The Dream Crib

She finally broke her gaze from the pot of water, as though mindful of the adage that a watched one never boils, to open up the pantry to search for something extra to throw in the soup. As a child, she'd loved making it with black pepper, though it may just have been that it was the one seasoning they actually kept on hand. Her mother was fond of throwing it into her mouth as punishment for using curse words in her presence, and as a result she had developed the taste for it. Their current pantry held cinnamon, rock salt, not much else usable.

She tried the fridge. A bottle of Grey Goose which she had not noticed before was sitting there. The buzz from the weed was dwindling into a slow, silent hum, and she thought a little vodka might be just the thing for it. Stirring the noodles in with the seasoning, she popped the bottle and measured out a cup. "I will not get drunk tonight," she said out loud.

She started crying just as the noodles had reached their desired level of firmness and the flavoring in the soup had found its consistency. Everything was balanced out, just the way she liked it, little bubbles clinging to the edges of the noodles, steam circling upward from the bowl she poured the broth into. It was all perfect. She threw the cup of vodka in and mixed it around, and cried softly, almost unaware of herself.

The bolt to the door turned just then, and Naomi walked in the door, tapping on her phone, not looking up. Calisto sniffed and carried her bowl over to the couch.

"You turned the light on... Smells good in here," Naomi said.

"Do you want some? It's got vodka in it."

"Vodka? Jesus H., Calisto, you're fucking stoned!"

"I've been crying but I'm okay."

"Oh my god babe, I'm so sorry. What did that guy do to you?"

"Nothing. We got ice cream. He hates Eric."

"I won't abandon you like that again, honest to Christ I've been running guilt trips the whole night. I invited you out and ditched you. If I ever do that again you can unfriend me."

"It was nice. We have a scary amount of things in common. And this is so good, you now have to try some," she blew on a forkful of hot noodles and offered them up.

"Thanks. Okay, you got me, I kind of heard some things about the freak's life story and thought, Hey, he sounds kind of like you. Maybe that's what you need. But that was a mistake and now I feel awful."

"Don't, come on. I'm serious, he's a nice guy. Yeah he's strange, but I don't know anyone who isn't. Thank you. Thank you for introducing us. This is gonna sound dumb, but I feel like I turned some kind of page tonight."

"Yeah well, next time I leave you alone with some guy who has drugs, call me up."

Calisto smiled to herself and packed her mouth with another forkful of vodka saimin. She was smiling because the last time Naomi had left her alone with a guy who was holding, that guy was James and the drug was coke and they'd ended up fucking off and on for 10 or 11 months before he finally made a clean break from her. Calisto would never think of blaming Naomi for that outcome, but her friend tended to hold herself responsible for any disasters that may befall her. Although their relationship had never become defined enough for him to be considered her "boyfriend" it was the last intimate one she'd had and if she didn't think of him as that the alternative was to loathe herself and languish in shame. She'd thought of herself as free and open at the time, when was she really was was attached and lovesick. And she had never wanted to be one of those girls -- unable to distance herself from the emotions a man had made her feel, always deluding herself that this time, no this time when he breaks down in tears and begs her to come back and swears that his father never showed him how to be faithful so how could he learn it from scratch, this time he wouldn't turn around the next day and start cheating on her with the first fair-looking piece of ass he laid eyes on, he would control what he referred to as his "sickness", he would love only her.

Recalling the drama made her realize that perhaps Naomi had been on to something -- Monte couldn't have been different from James, and that had to have been taken into consideration. Afraid she'd made Monte out to be a shadier character than he actually was, she downplayed her uneasiness with the note they'd ended the night on and backpedaled. "He's probably the type of guy who would be good for me. Which might explain why we have no compatibility on that kind of ground whatsoever."

"You sure about that? I think he digs you." Naomi was calling this from the hallway bathroom, her toothbrush working though the garble.

"Then it's a one-way thing. Actually, he wouldn't stop talking about his failed marriage." It's wasn't true, and Calisto had no reason to lie about it. Yet the fallout from his previous relationship had hung in the background of their entire evening, like an unremarked-upon odor.

"Well, better luck with the next one." She emerged from the hallway in her robe, taking her hair down. "I think this is a good start for you. Besides, any experience is better than none, right?"

Calisto shrugged. Mixing vodka with two bags roast beef saimin noodle soup had not been a bad idea. The first few bites were savory, but the alcohol had meddled with the consistency of the broth and rendered the whole mess soggy and unappetizing. She put it aside, resolving to finish it later.

"Listen," Naomi went on, "I have to talk serious for a second. Eric's manager friend found this really cute duplex for you. It's in Kaimuki, you'd have to find a ride. But we would help you out with that until then. Three other girls live there, they all work super hard and none of them have pets. It's perfect."

"Can we not do this right now?"

"Look, I know you're holding out for that raise, or that promotion, whatever it is. But in your price range, this is as good as it will get right now."

"I had a couple more months, or thought I did."

"And you can always look around once you get established. Now we've carried you this far, and you know I hate to do this. But it's time to get realistic."

