12 Hours In Paradise
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Authors: Kathryn Berla
12 Hours In Paradise
By Kathryn Berla
12 Hours In Paradise
Copyright © 2016 by Kathryn Berla.
All rights reserved.
First Print Edition: April 2016
Limitless Publishing, LLC
Kailua, HI 96734
Formatting: Limitless Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1-68058-570-4
ISBN-10: 1-68058-570-3
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
For my husband George. My one true love, inspiration, and fellow traveler through the late night streets and beaches of Waikiki, where magic is simply a state of mind.
My parents often remind me that my whole life is ahead of me.
There’ve been more times than I can remember when I’ve felt it was already behind me.
But one day not too long ago, from the time the sun set to when it rose again, my entire life was contained within twelve precious hours.
Reflected back at me through a boy’s eyes.
Sampled by his lips.
Held tightly in his arms.
***
“We’d better get back to the hotel if you don’t want to miss our last happy hour.”
My ten-year-old brother Chester’s mouth went upside down. “I wish we were staying longer. I don’t wanna go back to stupid school. I don’t wanna go back to stupid Reno and stupid snow.”
“Why’s Reno stupid?” I couldn’t argue with the snow part. Chester and I were deviants—Nevada natives who didn’t ski.
“Duh. Because that’s where school is. Let’s go in here.” He ducked into the Honolulu Cookie Company before I could say no. I followed him inside.
“Dorothy,” he squealed in a much-too-loud voice. “Everything’s free.”
He stood in front of a row of cookie pieces, each flavor separated from its neighbor by a clear plastic wall.
The store lady smiled sweetly. “Let me know if I can help you with anything,” she said. A fragrant plumeria blossom was tucked behind her ear.
“Chocolate chip macadamia,” Chester continued in his way-too-loud voice. “White chocolate coconut, dark chocolate lili…lili…”
“Lilikoi,” the store lady rescued him. “Please help yourself to a sample.”
Before I could stop him, Chester dove into one of the bins and pulled out a bare-handed fistful of samples.
“Chester!” I was mortified. “You’re supposed to use the tongs. And just take one.”
I wrenched him away from the tasting counter and backed right into a sturdy body, whose face became apparent when he grabbed my shoulders and I twisted my neck to survey the damage I’d done.
“Ouch.” A glassy, blue-eyed stare from a boy whose blond good looks turned my face hot.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.” I dug my nails into Chester’s puny bicep, but he knew enough not to cry out.
“It’s fine, really. Nothing a cast on my foot for six weeks won’t take care of.” He pulled his foot out from underneath mine and released his hands from my shoulders. It was then I noticed his friends who were in varying stages of amusement from snickering to outright laughing at me. I wanted to hide under a rock.
“My brother…” I mumbled. “Sorry.”
“No problem,” he said in an American accent I pegged as West Coast. “Here, have a—” he glanced at the tasting counter, “—triple chocolate macadamia.”
He pulled out a chunk of nearly black cookie and hovered the tongs over my open palm before swinging it over to Chester. “Is this what you were after, buddy?”
Chester for once was speechless, as was I. He tossed the cookie piece into his mouth.
“Thanks,” I mumbled. “Let’s go, Chester.”
I took him by the hand as though he was five instead of ten and dragged him toward the door.
“Wait.” Chester found his voice again. “We can have as much as we want. It’s free.”
“Bye, Chester,” the blond god called out after us, with a chorus of chuckles rising up behind him.
My last glimpse was of his smiling face, his dimpled cheeks, and two or three other guys all enjoying the show. At my expense, of course.
“He liked you,” Chester said once we were out on the sidewalk. “I was just trying to give you some more time to get to know him.”
“What are you talking about?” Chester always seemed to come up with new ways to annoy me. “Dude, you were so embarrassing in there. You don’t pick up food with your bare hands in public where other people are eating from the same place. You think strangers want your germs? God! Sometimes I think the doctor dropped you on your head when you were born.”
“Duuuuude,” Chester mocked me. “That guy liked you. I could tell by the way he smiled at you. Ha-ha!”
