Above the East China Sea: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

streak of lightning when she suddenly went quiet.
    After the silence had gone on too long, I called out, “On your three o’clock,” claiming a spectacular artery. “That’s a winner. What’s my prize?”
    I expected Codie to protest and say her last lightning strike was longer. Or to tell me that I
had
won, and my prize was ten trays of Pueblo Heights High’s cafeteria signature dish, Road Kill Enchiladas. Anything, because Codie hated, hay-
ted,
to lose. Instead, in a weirdly flat voice, she said, “I enlisted.”
    Certain that I’d misunderstood, I made a blinky face at my sister for so long that she asked, “Caboose? Did you hear me?”
    Luz the Caboose. I got the nickname because I was always following her around. Codie was the one who led, who knew where we were going. But this? The military? Our whole lives the military had been the thing we both wanted to escape. The thing that made our parents such hard-asses that it was punishment loving them. I waited for her to tell me, “All I said was that ‘I insisted.’ ” Or, “I am twisted.” Or, “Iron lisped.” Any of those phrases would have made more sense than “I enlisted.” I would, in fact, have been less surprised if my sister had told me she was a hermaphrodite and that I’d have to learn to love her as a brother. Then I realized: Codie was messing with me.
    I humphed out a dry laugh, since this wasn’t really funny, and said, “Right. You enlisted.”
    Looking down at the bottle she was carefully picking the label off of, she pressed her lovely, full lips together and nodded. “Yeah, I did.”
    “You’re serious?”
    “As syphilis. Signed the papers and everything.”
    “You enlisted?” I kept saying the word, still hoping it might have another meaning that I was unaware of.
    “Air force. Security Forces.”
    “An air bear? Like Mom?”
    “Pretty much. I leave right after graduation.”
    Less than two weeks away. “No,” I stated flatly, trying to convey how unacceptable this was.
    “Well, actually, yes.”
    “Does Mom know?”
    “Yeah.”
    Of all that was incomprehensible about my sister’s announcement, that was the worst of it. That our mother knew before me. That she knew and hadn’t stopped her. But it was worse than that. “She signed for you, didn’t she?”
    Codie shrugged. “Had to.” She wouldn’t turn eighteen until the end of June.
    “And you didn’t tell me? Neither of you told me?” I could not think of another time when my sister and mom had had a secret. Codie and I were the ones who always kept secrets—from our mother.
    “I knew you weren’t going to be happy.”
    “No, Codie, I’m not happy. I’m really, really not happy.”
    A whole Mount Olympus of lightning bolts streaked the sky, but neither of us claimed any of them.
    Our entire lives, Codie and I, always moving to another base, another state, another country, we had been like those diving beetles who can live underwater because they take a bubble of air from the surface with them. Codie was my bubble of air. No matter what hostile environment the air force thrust us into, as long as I had Codie, I could breathe.
    After we sat there saying nothing for a long time, Codie took my hand. My fingers had gone colder than the Breezers, but hers felt warm and soft as rising bread dough around them. “Cabooskie, be happy, okay? It’s nothing. It’s a couple of years when I would have fucked off and dropped out of community college and worked a bunch of crap jobs. It’s just a way to pay for a real college. If I ever decide to go. It’s not like colleges are going to come after me the way they’re already coming after you, Miz Four Point Three.”
    “Codie, you don’t know that. You’re so smart. Smarter than me.”
    “Smarts don’t count if you can’t put them on paper.”
    Even though Codie had a classic case of dyslexia, we moved around so much in her early years of school that by the time it was diagnosed when she was in fourth