"I just remembered, I have to go smoke --" Calisto got up and opened her pack. "Twelve cigarettes in a row. Let's pick this up later, okay?"

"At least look at the place," Naomi stopped her on the way to the door and pressed a card into her hand. "You can check out the pics on Craigslist. It'll mean a lot to me if you look. It's the best place yet."

"Thanks," said Calisto, accepting the card without looking at it, making haste to get out the door, like a guilty shoplifter.

You weren't supposed to sneak onto the roof of their building via an old fire exit on their floor. If the manager saw her going up there she would catch hell for it; even a member of the maintenance crew who did repairs in the apartments had managed to get a former tenant evicted when they were caught using that stairway, which was a safety hazard that never got brought up to code. But it was late and she was alone, so the noise which commonly gave away would-be prowlers and trespassers could be kept to a minimum. This rooftop had always been Calisto's favorite spot to smoke, and she crouched near the edge lifting deadly toxins into her face and exhaling them out again.

She liked this particular roof for a specific reason, though. She could look down on the Dream Crib from up here. The pool on the roof of the Dream Crib was empty, but the lights to the pool were turned on, and the pale blue water in it rippled and undulated, reflecting back the higher lights of the city to their sources. This was where she had planned on living once Naomi and Eric got married. A modest enough building from the outside, but with luxurious 2 bed/2 bath rental units that each took up one half of an entire floor, in a plum location mere blocks from the ocean that was adjacent enough to the heart of downtown without being surrounded by its most congested areas (like the Seafood Square where she worked). She could've afforded it too, if she had been able to convince James, who was a commercial real estate developer, to move in there with her. The owner of the unit she wanted, on the 6th floor, was a friend of his family and would've pro-rated their rent and deposit. The idea that she stayed with him (or tried to) for so long because his salary would've made it possible for her to live in the Crib of her Dreams was one of the guilty, shameful thoughts that drove her to do things like smoke entire packs of smokes in a single night or sit in dark rooms neglecting her most basic desires. This was partly why it was important to convince herself that she had been in love; it seemed to justify the lengths she went to more so than rational concerns like living arrangements and financial solvency. You can question motives that are based in pragmatic reasoning more scrutinously than you can ones that stemmed from emotions and unaccountable human attractions. Matters of the heart have the advantage of being beyond debate.

The truth was, Calisto could've afforded it herself after her mother had died, at least initially. When she'd sold her clothing label to a friend who owned her own boutique she had kept an interest in the rival company as part of the deal, which had grown considerably in the years following and would cash out and be left to her daughter in the event of her death. True, the few tens of thousands that this investment was worth would only cover about half a years's rent at the Dream Crib (not counting the cost of utilities and the basic essentials of a comfortable life), but there were moments when Calisto had seriously contemplated quitting her job with the Hawaiian Airlines customer service center, moving into the place alone, and just living in lap of luxury, generally spending that time recuperating from the challenges of the past year and figuring out where she truly wanted to go next from there, until her inheritance was all used up. This was the stuff of idle fantasy of course, and even in her worst moments she knew this sort of life would soon lead to boredom and restlessness, and the pain of being evicted from her Dream Crib would far outweigh the quiet comfort of spending a few months there.

No, the Dream Crib was not a place you spent a few days in like a timeshare, it was a place where you went to retire. She knew on some level that she would be unable to drag her standard of living backward once she had experience such a radical upgrade. Anyplace she moved after that would seem poor and depressing in comparison. Another part of her fear of letting things finally end with James was that it had honest-to-God been the most stable and healthy relationship she'd yet experienced with a man (which was saying something in itself), and the thought of leaving that and ending up in something that didn't quite match it, or worse, simply repeated her old cycles of pining after boys who never seemed to return the same measure of affections was just too heartbreaking to face. It was the same way with the Dream Crib. She hadn't wanted to move there unless it was going to be a permanent move, and after James broke it off with her she lost all desire to live there at all. It was the kind of place you wanted to share.

Leveled

"Let's get me more smokes," he said. Perversely, the convenience stores nearby had long since closed, and they would have to stray seven blocks West from Seafood Square to find the nearest Seven-Eleven. Calisto was feeling a walk at that time anyway, and badly wanted to get a bottled water, the sugary-dairy confections having left a filmy residue all down her gullet. Anyway, the area was getting too crowded and noisy. The night suited a constitutional, and they pulled their drags with a palpable sense of relief at having escaped the site where they spent the majority of each day anyway.

Taxis were pulling up. Mopeds and weird little 2-seater rental convertibles that looked like bumper cars gone runaway went by, lending the night an ever more surreal air. No longer feeling the need to keep up the chatter, they walked as if not even together, like they just happen to be moving in the same direction, at the same pace.

Calisto was in one of her stoned zoning-out moments where her thoughts and impressions were so loud and vivid they threatened to drown out the actual world. She was thinking, I need to get out of that apartment but I don't know how.

