This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila

He took a long sip from the bottle, and as they drove out of Pāʻia he turned the radio to her favorite Hawaiian music station. Houses gave way to cane fields, which ascended Haleakalā’s gentle slope. Dense clouds hid the crater’s upper reaches. All the plants were green, even the scrub beside the road, and it was hard to imagine he was ever thirsty here.
    Just before Māliko Bay the radio went to white noise.Cameron ignored it. He needed to concentrate on the road, the way the Hāna Highway followed the topography of the cliffs, teetering above the ocean, then turning tightly inland.
    “See that church?” Becky pointed to a whitewashed chapel. “My auntie was married there. My grandma’s sister.” The church was small, trimmed in a rust-red reminiscent of the color of volcanic soil.
    “It’s so quaint.”
    “Isn’t it?” She squeezed his knee with her hand. “Her holokū was all lace, and she made every inch of it herself. Can you imagine?”
    “Is that one of the traditional skills you want to learn? Sewing your own wedding dress?”
    “Hardly,” she giggled. “I’ll learn to pound kapa, but lace-making I’m happy to leave in the past.”
    “It’s from the missionaries anyways,” he teased her.
    “Exactly.” Her tone was serious. “My aunt’s dress was beautiful, though. I’ll show you the pictures one day.”
    The car coasted down a hill and settled into a curve that reminded him of the inside of Becky’s elbow, the smooth pocket of her
antecubital fossa
. Becky was in her second year of residency at Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu, and she was teaching him the scientific terms for his body. Sometimes he’d pick her up at the end of her shift and she’d tell him what she’d treated that day: scapular fracture, septicimia, tarsal dislocation. He enjoyed the sound of these words, like coral popping underwater. Heloved watching her mouth moving around the syllables, her tongue tapping against her palate and her teeth flashing white beneath her chapped lips. From her even “influenza” sounded urgent and exotic.
    She gestured toward a bamboo forest at the side of the road where the reeds grew densely together. He had once been to a bamboo forest in Japan, outside of Kyoto, where he studied for a year in college. Paths had been cut through the forest, and the bamboo grew in thick arches that curved over the walkways. The light that managed to trickle through the leaves was thin and green. A girl had taken him there. His girlfriend at the time. He could still see the way her black hair hung straight and thick, its blunt cut running parallel to her bra strap, the outline of which he glimpsed beneath her white blouse. She had run ahead, and when she turned to tell him something, the viridian light caught in her hair and turned it a deep turquoise.
    “One of my uncles used to dig up the bamboo shoots,” Becky said. “He’d boil them all day, until they were soft, and then cook with them.” She rested her head on his shoulder, and he could smell the piney scent of her shampoo. “I wish everyone was still here.”
    “Me, too. I’d ask your uncle to cook for me!”
    She laughed. “He’d love that. He loves feeding people.”
    “Were you happy when the rest of the family moved to Vegas? You were all together then.”
    “We were, but then it wasn’t the same. Everyone was far from home.”
    “Were they happy when you left for Oʻahu?”
    “I guess. They didn’t really say.” She tucked her legs underneath her and offered Cameron her hand.
    “Maybe they were jealous. Not angry jealous, just sort of wistful.”
    “Maybe. It’s funny, they spent years trying to get my parents to move back here, and now they’re always asking me when I’m coming home to Vegas. But I tell them, Vegas isn’t home. It’s not where I’m from.”
    “But you were born there. That doesn’t make you less Hawaiian, but it does make you something else, in addition. Maybe Vegasian.” He waited for