2 Empath (12 page)

I grinned.

“And by the way,” he added. “Can you tell what I’m feeling right now?”

I concentrated. I imagined him sitting in a studio apartment on the beach. It would be cramped and probably a little dingy, but brightly painted. It would be early evening there now, right around sunset. The breeze would be blowing in through opened shutters, carrying the sound of waves crashing on the sand. I could guess what he might be feeling. But the “emotion vibe” was a different animal. It was a unique sensation that I either picked up or I didn’t. Right now, I was getting zip.

“No,” I answered, disappointed.

“Excellent. In that case, I’m exhilarated by the music.”

I cracked up laughing. “I don’t think you have to worry about me spying inside your head; I can’t feel Kylee or Tara, either.” I explained about the paradoxical “stronger with strangers” thing. “So your evil secrets are safe, at least for now.”

“There you are!” I looked up to see a jarring display of purple and red. Lucas was beaming at me from the entrance to the alcove. “Everyone’s looking for you! You coming back to dance some more?”

“That must be one of the barbarians,” Zane said dryly.

“I’ll be back in a couple minutes,” I answered Lucas.

He raised a cup of punch in the air, as if toasting me. “Cool,” he stated. Then he did some kind of marching band move — a stiff about-face which caused half his punch to splash out onto his pant leg — and left again.

Lust.

Sheesh!

“I should let you go, Kali,” Zane insisted. “You only get one junior prom. Go enjoy it.”

“All right,” I said reluctantly, sliding off the chair. “So…” I dared, “What are you going to do with all your free time, now that you’ve made it to the North Shore?”

It was kind of a joke, but not really. Of course he would be dying to surf, but was he physically able to?

“I’m trying to remember things,” he answered.

It was hardly the response I expected. “Remember things?”

“I meant to tell you earlier,” he began, his tone serious. “Seeing the ghost wasn’t the only weird thing that’s happened to me since the accident. Ever since I’ve gotten to Oahu, I’ve been having these sensations… like deja vu, I guess. I’ll see a place, and I’ll
know
I’ve been there before. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t remember a thing about it. It’s crazy making!”

My pulse quickened.
Yes.
It was happening just as Tara predicted!

In a rush, I explained her theory. “So when I get there, you can tell me what seems familiar, and I can help you fill in the blanks.”

“That’ll be great,” he said, sounding relieved. “Now enough about me. Go back to your friends and dance!”

I smiled. “Will do.”

We said goodbye and I hung up, my face glowing.

When I get there.

I
would
get there.

The “do-over” was coming soon!

I moved through the doorway and back out toward the crowd, realizing only then that, once again, Zane had cleverly avoided my question about what kind of shape he was in. He’d also avoided sending me a picture of himself. A wave of fear struck through me. What if he
was
hiding the extent of his injuries? What if he was afraid to tell me that he could never surf again?

Lust.

I wheeled around to see Lucas approaching. “Ready now?” he asked politely.

I nodded absently and followed him to the dance floor.

Zane wasn’t hiding anything. I would know it if he was.

Lucas flashed me a smile of pure innocence.

Wouldn’t I?

Chapter 9

The last day of school. The last period. The last minute. Sad as I was to be leaving my friends so soon, every second of the day had felt like an eternity.
One week.
Seven days from now, I would be in Oahu.

This time with a living, breathing Zane. And this time, I would be staying there.

I was so excited, I couldn’t allow myself to think about it… or I might explode.

Kylee and Tara didn’t want to think about it, either.

“This,” Kylee announced, flipping the switch on her blender to pulverize our celebratory smoothies, “will be the best we’ve ever made.”

We smiled at each other silently while the motor whirred. None of us wanted to talk about my leaving. In the beginning, we’d made plans that maybe they could visit me at Christmas break. But airfare was expensive. Tara had money saved up, but I knew she needed it for more substantial things, like college. And Kylee could work all summer and not make enough to cover both airfare and spending money for senior year. Maybe, I had suggested meekly, they could check out the University of Hawaii and consider it a college visit? I knew that Kylee, who loved the ocean, wanted to go to school somewhere on the coast. Tara didn’t care where her future college was located, as long as it had the engineering program she wanted and would give her a good enough scholarship. But while Kylee’s parents could help her out with the costs of a legitimate college trip, Tara’s parents could not.