A bike flew by, barely able to maintain its trajectory along the sidewalk with the two of them walking abreast. Calisto jumped, instinctively, toward Monte, as the bike swerved around a lamppost.

"Hey!" Monte shouted after it. "Fucking crackhead," he muttered as the cyclist disappeared down the way. "Go smoke a dealer's dick. You ok?"

"Yeah," she said. Then Monte laughed like a jackass. "What?"

"We had this crazy dude we were treating for his hypertension, the other week. One of those guys you see walking down the street jabbering at himself the whole time. But highly articulate, at that. He was talking about how he hates this town and all the rude people in it, then somehow he got on the subject of people on bikes. He said, 'The Bible says the Apocalypse will come on a horse, but here in Town it will come on a bike.'"

"Jesus."

"Super serious about it too. Looked at me dead in the eye. Don't know how I didn't just shit myself, whether from fear or mirth."

"So what are you gonna do now that you're giving up your ritual?"

"I thinking I'll try your way. Just not let myself have anything I want. Sounds fun."

"Well, you can see how much good it's done for me."

Her phone buzzed, and she snatched it from her bag like she was swatting at a fly. "'Sorry babe, we were an hour early," she read verbatim. "'Be home later, don't wait up.'"

"You called it. Why did you say you needed to get out of her hair earlier?"

"Cause I do. Too much sitting around, nothing going on. You'll see how it is, if you try it my way." She had neglected to mention the parts of her routine that involved smoking every last cigarette she had left and spinning Adele's 21 over and over again -- glaring exceptions to her rule of deprivation.

They walked out of left the Seven-Eleven, Monte packing the flip-top box against his palm and Calisto chugging her Dasani. "Lead the way," he said, making a gentlemanly gesture with his wrist, once he'd lit the first cigarette, its orange ember tracing circular patterns in the night air. Ambulance sirens screamed in the distance as they headed back in the direction that they came. It seemed that sirens were always going off in Town, no matter what time of the day or night. "That's that guy on the bike," Monte insisted. "Got hit by a car. There were no survivors. The driver died too."

Calisto smiled politely, his banter feeling suddenly too morbid for her. "What about you, who do you stay with during a divorce?"

"Staying at my mom's place right now. My pops kicked it a couple years back, and ever since then she's been saying I can crash there."

"I'm sorry. I lost my mom back in April." Somehow it came back around to death no matter where they started from.

"Ouch. OK, so your roommate has no right to be fed up with you at this point, right? Not while you're still grieving."

"She's not fed up with me. She's engaged and in love and probably stressing out over everything, and I'm moping around when it's time for me to be happy for her."

"My dad, when he was passing, he said to me, 'Take care of her,' and I didn't. And she was leveled, mind you, I just wasn't equipped for any of it. And then one day my wife leaves me and she takes me in, not even looking for an apology, as if I never turned my back on her."

"Right, so in that same way, I don't hold anything against Naomi if she is getting a little impatient with me right now."

"It's your time of need! When she loses someone she loves, then she'll understand."

"I don't know if I even understand."

They left it at that. The rest of the way home, they mostly didn't talk about loss or death or the role of the comforting survivor. They didnt talk about much of anything, really. Just lapsed into a pot-induced stupor with their individual thoughts circling. Anyway, there came a certain point with a new acquaintance where no matter how well you were getting on together, the effort of remaining pleasant company no longer seemed worth it. Calisto thought to herself: I got out, I met someone new, I did my part. The night can be over now, and her mind it already was.

At one point she asked him what his father had done for a living, and he responded that he owned a restaurant she had never heard of which no longer existed. "Did he ever want you to do the same thing?" she asked, but this line of questioning didn't lead anywhere. Monte didn't seem keen on discussing what kind of impact the loss of his old man had had on him. Unfortunately, she felt the need to keep pressing, and followed up with this question next: "How did he go?"

"Painfully. Slowly. Long enough to still give me nightmares. He cried and kept saying he wish he had the strength to end it himself, and we kept telling him we'd help if it were legal. Finally one day he just checked out. Stopped acknowledging us, or maybe it just got to his brain. A few days later he was gone."

This came out in a barrage, with no opportunity for interruption, yet replying to such a morbid disclosure immediately felt like a bad idea. After a long silence, she responded, "I meant, what did he die of."

"Oh. Liver failure."

That exchange had somehow seemed to cast the night into relief, exposing everything that had gone on before as a series of misbegotten attempts at salvaging a lousy setup. A simple misunderstanding maybe, but one that read at the time as a serious incompatibility between them. How could Naomi have left her alone with this creep? Or, why did she think the thing she needed to lift her spirits was a stoned walkabout with a stranger who she could never possibly relate to on any level?

They'd had a pleasant enough parting at the door of her building (Calisto had simply turned and said "This is me," and he said to her "We had a good time, didn't we?" and she nodded and he had turned around and said "See you on Monday"), but by the time she got up to their studio she was only too relieved to be by herself again. Moving through the door of 16B slowly and soundlessly -- she had walked in on Naomi and Eric fucking on more than one occasion, and her strategy was to lock herself in the bathroom until it was over, which she was prepared to do tonight -- she flicked on the lights and headed for the fridge. The pit of her stomach yawned with hunger, and it was a hell of a time to not have anything to eat. She didnt feel like cooking eggs or microwaving frozen breakfast sandwiches. Finally she settled on making two bags of saimin, roast beef flavor. 

