We’d all been making the most of our summer holiday when Nixie started yelling that the Whitfords had arrived next door. It was no surprise to the rest of us that she got worked up about it. Nixie got worked up about everything. She was too small to be involved in the drama of the last few summers, but this year she picked up on enough sideways glances and whispers to start sniffing for secrets. She wouldn’t stop until we told her stories, and sometimes stories are scarier than seeing the blood spilt with your own eyes. Nixie would climb up the pōhutukawa and watch the road through a newspaper telescope, always on the lookout for dirt clouds trailing around the hills and down the road into the Whitfords’ driveway.
All five of us knew they were coming, but we ignored the fact. Our summer days were too peaceful to spoil with worrying. The beach had been ours for three long weeks. We spent afternoons finding the sandy carcasses of pufferfish and snapper with their eyes and bellies pecked out by gulls. We slapped our soles on flat sand where the tide went out to the horizon. Brook dug sticks into washed-up bluebottles and chased us with their tentacles dangling in strings of stinging confetti. For the first time in the longest time, we were the five water sisters, silhouetted against the sky.
At school they called us The Drips. I liked to think it was because we rolled and floated, because we were each a different kind of drifter with wispy hair and the ocean on our skin. But it had to do with our strange watery names, the fault of our strange watery mother with her crystals hanging from the windows and her clutter—the brown crisps of dead flowers, dusty bagpipes, rock collections in cardboard boxes. I used to wonder why our father agreed to her naming my sisters Aqua, Brook, Nalu and Nixie, but now I know he handed us over the moment we were born. Our skin was too slippery. Our mouths and fists were clinging. He took one look at us and we were hers.
I was named Kai after the Hawaiian word for ocean, even though in our country Kai means food. The devoured. To devour. ‘Why are you named after a feed?’ the kids at school would say. ‘Who’d want to eat you?’ So I used to dream of being buried in a pit of dirt and steamed inside a tinfoil wrapper.
Nalu and I were the ‘Hawaiians’ of the family. We lived on our own island, the two of us. She’d been bullied and it left her quiet, as if she’d hidden part of herself on the school grounds and now that part was lost. We made a pact to have a peaceful summer—stretching our legs on dry grass and shutting our eyelids to the sun. In the evenings we stole warm beer in dusty bottles and wrapped up in blankets under the winking sky. It started to feel as if this summer would be different.
When Nixie yelled about the Whitfords’ car, Brook was up the tree faster than a feral cat. She was the fighter of the family. Last summer, she found a stray Amy Whitford on the rocks and herded her with a broken branch until Amy’s only escape was to run over the mussels with bare feet. We watched her slip and scramble back up, swallowing tears and trailing blood. Brook was 12 the year Dad left, and he used to get aggressive with her more than the rest of us—grab her tangled hair and throw her writhing and scratching to her room. His outbursts fuelled Brook’s fighting side. Her personal mission since Dad left was to not let anyone bully any of us, and she was proactive about it: beat them down first.
I’ve helped her out, I’ll admit. One summer we saw David Whitford climb into our fort. Brook went straight to the bottles of old milk she’d pushed to the back of the fridge and sieved out chunks of cottage cheese. I held my nose while yellow rot glugged into the barrel of the Super Soaker. We took turns spraying him. Brook soaked his hair and his collar.
‘Just because it was Dad’s doesn’t mean it’s yours now,’ she yelled after him. ‘Stay away from us. Stay away from our stuff.’
There was something about Amy and David Whitford. Their eyes were round and protruding as if their limbs squeezed so tight that they burst at the eyeballs. Amy was scaly with eczema, and David’s birthmark crawled up his shoulder like a rodent. They were gawky, gangly. They stole our father from us, for a while, but Dad-thieves or not, they bugged me. They were bland, stupid. After Dad left, Brook used to yell at them, ‘Hey, fish eyes, why are you staring? You got a two-second memory or something?’
This summer even Aqua was keen to fight, and she was the coolest drifter of us all. She was the prettiest, too. One of those sea butterflies pulsing through the blue. I think she was bored, frustrated. She’d broken up with her boyfriend and had spent the summer moping—waiting for someone new to arrive or for something to happen.
