Hapa Girl: A Memoir

22. The Lone Apache

One night I heard my brother’s motorcycle racing up the driveway , spewing gravel. It was late, I should have been in bed asleep, but I had insomnia and was always awake now. My father was gone to Chicago or there’d have been hell to pay, he’d shout at Jeff for coming home at this hour. But he was gone, so my brother came to my room and stood outside my door. “You awake?” he whispered. Maybe he didn’t even have to say the words. I sensed his presence, got up from my bed, and came into his room. “I thought I was going to die,” my brother said. And then he told me what had happened. It’s a dark night and all the kids are gathered in the parking lot behind the high school. The moon keeps disappearing behind the clouds racing across the sky as though they need to be in Minnesota before daybreak, as though they are being chased. The wind is odd this evening, not spring-like, not moist like most March winds. This one howls like a blizzard, lashes the skin like a whip. Everyone gathers in the parking lot after the basketball game. There’s nothing else to do. The restaurants don’t stay open past nine. The bars won’t let teenagers in. There’s no mall, no McDonald’s, no multiplex—this town is too small. So everyone gathers in the bluewhite pools of light beneath the three or four street lamps. They 22 The Lone Apache clump together, girls with girls, boys with boys, eyeing each other with curiosity. The steady couples have already gone elsewhere. They’re necking in the backs of the cars borrowed from their parents, in the cab of their best friend’s pickup. Everyone else is standing around in the parking lot. Some of the boys hoot, cupping their hands around their mouths. They hoot to see how the girls will react: will they like it? This sound like a monkey’s mating call? A few girls giggle. A few more boys hoot. The girls decide, no, they don’t like it, and turn away. The boys stop hooting. It’s exciting for no good reason except that everyone is young and the parents are gone; they have climbed into their cars and are in the process of driving away, back to this or that small town or to their farms. Some people have driven halfway across the state to watch the game. Some people keep the high school schedules taped to their calendars , stuck to their refrigerator doors with magnets, paper-clipped to the cover of their phone book on the kitchen counter, so they’ll be sure not to miss any. There’s nothing more interesting than high school sports. Watching the games brings back so many memories, what it was like to be young and full of potential, your whole life ahead of you. Your bones didn’t ache from sitting on a vibrating tractor seat all day, your knees didn’t crack when you bent over a cow in the muddy yard. You drank a lot but you didn’t feel like you’d been clocked in the temple with the butt of a gun the next morning. The only thing that reminds you of your youth is watching the young people play. It’s exciting to be sixteen. To feel the blood coursing through your veins, your strong, young, healthy heart pumping all those gallons of red blood through your pulsing, sweating, oily, hairy, hormonedriven body. My brother is standing with his two best friends, the farm kid and the kid who wishes he had a farm. They are watching the girls on the other side of the parking lot, pretending that they are not watching the girls. They are trying to be cool. My brother has on his new leather jacket, the one he got from the mall in Sioux City, Iowa. No one else has a jacket like this. It goes with his motorcycle. When the girls glance back at my brother and his friends, while pretending not to glance 160 • Chapter 22 back, they are in fact glancing at my brother. At sixteen, he is very nearly perfect looking. Tall, dark, wavy hair, green eyes, chiseled cheekbones. He’s muscular but trim. He looks like a movie star. Everyone is just standing...