She stared at the water on the hot plate, waiting for it to boil. She never made saimin. The older single ladies at her work made it in a microwave. She found it depressing, for no particular reason. This had been a food she would often make for herself as a kid, when her mother wasn't around because she was attending to some aspect of her business. It was the only thing she knew how to make besides PBJs. At the time, it had been fun. Self-reliance has about it an air of power, as low-scale as it is, and every young child craves the rush of sneaking sweets when she's not supposed to know where they're hidden, or staying up past bedtime during whispery, flashlight-waving sleepovers. Feeling grown-up, however, soon gives way to feeling grown-out, and even the power trip of determining one's own fate soon becomes burdensome, as any post-collegiate job-seeker will tell you.

Double-barrel tragedy

'He got each of them a dark chocolate-red velvet cupcake and a caramel ice cream sundae. Calisto didn't even know that they served ice cream sundaes there. If the intention was to give the impromptu date some kind of official feel, it was working. Monte had played it smart. She had felt like her mouth was hot-glued shut ever since the weed had run out, and he had taken her to familiar surroundings (thus taking the pressure off of the interaction, as if implicitly saying: we can just be ourselves here) and bought her something sweet and cold. They had broken the ice by getting stoned together, and now they could ignore each other for a few moments and focus on their desserts, which they both attacked with gusto, sitting at a two-chair table near an open-air restaurant.

"This is so fucking good," Calisto said.

Monte nodded. "I am really, really high."

She suppressed a giggle, as if the cop might reappear at any moment and piece together what had happened. "This was a good idea," she said. "Thanks for the treat."

"You know what's sad? This has been my after-hours ritual every day for the last month, and up until now I've been doing it all alone."

"This is your idea of sad? That's your real problem right there."

"If you were by yourself right now, you'd see it. It's just craven indulgence. But I'm giving it up after tonight. I have to re-learn how to be alone again."

"I don't like hearing that."

"Why?"

"It doesn't give me much hope. It says, once something is over it stays that way."

"But that's how things are."

"It's like this. I picture myself, going through life, little pieces falling off of me, some important, some not. Like I'm a boat in a storm and shit keeps falling overboard. And all I can do is keep moving forward, because that's all there is to do. And eventually there will be nothing left and my life will have amounted to this, this trail of debris that went missing. Irretrievable."

Monte laughed in a way that attempted to convey incredulity and empathy at the same time. "We can't return, we can only look. Behind from where we came. You don't know that song?"

"No. You know what's really sad? My ritual these days is the opposite of yours. Instead of indulging, I deprive. I don't eat, I stay awake, not because I'm not hungry or tired, but just to see how much I can go without, or how little I can survive on."

"You have an eating disorder."

She waved a spoon of ice cream and pointedly stuck it in her mouth. "Look. It's not an eating disorder, it's a fulfillment disorder. I won't let myself enjoy anything, I sit in a dark room, I try not to think about anything nice. I hate knitting, so I sit around knitting in the dark!"

"Nice hat, by the way. I meant to point it out before."

She took off the aquamarine wool-knit cap she'd been wearing and set it down on the table. "This is the disorder. No wonder we got ditched."

"Eric is a dick, so I'm fine with it."

"She said he was your friend."

"I can't stand him. You can?"

"It's different with us." This was tricky territory for Calisto to navigate, even now. She had been convinced that it was never truly possible to fully approve of your boyfriend's best friend; the best relationship you could hope for was a friendly rivalry, since you would always be in competition with each other. But after her double-barrel tragedy of losing her mother and being dumped by James, Eric had been there for her, right there with Naomi, as much as if he'd been her best friend all along. They'd stay in with her when things were rough, bring her little presents and treats (no boy had ever bought her flowers before; even while consciously thinking she should not attach this much meaning to it, she could not keep her eyes from welling up gratefully at the gesture), and now they had brought her out and introduced her to this guy -- not her type at all, but she couldn't remember the last time she got on so well with someone after having just met them. Maybe, she thought, we don't know our own type as well as we think we do. "Eric has been really sweet to me, but I think it's because he knows he has to win me over if I'm gonna let him marry my roommate."

"Fuck him. Your roommate seems nice, I don't want to say anything bad about her, but why the fuck is she with a piece of shit like that?"

"What do you find so hateful about him, exactly?"

"I don't know, I just want to punch his fucking face every time I see him. It's an irrational hate, but so what? Nobody said hate had to make any sense."