When Brook scrambled up the pōhutukawa tree, Nalu brushed the grains off her thighs and made her way back to the bach. I was up to my knees in the sea, and Aqua splashed up to me, her hair in salty tangles around her cheeks. She had blonde roots, but the ends were dyed sea-green. She put a palm to her forehead to better see the Whitfords’ place. Their bach was waking up—its eyes opening with every curtain peeled and blind pulled.
‘I reckon we do something tonight,’ Aqua said.
‘You sound like Brook.’
‘It makes sense.’ She slapped a wave with her palm. Water sprayed out in a foamy fountain. ‘Brook saw them chatting with Karen Rosewood last summer.’
I squinted at the shards of light on the water and forced myself to breathe. ‘How about negotiations,’ I offered. ‘Or a peace deal?’
‘You reckon we can trust them?’ I shrugged.
‘David is kind of hot.’
I fake-puked.
Aqua dived over a wave then emerged glistening and floating on her back.
We let the first afternoon pass fuss-free. That evening there was a tautness to Brook’s movements, to her skin and teeth. Nixie darted—again and again—from the pōhutukawa fort to the living room, reporting urgent nothings. Nalu ate her crumbed fish in silence. Aqua stabbed hers and dissected it. I rested my elbows on the windowpane and watched from between swaying crystals as the Whitfords strolled along the beach under a dimming sky. They couldn’t walk over the shells properly without flinching. When Amy looked up it was as if she could sense me watching—as if my tension behind the glass squealed in a frequency only bitches could hear. She tugged on David’s elbow, and they ran, stumbling towards the flat sand and the glowing shoreline.
Brook had a plan. Nalu didn’t understand why I was going to be part of it again. ‘I thought we had a pact,’ she said. After dinner she clinked her plate into the sink and crawled to bed with her head buried in book. When I tried to talk to her, she swapped the book for a pillow.
The moon and the crickets were out, and we stood, the four of us—no Nalu—on the damp grass of our back lawn. We wore hoodies over pyjamas. Brook squashed a beanie onto her feathery head, and Aqua pulled her drawstring tight so that she was all hood and a small circle of face. Her skin glinted faintly in the blue light—for her, something was finally happening on this holiday. Nixie had wrapped a flowery scarf around her head and painted warrior stripes on her cheeks with lipstick.
‘Are you serious?’ I said.
‘Shhhhh.’ She jabbed a finger against her lips. ‘Hold these.’ Brook shoved ice-cream containers into Nixie’s hands. ‘Let’s go.’
We stuck to the grass beside the fence and slipped onto the Whitfords’ property. They still kept their key under a stone behind the garage. I pocketed it, and Nixie handed out the containers. We pulled down our pyjamas and squatted in the shadows.
‘This is awesome,’ Nixie whispered.
‘You’re a genius, Brook.’
A few drops landed loudly in Aqua’s container, then she stopped. ‘I can’t pee.’
‘Shhh, will you.’
‘I forgot toilet paper.’
I was the first to finish, and I shook off as best I could.
‘Go,’ Brook said. ‘You’ve got to go while it’s warm.’
I held my breath down the hallway. A drip of pee trickled down my thigh and made my pyjamas stick to my skin. Amy Whitford was sleeping with her sheets down. I let my container tip, gently, onto the mattress between her legs, some on her boxer briefs. She turned and groaned. I ducked out, nearly crashed into Brook; her ice-cream container splashed. She gritted her teeth and skated into David’s room.
I was in the hallway when the barking started. Nixie came running with a small dog at her heels. A cat-sized dog that stopped to shake its fur and scatter droplets on the floorboards. I bolted. I dropped my container and stumbled over it. Aqua couldn’t open the door; her fingers fumbled at the lock. Brook tried to push her out of the way, and the dog jumped up on Nixie.
She squealed.
The door flew open and my sisters piled onto the grass, but before I could move, a figure stepped into the hallway—rough skin on her neck, boxer shorts with lightning strikes on them, hair rumpled in a fat wig around her head.
‘What the eff,’ Amy Whitford croaked.
We sprinted over damp grass and around the fence towards our back door.
‘Trust Nixie to pour pee on a freaking dog,’ Brook said.
‘I didn’t do it on purpose.’ Lipstick was smudged up Nixie’s cheeks. ‘Anyway, you should’ve known they had a dog.’
‘Doesn’t change much,’ I said. ‘They’d have guessed.’
We wanted to rise early and listen out for damage, but the sun slipped up and steamed the grass behind closed curtains while we dreamt noiselessly in our beds.
