“Where did you learn how to swim like that,” he asked me. 

I cling onto the side of the pool, and carefully pry off my goggles, so I don’t get much water in my eyes. 

I look up and its Mr.Thorne. 

“I don’t know when I learned, but I remember that I’ve always been able to swim,” I replied.

“Kalea, that’s impossible,” Mr. Thorne said. 

He looked at me, eyebrows raised, not believing a word I said.

“In Hawaii the water is everywhere. Maybe I learned before I could remember.” 

I shrugged and pulled myself out of the water, and quickly ran to a nearby bench to get a towel. I hadn’t been in the chlorinated pool long enough to warm up to it. I shivered on the sidelines as I watched other girls try out for the swim team. 

You could tell who would make it, and who couldn’t, from their strokes, or their hesitation. 

Mr.Thorne is rapidly writing down notes as more people try out, and I wait patiently for the results. Mrs. Ferguson is yelling out commands on the other side of the pool, and pacing up and down, picking who is the weakest link. 

There’s no way possible I couldn’t make the team, but I’m still afraid.

What if my form wasn’t good enough?

What if he isn’t impressed?

What if?

What-if?

What if?

I fill my head with what-ifs, take off my flower pattern swim cap, and wrung out my long black hair, still waiting in my green one-piece. Mr.Thorne notices me waiting on the bench as raises his eyebrows again.

He does that often.

“You won’t get the results until tomorrow,” he says. “You can go home.”

“Ah- ok, sorry.”

I shake my hair, shaking off the what-ifs, and leave for the locker room. I quickly change after I shower, wearing a long-sleeve shirt, jeans, a big puffy coat, and a knit cap.

I frown a little when I remember I forgot my gloves.

 Everyone else around me isn’t as covered up, and some people walk right out in nothing but shorts, shoes, a thin shirt.

It’s been months since I’ve moved to the mainland, and I still can’t handle the cold. 

I walk down the squeaky speckled hallway, parts of it wet from the melted snow outside, and attempt to not slip again. While weaving through everyone else clogging the hallway, I see my favorite person of the day, standing near the exit. 

 

It’s Molly.

 

She’s all bundled up just like me, another person who isn’t used to cold weather. Her jacket is bright pink, and mine is yellow, both of us bright flowers in a sea of brown, black, and navy blue. She hugs me and gives a big grin.

“I made it,” she rasped. “I made the cheer squad!”

“What happened to your voice?

“I wanted to be the loudest, so I would be remembered. It worked…”

She coughs and rubs her neck, knowing it was all worth it.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna make it until tomorrow,” I sigh.

“It’s ok, it’s ok, you got this.”

Molly is the perfect cheerleader because she just knows what to say to make me feel better. She tells me that I have the home advantage, living on an island. She’s my hype-man, keeping my anxiety at bay, all the way home on the bus. I lift her up too, telling her I’m jealous of her long, brown wavy hair, and she says she’s jealous of my thick, black hair.

Ever since we became friends, the long bus rides staring out at the bleak landscape, the trees always nude and sky always cloudy, became so much shorter.

I hop off the bus, and slowly make my way up the driveway, still paranoid about slipping even though it’s been cleared out.

Our new house is much better than the apartment we lived in Hawaii. 

Well, it was more like a hotel.

It was a hotel.

My mom moved to the mainland because the rent was unaffordable, rising higher into the sky, touching the heavens, refusing to come back down. She said she “always wanted a backyard.” She got her wish, and we’ve been here for a few months. 

I quickly tear of my outer layers, like an onion, once I’m inside.

“I love heating,” I say to myself, as I run up the stairs and start on my second mission of the evening. It’s time to read, and the book I have is like no other. Inside my room, the floor covered by my clothes, clean and unclean. I trample them, open my sock drawer, and take out my secret book.

It’s worn on the sides, and the cover is made of real leather. The paper looks like it was hand-made, and the ink is faded but legible. The only part of the book I can’t read is the first. The title and author’s name is all washed away.

My last day at home- I mean, my old home- I found a book washed up on the shore. I knew mom would yell at me for bringing more junk back from the ocean, but this was different. It wasn’t a sparkly rock, or a VHS, it looked like it belonged in a museum.

I’ve been nervous to read it for some reason once I opened it for the first time, worried I had actually stolen something lost from a museum, caught in the currents and washed up to the coast.

I realize something while flipping through the thick pages.

“Why is the title washed away, but the rest of the book is fine,” I ask myself.

Every day, I learn something new about my secret book.

Parts of it are written in a language that I don’t know, very little of it is in ʻŌlelo Hawaii, and I don’t know much of that. Some pages are written in English, but it’s written like some lines pulled out of Romeo and Juliet. 

I only understand what its about from the detailed diagrams and pictures in the beginning of the book, and as the language changes, the book passed down from owner to owner, the drawings become more crude and not as pretty.

There is a page with the header in English.

Uncharted Waters.

I try to read the parts in Hawaiian and English first out loud because it’s easier to understand when I say it loud, but my mouth feels jumbled and heavy. I feel like there’s water in my mouth, the more I try to read a page out loud, and then I started choking.

Water fills my lungs, burning like fire, my vision is blurry, and I started to feel cold.

I’m drowning on dry land. 

I drop the book and it stops.

I cough, but no water comes up, and I lay on the floor heaving, gulping for fresh air, a fish out of water.

I crawl to my bed, and crash into my pillows, my body facing away from the book, afraid to look at it.

Is it angry? 

“Of course not,” I say, in a bad attempt to reassure myself. “You can’t make a book angry, it’s not alive.”

I try to fall asleep but a voice in my head begins to grumble. It repeats a phrase over and over, and I don’t know what it’s saying. I squeeze my eyes shut, but then the language changes.

Wai. Wai. Wai. 

It’s asking for water.

I slowly turn to see the book on the table, and no longer on the floor. Every atom in my body is telling me throw it into the woods, but I wonder aloud.

“What if?”

I walk down the stairs apprehensively, make my way to the kitchen, and get a glass of wai. I go back upstairs feeling silly, offering a book a glass of water. It’s a weird feeling that washes over me. I’ve been rude, not offering the guest in my house a glass of water this entire time.

In my room the book has not moved from the spot on my desk. Standing in front of it, I slowly tip the cup over, the water almost spilling onto the book, but I stop myself.

“This isn’t a good idea.”

The front door loudly crashes open, and my mom hollers from downstairs that she’s home. I jerk my body, and drop the cup, the choice made for me.