This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila Page A

her to laugh, but she was quiet, thinking about something.
    “I know it’s hard growing up haole on the islands. You’ve said before the teasing was rough.” She paused. “I never got teased for being Hawaiian. No matter where you are, being Hawaiian is cool. But in some ways, I think it was harder growing up Hawaiian and
not
being here. That sense of displacement, of never quite fitting in.”
    He brushed his fingers through her hair, and she held his hand there, his palm warming the corner of her earlobe. “I know that feeling. I used to think, I wouldn’t stick out if my parents went back, if we were in our homeland.”
    “Germany?”
    “Minnesota.”
    “I think the Ojibwa might take issue with you calling Minnesota your homeland.” Now she laughed, as if she were teasing him.
    “But I’m not from Germany. My parents and grandparents weren’t from Germany. They’re Minnesotans through and through.”
    She sighed and lifted her hand from his. He let his fall back to the steering wheel. “My cousin can chant back twenty-five generations. That’s what it means to be from a place. And yet, you’re from Minnesota, and I’m from Vegas. How can that be?”
    He wanted to say he wasn’t from Minnesota. He was from Hawaiʻi. Yet, that didn’t seem quite right. He was local, he knew that much. He was local and she wasn’t. But did that matter? Was local being from a place, or just of it? “I have to think about what you said.”
    “I like when you think.” She took his hand again. “I’m happy we’re doing this. It’s good to take a vacation together.”
    She looked out the window then, her cheek pressed against the plastic wall of the car, her hair tangling in the wind. They passed a house with two tireless cars in the yard and a lime green schoolbus on blocks. A dog lay panting beneath it in the cool dirt. “Remember when we went to North Shore together for the first time?” she said. “You packed your truck with a cooler of food and that tiny bridge on the way to Waimea was covered in water. The waves were practically at the road, and you wanted tokeep the windows rolled up with the air-conditioning on, and I wouldn’t let you. It’s like that every time, isn’t it?”
    “I get hot is all.”
    “And I don’t like the smell of air through the conditioner. It’s too clean.”
    “What’s wrong with clean air?”
    “It doesn’t smell like Hawaiʻi. It’s just like after you shower and all I smell is that green soap you use. You don’t smell like you.”
    “What does me smell like?” He winked at her in the reflection of the windshield.
    “Like mushrooms and dried limu and raw beef about to go bad.”
    He made a face. “Sounds disgusting.”
    “No, it’s wonderful.” She brought her mouth to his ear and whispered: “You smell like a man.”
    Happiness was a balloon inflating inside his chest. He felt for the backpack behind his seat: inside its left pocket, tucked underneath a battery charger, was the ring. He ran his fingers along the nylon shoulder strap. The dozens of ridges in its weave were smooth and slippery.
    “Tell me something else,” he said.
    “Something else.” She smiled. “How about this: I love you like a wave loves sand.”
    He thought of how the ocean unfurls in every direction on the beach and then retracts like a gigantic, curling tongue. “Hungrily?”
    “Powerfully.”
    The road crested and Cameron glimpsed a narrow inlet. The cliff walls were sheer, black rock, and the road hugged them, falling steeply. As they descended toward sea level, Mustang convertibles lined the narrow road, parked in even narrower turnouts. Every convertible had its top down. Between hala trees he glimpsed a couple of twentysomething girls walking gingerly across the stone beach. They held hands, fingers knitted together, arms raised above their heads as they tried to balance against one another. He saw a flash of hot pink, a purple flower pattern, a bare stomach. A little boy was