My coming back to Cheyenne for a visit was the backup plan, of course. But none of us could get quite as excited about that.

The blender ground to a halt, and Kylee poured the smoothies. “To summer,” she toasted, raising her glass.

“To summer,” Tara and I echoed, clinking the tumblers and taking a sip.

The drinks were heavenly. Strawberries, kiwi, pineapple, and lime. Kylee had thrown in some mystery ingredients, too. She was good at that.

“You’re right,” Tara agreed. “They are the best ever.”

“You do have a way with combining flavors,” I praised.

Kylee smirked. “Must be my fab multi-continental gene pool. My profile had the greatest ‘ancestral diversity’ of anybody’s I saw. What did you guys get?”

Tara and I exchanged a startled glance. “We forgot all about it!” Tara answered for both of us. She moved out of the kitchen to where our backpacks lay on Kylee’s family room floor. She handed mine over to me, then began to rummage through her own. “Mr. Stedman didn’t hand them out until after the bell rang,” she explained. “And then everybody was partying in the halls…”

Mr. Stedman, our advanced biology teacher, had asked for volunteers months ago to enroll in an ancestral genetics study. It was the same type of DNA test other people were paying big bucks for on the commercial market, but we had gotten it done for free in exchange for swabbing a cheek and filling out a survey about our known family tree. We were supposed to analyze the results in class, but they took too long to come back and he had taught the unit without them.

“I came out 49% East Asian, which is a no-brainer,” Kylee explained, pulling a crinkled piece of paper out of her back pocket. “But my mom had no clue where her ancestors came from. She thought one of her grandmothers was Irish, but she wasn’t sure.” She hopped up on a kitchen stool, shook out her paper, and took another sip of her smoothie. “So it turns out — everybody ready? — not only am I half Vietnamese, I’m 22% Scandinavian, 16% British Isles, 6% Central European, and 6% European Jewish. How totally cool is that?”

“That is totally cool,” I agreed, impressed.

Tara whistled. “I think you’ve got both sides of most major wars covered there. Good thing your ancestors got along!”

I rummaged anxiously through my own backpack, but the envelope remained stubbornly hidden. Where had I stuffed the thing? I couldn’t wait to see my own results. I knew that my grandmother Kalia, whom I was named after, was Hawaiian, but I couldn’t wait to see that fact verified in writing. She had died when my father was young and he’d been raised by his father and stepmother in Minnesota, so he had pretty much zero cultural association with the islands. Still, blood was blood, and I was proud of mine.

“Mine is going to be totally boring; I know it,” Tara prophesied, finding her envelope and ripping it open with haste. “My mother says she has Native American ancestors, but out here everybody says that. I bet it’s not true. That company probably laughs its head off at how many people’s family trees are completely wrong.”

She unfolded the paper, and her eyes grew wide. “Get out!” she shouted with glee. “I
am
part Native North American! 4%!”

“I always did think you looked a bit Cherokee,” Kylee joked.

I laughed with her. All Tara’s siblings looked like they’d fallen off a Viking ship. “I bet you’re mostly Scandinavian though, right?” I asked, still looking for my own envelope.

Tara nodded, her face beaming. “Yeah, 63%. But I’m also 32% Central European. That makes sense too, since my one grandfather was definitely German. This is too cool!”

“What did you get, Kali?” Kylee asked, just as the stubborn envelope at last made an appearance (inside my English folder). I pulled it out. It was labeled only with my identification number; the testing had been anonymous. I ripped it open.

“Yours should be really interesting,” Tara predicted. “The Hawaiian islands have so many different populations mingling. You’re sure your grandmother was native Hawaiian, right?”

“That’s what my dad says,” I answered, unfolding the papers.
Please, please, please be true!

My hands were practically trembling. My eyes roved over the gibberish, searching for the words I longed to see. What category did native Hawaiian fall under?

“Pacific Islander!”
I shrieked with joy. “It’s here! It’s really here!”

My friends cheered. “Awesome!” Kylee praised. “You’ll fit right in!”

