AN: There are a thousand things I could tag, but I'm choosing not to tag anything. This is entirely self-indulgent.
When Grandma asked to speak to my mother in private, I thought nothing of it. I suspected she had grown bored of the dinner conversation, as had the rest of us, and fabricated some urgent gossip. The feast had lost its allure, and everyone was sluggish after the third helpings. Except for my older cousin Lia who was on strict diet orders from the modeling agency, and her mother Aunt Karna who had always been obsessed with staying rail thin.
Uncle David boasted about his real estate investments and explained the state of the market to my little sister Melanie. She was the last person to care (or understand) but polite enough to humor him with her attention. Mom and Grandma, sat at the very end of the table, slipped into the hallway undetected. Unconcerned, I resumed my discussion with little cousin Oliver about his favorite dinosaurs.
I had forgotten about them until Mom returned a half hour later. "What's going on?" I asked her in a hushed voice as she reclaimed her spot next to me.
Grandma stood, the side conversations subsided, and everyone's eyes were on her. She said, "I wanted to enjoy the holiday, but I'm afraid I have some bad news. A few days before my flight, I was diagnosed with breast cancer."
Aunt Karna broke down instantly, running over and throwing her frail arms around her. "What's cancer?" asked little cousin Oliver to his father, my Uncle Mark, the only soft voice in the room stunned to silence. Uncle Mark struggled to explain, so mom's sister Sheila took him aside and told him in simple terms that grandma was very sick.
Mom stepped away and the room slowly began to move again. Cousin Lia and her step-brother Charlie came over to offer their condolences. Aunt Kelly asked how to help, but Grandma simply said, "Lisa and her girls are relocating to Albuquerque."
"What?" I called out, cutting through their chatter like the crack of a whip. Grandma glanced at me briefly, but just then Aunt Karna burst into another round of sobs. I rushed past the two holding each other, hunting down my mother. I found her in the kitchen, her arms buried in a sink full of dirty dishes and suds. "What does grandma mean we're moving to Albuquerque?"
She closed her eyes and sighed. "I didn't know what else to say, Gabriella."
"Did you try, 'No?'" I pressed, "You need to fix this. I'm not leaving Hawaii for Albuquerque. It's never happening." She didn't respond, and we didn't talk about it any longer.
It was few weeks before Mom brought it up again, but I had convinced myself she had sorted everything out in the meantime. It was ten in the morning and she was perched at the counter, pouring herself a second glass of red wine, nothing out of the ordinary. "I'm flying out soon," she said. "Grandma and I are looking at houses in Albuquerque."
"Grandma is moving?" I asked, still coating reality with a rose-tinted shade of denial.
"No, a house for us."
I was seething, and for the first time since my anger management counseling sessions, I allowed myself to lose all restraint. It was one of those rages without the proper words to explain my feelings, so I threw everything I could think of at her. Her alcoholism, the divorce, putting her work above my sister and I, etcetera. It wasn't eloquent, either. Every sentence had at least one 'fuck' in it, and sometimes the words got jammed into an unintelligible stammer. All she did was flip through a magazine and sip her wine, unphased by my hysterical screams. Once I felt marginally better for yelling at her, I stomped up to my room and slammed the door shut.
I had plans to see my friends that night, but I canceled with a curt text to the group chat and then turned off my phone. I hid in my bed and lied in the darkness, stiff as a board.
My mother was a fucking liar. She said she wanted help, but she truly didn't. She wanted to want to help grandma because that's what a happy daughter in a loving family would want, but that wasn't reality. She pretended desperately enough to agree to move for her, but that's all it was: pretend.
I don't remember who suggested or decided it, but at some point during one of the planning sessions for our New Year's Party, I was chosen to host. For five consecutive years since I came to Hawaii, we've held the New Years party in Paris' clubhouse. It had been a detached guest house that the family never used, but her dad finally agreed to renovate it after her incessant pleading and pouting. There was a fully functional DJ booth, bar, VIP section, and all types of lights in various colors for the full club atmosphere. The best part was that her parents never asked why half the liquor from the bar mysteriously disappeared each time they left town, but generously restocked before their next departure. Every time someone suggested a party, or a holiday like New Years approached, we always, always went to Paris' clubhouse. Jay's place would have been the next best option. His fashion designer parents were always away at fancy shows in Europe, and there was a club somewhere inside their four-story modern mansion.
But we decided on my place, and, also oddly, we didn't invite anyone outside our core group. It was just the seven of us standing around with just the waves crashing into the shore to be heard.
Jay asked, "You got it yet?"
"No," I said, tapping the Bluetooth icon on my phone harder as if that would make all the difference. The speakers had been synced to the laptop, but my little sister Melanie left it out one night and it stormed, frying the brand-new MacBook in seconds.
"I can try mine," Jessica suggested.
"Go ahead," I said. I rushed across the patio and past all my bored friends, loitering and checking their phones with nothing better to do. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted up the balcony, "Melanie!"
Her window opened and she called down, "What?"
"How do you get the speakers to work?"
"They're broke!"
