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The Marine said his name was Dusty. She said hers was Laila, which was the name on the fake ID Kareena presented to the bouncer at the Wave Waikiki. If Crystal hadn’t led the way in a tube top and jean skirt, Kareena never would have made it past the bouncer, who called Crystal “a honey.” Even without the ID, Kareena would have given the burly haole with a buzz cut who rolled towards her like a boulder a fake name. Before she could move out of his way, he started two-stepping behind her to “Night Nurse.” And when the song ended, his hand, rough as a mitt, fell on Kareena’s bare shoulder and turned her to face him squarely. He had freckles scattered across his cheeks and fine etchings around his eyes, and he smiled like he’d just won a prize when he appraised her. She fought the urge to shrug his hand off. Being rude to a grunt in 2004 felt risky. Everyone knew that military men could be ferocious, running amuck in Pontiac Sunbirds, driving drunk and molesting local girls with impunity. Plus, people mistook Kareena for Middle Eastern all the time, asked her how she felt about the war, whose side she was on. The terrorists’? “You ever danced with a Marine?” asked Dusty. Sucking in her breath, Kareena scanned the smoke-filled crowd for Crystal, last seen by the bar to procure screwdrivers until a semifamous Brazilian surfer had sidled up to her. That was three songs ago.

Dusty leaned in, his dry lips on the verge of scratching her cheek. “Let me be your first,” he said, as Beres Hammond’s “I Wish” blared through the speakers. Silently she groaned, but since Dusty was careful to maintain a respectable distance so that their hip bones would not touch, since he never once allowed his stubby fingers to graze the roll of skin between the snug cutoffs and orange crop top Crystal had dressed her in, Kareena let Dusty match her steps and buy her two screwdrivers. She allowed herself to loosen along with the other bodies moving in desperation and eventually stopped looking for Crystal, her best friend who had vanished.

After the last song played and the lights went up, after the crowd sighed and dance partners inspected each other with a mix of expectation for what was to come and disappointment for what the light revealed (someone’s bad skin, someone’s crooked teeth), Dusty’s finger, fat as a bottle cork, grazed the pink, bud-shaped scar above her lip. Kareena waited for him to ask how she got it—which was from a moonstone ring a Brahmin had insisted her father wear on his pointer finger to control his anger—but “You’re pretty” was all he said, not realizing that these words would keep her alive on countless nights to come, and that when she got home and confronted herself in the bathroom mirror, she would touch the spots on her face that he had kissed—the forehead covered with baby hairs, the flat nose, the pointed chin—and watch them transform into features worthy of appreciation.

Under the club’s lights Dusty was even more sapped of color, like meat left on a buffet tray for far too long. But he insisted on remaining by her side until she located Crystal, who appeared a half hour later in the parking lot. As Crystal stumbled towards her beige Land Cruiser, her eyeliner smudged, her lips swollen, devoid of apology and interest in Dusty, who’d plopped a heavy arm on Kareena’s shoulder, Dusty sighed. Shaking his head like his team had just lost the championship, he plucked the car keys from Crystal’s hand and led them to the line of taxis waiting outside the club. “You get her home right quick,” he said to Kareena, pulling open the door of an empty cab and handing the driver a wad of money.

The next morning, tiptoeing down Crystal’s marble staircase, Kareena admired the view of Nu’uanu Valley, one she wished she could enjoy from her parents’ apartment. The valley in which Kareena and Crystal lived was violently lush, fraught with unpredictable rains (one historic storm had dislodged a boulder that slammed into the bedroom of a fellow classmate at Punahou, Lia Maeda, who people had terrorized for being quiet and obese but then pretended to mourn) and wild boars known to devour people’s puppies. After Kareena scarfed down at least three bowls of Corn Flakes, Crystal emerged from her room holding a teddy bear, which she set down on the kitchen counter. “I’m bad with time, you know I’m bad with time,” Crystal muttered. “And plus I really wanted to just do my own thing. You understand, right babe?”

Kareena marveled that even now Crystal’s luminescence overwhelmed her. Crystal was a half-Filipina, half-Greek bikini model, with actual hazel eyes and the golden highlights for which women of all ages paid exorbitant prices. “But why would you invite me to come and then just leave me?” Rolling her eyes, Crystal grabbed a grapefruit from the counter and a packet of Equal from the cupboard.

