Grandma Young glowed with pleasure, even though it would be a few weeks before she could eat solid food. Everyone was talking at once, lively and loudly, when a nurse that Makani didn’t recognize popped his head around the door.
“We understand these are special circumstances,” he said, “but I’m sorry. Only two visitors at a time are allowed in ICU rooms.”
“Oh,” Makani said as the chatter halted. It was clear that none of them had considered this.
“That’s all right,” Grandma Young said. “Why don’t you go to the waiting room to catch up? I’m feeling a nap coming on, anyway.”
She did look tired, so Makani kissed her cheek. “Ollie and I will be back in a bit.”
Grandma Young thanked Darby and Alex for coming, and then Makani and Ollie followed them out. They were able to find a different waiting room from the main room the previous night. It was smaller, but the seating was more comfortable. Even better, it was empty of other people. Makani and Ollie took separate chairs beside each other, and Darby and Alex squeezed together into a love seat. They exclaimed over Makani’s arm.
“It’s not that bad, really,” she said.
“Not that bad?” Alex was aghast. “A berserk teenage boy broke into your house and tried to stab you to death. Get some fucking perspective!”
Everyone froze as Alex realized that Makani probably already had a decent grasp on the situation. And then she lost it. Alex’s laughter was crazed and contagious, the kind only borne from dark situations. Like giggles at a funeral, it infected them all. Out of the four of them, she seemed the closest to the edge. But perhaps Alex sensed Makani intuiting this fragility, because she grabbed a doughnut and waved it around. Feigning an air of composure. “Looks like we’re real cops today. Think we can crack the case?”
“Hey,” Darby said, licking glaze from his thumb as he took a doughnut for himself. “Stereotype. Brother of a cop right there.”
Alex rolled her eyes, but Ollie gave Darby a smile.
“Speaking of . . .” Darby was hesitant. “What are they saying? The cops?”
With occasional interjections from Ollie, Makani filled them in on the last twenty-four hours. But she tripped up when she reached the part about him being naked.
“Hold up.” Alex’s gaze whipped to Ollie. “A minute ago in this story, you were covered by only a blanket. Did you run downstairs in a blanket toga?”
“Yes,” Makani lied, as Ollie said, “Not exactly.”
Alex cackled. “Ohmygod!”
An inevitable blush spread across Ollie’s face.
“Please confirm, yes or no,” she said. “You, Ollie Larsson, chased after the Osborne Slayer in your bare essentials.” When he nodded the affirmative, Darby and Alex erupted with a fresh round of riotous laughter.
Sorry, Makani mouthed.
Ollie shrugged helplessly. You tried.
Makani understood where her friends’ laughter was coming from, so she wasn’t offended. It was the necessary moment of levity that would get them through the rest of the story. By the time she finished filling them in, their expressions had sobered.
“The part I can’t get over,” Darby said, “is David.”
Alex shook her head in equal disbelief.
“He seemed so normal and boring,” Darby continued. “Like one of those guys who’d fade into the landscape to live the same life as his dad—”
“And his dad before him,” she said.
Ollie stared at nothing. The shock of what had happened to them was circuitous; it kept coming back. “I guess you never really know what’s going on inside someone else’s head. His external life seemed dull, but his interior life . . . must be a lot more complex.”
“It must be angry,” Alex said.
He nodded. “Hurt.”
Makani hadn’t planned on telling them, not ever. Certainly not now. But as their words stirred inside her, they melded with her grandmother’s trust, and that powerful undertow of resistance—as familiar as it was formidable—suddenly released its grasp. Her mother didn’t care about her, but her friends did. She wanted them to know.
“He must have been planning this for months, maybe years,” Darby said. “What cracked? What makes a person go from fantasizing to actually doing?” And as he turned to Makani in bewilderment, she knew his next question—the big one—before he even asked. “And why did he go after you?”
Makani took a moment before answering, but her voice was steady. “Because I think he might have learned something about my past.”
Their silence was weighted with curiosity and pressure.
“My name,” she said, “wasn’t always Makani Young.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Alex’s eyes were saucers. “Ohmygod. You killed someone.”
“What?” Makani was taken aback. “No. God, no. If I’d killed someone, how could I even be here? Wouldn’t I be sitting in prison somewhere?”
Ollie and Darby stared at Alex in disbelief.
“Okay,” she said shamelessly. “Overreaction.”
Ollie turned his body toward Makani to encourage her. “Go on.”
Makani Kanekalau startled awake with a terrified gasp as Gabrielle Cruz and Kayla Lum burst into her bedroom. They yanked her to the floor. Makani’s skin smelled like body odor and day-old suntan lotion, and her hair was an untamed ’fro. She was wearing a tank top without a bra, and her pink pajama shorts were an old pair, see-through with age.
The girls pointed at her striped panties and laughed.
Gabrielle’s teeth flashed like razors through the darkness—the last image Makani saw before she was blindfolded. “Tonight’s the night, rookie,” Gabrielle taunted. The blindfold was too tight, but Gabrielle was the captain, so Makani didn’t dare complain.
Kayla hissed in her ear. “You’re coming with us.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex interrupted. “These girls kidnapped you? Were they your friends?”
“Teammates,” Makani said. “Sometimes friends, sometimes rivals. But they were seniors, and I was a junior. This was last October. My first year on varsity.”
Darby seemed startled that she’d been an athlete. “Varsity what?”
The swim team’s hazing rituals were notorious, and they’d been growing worse every year. Escalating. Now their turn, the senior girls of Kailua-Kona High School were hungry for revenge. The power of authority coursed through Gabrielle and Kayla, no doubt blinding them in its own way, as they tugged and shoved Makani down the hall.
Makani stiffened as her mother’s harsh laughter cut through the narrow space. “Sorry again about the locked door, girls.” A familiarity on the word girls indicated that she was on their side—and she wasn’t surprised that they were here. “Glad I was still awake to hear your knock.”
It was well known that parents were informed of the initiation ahead of time so that they could leave the front door unlocked for the older girls to get in. It was understood that the parents would play along, but that they’d also give their daughters the heads-up. That way, the rookies could already be dressed in their cutest pajamas with swimsuits underneath. That’s what parents were supposed to do.
Makani tensed in hopeful anticipation of another apology, this time for her. Or, at least, an excuse. But as she was pushed outside, all she heard was the click—and lock—of the door behind her.