The point, though, is that I had stood; I had been standing. It felt both foreign and also familiar to be upright again, even if I trembled for a long time afterward because my limbs were so wasted. Last night, after I had been fed and washed and the space was dark and silent, I began to think. It had been luck that no one had seen me standing, because if they had, there would have been questions, and my mother would have been called, and there would have been tests, the sorts I had had when I first came here: Why would I not walk? Why would I not speak? Why would I not see? “You’re asking the wrong questions,” my mother had snapped to someone, a doctor. “You should be asking why he can’t do those things.” “No, Mrs. Bingham,” the doctor replied, and I could hear an edge in his voice. “I am asking exactly the right questions. It’s not that your son can’t do these things—it’s that he won’t,” and my mother had been silent.
Now, however, I realized: What if I could learn how to walk again? What if every day I practiced standing? What would happen? The thought scared me, but it was exciting as well. What if I was getting better after all?
But I meant to continue my story. Throughout the remainder of fifth grade, Edward and I saw a lot of each other. Occasionally, he came to my house, but more often, I went to his, where we would play checkers or cards. When he came to my house, he’d want to play outside, as his yard was too small to toss a ball in, but he soon realized I wasn’t much of an athlete. The strange thing, though, was that we never seemed to grow closer in any meaningful way. Boys that age may not exchange intimacies or secrets, but they do become more physical with each other: I remember you at that age, how you would tussle on the grass with your friends like little animals, how much of the fun you had with them was getting dirty together. But Edward and I weren’t like that—I was too fastidious, and he was too composed. I sensed, early on, that he would never be someone I could relax around, and I didn’t mind that.
Then came summer. Edward went to the Big Island to stay with his grandparents; my mother and I went to Hāna, where we at the time had a house that had been in my father’s family since before annexation. And by the time school had resumed, something had shifted. Friendships at that age are so fragile, because who you are—not just the physical dimensions of you but the emotional ones, too—change so dramatically from month to month. Edward joined the baseball team and swim team and made new friends; I reverted to my solitude. I now suppose I must have been sad about this, but, curiously, I remember no feelings of sorrow, no feelings of anger—it was like the previous year had been a mistake, and I had known that things would at some point return to normal. Also, it wasn’t as if there was any animosity—we had only drifted, not split, and when we saw each other across campus or in the hallways, we would both nod or wave, gestures you’d make across a wide sea, where you knew your voice couldn’t carry. When we reunited more than a decade later, it felt somehow inevitable, as if we had both drifted for so long that we were bound to find each other again.
There are, however, two encounters from those years apart that stood out for me. The first took place when I was around thirteen. I had overheard an exchange between two girls in my grade. One of the girls, it was well-known, had a crush on Edward. But her friend disapproved. “You can’t, Belle,” she hissed. “Why not?” Belle asked. “Because,” said the first girl, her voice dropping, “his mother. She’s a dancer.”
Since he had matriculated, Edward was occasionally the subject of—not rumors, because they were all true, but stories. Eventually, we came to learn who the scholarship students were, and their parents’ occupations were sometimes whispered from child to child, all mimicking the voices their own parents used to discuss the newcomers. Edward had no father, and his mother was a waitress, but he was spared from outright ridicule: He was good at sports, and moreover, he didn’t seem to care what people said, which was partly what motivated the stories—I think the other students hoped that they might provoke him to react, but he never did.
At least he wasn’t Oriental. This was in the years of the quota, when only ten percent of the school’s population was Oriental, even though the territory’s actual population was around thirty percent. Most of the Orientals who did attend arrived, in some cases, having never worn shoes, just rubber slippers. They were all on scholarships, identified by their public-school teachers as promising and bright, and subjected to multiple tests before they gained admission. Their parents worked on the island’s final sugarcane plantation or in the canning factories, and on weekends and in the summer, they worked there, too, cutting cane or picking pine, as they called it, in the fields, loading it onto the trucks. There was a boy, Harry, who had begun at the school in seventh grade whose father was a night-soil collector, someone who cleaned out the plantation outhouses and transferred the human feces there to—where, we didn’t know. It was said he smelled like shit, and although he too always sat alone at lunch, eating his rice sandwiches, I never thought of introducing myself to him: I looked down on him as well.
Hearing about Mrs. Bishop made me miss her. Indeed, she was what I missed most about my friendship with Edward: the way she held me by the shoulders and then pulled me in for a hug, laughing; the way she kissed me on the forehead when I left their house for the evening; the way she told me she hoped she’d see me again soon.
I had never listened to the talk about Edward, but now I did, and after a few weeks, I learned that, while Mrs. Bishop was still a waitress at Mizumoto’s, she was now also dancing three nights a week at a restaurant called Forsythia. This was a popular place near Mizumoto’s, a hangout for union men of all ethnicities. Matthew’s brother, of whom he was very proud, was a union representative for the Filipino cannery employees, and I knew he sometimes went to Forsythia, because occasionally Jane would beckon me into the kitchen after school and, with a flourish, present the restaurant’s yellow bakery box, in which would sit a guava chiffon cake, its surface a glossy rose-pink.
“From Matthew’s brother,” she’d say—she was proud of him, too, and pride made her even more generous. “Have a big slice, Wika. Have more.”
I didn’t understand why I wanted to see her so badly. But one Friday afternoon, I told Matthew and Jane I had to stay late to help paint sets for the annual school play, and then I cycled over. Forsythia （much later, I would wonder who had chosen this name, as it wasn’t a plant that grew in Hawai‘i, and no one knew what it was） was at the end of a row of small, mostly Japanese-owned stores of the sort that surrounded the Bishops’ house, and though its stucco exterior had been painted a bright yellow, it was designed to resemble a Japanese teahouse, with a peaked roof and small windows cut high into the walls. In the rear of the building, though, near one of the corners, there was a long, skinny window, and it was to here that I quietly wheeled my bike.
I sat down to wait. The kitchen entrance was a few feet away, but there was a dumpster, and I hid behind that. A Hawaiian music group performed here on Fridays and the weekends, playing all the big-band standards, music my father had liked to listen to—“Nani Waimea,” “Moonlight in Hawai‘i,” “ē Lili‘u ē”—and it was after the fourth song that I heard the guitarist announce, “And now, gentlemen—and some ladies, yeah?—please join me in welcoming the lovely Miss Victoria Nāmāhānaikaleleokalani Bishop!”