“Maybe you’re just, like, holding me back right now,” she said. “And anyhow you had that grunt to play with so really I don’t get why this is such a huge deal. Like why are we even talking about this?” Still in her underwear and an Esprit tank top, Crystal sauntered to the yard, where she sat down on a stretch of Futura Stone. Gazing into the small puddle of yellowed milk, Kareena fought back tears and recalled Dusty’s words as he helped to settle the girls into the taxi: “You need a new best friend.”

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“Come see me, Laila,” said Dusty. “Let me show you my Hawai’i.” His Hawai’i was Hickam on the west side of O’ahu, miles away. “Come on,” he said. “Do it for your country. I’ll pick you up,” said Dusty. “I’ll come get ya. Seriously Laila. I miss your face.” Kareena twisted the telephone cord around her finger like girls on television did when they were talking to their crushes.

Two stories below, in the courtyard of their drab UH Faculty Housing complex, her mother was babysitting, which meant sitting on a discarded lawn chair while some kids bounced a ball around. Some rode tricycles and one or two shouted. At the kitchen table Kareena’s geologist father clacked away on his computer, writing, no doubt, another op-ed rant which would never be published about the need to privilege science over Native Hawaiian beliefs, more specifically, to fund “essential” projects even if they desecrated sacred sites. The letters were always sprinkled with bits about how secularism had worked for his native India, so why couldn’t it work here in colonized Hawai’i? Kareena turned to the bus schedule taped to the fridge. “I’ll come to you,” she told Dusty, providing the exact time she’d arrive at the bus stop by the airport. With its roars of arrivals and departures it was the perfect place to meet.

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Two hours later, when Kareena stepped off the bus, the silver Chevrolet that Dusty had described was waiting, engine on. A plane thundered above a McDonald’s parking lot crammed between two car rentals. Tourists at the counters fanned themselves in the heat, some too elegantly dressed, others in meaningless floral shirts made in lands far far away from this one. From the driver’s-side window Dusty’s hand shot out and waved. A tattoo of a cross she hadn’t noticed the night they’d met ran the length of his arm. Kareena’s legs wobbled. She forced a smile and climbed into Dusty’s car, arranging her jean skirt under her thighs before sliding onto the hot vinyl of the seat. He leaned in for a peck, leaving a trace of Vaseline on her cheek. “You excited?” he asked, turning down the Metallica that poured from his speakers.

“Totally. I’ve never been to base before,” she lied. In seventh grade, she’d had a friend whose parents were high-ranking officers stationed at Hickam. Dawn, a Black girl who moved back to Buffalo after just six months at Punahou. Kareena spent almost every weekend at Dawn’s house, completely taken with the central air conditioning, flags, creamed corn, and wall-to-wall carpet. Even more fascinating than the signifiers of quintessential American living was the intense love Dawn’s parents displayed for each other—the shoulder squeezes, deep kisses, slow dances in the living room. How they always told Dawn she was smart, beautiful, and most importantly, that she had the right to be here, no matter what ignorant questions she received about where she was from. “Some people can move here and just blend in. Not us. It doesn’t even make a difference that you were born here” is what Dawn said after they’d had their abdominal flesh pinched by calipers as part of the required fat testing at Punahou. “No shit,” Kareena said. After Dawn left, the girls exchanged letters for a few months, but when Kareena’s updates dwindled to two measly paragraphs, she stopped answering altogether her friend’s juicy pages, which always described new loves, vicious girlfriends who wanted to dim her light, and road trips.

After school one particularly lonely day, Kareena took the bus to Makapu’u. She waded into the water from the frothy shore, swam past the break, away from the surfers, into the stretch of undisturbed sea, and let the current do what it wanted. She’d been surprised to see Crystal, the legendary mean girl, out there alone, too, treading water. Eventually, perhaps having drifted too far towards the rocks, both girls were signaled back to shore by the lifeguard’s shrill whistle. In the showers afterwards, stinging from the stern lecture they’d received in front of a sunbathing crowd (the lifeguard had called them lolo), the two had laughed it off. “God, did he think we were going to die out there or something?” Crystal had joked, yanking open her bikini bottom to let the weak stream of water rinse the sand off her very tight ass.

