Even though he’d ignored her question about how he’d gotten it.
Her brow was still pinched as she pushed aside her textbook for the latest issue of Rolling Stone. Makani didn’t normally bother with paper magazines, but she’d been unable to resist when she saw Amphetamine on its cover. Their scandalous song about an underage girl who’d broken the heart of the lead singer—supposedly based on someone real, according to the article—was a huge hit. Makani felt both the anger and the ecstasy of the song’s catchy lyrics. She wondered if she’d broken Ollie’s heart last summer. Had he broken hers? Or had it already been too broken to make a difference?
Her phone dinged. She scrambled to pick it up, dropping it twice in her haste and excitement.
It was a picture of an enormous, hairy, white male ass. Makani groaned and tossed the phone aside without replying. She didn’t feel like indulging Alex in one of her favorite games. Alex liked to steal her and Darby’s phones, type “hairy butts” into Google Images, and then slip their phones back to them. When they weren’t at school, Alex texted the pictures at random.
Her phone dinged again at 11:31. It was him.
I was at work, but I’m home now. Are you still awake?
A primal panic flooded her system. Should she wait before replying? No, that would be stupid. Silence got them into this mess in the first place.
Ollie answered after the first ring. “Hey, sorry about that call earlier. I was on my break, but I guess that was a bad time?”
Makani’s voice was cool. “How did you get my number?”
“Oh.” Ollie sounded startled. “Uh, yeah. Sorry. My brother. He can, you know . . . get things. Information.”
It was his second apology in seconds. And he’d asked Chris for help, which meant he’d at least told his brother something about her. A smile grew on her lips, but she said, “That’s a little creepy.”
There was a long pause.
“I’m kidding.” Makani laughed, pretending to be more composed than she actually was. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s still creepy. You should have asked me for my number. But . . . I’m glad to be talking to you.”
His voice loosened on the other end. “Me too.”
“So.”
“So.”
Her fingers picked at the comforter’s eyelets, but she spoke her next line flirtatiously. “So, you still work the Wednesday shift at Greeley’s.”
He laughed once. “I do. Though I can’t help but notice that you don’t come around anymore.”
“Yeah, there’s this real asshole who works there. He acts like I’m invisible whenever I see him at school.”
“Interesting. Because there’s an asshole at school who’s been ignoring me, too.”
Makani thrilled at the ease of their banter, but her laughter dwindled with an uneasy twinge of regret. “That was pretty lame of us, huh? Assuming.”
Ollie agreed without elaboration. “Monumentally.”
“Could we speak clearly for a moment?” she asked.
“I’d like us to speak clearly for all moments—present and future.”
Makani almost smiled, but the gesture vanished before fully arriving. Her voice hardened. “Look, I only want to keep talking to you if you want this to happen in a real way. If you want to, like, hang out with me. If you only want to fuck me, I’m out.”
“Whoa.” Ollie exhaled. “No. No. That was never only what I wanted. It just happened. I have no idea how that happened.”
“We’re equally to blame. I think that’s been established,” she said wryly.
Their phones filled with another tense silence.
“So,” he ventured, “speaking clearly . . . you like me?”
“Speaking clearly . . . yes.”
A respectful pause. Or perhaps Ollie was catching his breath again. “Speaking clearly . . . I like you, too.”
It had been so long since Makani had felt any amount of genuine, unadulterated happiness that she’d forgotten that sometimes it could hurt as much as sadness. His declaration pierced through the muscle of her heart like a skillfully thrown knife.
It was the kind of pain that made her feel alive.
CHAPTER FIVE
They talked for hours. Until Makani’s hands were cramped from gripping her phone and even the singing crickets had gone to bed. His obliviousness to her past was a relief. They needed to speak clearly, yes. But only about the things that needed to be spoken about.
His parents had been farmers, and the family had been tight-knit. About a month after the accident, the police gave his brother, who’d just been hired, the old cruiser to replace the car that had been totaled. It was a generous gift. When Ollie turned sixteen, Chris had given him the cruiser as a birthday present. Ollie despised the Crown Vic and the loss that it represented, but he drove it out of respect for his brother. And his need for a car. He talked about his relationship with Chris—strained, parental, loving, frustrating—and she talked about her relationship with her grandmother. Which was the same.
“What happened to your grandparents?” Makani’s house was dark and filled with old shadows. She curled up under her covers. “Why didn’t they take you in?”
“Half of them are dead, and the other half are drunks.” The timbre of Ollie’s voice was lower than usual. It was quiet and gravelly with the night. “So, when a guy with a blood-alcohol concentration that was twice the legal limit killed our parents . . . you can see why Chris fought to be my guardian.”
Makani didn’t like her parents. But she did love them, and she could only imagine how shattering it must have been, must continue to be, for Ollie to have lost both of his in the same senseless act. They’d been on their way home from an errand at the Feed ’N’ Seed, the same location where Darby and Alex now worked. Their car was struck in the broad daylight of a random Tuesday afternoon. Something about it being daytime heightened the tragedy in Makani’s mind.
“How did your mom wind up in Hawaii?” Ollie asked.
“She left here right after graduation. She had this grandiose plan—that’s what she always called it—to travel through all fifty states before picking a new home. She even had this foldout map that she’d stolen from a bookstore in Norfolk. She still has it. She showed it to me once, and there was just this big, black X through Nebraska.”
“So, what happened?”
“She used all her savings to go to Hawaii first. She got a job at a resort, enrolled in community college, and then met my dad.”
“A grandiose plan. Maybe that’s what I need.”
Makani made a sound between a huff and a snort. “Only if you can follow through. To me, it’s just another story about my mom’s failures.”
“It’s not about Hawaii being so great that she didn’t need to see her other options?”
“No.”
“I always follow through on my plans,” he assured her.
He proved it only a few hours later. Makani was slumped inside Darby’s car before school, seething with sleep-deprived irritation. She’d been excited to tell her friends about the call, but they weren’t reacting in the way that she’d hoped.