She wouldn't have said so out loud, but she knew where he was coming from. The first time Naomi had brought him around was privately one of the few serious tests of their friendship. She knew what kind of guy would be right for her -- tall, piercing eyes, a smile that radiated warmth and humor, and most of all, dressed to kill. So seeing her with this stoic, withdrawn, shorter-than-her, hair already thinning, eyesore of a person felt not only wrong, but traitorous. She remembered feeling like the mother whose little girl had brought home the baddest boy she could find, specifically because she knew she would hate him. It had taken a lot of effort from both of them to bring her around. "I know you have reasons. Are you an anesthesiologist too?"

"I'm training to be a male nurse. I have to say male. Everybody says it."

"I don't know what he's like to work with, but I think you're being unfair."

"What he's like to work with is, he's there and I have to work with him. That's bad enough. If he wasn't, I wouldn't care."

"Well, he brought us out tonight. And then he left us alone, you have to give him that."

"Tell him thanks for me later."

They ate in silence, their sundaes already sinking into puddles of ice milk at the bottom of their paper cups. The sun had long since gone down, but the heat of its rays would linger well into the night. Young people shuffled past their table, dressed in pastels and whites that glimmered faintly in the dark. Tourists checking out the nightlife, gabbing on cell phones to arrange meet ups or just making a racket for no apparent reason, as if even the prospect of future intoxication was enough to facilitate wild behavior. In this impending party atmosphere, Calisto now felt nervous and out of place. All the good will from the joint and the treats was fading, and she now felt abandoned with a guy she hardly knew, in the last place she wanted to be. Monte caught her clutching her coat around her, though it was not for he reason he thought.

"Cold? You downed that ice cream pretty fast."

"The wind is starting to get to me. I'm too fucked up to be here. Can we leave?"

He got up, pushing his chair back and gathering up all the trash. "I'll walk you home. Where do you live?"

"It's ok. It's just a few blocks." She said this even though she wanted the company.

"Come on, I'm not your roommate."

"Kaka'ako. What about you?"

"I live down Kalihi side."

"That's the opposite direction! Don't bother, I'll be fine."

"Please, there's a bus that goes through there all hours. There pretty much has to be. Motherfuckers use public transit as their mobile homes out there. Come on, we're doing this."

They got up from their table and immediately went for their cigarettes. A passing dude with either too much or not enough facial hair, it was hard to tell, stopped and asked Monte for one. This time, he pulled out the pack he'd been smoking out of earlier and found it truly was empty. He looked over at Calisto with a shrug as half-beard walked off. Calisto held his gaze, then produced her pack and pulled out two of her own.

Kill your own mother

They sat together in the silence between them letting the music and voices fill the air for them. The singer had just made her dedication of the final song to "two lovebirds I know who are finally tying the knot" when Monte spoke up.

"You can take out your phone, it's ok."

Calisto was mortified in her transparency, having not even unconsciously registered that she had been fingering the outer pocket of her bad all this time. "I hate when people do that. It's rude."

"Etiquette is cultural. And the culture we're in says it's ok."

She took it out. "I'm not like this," she said. "Just a nervous habit."

Monte took out his, and at that moment she realized he may have been condoning shunning one another in favor of electronics just so he didn't feel bad. "And what do you have to be nervous about?" he asked, not looking up.

She shrugged, scrolling through her Twitter feed. "This situation, it's an awkward one." Then she backtracked. "I mean, it's not really, I'm just a nervous person."

"Does meeting new people make you feel awkward?"

"No, not most of the time."

"Of course, we've seen each other around. Maybe that's what makes it awkward."

Calisto shoved her phone back into her bag. "Want to go for a smoke?"

They stepped into the night and lit up on the street corner, pedestrians and vehicles slowing down and passing by. Calisto could only produce sparks out of her lighter, until Monte cupped his hands around hers keeping the wind out, and drew in a deep breath, making her cherry glow.

After getting his lit, Monte said "I don't know what they told you about me, but I'm not looking for anything right now. I'm going through a divorce, but that doesn't mean I'm ready to move on just yet." He paused. "I mean, they told me you were single, so I'm not sure what they told you about me."

"Is that what you think this is?"

"I don't know. Does it feel like a set up to you?"

"It doesn't feel like anything to me."

"I'll keep you company tonight, don't worry. You seem nice, I'm into that. It's just the timing."

"It's not me, it's you?"

"Sorry. It's coming out wrong. What I'm trying to say is, I'm not actually like this. Haven't been myself for some time."

"It's ok. Whoever you are, I can handle it. You can't be at your best all the time."

A stranger stopped while passing them and asked if he could bum a cigarette. Calisto looked at Monte, and Monte reached in his pocket and produced an empty pack.

"Last one," he said.

The stranger left, and Monte replaced the pack. When the guy was out of sight, Monte pulled out a fresher pack and put a new cigarette between his lips, flicking the old butt away.

"Nice tactic," Calisto said.

"Works every time." He flicked his lighter.

"Now give me one. Buy my silence."

He obliged and they smoked for a while in silence. "Did you want to go back in after this?"

He shook his head. "I was thinking, do you like chocolate?"

"I'm listening."

"There's a cupcake place down the street that's still open. They have this dark chocolate-red velvet combo that you'll kill your own mother for."