The Whitfords didn’t confront us. If their mother mentioned anything to ours, we didn’t hear about it. The sun crept high over white bed sheets that blew in the breeze on their back lawn. Flags of surrender, or defiance.
Next time I looked the sheets were gone, but Amy Whitford was on the grass wriggling into her wetsuit. I dashed inside and hid behind a curtain. When I looked out the window she was squinting at our house. She stared right at me, right at where my eye peered through the centimetre gap between window-frame and curtain. She held up both middle fingers.
‘Nice one, Kai,’ she said. ‘You’re disgusting. You belong in a cage, all of you do.’ She walked closer to the fence and directed her words at my eye. ‘We’ve heard about you. At the dairy, with Karen Rosewood and some other kids, they told us all sorts of things. You’re not as cool as you think you are. I know you’re there, Drippy Kai.’
Prickles peaked in waves across my skin, and Amy Whitford, jaw locked and frazzled, scrambled back into her bach.
Mum had her singlet straps tucked under her armpits and her hair twisted into an alligator clip. Her skin was leathery from too much sun, and she’d made her own earrings out of sea objects: two baby kina dangled either side of her neck.
‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘I never thought I’d say this, but leave the Whitfords alone.’
She’d been forced into a confrontation with Mrs Whitford, that toxic woman.
What was wrong with us, her kind-hearted girls? I could picture the two of them, backs arched like cats, Mrs Whitford in linen and Mum in a sarong from the 123 dollar shop that she bought because it had fish on it. She’d have her hands on her hips, drawing strength from her moral high ground, faking superiority.
‘No more, all right?’ She switched from scolding to dismissive, as though she didn’t give a crap about the Whitfords, not anymore. But she was faking that, too.
Brook bit a fingernail and spat it onto the deck. Aqua smirked.
‘Especially you, Kai,’ Mum said to me.
My sip of ice water stopped moving inside my throat and burned.
‘I expected more, especially of you.’
Nalu lifted her head from the book she was reading and looked at me then carried on as if none of us were there. She confronted me outside the bathroom later that afternoon. Her hair was wrapped up in a towel. ‘Does it make you feel powerful?’ she said.
‘Or are you scared, trying to protect yourself?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
A lump of wet hair stuck to her temple. A droplet fell from it and trailed through the maze of moles on her neck. ‘Why are you pretending? Have you blocked everything out like it never happened?’
‘I said, I don’t know why.’
She watched me, her eyes pale as duck eggs. ‘Wake up, Kai,’ she said.
She left me by the bathroom where my shape was a blur behind the fog on the mirror, but it was the truth; I didn’t know why. I was not strong like Nalu and Brook, bored like Aqua, keen-to-follow like Nixie. I was numb and reactionary. I trailed through the water, a piece of bait, both dead and deadly. I don’t know what it was that made me break the pact, but when the Whitfords arrived it happened just like that—the sky clouded over. I’d seen them pulled up and reeled in by the summer, seen them flap around inside their shiny little bach, teeth snapping, tails whipping, and the urgent response, the appropriate response, was to slice their bellies open with a fish knife.
They left the house open and went to the beach. We could see their bright rash vests and glistening heads bobbing on boards in the waves. They’d left their towels on the grass. The car was gone and the dog. The key had been removed from under the stone, but we didn’t need it. We just pushed open the goddamned back door.
I hadn’t been inside the Whitfords’ house in daytime for over three years. The last time was with Dad when we came to borrow soy sauce. I used to scour that memory for a look of lust from him, for some display of affection towards the kids, but I couldn’t remember anything that gave him away.
The bedrooms looked the same. Faded lemon duvet covers. An old television and a PlayStation in a tangle of wires on the rug. Brook cracked her neck side-to-side the way she did when she was getting herself ready for something. She pulled a tube of glue from a plastic bag and gave it to Nixie. ‘For the locks,’ she said. ‘Don’t glue your fingers together.’
Aqua opened drawers and poked through the contents. She studied a picture of David with ski goggles on his head.
My plan involved Amy Whitford’s hairbrush. When I’d dug the sewing needles between the bristles it was ready.
‘Are you insane?’
Startled, I shoved the hairbrush in my pocket.
Brook, who’d been slicing faces out of photos, had moved back into the hallway and the Stanley knife was pointed at Nixie. Thick globs of glue bulged from the lock and dribbled down the handle. ‘You shut the freaking door?’
