House of Many Gods by Kiana Davenport Page A

They were muscular and fit from surfing, but their hair hung long and greasy. Some heads were garishly shaved with only topknots. Their arms and legs a grid of scars and tribal tattoos. She saw their drug-shot eyes and shook her head, their future written all over them.
    Shifting her heavy book bag and lunch bag, she walked on. Five mornings a week she would make the two-hour bus trip to the university up in Manoa Valley, and in the evenings, the two-hour trip back to Nanakuli. Stepping into the bus, Ana glanced at faces heading into the city, folks looking anxious and alert. It was not her first trip off the Wai‘anae Coast, but apprehension made her feel it was.
    Her dress was homemade. Her shoes were new and pinched. She was not beautiful, nor was she brilliant or accomplished. But she carried herself as if she were. Crossing her legs, she opened a textbook and thoughtfully smoothed down a page, ignoring the sea paralleling the highway. Now and then she looked up at the ruby-strung necklace of taillights bound for Honolulu.
    K NOWLEDGE DID NOT ENTER HER WITH UNWAVERING LIGHT . A T first it glanced over her. She could not keep up, even in basic chemistry, in which she had excelled. Called upon in class, she stood dumb and shy. Sometimes she thought of killing herself. Nights at the kitchen table, she pressed her forehead to the pages of a book, trying to literally absorb convoluted equations. Comprehension did not come.
    “The problem,” Rosie said, “is that right now you’re stuck in that place where you know too much and not enough. Why not just
pretend
you know? Memorize, keep repeating it, and see what happens next.”
    Slowly, miraculously, things began to coalesce. Ana memorized every lesson, every assignment, repeating and repeating it, until comprehension approached like a buzzing in her brain, and then a midnight Eureka. Once deciphered, certain equations became brilliant in their simplicity. Thereafter, each time she was mired in confusion, she remembered Rosie’s words: Sometimes life was just about holding on, waiting to see what happened next.
    She also learned that an honor student from Nanakuli High was not held in the same regard as a student from an elite private school in Honolulu. Each night she scrubbed red dust from her clothes and shoes, and from her book bag. Still, on campus, people knew. They knew from the giveaway pink of her cuticles and nails, and sometimes a faint pink tinge to her hair, that she was from the Wai‘anae Coast. Students walking behind her rolled their eyes, even their bookmarks stuck out at her like tongues. She hid her hands between her knees in class. She dropped behind and fell into depressions. Then she snapped out of it, running to catch up. The rest of life fell by the wayside.
    One day she looked up from her books in shock. Younger cousins seemed taller. Spring had come and gone and it was autumn, the wet season. Ana felt she had given life the slip, that she was moving through it like a shadow. She worked summer jobs but would not remember them. She forgot the name of her favorite boar-hound, the one with almost human eyes.
    Rosie waved checks at her from San Francisco. “Silly girl. With this money you wouldn’t have to work your way. You could live in the dorm, not have to commute.”
    Ana stared at her, pupils enlarged to an anthracite gleam.
    Some mornings she left the house so early it was dark, stars still hard and bright, the moon dropping blue notes on her shoulders. Wearing her rubber thongs, she grabbed her heavy book bag and her lunch and set off down the road, carrying her good shoes in a plastic bag. At night, walking home from the bus stop, she found her rubber slippers where she left them in the weeds, removed her good shoes and put them in the plastic bag. Then she started the steep climb up Keola Road. In
malo‘o
season, when red Wai‘anae dust blanketed the valley, she wore a kerchief across her face like a bandit. Neighbors watering their