[BL] Before We Knew

PART I: BEFORE WE KNEW

Freshman Year — 1990–1991

The rain started before school did.

Mo heard it first through sleep — soft, then less soft, then insistent against the windowpane the way Hilo rain sometimes got, like it had something to prove. He lay still for a few minutes just listening, his face half-buried in the pillow, and thought about how strange it was to feel nervous in a place you'd been your whole life.

Downstairs, his mother was already awake. He could tell by the sound of the kitchen — radio low, the wooden creak of the cabinet where she kept the mugs, the particular rhythm of her moving through a morning. She had a way of existing in the house that made it feel larger and warmer than it actually was. Even sound traveled differently when she was up.

Mo got dressed slowly. Dark pants, a soft gray shirt, nothing that would catch anybody's attention. He looked at himself once in the bathroom mirror and then looked at the tile instead, the old blue pattern his father had put in years ago when Mo was small enough to sit in the sink.

"Moani." His mother's voice drifted up the stairs, not calling exactly, just announcing that the world was happening downstairs. "Come eat before everything gets cold."

He came.

She had made rice and eggs and sliced some fruit she'd bought at the store the day before, and she was standing at the stove with her mug held in both hands, watching the window where rain was beading down the glass. She sang a few bars of something to herself under her breath, not any song Mo could name, just melody she seemed to generate the way other people generated body heat — automatically, without effort, as natural as exhaling.

"Nervous?" she asked, without turning around.

"No."

"Mm." She turned then and looked at him the way she sometimes did, like she was reading something written in a language she'd invented. "Okay."

Mo sat and ate. He didn't say anything more and neither did she, and the radio filled the silence with someone talking about weather he could already see out the window for himself.

Before he left she fixed his collar even though nothing was wrong with it, both hands straightening fabric that didn't need straightening. He let her.

"You'll be fine," she said.

"I know."

"I know you know," she said. "I'm saying it anyway."

The school sat at the edge of the neighborhood like it had always been there, which it had. Mo had passed it his whole life — on the way to the store, on the way back, on the way to Anaïs's house — and somehow it had remained abstract, something that happened to other people until very recently when it started happening to him. Now the gates were open and students were moving through them in groups and alone, backpacks slung, voices carrying through the rain-heavy air, and the campus spread out behind the fence with its open corridors and faded paint in a way that was both completely familiar and suddenly, completely new.

He stood at the edge of things for a moment.

Not long. Just long enough to understand he was doing it.

Then he went in.

The corridors were loud in a way that seemed to have its own weather system — noise rising and breaking like something oceanic, punctuated by the slamming of lockers, by laughter from somewhere out of sight, by sneakers squeaking on wet flooring from students who'd tracked in rain. Mo moved through it carefully, staying close to the wall, reading room numbers. He had his schedule folded in his pocket. He'd memorized it two days ago and looked at it four times this morning anyway.

He found his homeroom and sat near the window because the window showed the courtyard where rain was still coming down at a slight angle, which gave him somewhere to look that wasn't the room full of people he only partly knew.

Most of them he recognized. That was the thing about Hilo — he'd been going to school with the same people since he could remember, the faces changing slowly the way people change when you see them every day, so gradual you barely notice until suddenly a year has passed and someone is half a foot taller and you can't remember when that happened. He recognized the faces. He just didn't always know what to do with them.

Anaïs came in three minutes before the bell and sat down two seats away from him, dropping her bag with a soft thud and pushing her hair back from her face.

"You look like you're thinking too hard," she said, without preamble.

"I'm not."

"You are. Your face does this thing." She made a vague gesture toward her own forehead.

"I don't do a thing."

"Mo." She looked at him levelly. She had a way of looking at people like she found them genuinely interesting rather than like she was merely tolerating their presence, which Mo had always thought was a specific and unusual skill. "We've been walking to school together since we were seven. You do a thing."

He conceded this with a small shrug. Outside, rain tapped at the glass. The room was filling up around them with noise and backpacks and the smell of rain-damp clothing, and he let himself feel slightly steadier — the way he always did around her, some tension in his shoulders releasing that he hadn't consciously registered was there.

They'd grown up two streets from each other, their houses separated by a hill and a mango tree and several aunties who seemed to know each other in the particular way adults knew each other in Hilo, which was to say: completely and slightly before you understood why. He'd known Anaïs before he'd known most things. She'd heard him sing once when he was nine and hadn't made it weird, which he'd never entirely forgotten.

The bell rang. The teacher came in.

Freshman year began.

He had English third period, and Leo Tanaka sat two rows over.