"Sounds alright."

Of course Calisto knew about Devil's Food, the bakery downstairs from where they both worked, though she was more partial to the carrot cake variety. She did not relish the idea of straying too close to her workplace, but she seized the opportunity to get away from the coffeehouse, the noise of the Chinatown crowd and guitar chords following them into the night. After a few blocks they found themselves in a darker part of town, and uneasiness set in. They were approaching the square, and passers by were gradually dwindling to the roving homeless and the odd bicyclist. After flicking his next butt into a nearby puddle, Monte pulled the empty pack of cigarettes out, as if he didn't want to wait to be approached by another stranger to pull his little "last one" trick. This time, he opened the box, reached down behind the foil, and pulled out a little joint, wrapped in a crutch made from a rolled-up flap torn from a matchbook. They stopped at a crosswalk and Monte started lighting it up, taking deep puffs.

"Hurry up, hit it," he said, passing the j as the lights changed and the walk signal man came on.

"What the fuck, I can't hit this. We're going by where I work, someone might see me."

He gagged on his hit, speaking through the coughs. "It's where I work too. Hit it."

She took the weed and inhaled it like she was preparing to stick her head underwater. When she passed it back, Monte took it in his fingertips, then jammed it into his other fist.

"Fuck, a cop. Be cool."

There was indeed a police car rolling up to the next street corner in the right-turn lane, which they were already approaching. It stopped at the corner, as the light was red, and Calisto held her breath as tightly as she could, which was difficult with the lungful of weed smoke tickling her throat. She gagged, and Monte looked over at her. At this point the cop was rolling passed them, and she stared it down a Monte stared straight ahead. When it was gone, she let go of the cloud and unleashed a torrent of coughs as Monte dropped the live roach back into his free hand, waving the hand that had palmed it around in pain.

"Ahhhhh!" he said. "Fucking pig."

Calisto hadn't stopped coughing, and they were interspersed with the sort of giggles that come on not from imbibing cannabis but from getting away with something naughty in front of an authority figure. Before she had finished up, he was passing it to her again. When she could get her breath back, she managed "That was a bad idea," and immediately downed another hit.

"Like I said, I'm not like this." He said this is a choked voice, spewing his own smoke out and allowing himself a rather more polite series of coughs. "You're getting the shit end of me, and I apologize," in his regular voice. "Somebody left me and took all the good parts with her."

She no longer made any attempt to inhale or hold her smoke in -- it was too potent, and it'd been too long since she'd gotten high -- and she puffed on it like a stogie before passing it back to Monte to polish it off. "I don't see how this is your shit end. Nobody has smoked me out in forever. I mean, Naomi used to, but that was before she got with Eric."

"Wanna go say hi to them?" Squarehead's was on the other side of the Square as Devil's Food. Calisto reflected on the pointlessness of letting them run off for pulled pork and then going somewhere so close to where they were going to be. The area of the Square they were in was empty save for a few stragglers finally clocking out from their overtime and one of the security guards who hung around there all day.

Weirdly, the weed didnt kick in until they entered the cupcake place. The lighting was bright, the aroma of baked goods was strong, cloying, it made the air in the place stick to their clothes, and the thought of transacting a business arrangement that would result in a cupcake being place in her hand was too overwhelming to contemplate. Luckily, Monte ordered for her.

Jack pulled pork

The first bit of advice (though it felt more like extortion, as if her mother would not allow herself to die in peace unless Calisto agreed to carry out her las requests) was this:

"Don't ever work for anyone other than yourself."

Her mother had treated Calisto's insistence on attending college as a foolhardy exercise at best, and an excuse to live young and wild for a few years at worst. She was fond of saying "I never registered for a single course, and yet I've been supporting myself since I was 19 years old," which it was true had been the time when she started Haughty, although it was not successful enough for financial independence until years later. Ordinarily Calisto (who'd heard this spiel enough times to have it memorized front-to-back) would retort with "Not everybody wants that" or, in less patient moods, "There are more choices in life than making dresses all day," to which her mother would respond "It's either that or go into debt for 25 years just to learn how to make somebody else rich," and they'd be off again. This was well-trodden ground for both of them, and Calisto still harbored bitterness over her mother's lack of support in those early days and even partly still blamed her for her washout. But all she'd said was "I know, mom. I will."

The next piece of wisdom she had to impart was:

"Find a man worth keeping, and stay with him."

This one was actually harder to swallow. Calisto had never formally introduced any of her always-short-term boyfriends to her mother before. In high school, she was the kind of girl who'd take a gay boy to the prom so he could stay in the closet a few months longer. At least she would have if she had known any gay boys at that time, or at least any who made her aware of it. As it was, she spent prom night studying for entrance exams so she could get the hell out of her mother's house. Only after her death did it ever occur to her that her mother's disdain for academia may have been rooted in anxiety over losing her only child to the outside world, however distant their relationship had grown at that point, and in that realization Calisto struggled through several tear-filled nights trying to reconcile that she was in fact so driven to get into college specifically because she needed to spend time away from her mother.