They all pouted and groaned, and Tiffany suggested we go somewhere else. "We're not doing that," Paris said decidedly. "This is Gabriella's last night here."
I remembered then why we chose my place. Nobody outright said it, just like nobody said not to invite other people, but this was my last night in Hawaii, so it needed to be special. my last night with them. My last night in this incredible house.
"How are we going to party without music?" Jay sarcastically asked. "You want me to beatbox?"
Rachel, who had been glued to her phone the entire night, finally looked up long enough to know what was going on and offered a solution. "I have a portable speaker in my trunk. It's not super loud, but it has good sound."
"It's better than nothing," I said.
Jessica went with her to retrieve it, and they returned a few minutes later with one of those pill-shaped Beats speakers. "It's only at forty percent battery," she said, and we huddled around in anticipation. She set it on the railing and cranked it all the way up, Bruno Mars' synthed voice singing the first few lines of 24K Magic. I shouldn't have been surprised given the fact that this was Rachel's playlist. She's been obsessed with Bruno Mars since his Beautiful Girls days, and the only reason she befriended Megan was because she's his second cousin. Megan wasn't there, thankfully, as they all know I don't like her.
Everybody grooved to the fun beat, dancing with each other and pausing only to take a shot from the communal bottle of tequila. When the song came to an end, Jay stole the speaker and resynced it to his phone, mumbling something about getting the party started forreal, in his words.
Unsurprisingly, it was Jay's idol, Todrick Hall, whose voice came out of the speaker next. He struck a new sassy pose with each of Todrick's lyrics: nails, hair, hips, heels. Everyone cheered him on with synchronized, "Yas queen!" It was just enough encouragement for him to drop into the splits on my patio and twerk one ass cheek at a time. All us girls lost it, screaming out in laughter and disbelief. Tiffany held onto me for support as she hysterically laughed, her weak knees buckling beneath the hilarity.
Jay rose to his feet, leaned at his hips, and proceeded to twerk backwards against Paris. She spun around to put their butts together and twerked back into him. Jay screamed, "What you got?" He hopped back with each pop of his ass while whipping his head around in circles, only stopping once he had twerked Paris off the patio. I laughed harder than ever before and collapsed onto the floor with Tiffany, joining the others who had already fallen over from laughter.
Another Todrick Hall song had played and ended by the time we all were at least on our feet again. Jay pulled Paris up from the bushes she had fallen into, leaves stuck in her hair and sticking to her dress. I could tell from her annoyed look that she was the least amused, and the thought of her being mad for getting twerked across my patio made me crack up again. It became contagious and we had another round of drunken laughter, each of us yelling out that we were almost crying or peeing.
It eventually subsided and we resumed our usual dancing, fairly sharing the role of DJ. When it was my turn, they all groaned I was going to play old music. But I remembered one of select few of my songs they liked, Shots by Lil Jon and LMFAO, an old crunk hit from the early 2000s. Everyone danced along and when the chorus played, I held the bottle above my head and waterfalled a generous stream of tequila into my mouth. Everyone screamed out and began chanting, "Shots! Shots! Shots!" But we were missing a crucial piece, shot glasses. We desperately attempted body shots, sucking up shots of tequila from each other's bellybuttons and licking lines of salt off the cleavage. We didn't have lime wedges to put in our mouths, but Jessica kissed Rachel at that part anyways, making everyone scream out and laugh again.
We were so wrapped up in the music and fun that we forgot the whole purpose of the night, to celebrate the new year, until five minutes before 2020. I almost regretted telling them the time, because then Jay wanted to celebrate on our private beach below the cliff and the others were too stupidly drunk to listen to my objections. I was still explaining my argument when he stood up, breezed by me like I was nothing more than an annoying whistle in the wind, and stepped off the patio. He disappeared into the palm trees and led the others along the steep path down to the beach. Reluctantly, I followed them.
It was almost midnight and very dark, but the light of the moon was enough to make out silhouettes and general details. I watched Jay strut along the shore, kicking sand up at Paris, the victim of all his antics tonight. She retaliated with splashes of cold ocean water, and then they were both throwing sand and water at each other. The others ran towards them and joined in, but I remembered I had a bikini on underneath. I took off my shirt and shorts, then rushed in, my hands loaded with dry sand.
Everyone was screaming and laughing so loud I barely heard Jessica say, "Guys, stop! It's almost time!" When she started counting down, everyone listened and joined in, "Ten! Nine!"
Jay looked at me with a mischievous smile.
"Eight!"
He reached out towards me, grabbed my shoulders, and dragged me towards the water.
"Seven!"
The others followed and watched on as he pushed me deeper and deeper into the ocean.
"Six!"
The freezing water was up to my ankles. "Five!"…my knees…"Four!"…my hips…"Three!" I finally started to resist, but he still managed to entirely submerged me into an incoming wave. The water was loud when I first went under. I tried to stand up, but his grip was too strong. He held down in the freezing ocean as the year changed, and all I could do was listen to my friends' muffled cheering through the water, "Happy New Year!"