“What else do you have?” Tara asked. “Your mom’s like, totally Greek, isn’t she?”

I nodded. “Both her parents were born in Greece, and she never heard anybody in the family ever claim to be from anywhere else.” My face was still buried in the paper. Something didn’t seem quite right. “What category is Greece?”

Tara looked at the map on her papers. “It would be Eastern European. You have it?”

I nodded again. “I’m 49% that, so that makes sense.” But did the rest of it?

“What’s wrong?” Tara asked. “You look confused.”

“I…” my heart started to pound. “I am confused. It says I’m 31% Pacific Islander. But I couldn’t get more than 25% from Kalia. Right?”

Tara’s forehead creased.

“That must mean you have other relatives who were Hawaiian, too!” Kylee suggested brightly.

I shot a glance at Tara. “But my dad’s father’s people were all from Minnesota. The name Thompson is British, but all the other family names were things like Abramsen and Gulbrandsen. My dad was showing them to me when we filled out the forms…” My voice trailed off. I stared at the paper another moment, then looked back at Tara.

“But I don’t have any Scandinavian here.
Zero.”

Tara’s eyes held mine with understanding. “What do you have?”

I took a breath. “It says 49% Eastern European, 31% Pacific Islander, 12% Southern European…” I hesitated. “And 6% East Asian.”

“East Asian!” Kylee squealed, hopping off her stool. “Seriously? Where did
that
come from?”

“2% uncertain,” I finished. “And I don’t know.”

“Well, aren’t there lots of Asians in Hawaii?” Kylee suggested. “Kalia could have been a mixture.”

I shook my head. The effort made me a little dizzy. “But I’m already more than 25% Pacific Islander!”

“Can I see the paper?” Tara asked softly.

I handed it over to her. Her eyes scanned the numbers, and I could picture the calculations she was running in her head. The same ones I had been running. The ones that didn’t add up.

After a long moment, her eyes met mine. “Your dad went through all his father’s ancestry with you, and he knew it was for a DNA project?”

I nodded.

She exhaled. “It could be a mistake,” she offered.

“What mistake?” Kylee demanded.

“All of the Pacific Islander and Asian background in Kali’s profile couldn’t have come just from Kalia,” Tara explained. “And her mother’s parents are already accounted for with the 49% Eastern European. That leaves her father’s father. Even if Kalia herself wasn’t all Polynesian, but had some Asian or even some European thrown in, the fourth grandparent couldn’t possibly have been Scandinavian. According to this, he was Southern European… possibly with Asian blood. He must have had some Pacific Islander blood, too.”

Kylee’s dark eyes shown with grim understanding. The room went quiet a moment.

“Like I said,” Tara offered again, gently. “It could be a mistake.”

“Of course it could,” Kylee agreed. “Did you see that disclaimer form? It was a mile long! It’s a new technology — it could be way off. Plus, it was all done by the numbers, so you know a few are going to get switched around.”

I shook my head stubbornly. “If it was
all
off, maybe I could believe that. But it’s dead on with my Greek grandparents. And how many Americans outside of Hawaii have Pacific Islander blood at all? For it to be right about all that, but totally, completely wrong about one grandparent out of four…”

Nausea rose in my middle. I remembered how eager my father had been to help me with the project. How proud he had been to show me his Swedish grandmother’s family bible, with its generations and generations of carefully penned birth and death dates. Of Kalia’s parents, he had known almost nothing.

I had to wonder how much he knew about Kalia herself.

“I don’t think it is a mistake,” I said weakly. I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t even want to think it. But my lips formed the words anyway. “What I think is that Albin Thompson was
not
my biological grandfather.”

The nausea got worse.

“And my dad has no idea.”

Chapter 10

“Here,” Kylee ordered, setting a peanut butter cup on the table in front of me. “You need chocolate. Eat.”

We were sitting in the food court at the mall, eating frozen yogurt. At least, Kylee and Tara were eating theirs. I had only been staring at mine.

“Kal,” Tara cajoled. “The official Cheyenne last-day-of-school junk food binge crawl isn’t nearly as much fun if you don’t actually eat the junk food.”