But her mother had never married, and she knew her words of advice really meant "Get married while you're still young." Hers had been a liberated, enlightened generation, raised to believe that marriage was a failed, obsolete institution and that the traditional obligations of child rearing and housewifery were long dead. Perhaps for this reason Calisto had always felt herself to be a burden to her mother, and had grown to accept that her mother's business would always come first and hearing that she'd apparently changed her mind on this issue and now wished she had spent more time looking for a man to settle down with felt like a betrayal of her whole upbringing. Not that her upbringing was the ideal one to have, but it was still hers.

These were her mother's dying requests and at the time they didn't mean anything, but once the standard period of grieving was over and she had returned to whatever semblance of a live she had, they stuck with her. Actually, it was disturbing how quickly things got back to normal. She would think about her mother as if she were still alive, until she remembered she had died, and at that point those two nuggets of wisdom came back to haunt her again. She would wonder how her mother had settled on those two things being the last advices she'd give. Had it been a long-term plan, or had those things simply been at the forefront of her mind in her dying days? And why did they seem to contradict each other? One thing seemed to say "Do exactly what I did," and the other seemed to say "Don't do what I did." Yet it wasn't as if she had asked a lot of her, or that it was totally unfeasible to accomplish both of those things.

Calisto had been obsessing over these questions, in one of her typically pensive moods that night when Naomi had announced "That's it, you are going out with us tonight."

It wasn't as if this type of invitation was unheard of, but it was so unexpected that she could only respond: "Who's us?"

"Me and Eric and some guy he works with. Come on. If I leave you here tonight you'll fossilize."

It didn't appear to be a double date at the time, but looking back Calisto realized that was probably how it had been intended. If she'd had any inkling that her roommate intended to hook her up with the skeezy-looking guy who was always slinking around by her workplace, she never would've accepted, which was probably why it wasn't presented that way. 

The night went like this: The four of them met at a small coffeehouse on Hotel Street, ostensibly to see a friend of Eric's who went by the stage name Kolo. They had sat through an unreasonably protracted sound check and one acoustic slack key number when Naomi received a text from her work friend.

"We have to go," she said. "Jack pulled pork is $2.50 a tray for the next hour, and I'm starving."

"We just got here," Monte said.

Calisto knew better than to protest. Squarehead's was her and Eric's usual haunt, a bar and grill downstairs from where they all worked, and Naomi lived and died for the Jack Daniel's pulled pork they only served on certain nights, which was by far their most popular menu item. 

"I have to get there right away," she would say. "They run out of the shit after 10 minutes. It's that good. People riot to be first in line. I swear to god I saw someone scalping trays of it last time."

So her and Eric were gone, saying they would be back, Calisto declining to accompany them because she knew how those crowds would get and could not face them tonight, and Monte, being a vegetarian, not seeing the point in any of it.

"Jesus, that was abrupt," Monte said when they were gone.

"That's Naomi. That's Eric, too, really. They won't be back either."

"How do you know?"

"I know my roommate. She will text me with some excuse an hour from now, tell me not to wait up while they get some alone time. I think she brought me out tonight just to do this."

"That sounds shitty."

"I deserve it. I've been in her hair way too much lately. She needs a break from me."

A tendency to disappear

The main thoroughfare which ran through the outdoor dining area of Seafood Square was a large, open-air courtyard, the type of area which Calisto's roommate Naomi Hartson would refer to as a "rapist's paradise", or a good place to get kidnapped. Densely populated, full of narrow passageways and tight corners to disappear into, it seemed to Calisto like a location for a spy movie chase scene, and was in fact adjacent to the 5th Circuit Courthouse. At any given point in the day, actual convicts, accused suspects, and law enforcement officers could be found wandering the courtyard alongside messengers (on foot or on bicycles with file envelopes tucked under their arms), business people and immigrant families (the office Calisto worked in was 2 floors below the State Immigration Office and the elevator she took to work saw enough foreigners step on and off on a daily basis to staff a UN Embassy).

Owing to the preponderance of foot traffic weaving in and out of the courtyard and the confoundingly asymmetrical layout of the courtyard itself, it was perhaps no surprise that Monte Steinhouse, a med student interning at a nearby surgical center, always seemed to appear out of nowhere. A thin wisp of a man, he had a tendency to disappear into a crowd, which made it difficult for Calisto to ever feel prepared for his sudden appearnces. He had made her acquaintance through his co-worker/erstwhile drinking buddy Eric Arnold, who was Naomi's fiancee. This introduction had led to the realization that the two of them worked in adjacent buildings. In truth, Calisto had always noticed the guy slinking around the square, and it had struck her as strange to see the man scrubs constantly smoking cigarettes by the street corner. She would have assumed that people in the healthcare industry, as a rule, live healthy lifestyles. It reminded her of vintage cigarette ads from the 1950s showing testimonials from doctors promising that this particular brand of cigarette was more beneficial to your health than any other.

