys and girls, with their
gray gym T-shirt sleeves rolled up to the tops of their
shoulders. It’s like a rule. You can only do it if you’re cool.
Then picking the teams for basketball. I’m actually not
bad, but do I get picked first or second? Nope. Even
though I’m better than most of them in here, even though
Coach Randy, our PE teacher, keeps trying to get me to
try out for JV next season, I get picked like third or fourth.
The cool guys (the ones who say, “It’s like Cube says,
‘Life ain’t nothing but bitches an’ money.’”) are always
captains, and they pick their friends or the girls (the ones
who read Cosmo and put highlighted streaks in their hair)
they want to get with first and second. It’s so stupid.
Usually, all I want to do is get out of there, go home, and
play Everquest.

But today I don’t give a shit about any of that. Who
cares? I have other things on my mind. Big things.
Besides, I’m tired. Can’t sleep. I have to wake up at five
in the morning and catch the bus all the way from
Waianae. It takes like years to get to school. Kaipo doesn’t
have a computer. But I’m not even sure if I want to play
computer games anymore. It’s like I don’t want to do anything.
I’m tired all the time now. That’s why I didn’t bring
my gym clothes to school on purpose today. That’s why
I’m laying on the bleachers right now with my arm over
my eyes. The last thing I want to do is fuckin’ jumping
jacks right now.

I think I’m in love. I’m talkin’ Disney in love, Little
Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast in love, only with crazy
sex and stuff. But I don’t know what she’s doing or where
she is. That’s all I think about now. I think, any day now,
she’s going to come and pick me up from school. Then
she’ll take me to her place, and we’ll live there. I can drop
out of school and get a job. I don’t even like school anyway.
I could work at Safeway or something. That’d be
unbelievably cool. I think any day now she’s going to
come. I don’t know where to find her, but she knows where
to find me. She’ll come. But it’s been over a week. Why
didn’t she come yet? I mean, I know I’m a kid and all, but
she told me so much stuff. It was like we could tell each
other anything.

She told me about her fucked-up childhood. I felt so
bad for her. All I did was ask about the scar on the lower
part of her stomach and she told me. She told me how she
got hit by a car running away from her dad, who was
raping her for like years. She told me how when she
woke up in the hospital the doctors told her that she had
been four months pregnant, but she wasn’t anymore and
that she probably wouldn’t be again. She told me how
she moved in with her cousin after that and never saw
her dad again. She told me how Kaipo had to go to the
boys’ home because when he was finally big enough to
kick their father’s ass, it was the first thing he did. Broke
their dad’s nose, both cheekbones, and his own hands on
his father’s face. She told me that the problem with Kaipo
was that when he first started hitting their dad, it was
like he couldn’t stop. He had to hit everybody. She told
me how she would visit him every weekend. She told me
how her dad finally died of a heart attack, and it was like
the happiest day of her life. She told me that her mother’s
still alive, apparently, but she hasn’t seen her in
years. She said even though her mother lived in the same
house for years, the same one Kaipo lives at now, and
she still lives there to this day, the last time she remembered
seeing her mother was when she was like twelve
years old. I’ve been there for a week now, and I still
haven’t seen her.

She told me she used to fuck a lot of guys in high
school, and at the same time she was taking Kaipo’s liver
pills because she wanted to be bigger than all of them.
She told me how Kaipo graduated from the boys’ home to
prison, and how she still visited him on weekends. She
told me that the stuff she was telling me was stuff she
never told anyone before.

But I don’t know what’s going on. I’m stuck out in
Waianae with Mom, Aunty Darian, and Kaipo. I dig
Kaipo. I mean Crystal thinks he’s the coolest, so I dig him.
And she’s right. He’s cool. I wanted to ask him if he’d
heard from Crystal, but I chickened out. He doesn’t really
work, so he takes me to places after he picks me up from
school. He even bought a dog like the day after we moved
to Waianae. It’s a half-pit bull, half-Akita puppy. It had
like a lot of fleas. When Mom and Darian started complaining
about the fleas, Kaipo laughed and started walking
around the living room while dragging his right foot
behind. He looked weird, like he was hurt, but then he
showed me how all of the fleas jumped on his leg.
“Trolling fo’ fleas,” he said. That afternoon me and him
trolled for fleas. We caught like twenty of them.

Last Saturday, he took me surfing. But it wasn’t like
surfing with Dad. When I’m out there with Dad, it’s like
he wants to turn me into a pro or something. But Kaipo
doesn’t even say anything. We just surf. That’s when I
almost asked him about Crystal.

