Strong Like the Sea, стр. 2
I glance at the door, ready to go for it and find where it leads—except my map of sorts doesn’t have a starting point.
The first direction says to take thirty steps mauka—toward the mountain. But thirty steps from where? From the cabinet where I found it, or from the yard?
My parents’ room isn’t anywhere near thirty steps wide, so that would lead right through a wall if I started in there. But where else would it be? After a few minutes with no new ideas, my stomach rumbles, and I swipe a few lumpia spring rolls from the fridge for an after-school snack.
A sticky note on the fridge reads: Alex, Don’t forget to do your chores. Love, Dad. But I ignore it and read Mom’s scroll over and over again. There’s a faint watermark on the back—a palm tree over a square—but Mom wouldn’t dig up a palm tree to put a square under it, so I’m not sure if that’s part of the clue or if that was already printed on the paper Mom used. On the front side, the directions are clear from top to bottom and back again, but I can’t find anything that says where to start.
Why make a scroll so detailed but leave off the most important part? Mom doesn’t make mistakes like that, so she must’ve done it on purpose, believing I could figure it out.
When nothing else pops into my head, I follow Dad’s advice and change the laundry—my Friday chore. I pull the bundle of damp clothes out of the washer and let it flop into the laundry basket before shoving Dad’s swim shorts and towels inside and starting the machine again.
With the basket on my hip, I slip out the screen door to our laundry lines that drape from the side of the house to a pole supporting the roof that stretches from our house out over our lanai. Dad still sometimes forgets and calls our covered cement area a porch or patio, but everybody here just says lanai. Sometimes, mainlander words sound so weird to me. Like “flip-flops,” or worse, “thongs”—what kind of a name is that for a shoe? It makes way more sense to call them rubber slippers.
Setting the basket of clothes on the cement, I drape Dad’s shorts over the line and pluck the clothespin basket off the step to pin them all in place.
A three-inch, dark brown oval scuttles out from under the basket, its long, whiskery antennae twitching in the bright sunlight.
A huge cockroach!
I jump back with a squeak, hands flailing, and clothespins scatter, clattering across the cement as the dropped basket bounces, then rolls to a stop. Breathing hard, I push my glasses back up onto my nose and stare at the nasty little beastie.
With his long antennae waving all over, he turns this way and that, as if looking for the fastest way out of the sun.
I shudder with heebie-jeebies, my imagination creating a hundred invisible bugs crawling all over me.
It’s a big one—a B-52 bomber roach—maybe the biggest I’ve ever seen, and when it turns my way, I swear it’s looking right at me.
I make a grab for a rubber slipper to whack it before it decides to fly at my face, but when my shadow crosses the step, the roach bursts into flight, a buzzy whir of wings and shell with sticky legs spread wide to catch hair or clothes.
Ick, ick!
I duck, pulling my hat down over my ears as the thing flies overhead into a cluster of red ti tree leaves beside the lanai and disappears.
With a shiver, I drop the rubber slipper back onto the pile with the rest of the shoes at the foot of the stairs. Good riddance.
If that bug had been any bigger, it could have carried the laundry basket off by itself.
I reach to gather the clothespins, but a big red X marks the step where the pin basket had been. A big chalk X to mark the spot where my adventure begins.
“Sneaky.” I grin.
Leave it to Mom to make sure I can’t start my adventure until after I do my chores.
I pin the clothes to the line at turbo speed, grab my compass and scroll, and stand on the X to begin the quest.
Half an hour later, I’m still following Mom’s directions, walking all over Laie. At a corner, I adjust my glasses and squint at the map before checking the directions against my compass. One hundred steps mauka, then two hundred north, and—
“Hey, Alex! Wassup?” Jack glides past on his bike and circles me once as more boys from school pedal fast to catch up. “We going Sam’s store. You wanna come with?”
“I can’t. I’m busy.” I show him the map, and he pulls up beside me for a better look.
“Eh, what is it? A new challenge?”
“Yeah, my mom left a new map. It goes all over Laie.”
“A map?” He peers over my shoulder. “A map for what? Where’s it goin’?”
“How would I know? I’ll tell you when I finish it.”
The other boys pull up and stop in a half moon around me—some barefoot like me, others not—like Kase, the newest to hang with us at Castle Tree. He moved here from the mainland a few months ago but still has a lot to learn. He waves. “Hi, Alex.”
Ekolu throws me a shaka with his pinky and thumb out. “Howzit?”
“She’s working on a map,” Jack answers before I can. A gust of wind lifts my trilby hat, but I grab it quick and hold on.
“What kine map you get? One treasure map?” The breeze teases Ekolu’s dark hair as he leans over to see my scroll.
Kase tilts his head. “What’s a kine?”
“Da kine is sort of like ‘the kind’ or ‘thing.’” I glance at