Over the next few hours I voluntarily throw my body down every available slippery surface at the Hilton Waikoloa. I gave Mom a hard time about always assuming that I’m on duty for childcare, but I am grateful to be hanging out with Abby and not alone to stew in the problems of my messed-up life. I have to spend almost every minute trying to keep my little sister’s head above the water.
This, too, feels like a metaphor somehow.
Sometime after lunch Abby gets tired enough to sit down for a few minutes. I reapply our sunscreen and then lean back in one of those white plastic lounge chairs that line the pools and close my eyes, feeling the sun soak into me.
My mind starts to wander back to the situation with Mom, so I deliberately choose to think about Nick instead.
Nick. The way he equates having sex with having a cup of tea. So funny.
And even funnier, our sex plan. Just the words sex plan cheer me up substantially, not because sex is such a cheerful subject, but because the idea sounds too ridiculous to be true. Nick Kelly and Ada Bloom—arguably the two least-cool individuals on the entire Big Island—are going to have sexual intercourse. It’s glorious, in a silly yet appealing way. It’ll be a good, distracting adventure.
Speaking of adventures. “How about we try paddleboarding?” I ask Abby. Paddleboarding with Abby is not exactly what I’ve been picturing, but at this point I’ll take what I can get.
She doesn’t answer.
I open my eyes. She’s sprawled on her stomach over the next lounge chair, using the end of one curly wet braid to drip patterns on the concrete.
“Abby?”
“No, thanks,” she says lightly. “I need some quiet time now. Maybe even a nap.”
My sister is a strange five-year-old.
“But it will be so peaceful and quiet when we go paddleboarding. Just picture it, Abs, you and me on a paddleboard in the middle of the lagoon, water lapping at our feet, the sun on our faces, the wind in our hair.”
“We could tip over,” Abby says. “I could drown.”
“You’ll wear a life jacket. Plus, you’re the best swimmer I’ve ever seen. You’re like a baby shark.” I try a few lines of the song, but she doesn’t go for it.
She sits up and crosses her arms. “I can swim in a pool, yes. But the lagoon is like the ocean. Dark and deep, with monsters under there.”
“What monsters?”
“Giant squid,” she informs me gravely.
“The lagoon is not the ocean,” I argue. “Water is water, Abby. We’ll be fine. There are no monsters, I promise. I’ll be right there with you.”
“No, thanks.”
“If you were going to drown, you would have done it already,” I say. “And then . . . I would go paddleboarding.”
Her eyes widen. “I can’t believe you just said that! I’m going to tell Mom.”
“You go right ahead.”
She jumps up. “Look!” She points to where, not too far away, a couple has just gotten out of one of those white rope hammocks. “Let’s sit in there, and you can read me my Amelia Bedelia.” She reaches into our bag and pulls the book out proudly. “I packed it. I thought, you never know when you might need Amelia.”
“Oh, good.” I am clearly never going to go paddleboarding. I am never going to have that spiritual experience Pop talked about, whenever he talked about Hawaii.
I inspect Abby’s book. It’s called Amelia Bedelia Means Business. The letters of the title all look hand drawn, with Amelia Bedelia large and centered on the orange cover, and Means Business much smaller to one side. Abby traces her fingers over the big A.
“Amelia’s initials are A.B.,” she points out. “Just like mine.”
“And mine,” I say. Abby’s name is Abigail Bloom-Carter. A.B.C. I always thought that was neat.
“And Afton’s!” Abby exclaims. It obviously just now occurred to her that we all have names that start with the letter A.
“And Mom,” I add.
Afton and I have conflicting theories about why Mom did this to us. Mine is that Mom likes things orderly—she likes our family to match, so we are her straight A’s: Aster, Afton, Ada, Abby.
Afton’s idea is that every time Mom got pregnant, Ruthie told Mom to go on a baby-naming website and make a list of the names she liked, but Mom never made it past the landing page, which was the letter A, before she got called away for a patient or an emergency surgery.
Afton is probably right.
