Above the East China Sea: A Novel (6 page)

Kirby throws an old lawn chair that had washed up on the beach onto the fire. The stink of melting plastic makes everyone jump up and, cursing him for the idiot he is, move away from the toxic fumes. I move too, but not because the smoke—or much of anything else—bothers me, since I’m not even really on the beach anymore. I’m back at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, where we were stationed before transferring here. It’s a year and four months ago, and I’m enduring the last few weeks of my sophomore year, and Codie her senior year, at Pueblo Heights High. That evening, the one when everything changed, the two of us were sitting on the patio in the backyard of our base house, working our way through a four-pack of Bacardi Breezers.
Mom was pulling a double shift because of a security alert on the flight line. An electrical storm sizzled through the black sky, and Codie and I were competing for who could spot the longest streak of lightning when she suddenly went quiet.

After the silence had gone on too long, I called out, “On your three o’clock,” claiming a spectacular artery. “That’s a winner. What’s my prize?”

I expected Codie to protest and say her last lightning strike was longer. Or to tell me that I
had
won, and my prize was ten trays of Pueblo Heights High’s cafeteria signature dish, Road Kill Enchiladas. Anything, because Codie hated, hay-
ted,
to lose. Instead, in a weirdly flat voice, she said, “I enlisted.”

Certain that I’d misunderstood, I made a blinky face at my sister for so long that she asked, “Caboose? Did you hear me?”

Luz the Caboose. I got the nickname because I was always following her around. Codie was the one who led, who knew where we were going. But this? The military? Our whole lives the military had been the thing we both wanted to escape. The thing that made our parents such hard-asses that it was punishment loving them. I waited for her to tell me, “All I said was that ‘I insisted.’ ” Or, “I am twisted.” Or, “Iron lisped.” Any of those phrases would have made more sense than “I enlisted.” I would, in fact, have been less surprised if my sister had told me she was a hermaphrodite and that I’d have to learn to love her as a brother. Then I realized: Codie was messing with me.

I humphed out a dry laugh, since this wasn’t really funny, and said, “Right. You enlisted.”

Looking down at the bottle she was carefully picking the label off of, she pressed her lovely, full lips together and nodded. “Yeah, I did.”

“You’re serious?”

“As syphilis. Signed the papers and everything.”

“You enlisted?” I kept saying the word, still hoping it might have another meaning that I was unaware of.

“Air force. Security Forces.”

“An air bear? Like Mom?”

“Pretty much. I leave right after graduation.”

Less than two weeks away. “No,” I stated flatly, trying to convey how unacceptable this was.

“Well, actually, yes.”

“Does Mom know?”

“Yeah.”

Of all that was incomprehensible about my sister’s announcement, that was the worst of it. That our mother knew before me. That she knew and hadn’t stopped her. But it was worse than that. “She signed for you, didn’t she?”

Codie shrugged. “Had to.” She wouldn’t turn eighteen until the end of June.

“And you didn’t tell me? Neither of you told me?” I could not think of another time when my sister and mom had had a secret. Codie and I were the ones who always kept secrets—from our mother.

“I knew you weren’t going to be happy.”

“No, Codie, I’m not happy. I’m really, really not happy.”

A whole Mount Olympus of lightning bolts streaked the sky, but neither of us claimed any of them.

Our entire lives, Codie and I, always moving to another base, another state, another country, we had been like those diving beetles who can live underwater because they take a bubble of air from the surface with them. Codie was my bubble of air. No matter what hostile environment the air force thrust us into, as long as I had Codie, I could breathe.

After we sat there saying nothing for a long time, Codie took my hand. My fingers had gone colder than the Breezers, but hers felt warm and soft as rising bread dough around them. “Cabooskie, be happy, okay? It’s nothing. It’s a couple of years when I would have fucked off and dropped out of community college and worked a bunch of crap jobs. It’s just a way to pay for a real college. If I ever decide to go. It’s not like colleges are going to come after me the way they’re already coming after you, Miz Four Point Three.”

“Codie, you don’t know that. You’re so smart. Smarter than me.”

“Smarts don’t count if you can’t put them on paper.”

Even though Codie had a classic case of dyslexia, we moved around so much in her early years of school that by the time it was diagnosed when she was in fourth grade, she’d already absorbed the idea that she was a dummy.