Kareena went quiet. At some point during her swim she had ignored the fatigue, the slight cramping of her toes, the numbing fingertips. Studying the shore, she could no longer locate the red towel she’d been using to mark how far the current was pulling her. When a huge swell rose above her she didn’t duck, and when the salt water slammed into her nose and throat, Kareena wondered what would happen if she just gave up right now and sank to the bottom of the Pacific. Her parents would blame this country, the lifeguard. The news would blame her. How many times had first responders, most of them Hawaiian, lost their lives hauling tourists and other dumbasses out of waters they had no business entering, or while scouring mountains for hikers who failed to heed official signage?

That evening, when her parents had finished fighting and it was safe to sleep, knowing she would not have to put her body between her petite but cruel mother and her violent father, Kareena peeled back the light covers on her twin bed and folded herself inside. She was glad she hadn’t died today.

It was a pity that Crystal had no idea Kareena was with Dusty, whose car now exited the freeway, slowing at the base’s security checkpoints, where a uniformed man in gold-rimmed aviators saluted each car that entered. “How come we didn’t get one?” Kareena asked.

“Probably forgot,” Dusty muttered. It’s because you’re enlisted, Kareena thought, remembering the special salute Dawn’s parents received when they drove onto base.

Hickam was as she remembered: devoid of character and color. The buzz-cut lawns, the wide sidewalks and indistinguishable homes, the threats of punishment if one failed to abide by the 25-mph speed limit were truly exotic to her. “Wish I could show you my room. But you gotta be eighteen. You wouldn’t want to see it anyway,” Dusty said. “It’s depressing.” At nineteen, Dusty was just three years her senior. Kareena imagined Dusty sleeping on a bunk bed, with his toes pressed against a piece of wood, his head just inches from the ceiling. Having to read in the dark after they called lights-out. Her little soldier boy. With a life so bleak, he would always be happy to see her.

As they drove past the shopping area, Dusty bragged about how cheap a gallon of milk was at the commissary, about all the wonders one could find in the aisles of the exchange: barbecue grills, the latest electronics, designer jeans. She wanted him to talk about war—Had he been to Iraq? Would he go soon? How did he determine if someone was an actual enemy? Had he ever shot someone up close? What was his rationalization for murder? Instead, Dusty was attempting to astound her with other facts, like the price of thirty-two-roll packs of toilet paper. Kareena shifted the conversation to what he ate every day, what his training entailed. Was it as grueling as everyone said it was? How heavy were the backpacks he had to carry up Koko Head Crater? She’d seen groups of army folks running up and down the railway steps and always wondered. “If you’re asking if I can pick you up and haul you over my shoulder, I can. And if you let me, I’ll prove it,” said Dusty, squeezing her thigh. She let out a yelp, then promptly mumbled an apology. It would be suicide to reveal that Dusty was the first man to ask her on a date, to touch her. Luckily, she didn’t have to. In response to her panic, Dusty only shrugged and said, “I’ve got a firm grip.”

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At Paradise Café stalks of fake ginger and birds of paradise rose high amid tables adorned by hula lamps. Enlisted men sipped beers and highball cocktails at a bar flanked by miniature palms. Dusty asked the host, a scrawny haole with a suspicious number of Band-Aids on her calves, for a table by the water, and as he pulled Kareena onto the lawn he pointed across the channel. “That’s Pearl Harbor,” he said, sweeping his hand through the air. “Isn’t this nice?” Dutifully she admired the USS Arizona, which her middle school history teacher once referred to as a milk carton fallen on its side. “You know what else is nice? Having a girl.” Dusty removed his sunglasses and massaged the crimson bridge of his nose. “Was getting real lonely before I met you, Egyptian princess.” Kareena smiled at his assumption. What a relief it was to play a part, like a Disney character.