Abby’s face is all lit up now. “Holy smokes!” she yells, which is hilarious because it makes her sound just like Pop. “We all have A’s!”
“Yes, we do.”
“What’s Pop’s first name?”
“Ryan,” I say. “A long time ago Pop told me his name means ‘little king.’ Which I guess would make you a princess.”
But her face falls. “Pop’s different from us. He’s not a A.”
“That’s a good thing,” I say. “It would be boring if we were all the same.”
My father’s name is Aaron, I realize with an inward cringe.
Dear god. We can’t lose Pop.
My phone starts to ring. Abby grabs it out of my bag and holds it up. Yep. Pop. As if he could hear us talking about him from two thousand miles away. Calling to video chat.
Abby presses accept before I can decide whether talking to him right now is doable.
“Poppy!” Ada beams.
“Hi, sweeties!” He’s smiling. He has a particular smile he uses almost exclusively for Abby, so big and wide it shows his back molars. I love that smile. I even tried to draw it once, but the teeth turned out kind of scary. I’m not good with teeth.
“We went swimming!” Abby cries.
“I can see that, Abby-cakes! And now you’re all wet!”
“I’m getting drier, though. We went down all the slides, but I need a quiet time now so I’m going to go in the hammock, and Ada’s going to read me Amelia Bedelia.” Without waiting a second longer, she runs to the hammock and flings herself in. I can hear Pop’s chuckles as the white rope envelops her. I gather up our bag and sunscreen and stuff and jog after her. It takes me a few tries to figure out how to get into the hammock without tipping us over. Finally I just kind of back my butt in and swing myself down.
Abby shifts the phone so Pop can see both of us.
My eyes prickle, seeing his face. This is a bad idea. I’ve never kept a secret like this from Pop before. I’ve never felt like I had to.
He’s at work. He’s wearing his scrubs and directly behind him there’s a shelf full of medical supplies.
“Are you hiding in the supply closet?” I ask.
“It’s been one of those days.” He gives me a look that means, I’ll tell you later. Pop loves to try to gross me out with stories of bizarre or improbable things that happen in the ER. But not in front of Abby, who screams like someone is murdering her whenever she sees or hears anything blood-related. “How’s the trip going?” he asks.
“Great!” Abby says. “We saw dolphins, and we saw a volcano, and we rode a big bus, and we ate a lot of pineapple and pigs.”
Abby often insists on calling food by the source. She calls pork pigs, and bacon flat pigs, and beef cows, and so on. She doesn’t mind eating meat, but she wants to know where it came from.
“Awesome!” Pop says. “What about you, Ada-bean? What’s happening with you?”
I force my face into a casual expression. “Dolphins, volcanoes, pigs. That’s a fairly accurate description of our trip so far.” I poke Abby in the side. I have an idea. “Tell her we should go paddleboarding on the lagoon,” I say to Pop.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Are you sure she’s big enough for that? She’s only five.”
“It will be fine!” I rant. “She’s a great swimmer! She’ll wear a life jacket! I’ll do all the work!” I sigh. “Never mind.”
Pop is looking at me intently. Even through the phone, I can feel his dark brown eyes examining me, like I am a patient he needs to figure out a diagnosis for. “What’s going on with you, Ada? What’s wrong?”
Both of my parents have asked me this today. I obviously need to get better at acting like things are fine.
“Ada and Afton are having a fight,” Abby volunteers.
Pop’s bushy eyebrows lift. “A fight? Still?”
“Again,” I say with a sigh. “Or, kind of still.”
“What about? It’s not like you two not to get along.”
I bite my lip. I don’t know what to tell him. Anything but the truth. Anything.
“I don’t even know,” Abby says wistfully. “But it’s a doozy.”
“Leo called the home line the other day,” Pop says carefully.
Even my toes clench at the mention of Leo. He should have known I’d be in Hawaii. I told him weeks ago. I complained about how I was being forced to go. I moaned about how much I would miss him. Did he even listen to me when I spoke? “I don’t care about Leo. Leo is a total—” I pause to modify my choice of language on Abby’s behalf.