“Ha-ha yourself. You don’t know what you’re talking about, and besides, he’s not my type even if you were right, which you’re not.”
Inwardly, I was glowing and wondering if Chester was right. Did the guy really think I was cute? Was he flirting with me by paying attention to my little brother?
“Like you have a type,” Chester mocked. “Since when?”
“Since shut up or I’m telling Mom and Dad what you did in there.”
We were standing in front of our hotel, and it was almost time for happy hour, which had been the highlight of the trip for him even though it only meant guava juice, pretzels, and garlic popcorn. Anything that was free was nirvana to Chester. He didn’t consider that what my parents were paying for the hotel rooms more than covered the cost of a few cheap snacks at the end of the day.
He slumped down on the sidewalk. “I don’t want to go home.” He scowled. “I want to stay in Hawaii forever.”
“Come on, Chester, get up. The sidewalk’s dirty, and you’ll miss your happy hour. Just grow up and make a ton of money. Then you can come back to Hawaii and live here forever.”
His face lit up, and I thought I’d succeeded in shaking him out of his misery.
“That guy followed us,” he said. “I told you he liked you.” Chester pointed across the street.
But when I looked up to see who he was talking about, I saw no blond, dimpled, blue-eyed future movie star. I saw a slender, brown-haired boy, slightly above average height and wearing round, wire-rimmed glasses. And then I recognized him as one of the backup guys in the cookie store. The one who had been snickering. Or had he just been smiling?
“
That’s
who you meant?”
I didn’t mean to sound so unkind.
“Who’d you think?” The boy was flagging us down from across the street and looking both ways as though waiting for a break in the traffic to cross. “The blond guy? Dream on.”
We stood there dumbly, both of us wondering what the guy wanted from us. When the opportunity arose, he darted across the street just ahead of a speeding cab that sounded its horn as it passed, barely missing him. He did a little twirling kind of a dance step to wave to the disappearing cab and then hopped up on the curb right next to me.
“You dropped these in the store.” He held out Chester’s bright-yellow-framed sunglasses. “They’re yours, right?” he asked me.
“They’re my brother’s.” How could he think I’d wear glasses that ugly? Chester took the glasses and smiled warily.
“No matter. I still did a good deed, correct?”
“Correct, I guess. Anyway, thanks.” I pinched Chester’s shoulder. “You
could
say thanks, you know.”
“Thanks.”
“What happened to your friends?” I asked, relieved in a way that he was alone but disappointed it wasn’t the blond guy returning the glasses.
“Yeah, Dorothy liked your friend.”
I wanted to kill Chester, but any movement or remark I made would only have compounded my embarrassing situation.
“Let me guess…Harrison with the blond hair. Most girls like him.” I made out the barest hint of an accent behind his words.
“Brothers.” I laughed with false bravado. “Love to make stuff up, you know?”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “I’m an only child, so I never had the privilege—” he looked over at Chester and smiled, “—or the
curse
of a sibling.”
“It’s a curse,” I mumbled.
“But to answer your question,” he continued, “my friends went off to surf. But I had a task to perform—a good deed, I hope. And I have no desire to surf.”
“You talk funny,” Chester said, and I pinched him. “Ouch! Well, he does.”
“Funny peculiar? Or funny ha-ha?” the boy asked with genuine curiosity.
“I don’t know. Just funny.”
“You’ll have to forgive him,” I offered. “The doctor dropped him on his head when he was born.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.” He looked at Chester as you would a dog in the pound that was about to be put to sleep.
“That’s a lie,” Chester shouted. “She always says that.”
“Just an expression.” I was embarrassed by Chester’s constant exaggerated reactions to everything. He really was going to drive me crazy.
“Then that’s good news, isn’t it? That he wasn’t dropped on his head after all? Shall we celebrate the good news?”
“We have to go,” I said. “It’s our last night before we go home, and Chester likes to do the happy-hour thing at our hotel. That’s where we’re heading now.”
“I love happy hour!” the guy said. I figured him to be around my age. “A great place to celebrate Chester’s narrow miss from being dropped on his head at birth.”