Mo had seen him around — Keaukaha kid, one of those boys who moved through the world like he was only mildly interested in it but still somehow the axis everything else revolved around. He was louder than most people without seeming to try, and when he laughed, which was often, you noticed. Not because it was obnoxious. Just because it was real in a way that made you suddenly aware of how much performed laughter there usually was everywhere else.

The teacher had them do introductions, which Mo had been dreading in the way he'd been dreading most things about today — not catastrophically, just quietly, the way you dreaded something that required you to exist in front of other people on purpose.

When his turn came he said his name and the neighborhood he was from and one fact about himself, which he kept small: "I like music."

He sat back down before anyone could respond.

Leo, when his turn came, said his name and Ka'umana Drive and then added, without pausing: "I'm planning to get out of Hilo eventually. No offense." He glanced around the room with something that might have been apology but was mostly just honesty, like he'd said the weather was wet — accurate, nothing personal. Someone laughed. A few people shook their heads. The teacher moved on.

Mo spent the rest of the period looking at his notebook.

Not because he was avoiding Leo. Just because something about the sentence stayed with him in a way he couldn't name yet. *I'm planning to get out of Hilo eventually.* He'd never heard someone say that out loud like it was simply a fact, like leaving was just a thing you decided the same way you decided what to have for lunch.

He wrote down what the teacher said about the syllabus.

He didn't look over.

Lunch was a controlled kind of chaos.

Mo found Sam at a table near the windows because Sam was impossible not to find — he was already talking to three people he'd known since intermediate school, gesturing with a fork at something nobody seemed to fully understand, and when he saw Mo he pointed and said, loudly enough that several tables turned, "There he is. I saved you a seat." He hadn't saved a seat. He moved his bag from the chair beside him.

Mo sat.

"How was your morning?" Sam asked, without pausing from whatever he'd been saying before.

"Fine."

"Mine was — okay, so you know that thing in PE when they ask you what sports you play and if you say 'none' they look at you like you answered wrong?" Sam looked around the table. "Why is that a thing? What does that even mean?"

"You play basketball," said the boy across from them, who Mo knew slightly — Maka, who was athletic and confident in the way that seemed less like a personality and more like an environment condition, something you simply existed inside.

"I play basketball *recreationally*," Sam said. "That's different."

"How is that different."

"It's different because I could stop tomorrow and be fine about it."

"You would not be fine about it."

"I would be *completely* fine."

Mo ate his rice and listened and let the noise of it settle around him like weather. Sam had always been easy to be near — not because he demanded nothing, but because what he demanded was just *presence*, which Mo could usually manage even when other things were harder. There was something low-stakes about being included in Sam's orbit. He folded you in without requiring you to perform arrival.

Leo arrived mid-lunch with a tray in one hand and a look of mild amusement like he'd found something funny on the way over.

"What'd I miss," he said, sitting down without asking if it was okay.

"Sam is explaining the difference between recreational and professional basketball," Maka said.

"There's a difference?"

"*Thank* you," Sam said.

Leo looked across the table and his eyes landed briefly on Mo and he said, "Hey — English, right? Fujimoto's class," and Mo nodded, and that was it. No follow-up. Leo reached across for a packet of soy sauce and the moment passed.

But Mo noticed the noticing.

He wasn't sure yet what to do with that either.

By the end of the day the rain had softened to something light and indecisive, the kind that couldn't quite commit to stopping. Mo walked through it without a jacket because he'd forgotten one and it wasn't cold, just wet, and he didn't mind being wet on the way home. He went slowly.

The neighborhood sat higher up than the school, roads winding through green that got denser the further from the water you went, and he knew every turn of this walk the way you knew something you'd done ten thousand times — not consciously, just in your feet. He passed Mrs. Tamura's fence and the mango tree that dropped fruit nobody collected and the road that forked toward Anaïs's house.

He thought about his mother asking if he was nervous.

He thought about being fine, which he was. He was fine.

He thought about Leo Tanaka saying *I'm planning to get out of Hilo eventually* like it was the most ordinary thing, and about how it had landed somewhere in his chest and not entirely left.

Not because he wanted to leave. He'd never really thought about leaving. But something about the certainty of it — the *planning* — had gotten under his skin in a way that felt like recognizing a question you hadn't known you had. Like: was this a place you chose, or a place that simply happened to you? Was there a difference?

He didn't have an answer.

He came up the front steps and opened the door and the house reached out for him the way it always did — warm, a little cluttered, smelling of dinner starting, the radio going somewhere in the back. From the kitchen he could hear his mother's voice, not words, just the shape of a song she was working through. She did that sometimes, traced a melody until she found it, the way you followed a thread through fabric.

He stood in the doorway and listened before she knew he was home.

He didn't know why.

Just that it felt like something to hold, for a moment, before the day was fully over.

The rain tapped the roof.

The song continued.