“Cabooskie, I know that you want what you think is best for me, and it’s hard for you to believe that the air force is it, but it is. You just gotta
trust me on this. Besides, Mom’s up for a transfer, and if I gotta move anyway …?”

“But what if you get sent to …?”

“The Sandbox? No worries. Pretty much all the troops except rent-a-soldiers are already being withdrawn. Besides, I’m a female! In the air force! It’s not like they’re gonna put me out in an up-armored Humvee sweeping for IEDs or something. Statistically, driving I-25 would be more dangerous.”

I didn’t feel or look convinced.

“Cabooskie, don’t stress. Mom already said that she’d pull strings to get me a cush assignment.” She looked straight into my eyes and promised, “A safe assignment.”

“But, Codie, we hate the military. We hate Gung Hos.”
Our mother is a Gung Ho. She’s not like us. She’s the anti-us. You can’t trust her. You can’t abandon me.

Codie shrugged, muttered, “YOLO,” drained her bottle.

“YOLO? Don’t be all You Only Live Once. This isn’t like bungee jumping or some other onetime dumb-ass thing.”

Codie pressed her lips together and nodded without saying anything.

When I saw the finality of that nod, I started blubbering so hard I could barely get the words out. “Please, come on, you can’t do this. Please.”

“Luz, it’s done.” She went inside and slid the patio door shut behind her.

I made myself stop crying and tried to swallow the lump in my throat with a chug from my bottle. It tasted like perfume and chemicals. I’ve never drunk Breezers since.

“Jace, hey, Jace, are you watching this?” Like a kid overamped on sugar, Kirby tries to divert Jacey’s attention away from Zavie Plutino’s vaporizer and big muscles.

“What?” Jace asks, annoyed.

“Cooking an egg with my flashlight.”

Kirby is, indeed, swishing an egg around in a tuna can set atop a flashlight the size of a baguette. Beams of blinding light escape around the rim of the can and throw a halo up into the black sky like Batman signaling. The smells of burning tuna oil and can label blend with cooking
egg as Kirby stirs the clear yolk around with a stick until it turns white because, yes, the ultimate Gung Ho flashlight
will
cook an egg.

“Hey, look!” Kirby holds the can up to show Jacey, who barely notices because she’s still mostly involved with her short GI and his crafty vaporizer.

“Jesus!” Kirby drops the hot can and flicks his burned fingers in the air to cool them off. Scrambled egg spills onto the sand. Out of everyone’s sight, tears flood my eyes at the thought of Kirby Kernshaw with his spindly arms and freckle-smeared lips packing an empty tuna can and an egg,
an egg,
down a cliff just so he can impress his latest batch of new friends with the special trick he can do with his special toy. I know it is totally stupid to be bawling for Kirby Kernshaw, but that knowledge does nothing to slow the stream of tears. Instead they fall harder as I watch the guys windmilling karate kicks and Jacey oozing over her latest interchangeable drug source. We’re nothing but little baby birds in a nest, all open mouths, begging to be fed, to be liked, to have someone sit with us at lunch, to send us a Christmas card when we’re gone, to remember that we were ever here when our two—three, if we’re lucky—years are up and we have to start all over again at a new school with new Quasi-friends. Who’ll also forget us as soon as we’re gone.

Then, in the way I’ve been doing ever since it happened, I shift straight from sadness to anger, and Kirby’s naked show of need starts to work on me like a dentist’s drill, and I despise him. How has he not had it drummed into him that brats don’t whine? We don’t plead. We don’t need. We require nothing. Not even real roots. We’re air ferns. Kirby Kernshaw annoys me so much that I want to club his head in with a rock. I scrub the black mascara slurry off my face with the back of my hand.

I edge away from the fire. No one notices when I leave. I didn’t expect them to. There’s a myth that, because we move so much, military kids are geniuses at making friends. That we’re social chameleons who can blend in anywhere. And for a few freaks, it’s true. There are a minute number of brats who can strut into any school, anywhere in the world, get the social scene wired by second period, assemble an entourage by third, work their way up to the cheerleaders’ table by the end of lunch, be elected president of student council by the last bell, and reign over homecoming court that night. There are mutants like that in any group. Maybe we have a few more than average because all the moving
gives us more practice and turns some of us into ingratiation whores. In the end, though, what all military kids are truly gifted at, the social skill we’ve mastered better than any other, is
un
making friends. We’re geniuses at leaving people behind.

