SIXTY-FIVE SIXTY-FIVE It’s a little weird, though not totally unexpected, that Jake ignores me when school starts a week later. Ignore, though, that isn’t the right word, since I can feel a spot on my back heating up like there’s a laser aimed at it from where he stands at the edge of the crowd gathered on the front lawn of Kadena High School, staring at me. Christy and the rest of the Smokinawans are with him.
“What a man-whore,” Jacey hisses into my ear.
“Naw, it’s not like that,” I tell her.
“Like what?” Kirby, his arm draped over Jacey’s shoulder, asks.
“Nothing.”
“Spit it out, Cabooskie. You want me to put the hurt on Furusato for you? Because I will. Someone disrespects my girls, I’ma cut a bitch. You know I will.”
“Thanks, Kirbs.” Even though he’s kidding, Kirby does actually have a nice protective streak that Jacey brings out. I can even see the possibility that he’ll grow up into a decent man.
An honor guard of Rotzees in khaki uniforms with white webbed belts crossing their chests marches out. The instant the first notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” play over the school’s loudspeaker system, we all shut up, freeze, slap our right hands over our hearts, and watch our country’s flag being raised. Right beside it, on a flagpole precisely the same height, the crimson bull’s-eye of Japan’s rising sun ascends. DaQuane and Wynn, red eyed and reeking of pot, slip in next to us and sing out, loud and proud.
Instead of singing, I look away from both flags, stare at the clouds, white and high as Marie Antoinette’s wig, and think about my mom. It’s been different since she came back. Actually, things were exactly the same as before when I met her at the flight line. She was surprised to see me for about two seconds, then asked if I was in trouble with SF, needed to go into rehab, or was pregnant. No, nothing really changed until the funeral. Until I caught the last glimpse I would ever have of those cut-up squares of baby blanket that had stroked Codie’s skin going into the tomb forever. That’s when I lost it. When I surrendered. When, amazingly, my mom stepped up to catch me as I fell and whispered the most astonishing thing to me: “Your sister did not die outside the perimeter. She was inside the wire. She died instantly. Being a good soldier. Your sister was a good soldier, Luz.”
Because I understood then that the same question that had haunted me had also tortured her, and that she’d volunteered to go to the Sandbox so she could get answers for both of us, I said, “So are you, Mom. You’re a good soldier.” That’s when I laid my grudge against her down.
So now we’re careful around each other. And when she’s not, when she’s a jerk, which she and I will both always be entirely capable of being, I think about my mom as a baby, a newborn whose skin color made her father feel like the butt of a false friend’s joke. Baby Gena must have been just one color betrayal too many for Eugene Overholt, since she came along about the time that he was figuring out that his beloved air force had also done him wrong. That the supposedly harmless rainbow herbicides—agents Purple, Pink, and Orange—were killing him deader than any Charlie in the Mekong Delta could have.
And my sweet little grandmother? Anmā? I think a lot about her too. An ex–Koza bar girl, steeped in the belief that her entire purpose in life was to bear away a family’s shame in silence, what chance did she ever have to be the mother her daughter needed? I remember Anmā doing the best she could, dancing in secret with me and Codie, finding rare solace in the feel, the smell of her granddaughters’ dark curls, the ones that reminded her of being crazy in love with another man who wasn’t worthy of her, and my heart aches thinking of the damaged daughter these two damaged humans raised. A daughter who only found her true home in the military. Who was so genuinely devoted to the U.S. Air Force that she passed it on to her own daughter, believing, truly believing, that it was the most treasured legacy she had.
Once I accept that all of them, even my screwed-up mom, were just trying to do the best they knew how, I have no choice but to do the same. I even use military time now, just because it makes my mom happy. Makes her feel like the world is under control and has its shit wrapped up tight, the way it’s supposed to be. Which, I guess, is what we all want.
O’er the lah-hand of the WEED and the HOMO. Of. The. Buh-rave.
Kirby, DaQuane, and Wynn yell out their version of the last line of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The instant the anthem ends, the “on” switch is flipped, and all us military kids are reanimated again. At precisely 0815 hours, the bell rings and the doors open. Another first day at a new school starts, and Jacey and I surge up the steps together. We consulted on our first-day outfits. Even went to the BX together to see whether there was anything not terminally lame. There wasn’t. So she’s wearing the pink top I loaned her that looks amazing with her coloring, and I’ve got on a great pair of skinny jeans that shrank and she can’t wear anymore. Codie and I used to do the same thing, trade back and forth. I thought it was only a sister thing. Turns out it’s not.
Our fellow brats eddy around us, the boisterous ones, the shy ones. The ones who’ve been on the Rock for a while and know the lay of the land, the ones who just PCS’d in. The Post Princesses. The Gung Hos. The strangers who’ll sit beside us in class and play with us on teams. The kids who’ll become our best friends or our archnemeses. The ones with whom we’ll keep in touch for a few years, then not recall who stopped writing. The ones who won’t remember sitting next to us in geometry. The ones who’ll tell us at the reunion in twenty years that they had the biggest crush on us. The ones who will look us up after their children are grown and they’ve retired and have time to wonder what it would have been like to have grown up with the same friends. The ones who will want to connect with their childhoods, who they once were, and will settle for sharing the name of a base, the name of a teacher we both had, the name of a maid who might have worked for both our families. It won’t even matter all that much that we were on that base, had that teacher, that maid, at different times and never really knew each other. It’s a connection. It’s a true thing from our childhoods, and we shared it.
I’ll meet new people this year, my last at a dependent school, and the first thing we’ll ask one another is, “Where have you been stationed?” If our bases overlap we’ll talk about how great the French fries were at that one snack bar by the pool or how there was that bakery right next to the base and the smell of baking bread would drive us crazy. I’ll send them all Christmas cards. I’ll keep in touch. I won’t be the one who stops answering, because it turns out that friends are like the Velveteen Rabbit: They’re all Quasis if you don’t believe in them enough to make them real.
At the top of the stairs, me and my brat brothers and sisters funnel into the crowded hall and start looking for our first classes. I have calculus on the second floor. As I head for the stairs, I catch Jake scanning the crowd. When his gaze falls on me, the one he was searching for, he stops looking around, and tugs down the collar of his shirt enough to show me that he’s wearing Codie’s opal necklace. It makes me happy that he recovered it from the shrine. He touches the opal, but doesn’t give me a sexy smile or mouth the word “pretty” or do any of those flirty, playa things. He just closes his shirt and hides the gem’s pale radiance next to his heart.
I don’t know exactly what will happen with Jake and me. Maybe nothing will. Whatever does or doesn’t happen, though, I’m certain that the most important thing already has. I’m certain that Jake Furusato will never forget me.