Calisto couldn't say much though, since she was a prodigious smoker herself, a habit which had been exacerbated by her mother's death 6 months ago. "With Mom gone, no one is around to tell me to stop anymore," she reasoned. What was odd was that she and Monte had never shared a smoke together, until that night when Naomi and Eric introduced them. It was only legal to smoke in a handful of isolated areas of the Square, which meant that one was sure to see the same faces puffing away in their little nooks and street corners, with a rotating cast of new additions, day in and day out, often clockwork in their timing. So their paths had surely crossed any number of times during the year-and-a-half in which Calisto had been working there. In fact, her inward reaction when being introduced by her roommate had been "Oh, it's this guy." Certainly at the time she'd had no reason to believe that Monte would soon be owing her a great deal of money.

The truth was, guys like Monte had always given her the douche chills. There are certain types of people in this world that just don't commingle with us, and for Calisto he was one of them, at first. It turned out they had a great deal in common once they bothered to find out. They both had recently suffered the loss of a parent and were rebounding from the dissolution of a long-term relationship, in part because of the fallout from that loss. In retrospect she would come to believe he had zeroed in on these signifiers of vulnerability to take advantage of her, or at least she told herself when things were going badly. But although they had been through similar tragedies, they responded to them differently. Monte seemed to take it in stride and convert his experience into instant wisdom (he'd say "people die everyday, I just happened to be a acquainted with this one," as if his dad were someone from high school who he only recently reconnected with on facebook), where Calisto would question the meaninglessness of a mother being taken from her just as they were reconnecting.

Calisto's mother, in fact, turned out to be the reason she gave the money she left her to Monte in the first place. She had owned a small boutique, really a kiosk that sold dresses, while Calisto was growing up and therefore never spent much time for her daughter. But then as soon as it was time to go away to college, her mother had sold the now-profitable business to a competitor, causing no small amount of resentment on her child's part. "Oh she's too busy for me right up until it's time for me to go away, is that it?" Calisto would think to herself. With no other recourse, she turned to harder partying and neglecting her responsibilities, which led to her losing her scholarship and dropping out of college altogether.

Still, even seeing her mother in the sickbed, dying from cancer years later, she could not forget how neglected that selling of Haughty Couture had made her feel. Her mother, after all, used to refer to her business as "my baby", and in all the years she could remember, Calisto had never been referred to this affectionately. As if sensing that she had not held up her end of up the parental bargain by prioritizing her entreprenurial venture over it, she left two dying requests to her only child, which she had raised alone (however distractedly).

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SEAFOOD Square is a business district in downtown Honolulu whose every component part of its moniker is a misnomer. Although a number of popular local eateries thrived in the area prior to the expansion of its boundaries in the late 90s, only an adjacent Red Lobster, which wasn't even technically part of the square proper, was known for its seafood. The remaining establishments consisted mostly of sushi restaurants (and it is possible that the conflation of sashimi and seafood, which is easy to make, was responsible for this confusion) and bar and grills existing alongside a few other national chains. Fisherman's Wharf lay about a half-minute's drive, with traffic, to the east of the Square, but unlike the Red Lobster it's proximity was never close enough to be mistaken for one of its establishments, even after the expansion. As to the "square" part of the name, the district hadn't been shaped like that since it and its adjoining properties were bought up by the Harada Homes and Offices company. Since the expansion, in fact, the shape of this area resembled more a widened diamond or a flat bicycle tire than anything so symmetrical as a square.

It is unknown why the name stuck years after it outlived its descriptiveness. Harada attempted to rechristen the zone "Oceanside Pavilion", but it never caught on except for postal purposes and colloquially it remained known as "Seafood Square". With Red Lobster long since closed down and replaced with a nightclub, the Square instead housed an unending stream of commercial properties. The businesses in these buildings and structures in the district consisted of everything from tag-team startups to the headquarters of 3 of the largest 4 banks in Hawaii. Those who appreciated the island for its natural amenities and managed to function on it without having some business to attend to in the Square shunned it. It was a blight, a sad testament to the overwhelming reach of urbanization. It was described as the "Haole-est" part of the island of Oahu (indeed, tour groups often stumbled off of cruise ships after 8-day voyages only to find themselves in the middle of the Square, which more often than not resembled the very places from which they were trying to vacation) and all day it seemed to hum with human activity.

Every day at 1:30 pm Calisto Belter sat at one of the round tables on the makai side of Seafood Square and ate something frozen from home or purchased at one of the restaurant chains. Unlike the Square, she had herself chosen the name which suited her. Born Monica Calisto Kea'auhopu Belter in the summer of 1987, her parents had named her for each one of her grandparents. She had to ditch Monica (which she never liked anyway) after the name had first been hijacked by a Courtney Cox character on primetime network TV, then by a presidential scandal which had embarrassed everybody. She never connected with Kea'auhopu, the maternal grandfather she never knew, and the name Belter had always just been a family name which reminded her of boxing. But when as a little girl she discovered that Calisto derived from the myth of a Greek goddess who transforms into a bear, she related. There was always something secretive and less-than-human about her, she thought.