But he’s not always quiet. He talks a lot when we
drive. But he’s not like the others. It’s not like I’m getting
the full interrogation with him. “How’s school?”
Actually, that’s the only question they seem to ask, but
they ask it constantly, like when I say, “O.K.,” they don’t
believe me. But Kaipo doesn’t even ask me anything. He
just points out mountains, beaches, and roads that I’ve
seen a thousand times before, and tells me what went on
there like hundreds of years ago. His favorite is the Pali
Lookout. We pass it every day to pick up Mom and Aunty
Darian, and he always points it out. It’s either the
Kamehameha story, where the king pitched a bunch of
Hawaiians off the cliff like two hundred years ago, or the
whiffle ball story, where Hawaiians used to jump off on
windy days, and get gently blown back up. They did it for
fun, those crazy bastards. We stop up there sometimes.
Kaipo jumps on the wall, wets his finger, and tests the
wind. Then he shakes his head. “Not windy enough,” he
says. There would have to be like a hurricane to blow him
back up. Me, on the other hand, as small as I am, it might
work. I stood on the wall a couple of times with him. It
scared me, but I felt that sinking feeling, like I wouldn’t
just drop, but I’d float. It was neat looking down and feeling
the wind fill my T-shirt like a balloon. It was a good
scared feeling. It was weird thinking that if I just took one
leap something would happen, and it would happen fast.
Sometimes things don’t happen fast enough, and it hurts.
I guess that’s why people who know people who died are
all thankful if he or she “went quickly.” I guess velocity
is kind of neat. Suddenly, I got nervous, and Kaipo
must’ve seen it because he laughed. Then he asked me
the first question I remember him ever asking me. “What
kind Hawaiian you?” It was a good question. I still don’t
know.

Mom doesn’t even talk about her or Dad. Nobody
does. After Kaipo picks me up, and we go cruise and
stuff, and we have to pick up Mom and Aunty Darian
from the restaurant in Kailua, it’s like the quietest ride in
the car. And Waianae is far. They sit in the back and talk
about work and Grandma. Apparently, Grandma isn’t
showing up for work, so the dumb fuck works by himself
in the mornings. Good for him. But it’s only been a week.
I think everyone is worried about Grandma. I’m kinda
worried, too. She’s like old. What if something happened
to her?

But they don’t talk about that, either. They talk about
how maybe they should give up the restaurant. How
there’s too much work for just three people. How any day
now, the dumb ass isn’t going to show up and open. How,
even though they’re shocked that he’s made it a week, that
it can’t last long. They’re probably right. So it’s like the
car is already crowded with the four of us, but there’s like
all of these other people in there sitting with us, too. And
for me the ones that they don’t talk about take up the most
space. It’s like a clown car and Crystal and Dad are wearing
the biggest clown shoes.

A couple of times I daydreamed that I told them in the
car how much I love Crystal. They all started laughing.
Even when I try to force to dream them up as being like
sympathetic to my deal, I just can’t imagine it. I’m just a
dumb kid. I don’t even know what love is. Blah, blah, blah.
Like they do.

When is the bell going to ring? There they are, playing
basketball. Back and forth, back and forth. Put the
ball into the basket, then run the other way. I remember
during the first week of the basketball part of the class,
Coach Randy tried to teach us the weave. It’s so stupid.
The weave. I never saw anyone do the weave in a basketball
game on TV before. It like looks pretty and all, but
nobody ever does it in game situations.

It’s like sex in the movies. The first time me and
Crystal were about to do it, I was trying to make all
smooth, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, which was a
pretty shitty movie with great special effects. But then I
thought, the first time me and Crystal were about to do it,
that I was glad I sat through the like forty hours of the
movie, because at least I had an idea now how to kiss. Boy,
was I wrong. I didn’t see any tongue action in that movie,
but Crystal was giving me all kind of tongue action. So
Titanic ended up being a complete waste of time.

But me downloading porn was not as much of a
waste. That’s kind of how sex is. I didn’t feel like this kind
of corny, tingling love thing when we were doing it. That
came after. When we were doing it, I just thought it was
the coolest thing in the world. And when she started making
noises, boy, that was it. I guess I don’t know how it is
for other people, but for me it was like sex was sex, and
all of the other stuff was kind of separate. Or maybe it was
that all of that stuff is like after-sex stuff. The post-game
show. But that’s not right. The post-game is shitty compared
to the game. The other stuff wasn’t shitty. Maybe it’s
like science. Maybe sex is the catalyst.

God, I miss her. I can’t wait for the bell to ring. Last
period. I’m going to force myself to get up and go to the
parking lot, and I hope she comes. I don’t think she will,
though. How could she? Everyone hates her except me.
Mom and Grandma probably want to kill her. Of course
the dumb ass does. But I don’t know if he knows what happened
between me and Crystal. Dad’s probably pissed.
I’m supposed to stay with him this weekend, so I guess I’ll
feel that out. It’s weird, I don’t really miss him, but I think
I’d probably miss Mom, even though she pisses me off
more than he does. But with all of this, there’s no way I’m
ever going to see Crystal again. Besides, I’m just a kid.
Besides, even if I got a job at Safeway, what kind of chick
would want a guy who works at Safeway? Besides, I don’t
think she loves me. It’s funny, all that time, after I heard
about how there’s six billion people in the world and
thought about that plus how we’re on a planet, in a solar
system, in a galaxy, in a universe, I was kind of sad that I
was just one of them. Now I want to take it back. I want to
just be a number again. I want to lie in bed and sink into
my mattress. Being like a person is too hard.

Well, all of them, Mom, Aunty Darian, Kaipo,
Grandma, Dad, and the dumb ass, they’ll all start talking
about her again. They’ll start talking all right. Because if
she doesn’t show up today after school, I’m going to tell
them that Crystal is pregnant, and she’s keeping the baby.
Me, the kid, is going to be a father. And pretty soon it’s
going to be time to see what kind of Hawaiian I really am.
Will I float or sink like a stone?