“Umm. Your mom sucks?” Alex was both stating it and asking for confirmation.
Darby looked too sad to berate her.
Makani didn’t want to see Ollie’s reaction, so she kept going.
Gabrielle and Kayla prodded Makani outside and wrestled her into an open-air Jeep. Makani knew it was the captain’s car. Gabrielle swerved wildly, purposefully, down the street as Makani fumbled for a seat belt. The wind blasted her as she jostled from one side of the Jeep to the other, frightening her with the sensation that she was about to fall out. At last, she managed to strap herself in.
“Where are we going?” She tried to sound like she was fine, down for anything. But fear clouded her voice.
The girls just turned up the radio, and Makani’s neighborhood was left behind in a thundering wake of Beyoncé. The air was thick with humidity. The breeze was scented like salt water and sweet plumeria. Recognizing that she was being ignored, Makani lifted her blindfold for a peek. The dashboard clock said it was almost midnight. On the Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway, skinny palm trees were silhouetted by the night sky, the tallest vegetation amid the scrubland that characterized this side of the Big Island.
Only a few minutes later, Gabrielle cut the engine. The music vanished. Ocean waves boomed. “Time to deplane, rookie,” she said, and Kayla laughed at the dumb joke. Kayla was always trying to impress the captain. They grabbed Makani by the upper arms, one on each side, and steered her, barefoot, over a beach of volcanic rocks. Something punctured the ball of her right foot, and Makani hissed in pain.
Their grips tightened around her arms.
A crackling bonfire strengthened into a roar as Makani’s feet touched sand. Peals of girlish laughter swirled and eddied. She knew they were aimed at her.
“Are we the last to arrive?” Kayla called out, reveling in the attention.
Catcalls and whistles rose above the laughter. The blindfold was ripped from Makani’s eyes, and she squinted, holding up a hand against the sparks from the fire.
The whole team was there. The other rookies’ blindfolds had already been removed. They were laughing at her, too.
Even Jasmine was laughing. She and the other three rookies were dressed in bikini tops and board shorts. Their hair was done—Jasmine’s straight hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail—and some of them were even wearing makeup.
Mortified, Makani crossed her arms over her chest. She felt ugly and exposed. She’d swum with most of these girls since childhood. They’d seen her thousands of times in swimsuits, but it didn’t matter that her ratty tank top and pajamas covered more skin; she was the only one wearing the wrong thing. The private thing.
A rush of anger washed through her humiliation. Clearly, Mrs. Oshiro, Jasmine’s perfect mother, had warned her. Why hadn’t Jasmine said something? She was her best friend. They texted each other first thing in the morning and last thing before bed. They’d texted less than two hours ago, and Jasmine hadn’t given any indication of anything unusual. And she knew Makani’s mom couldn’t be relied on for things like this.
Gabrielle gestured at Makani’s pajama shorts. “Might as well take those off.”
Makani didn’t move.
“The captain said strip!” Kayla screamed into her ear. “Strip!”
“Strip! Strip! Strip! Strip!” the other girls chanted.
The intimacy of her underwear made Makani want to cry. Shivering, she pulled down her pajama shorts and folded them neatly on the sand.
The captain snatched them up and waved them triumphantly like a flag. “Let the games begin!”
Cheering broke out as the girls split into five teams, with two veterans to every rookie. The rookies’ veteran teammates were the same as their kidnappers. In block-lettered Sharpie, the captain wrote SLUT, NYMPHO, SKANK, and WHORE on the other rookies’ foreheads. The marker pressed against her skin, and Makani was informed that she was BITCH. If she responded to any other name, she’d have to take a shot.
Four vodka bottles were produced, two in each of Kayla’s hands, and she waved them like pom-poms. Kayla swam freestyle. She had insane endurance, and her muscles rippled in the bonfire’s light. “What’s your name, Bitch?” she yelled.
“Bitch!” Makani said.
“I said, what’s your name, Bitch?”
“BITCH!”
“Okay,” Gabrielle said. “Makani, your spot is between Hannah and Jasmine.”
Makani took off.
“Wrong! Who’s Makani?”
She couldn’t believe that she’d already forgotten. Divers were precise. They performed well in the spotlight. Makani did not make mistakes. Everyone cracked up again as she downed the first repugnant shot, trying not to gag. She’d never liked vodka. It reminded her of nail-polish remover.
Gabrielle’s best stroke was butterfly. The captain had the team’s strongest arms, so when she clapped Makani’s back, it stung. “Take your place, Makani.”
Makani stood her ground. Swallowed her tears.
“Hey! The rookie bitch has learned her lesson,” she said.
“Great job, Bitch.” Kayla ruffled her curls. Few things grated Makani more than someone touching her hair. “Now get your ass in line.”
Makani jogged to the area between Hannah (SLUT) and Jasmine (NYMPHO).
“Are you okay?” Jasmine asked, placing a pitying hand on Makani’s arm.
Two days ago, they’d gotten matching gel manicures of alternating silver and blue. School colors. Now Makani wanted to shove Jasmine to the ground and cram her mouth with dry sand until she choked. Makani fixed her with a livid glare. Jasmine seemed surprised by the intensity, but she removed her hand in silent surrender.
They were not a team tonight. She would not lose to Jasmine.
The games involved running and performing their usual dry-land calisthenics—lunges, jumping jacks, push-ups, and sit-ups—only they had to do twice as many reps and with two veterans yelling in their ears, forcing them to repeat pledges of team loyalty and tricking them into responding to their real names. It was the veterans’ job to make their rookie finish last in as many rounds as possible.
Between each round, the rookies had to drink a shot of vodka. The last rookie to finish had to drink two. The veterans could drink as little or as much as they wanted, and they all took swigs before stalking toward their rookies with brown-paper grocery sacks.
The first round began. Makani ran the beach with grim determination. The veterans removed egg cartons from the mysterious sacks and hurled their missiles from a distance. The eggs were rotten and sulfurous. Some of the girls dry-heaved. As Jasmine’s ponytail bobbed ahead of her, resentment scorched through Makani’s veins.