And I was better at it than most. Why shouldn’t I be? Codie was the one who mattered. A few days after she received her diploma from Pueblo Heights High, then Frisbeed her mortarboard across Tingley Coliseum, Codie left for Basic at Lackland. For the first few weeks the air force held her and all the other new recruits incommunicado. Then we got a preprinted card telling us where we could send mail, and even a time when Codie would be allowed to call us and talk for exactly three minutes. The card warned us not to worry. “Your recruit is adjusting to a new way of life and will sound scared, unhappy, and uncertain about whether he or she has made the correct decision.” But when we finally spoke, Codie was confident, happy, and utterly certain that she
had
made the correct decision.

“I was born to do this,” she’d crowed. “There’s always someone to tell you what to do, and it’s always a succession of random, unrelated tasks that you’re not expected to understand. And best of all, there are never any papers to write and you almost never have to read. Dyslexia with a touch of ADHD is like having a superpower in the military. I’m such a rock star here.”

“You were always a rock star, Kimchi.”

“You can’t call me that anymore. The big deal now is that we’re pivoting our forces into Asia.”

“ ‘Pivoting’ our forces?”

“Yeah, don’t you love that? Like we’re just gonna do a sweet little pirouette and vanish from Afghanistan, then pop back up in Yongsan, South Korea. No, listen, the Middle East? Yeah, it’ll always be hot, but not cool like the Far East is gonna be. China, Korea, Japan. It’s gonna be all about the Pacific Rim now, baby. How perfect is that? I even look the part. Hey, I’ve got a whole career ladder and everything.”

“A career?” I thought that I could just about hang on by my fingernails for two years until she got out; then I had it all planned: We’d go to college together. With her SF experience, Codie would be a shoo-in for law enforcement. “You mean you’re not coming back when your hitch is up? You’re staying in?”

“Don’t say it like that. Luz, I think I can get commissioned.”

“An officer?”

“Yeah, why not? Because we were raised noncom?”

“No. Of course not. Absolutely you could be an officer. I just never in a million years thought that—”

“What? I’d be a lifer? I can hardly believe it myself. But, Luz, listen, for real, for once in my whole existence, I am seriously good at something. I am seriously good at being a soldier. I guess I just needed the structure or something.”

“Like we didn’t get enough structure growing up? Like our lives weren’t run by Mom’s Duty Rosters?”

“At home, sure. Sporadically. When she wasn’t falling in or out of love.”

“In and out of bed, more like. Mom had to have the military for structure or she’d be so far off the rails it wouldn’t be funny. But you? Codie, you don’t need it.”

“Luz, you don’t know that. You don’t know what it’s like in my head.”

“Tell me, Codie. Make me understand.”

“I got people in line behind me waiting for this phone. They won’t give us back our personal ones for another month. Can’t you just accept that this is my choice? It’s what I choose to do.”

“Or maybe you’re just doing what Mom programmed us to do.”

“You got the same programming and I don’t see you rushing out to enlist. Come on, Luz, be happy for me. For the first time in my life I don’t feel like a retard loser.”

“That’s the thing; you never were. You said it yourself so many times. It was because we moved so much. By the time a teacher figured out that—surprise!—even if you spelled ‘stop’ ‘pots,’ you were really fucking smart, and even if, maybe, next year, they’d get you assigned to the right class with the right teacher, we’d be gone by then.”

“Boo-fuckin’-hoo. It is what it is.”

It is what it is?
I can’t believe she uttered the ultimate Gung Ho statement of idiocy in any way except making fun of our mother, who says that exact thing way too often.

“Is Mom around? I need to ask her if she knows my DI.”

Though I knew what a DI is, I tried to shake her out of Gung Ho mode by asking, “Your what?”

“Drill instructor. Is Mom there?”

I put our mother on and she barked, “What’s the sit rep?”

She meant “situation report.” Mom was still wearing her camo BDUs, her hair pulled up tight into a French braid that didn’t extend more than the three inches in bulk that the air force authorized. They talked to each other in the foreign language that I’d resisted my whole life and my sister had secretly become fluent in, and it was all MTIs and MEPs and BMC.