“Asshole,” she fills in brightly.
“Abby, we don’t say—”
“He cheated on me,” I blurt out.
“What does cheated mean?” Abby asks. “Is it like when Pop cheats at Go Fish?”
“I’m so sorry, Ada,” Pop says.
“Thanks.”
“But how does this have anything to do with you fighting with Afton?”
“Afton broke up with her boyfriend on Friday, so they wouldn’t have to do the long-distance thing at college. It was very mature of them,” I report. “So clearly she and I are in a competition to see who has the most gruesomely broken heart. And I don’t want to brag, but I’m winning.”
“Yeah, especially now that Afton has a new boyfriend!” Abby announces, proud that she knows some of the answers. “Michael!”
Pop frowns. “Michael? Michael Wong?”
“Michael’s not her boyfriend, Abby,” I try to clarify. “He only got here, like, yesterday.”
“No, he was here earlier than yesterday,” Abby says primly.
“How would you know? Anyway, he’s not her boyfriend.”
“I saw them kissing,” Abby adds. “Last night on the beach. It was yucky.”
So they’re already kissing. Wow. But why am I not surprised? Afton saw something she wanted, she went after it, and—shocker—she got it. Or should I say, she got him.
“How old is Michael?” Pop asks, his eyebrows dropping into a scowl. “I thought he was much old—”
“He’s twenty-two,” I say. “He just graduated from college.”
Pop makes a face like he’s bitten into a piece of bad fruit. “Now I’m starting to see why you two might be fighting. I assume that you told her no good can come from jumping right into a relationship with Michael Wong?”
I wouldn’t say they’re in a relationship. But I shrug. “You know how well Afton listens.”
Pop’s assuming that I did the Normal-Ada move here. The square thing. But I didn’t tell Afton to stay away from Michael. In fact, I told her to go hook up with him. I didn’t really mean it, but still. Here we all are.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Pop says again. “Sometimes you just have to let people make mistakes, and love them anyway.”
“Yeah, because sisters are forever,” Abby intones.
“Yes.” He smiles the molar smile again, then looks at me. “Don’t worry about Afton. She’s tough. She’ll pull through. You focus on yourself right now, okay?”
God, if only I could. “Okay,” I say faintly. I’m grateful, actually, that this conversation has been largely about Afton and Michael.
“Ada has a new boyfriend, too,” pipes up Abby.
“I take it back,” I say between clenched teeth. “No life jacket for you.”
Pop’s eyebrows are really getting a workout this afternoon. “Oh? And who is this fortunate and hopefully more age-appropriate young man?”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I say at the same time Abby shouts, “It’s Nick!”
“Who?”
“Nick Kelly.”
“Nick Kelly.” Pop’s lips purse thoughtfully. He doesn’t know Nick by name. He’s never had a reason to talk about him, except—“Wait, is that the kid who got lost in Rio?”
“That was six years ago,” I say in Nick’s defense. “And he is most definitely not my boyfriend. We’re just hanging out . . . occasionally. Okay?”
“Hmm,” Pop muses. “Okay, well, I trust your judgment, Ada. I’ve never seen a kid with more common sense than you.”
“We’re just hanging out,” I insist again. I wisely omit the part about us planning to lose our virginities together at the end of the week. “I see him once a year, remember? He lives in . . . Chicago? Baltimore?”
It’s sad how much I still don’t know about Nick. After all these years of basically going on vacation with him, I’ve never bothered to find out where he lives. Something I’ll have to remedy this week.
“Okay,” Pop says. “But promise me you’ll try to relax and enjoy your time in paradise, all right? You seem tense.”
“Spoken like a true hypocrite.”
He laughs. “Believe me, if I were there, I’d be loving every minute of it.” A loud voice blares in the background: someone calling a code over the hospital intercom. “I have to run. We’ll talk more about this later, okay? Bye, sweeties.”
“Bye, Poppy!” Abby yells, waving. “I loves you!”
“I loves you, too, Abby-cakes. Have fun!”
“I love you,” I murmur. But he’s already hung up.