The breeze carried the scent of buffalo wings. Under the table Dusty placed a hand on her knee. “Local girls don’t really give grunts a chance. You’re different,” he said, and at this reminder she winced. While Dusty studied the menu, Kareena wondered if she’d ever get to tell Crystal about this little adventure she’d devised all by herself. “No pork,” said Dusty, proudly. “I know. You ever been to Egypt, Laila?” Kareena shook her head. She could correct him, or if needed, paint a believable picture of Cairo with the details of the Bombay she knew well, thanks to torturous summer vacations, when monsoons pummeled her grandmother’s home and kept everyone inside: marble monuments, pollution, bazaars. “Sometimes I miss Fayetteville,” Dusty said, rubbing his chin. “Fucked up hellhole that it is.” He already told her about the girls who hid razor blades in their mouths at school, even the pregnant ones. Kareena pictured Fayetteville as a sweltering town of dirt roads, where people sat on porches sipping iced drinks from pitchers. “But like I said, I miss it. It’s just easier being around your own people. You know how it is.” She nodded as though she did. There was one other Indian girl in her class, but she was from Fiji and displayed no signs of unbelonging. Plus, she was friendly to everyone, which Kareena found suspicious.

An elderly Hawaiian woman with chopsticks poking through the silver nest of a bun walked towards them with a faint smile. “Maile” read the name tag attached to the black romper patterned with plumeria. When Maile flipped open her pad, her stack of gold Hawaiian bracelets jingled. “What can I get you folks?” she asked without looking up.

“One teriyaki burger well-done, one vegetable panini, and one oriental chicken salad, Ms. Maile. Thank you kindly, ma’am,” Dusty said politely, but he studied Maile’s walk back to the kitchen a little too closely. Kareena fought the desire to ask dear Dusty what he thought about being stationed in a colony, about having a Hawaiian woman older than his mother serve him food and refill his water. But he quickly turned the conversation to historical facts: when this army base was built, how buses full of single women magically appeared each Thursday for “ladies’ night” at the nearby karaoke bar, how many men were forced to share a bathroom in his quarters. He droned on until Maile appeared with the food. As Dusty tore into the burger, Kareena studied the limp lettuce of the salad, slick with sesame oil, the mandarin oranges wet with syrup, and the mass of fried noodles topping it all. She fidgeted with her fork. “You on a diet?” Dusty asked, a thread of tomato skin dangling between his front teeth. “You shouldn’t be. Bones are for dogs. Honestly you could stand to gain at least five pounds.” Kareena straightened in her seat, pleased that her hard work had finally paid off. For weeks her lunch had consisted of seaweed salad and an apple, a plan devised by Crystal to help Kareena finally “lose that fat ass.” Kareena grabbed at the untouched sandwich. Watching her bite into it, Dusty nodded in approval. He fed her some fries, and even as her stomach ballooned and pressed against the edge of her skirt, Kareena continued to accept them, the possibility of what she could feel for Dusty driving her to open her mouth each time his fingers took aim.

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Dusty asked about the scar above Kareena’s lip only after sucking on it in the back of his car. He brought his mouth to hers a little too quickly so that their teeth met first. Startled, she copied the wormed motions of his tongue, waiting for her triumphant initiation into the club of girls who’d been kissed by an older man to end. In Dusty’s rearview mirror, Kareena admired her lips—more swollen and red than they were after her father struck her. Never mind that this chubby haole was a soldier. Maybe he would comfort and not ravage her when he learned that the scar was courtesy of her father’s fist. “My father hit me,” she said, bracing for Dusty’s reaction. “I mean he punched me. It was a punch. A real punch.”

“A lot of parents slap their children” is what her mother had said the moment Kareena collapsed into her arms after being struck. Then, pressing an ice pack over Kareena’s bleeding mouth, she’d reminded her daughter that in other corners of the world, and on this very island they called home, children endured fates much worse. “Think of the Hawaiian children,” her mother had said. “Who are forced to sleep in tents on the beach until the cops order them off their own land. Whose parents are locked up in prisons on the continent! Think, Kareena, it could be worse.”

“So, your dad is one of them sheikhs with twenty-five wives who hits his ladies?” was Dusty’s response. Kareena shifted in her seat. Her thighs were sweating. Dusty’s hand meandered along her jaw like a spider. “You know I’m kidding,” he said. “But I know how it is over there. I seen it with my own eyes. Them men in Fallujah are barbarians. It’s okay to hate, Kayla. You gotta let yourself do it.”

