North Star

34 | waimanalo

2019

"Hoku, get up. You're going to be late for work."

Even before I opened my eyes, I could discern how late it was. Sunlight flooded the room as he swept the curtains apart, and I shielded my face with one arm as I rolled onto my other side. Salty beach air sailed inside as another reminder of where I was. It wasn't until I took a few deep breaths that I finally opened my eyes.

Growing up and attending Kaiser High School, the perception others held about Waimanalo had become so normalized that I stopped questioning it at some point. When you attended school in one of the nicer towns on O'ahu, it was hard not to feel inferior, especially since Waimanalo was a short drive from Hawaii Kai and students often compared the two. Hawaii Kai was nice and clean and the kind of place people who were well off went to live. Waimanalo was the dirty, run-down step-sister with a bad reputation.

That was the furthest from the truth. Nowhere else in the world made me feel like myself than being home. I lived in a community that raised each other as if we were one big family. Sure, families weren't perfect and there were issues that we needed to solve as a community, but maturing into the person I wanted to be meant I finally saw my home from a different perspective, and that was important.

"I'm calling in sick," I groaned, muffled by my face being pressed into his bedspread.

"I thought your boss was a pain in the ass about you calling in sick."

"That's a problem for me to worry about tomorrow."

Kaipo dropped back down onto his side of the bed, still shirtless from the night before.

When it came to making bad decisions, I thought I wasn't the worst of them. Sure, I wasn't always the best—some would argue I was never the best; some people being me—and often did things I regretted, but I never backed myself into a corner where I felt like I had nowhere else to go. Most of my concerns had to do with overthinking choices that, while not always expected or even admired, were still manageable. That was the totality of my existence—completely and utterly mundane and average, both in success and failure.

Sleeping with Kaipo for the first time again after the night out with Nikau (and the three times after) was one of those gray area situations. It wasn't as if one kiss—and another, and another, and another—meant we were suddenly in a relationship. Everyone involved was aware that night was a one-time thing and nobody resented the other for it, as far as I knew. Neither of us was tied down to the other.

That didn't mean part of me wondered if there was some underlying reason why I went back to Kaipo. (I knew there had to be but framing it as a question allowed me to claim plausible deniability as far as my brain and the actions I made were concerned.) He was in the habit of being used for reasons and enjoyed it anyway, so he didn't mind. But Kaipo also, despite his confrontation weeks ago, wasn't in the habit of disrupting the status quo unless it was absolutely necessary, and we had been managing to keep our heads above water so far. It was his way of showing he cared, even if we both might have been better off actually working through our problems instead of looking in the other direction.

Maybe that was our problem. We both relied too heavily on the security of our comfort zone.

"Are you off today?"

He didn't look at me as he dragged a book off his nightstand and cracked it open. I found the sound satisfying. "We went over this last night."

"Did we?"

"We did. And yes, I'm off."

There weren't any notifications when I checked my phone, aside from the alarm that, for some reason, hadn't made a damn noise. After sending a vague text to my boss that I wouldn't be making it to work today, I clicked it off and tossed the device back onto the floor next to the rest of my belongings which had been carelessly discarded.