“You can come with us,” Chester said. “Because my parents and Granny are packing, so they won’t be there. If they were there, you couldn’t come.”
Chester had no filter. Never heard of one, probably never would.
“Is this okay with you?” the nameless boy asked me. For the first time I noticed his eyes. Dark, almost black. Long, thick lashes. Beautiful, really. All of that hidden behind his glasses.
“Sure,” I answered before thinking it through.
“I know your names. Dorothy. Chester. Are you curious about mine?”
“Kind of…” Chester was getting bored, I could tell.
“Of course,” I answered.
“My name is Arash, but people at school call me Ari.”
“Why?” Chester had sunk back to the sidewalk in spite of my efforts at tugging on his arm to make him stand up.
“It’s a nickname. Arash is strange to them, so they latch on to something more familiar.”
“Dorothy and I have dumb names.” Chester grudgingly stood up, at last yielding to my pressure. “My mom said she gave us old-fashioned names so nobody else would have the same names as us in school.”
“Let’s go.” I led the way to the street-level elevator, which would only operate with a hotel key card.
But Chester wasn’t done embarrassing me. “So we all have dumb names,” he said brightly.
“On the contrary,” Ari said. “We all have special names. Your mother chose to honor the past and connect you to tradition.”
The elevator door opened and we stepped inside. I slid my key card in the slot, and the door closed, causing me my usual moment of panic before it began to move.
“Then how about you? Arash is a weird name.”
“It means
bright arrow
. My mother is Persian, so she chose a Persian name. Like your mother, she chose to connect me to the past. Her past.”
Bright Arrow
, I thought.
How
beautiful.
“Cool,” Chester said. The elevator lurched to a stop, and I had another mild moment of panic before the door opened. “I like Bright Arrow. Can I just call you Bright Arrow?”
“I’d prefer if you didn’t.” Arash smiled good-naturedly.
We stepped into the open-air lobby, where tables had been set out with bowls of the usual happy-hour snacks. A light breeze ruffled my hair, and scarlet-headed birds darted from table to table, looking for crumbs. Pigeons strutted purposefully under the tables, scurrying away whenever a human foot got too close.
Chester made a beeline to the bar, where he ordered a virgin strawberry daiquiri. Arash and I followed him, each of us ordering guava juice. I really
was
going to miss Hawaii. I never got to drink guava juice in Reno. I never got to feel air this soft against my bare skin. The surf pounded in the distance. I’d miss that sound too. A constant. The heartbeat of this island.
We sat down at an open table while Chester brought back bowl after bowl of chips, popcorn, pretzels, and everything else he could get his hands on.
“So is that why you talk funny?” he asked when he finally sat down. “Because your mom is Persian?”
“I grew up in six different countries,” Arash said. “I speak four languages. So my accent is a mixture of all the places I’ve ever lived. A mongrel accent.”
“A mongrel,” Chester said. “Like Genghis Khan?”
“Oh my God.” I shook my head. “Genghis Khan was a Mongol, not a mongrel.” I turned to Arash and rolled my eyes. “Sorry about my brother.”
But he just laughed. “Mongrel. Like a mutt. A mixture of many things.”
And then we talked about Reno and what it was like to live there.
And about the town outside of San Francisco where Arash lived.
And about how he was in Hawaii for a high school band competition.
And at some point Chester got bored and went up to our room to watch TV while my parents finished packing.
And at some point Arash asked if we could trade contact info just in case.
Just in case he ever came to Reno.
Just in case I ever went to San Francisco.
And at some point I realized Arash was not like any other guy I’d ever known. But in a good way.
And at some point after that, he left and I went up to the room I shared with Granny and finished packing my own stuff.
***
I remember all the little things, but I don’t remember the biggest thing.
How long after I finished packing before I mentally said good-bye to Hawaii and crawled into bed? How long before Mom knocked on the door to the room I shared with Granny to say good night and tell me lights out because we had to wake up early the next day? How long before I heard my granny’s heavy breathing, signifying she’d gone to sleep? How long before I drifted off myself?