She’d gone from Laila to Kayla. She could be anyone. She could tell Dusty that she often imagined killing her father, poisoning his morning tea like those abused wives in Bollywood movies. Slitting his neck open like she hoped Celie would do in The Color Purple. Kareena and Dusty had so much in common, didn’t they?

“I’m here now, island girl,” Dusty said, his eyes lasering in on her scar. No one had ever called Kareena an island girl before. “And I’m not done with you yet.” He smiled and sped out of the parking lot.

Where Dusty was taking her now was totally off-limits to the public, he claimed. Military only. Kareena’s heart thumped wildly. Dusty wanted to keep her just a little bit longer, no matter who her people are. And wasn’t that nice? Dusty took the long way, stopping at Hale’iwa to first piss and then watch the surfers brave winter waves. He pulled Kareena from the car, leaning her against the hood. Kareena thought of Crystal, how they had both drifted out to sea without worry that day at Makapu’u. How Kareena had trusted the ocean to take her, if that was her fate.

Now as a surfer ascended a monstrous swell Kareena held her breath. When she covered her eyes Dusty called her a baby. “What else are you going to be a baby about?” he said, his hand skittering over her stomach. Eventually the wave curled and swallowed the surfer’s swiftly moving body, leaving behind furious whitewash as onlookers waited for the brave soul to surface, at which point Dusty let out a battle cry. “It’s getting me all worked up,” he said, placing a light hand on Kareena’s right breast, squeezing it as though juicing a lemon. Kareena straightened her blouse, straining to see if the surfer girl emerged unscathed. Dusty said it was time to go. The salt air thickened. Now would be the time to escape, thought Kareena, but instead she told Dusty she wanted to stay and watch the sunset. “Wrong answer,” he crooned, pulling her off the car’s warm hood.

They raced down bumpy back roads that grew muddier, following the mountain’s curve until they came to a gate left open. Before them stretched a basalt shoreline marked with boulders and jagged outcroppings. Kareena knew this place, Ka’ena Point, where the souls of the dead depart. The westernmost point of O’ahu. The military’s rocket launchpad. Its sonar testing site, where dolphins and whales were killed and deafened as a result. Where something was about to happen to her now. Ka’ena, it means heat, Kareena thought of saying. It would have been the truest thing she’d told Dusty. The car jostled past barbed wire and signs threatening trespassers with Prosecution! and Jail! placed between rocks and homemade signs declaring Kapu! and Keep Out! until they reached the belly of the crater, framed by cliffs. To her right was the sea, angry and frothy. Behind them the sun shone fiercely. In minutes, it would lower and the sky would turn brilliant hues of pink and orange that Kareena would not see because she would be flat on her back. She would miss, too, a lone soaring albatross. On the radio, Bob Marley was singing “Three Little Birds.” Kareena imagined herself swaying in Crystal’s hammock, facing a forest of possibilities.

With a pudgy finger Dusty pressed her scar. He said that meeting a girl like Kareena made him feel less alone. That she, too, knew the pain of being an outsider on this island; he could see it in her eyes. “Everyone here thinks we’re the enemy,” he said. Kareena nodded. She breathed in the sharp scent of his cologne, accepted the way his forehead sloped dramatically, and struggled to appreciate the fresh sheen of Vaseline on his lips. She closed her eyes. Dusty stroked her arm. In her mind the sky was the color of a bruise. The surf pounded against the rocks. She imagined sea spray scattered on the windshield. In the back, Dusty had lowered the seats and spread a towel on which Aloha was written in curved gold letters. Opening her eyes, Kareena maneuvered her dark legs away from him, scrambling over the armrest and into the back the way she imagined he did over sand dunes or through underground passages to escape enemy fire. It was his Hawai’i, he’d warned. She was doing it for her country. Carefully, she arranged herself over the big bright word whose meaning had been confiscated and misused. Aloha. It had to mean the opposite of war. All she had to do now was wait.

 

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SHIVANI MANGHNANI grew up in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been recognized by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, MacDowell, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Instituto Sacatar, VONA, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Boston Review and Hyphen.

 

Featured image by Jeremy Bishop, courtesy of Unsplash.