“How drunk were you in Amsterdam?” someone shouts and someone else is asking if I’m here to go to rehab. Pretty much everyone alive has seen the video of me falling off a stage by now. Drew Takes the Plunge! was The Daily Mail’s headline. So very clever. Within hours, there were gifs, memes, stitches on TikTok. You haven’t truly made it until the whole world unites to ridicule your personal crises.
I take a step back as the crowd swells, but people shove forward. The air grows too thick to breathe and just as I’m about to succumb to the panic, a hand wraps around my bicep. Josh pulls me from the crowd as if he’s plucking me from heavy surf.
I’ll go back to hating him later, certainly, but in this moment, as he shepherds me all the way to the waiting van, I’ve never loved anyone more.
The van door is flung open, and I dive inside. People already surround us, and are now filming the van itself. Like…who will ever want to watch that video? Did I show you the taxi Drew Wilson was in? they’ll ask their friends later. And those friends, if even vaguely rational, will say Why the fuck would we want to watch that? Why would you film the outside of a cab?
I wind up shoved to the very back, which is less than ideal given I get carsick, but there’s not really time to reorganize everyone.
With a lurch, the van accelerates away from the curb. Joshua’s broad, khaki-covered thigh presses against mine and he smells annoyingly good. Like soap and deliciously male skin. It’s clear I’ve gone too long without sex if the smell of Josh’s skin is doing it for me at a time like this. And he flew here all the way from Somalia. Shouldn’t he reek of airplane and sweat like I do?
Beth starts reading to us from her guide book about Oahu. Can a human voice actually make you ill? Because I feel like hers is. And there is no air coming from the vent near me. I press my face to the window like a dog.
“The medical care is apparently excellent,” she announces. “Some of the best in the country.” I can’t imagine why this is what she wants to read about. Sure, there are three doctors in here—Jim, Sloane and Josh—but I’d put that fact neck-and-neck with here’s the cab Drew Wilson was in on the interest scale.
“Are you about to get sick?” Josh asks me, sounding pretty horrified for someone who is ostensibly a doctor. I have my doubts: he seems more like the guy you hire to wipe out a group of civilians by drone.
I take shallow breaths through my nostrils. “I hope not.” My eyes fall to his laptop bag. “Open that up a bit more, just in case.”
He manages to look even more disdainful, a feat I didn’t imagine possible.
“You get carsick,” he says flatly. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. “Maybe it had to do with the swarm of teenage girls who were chasing me.”
“She’s just like you, Josh,” Beth says, turning to beam at her son as if either of us will take that as a compliment. “She does what needs to be done.”
His eyes sweep over me with disdain. “Practically twins,” he says, lip curling. Then he adds, under his breath, “Except I don’t twerk for a living.”
“And I’m not a jerk to people I just met,” I hiss.
“Apparently,” he mutters, “you don’t remember the day we met all that clearly.”
My jaw tightens. I didn’t ask him if he’d finished high school. I didn’t suggest to my mother that he might steal the silver.
“Put your head between your legs,” he says. “And don’t throw up on my pants.”
I bend my body over and put my head down, just as Dr. Bedside Manner suggested.
So far, Hawaii is proving more exhausting than my real life.
2
JOSH
It’s a lesson I should have learned from children’s television programming: every lie, even lies of omission, even lies meant to spare someone, will come back to bite you in the ass eventually. I just never thought they’d all bite me in the ass at the same time.
Mere hours ago, I was at the end of a very long flight, looking forward to some time with my family in Hawaii. Well, looking forward to time with my mother, anyway. I expected to find her with her health restored—that last round of chemo behind her—and my father by her side, pretending to be a decent human being, while my brother drank too much and acted like the selfish prick he is.
But only my father is living up to expectations so far, because my mother is clearly not well and my brother couldn’t even bother to show up. I’m starting to wish I’d never stepped off the plane.
The van arrives at the hotel at last. By some small miracle, my brother’s diva girlfriend has managed not to vomit, but I climb out as fast as possible anyway and head to the Halekulani’s open-air lobby.
The place radiates serenity, all bleached stone and quiet elegance, the kind of hotel where no one speaks loudly and it’s as if you’re the only guest. There are no lines at check-in, no nonsense. In under a minute, we are being led （quietly） through a maze of well-kept gardens and gently gurgling fountains to the elevator in our wing of the hotel. My mother has reserved us three rooms, side by side, on the fifth floor. She wants maximum togetherness at all times.
“Let’s meet down by the bar at six,” she says when we reach our respective rooms. “They do a sunset show.”
I open the door to our suite, which consists of a bedroom with a plush king-sized bed, a living room spacious enough for a table, a desk and a couch, and a long balcony overlooking Diamond Head. In Dooha, I sleep in a tent barely tall enough to stand in. Simply having a bathroom nearby would be a luxury…and here there are two, complete with Japanese toilets that do everything but pull your pants down for you.
I can’t begrudge my mother a single thing. She wanted this trip to be perfect and I suspect I know why. I just wish it wasn’t…so much. There are kids at the refugee camp using wheelchairs constructed of bike tires and hospital chairs. How much equipment could we have purchased with the money this is costing? How much food?
“You really had no idea,” Sloane says. She isn’t talking about the room. She’s not even noticing the room. She’s only thinking of this—us, when “us” wasn’t even a thing until two hours ago.
I run a hand through my hair. Jesus, what a fucking mess. “No,” I say, forcing my mouth to move into a smile. “But it’s great to see you.”
It’s not all that great, really.
My mother’s decision to surprise me by inviting her was…definitely a surprise. Sloane and I were a fling, nothing more, and then she left Somalia, which fortuitously brought things to an end. Now I’ve got to pretend I wasn’t relieved, on top of everything else I’m pretending.
She folds her arms across her chest. Somewhere between the airport and here, she’s put together what’s happened. “Why did you let your mother think we weren’t over,” she asks coolly, “if you thought we were?”
I shove my hands in my pockets. It’s hard to explain how hung up my mother is on the idea of Joel or me settling down. I think she blames her screwed-up marriage for our aversion to relationships, and she isn’t entirely wrong. “I didn’t want to upset her right before she went through chemo,” I reply. I thought I’d gracefully exited the thing with Sloane, gracefully sidestepped the conversation with my mother. And now I’m back in the middle of both.