‘I was supposed to. Otherwise it won’t glue together.’
‘You were supposed to let us out first,’ I said. ‘I’ll find a tea towel or something.’
But I hesitated because Nixie was flapping her arms, going red in the face. When she wound up like this, things got interesting. She made Brook want to throttle her.
‘You have no clue,’ Brook spat.
‘We can leave through the front doors.’
‘They’ll see us.’
‘It won’t have dried.’
‘Open the door then, go on.’
Nixie turned to me. ‘Kai, get a tea towel.’
Brook used Nixie’s singlet to grab the handle. The door sucked open in thick strings of glue. She let go and the glue-smeared singlet slapped against Nixie’s stomach. Nixie squealed and held the fabric away from her skin. She spat at Brook, and Brook shoved her.
‘I hate you!’ Nixie yelled. ‘I hate you!’ She ran away behind the house.
‘Holy hell.’ Brook wiped her hands against her shorts. She ratted around inside her bag. ‘I’m going to the garage.’ She took off the same way Nixie had.
‘Come on.’ Aqua grabbed my wrist. ‘Let’s explore.’
I was tired and ready for this to be over. Aqua tugged me towards the living area where dust motes floated in the window light and grains of sand speckled the floorboards. A twist of woven flax made art over the fireplace, and the cushions were sewn out of faded lavalavas. It was the kind of ‘Pacific-themed’ decorating that frantically screamed, ‘We’re relaxed! Look how relaxed we are!’
The front doors banged open, and David Whitford stood between them, wet hair, a towel around his neck. I considered running, but my escape fled before I did. Aqua tightened her grip on my wrist.
He had grown up since the night Brook and I doused him in rotten milk. Salty droplets ran in thin rivers across the birthmark on his chest, but he’d grown to be decent-looking, I had to admit. Ruddy and tall with two rock pools for eyes, the same kelpy shade as his dripping hair. I could tell the moment he made some sort of decision. He straightened his back, and the pool rippled.
‘Hi,’ he said. Aqua had gone quiet, serious.
‘Are you pulling more pranks? We knew it was you.’
He glanced at our T-shirts and shorts, our empty hands, searching for clues. ‘My sister’s out body boarding.’
‘We didn’t stop by to see her,’ I said.
‘Why do you do it? You’ve hurt us, you know.’
Aqua’s face was a shade paler than usual. ‘We don’t mean it, all the pranks, it’s nothing. We’re stopping now, anyway.’
‘You guys made me stink for a week. I couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth, and Amy,’ he pointed at his foot, ‘she’s still got scars from the rocks.’
David’s attention was on Aqua, so I watched him. He was the sort of person whose popularity surprised you until you had a conversation, and then it was obvious: he was a neutraliser. Toned down people’s acid. Made the alkaline-sort feel balanced. He was gangly and glistening—a creature crawled out of the sea—but that didn’t matter when you slipped in and levelled out like he did. When everyone was your friend. For some people it was easy.
‘We’re stopping now,’ Aqua repeated. Her words hovered and settled on the cushions, seeped into the walls. ‘This is the last.’
David let out a breath and scratched behind his ear. ‘I’m getting an ice block,’ he said. ‘Want one?’
We followed him to the kitchen, not knowing what else to do. David pulled three Juicies from the freezer and offered me one. He passed Aqua a tropical, and she regarded it warily then took it. We perched on barstools, and the sun stretched rainbows on the windowsill. The concept of making peace was as foreign to me as sitting with a boy at a kitchen island. Not a relative or a forced play-date but something else. A drop of something hopeful.
Aqua was more familiar with this sort of situation. ‘That looks like the North Island.’ She nodded at David’s birthmark.
‘What?’ His chin pressed against his neck to look. ‘Yeah, I suppose. Mum used to say it was good luck.’ He smirked at her. ‘But I don’t know about that. I used to think she’d spilt barbeque sauce on me and couldn’t scrub it off. Don’t hate it now, though.’
‘They’re a leftover from a past life,’ Aqua said. ‘Like a reincarnation.’
‘Maybe I was a rat once?’
‘A bear.’
‘I’ll take that.’ His grin was all teeth and goggly eyes—he was a Whitford, after all.
We sucked our Juicies. ‘You have a nice place here,’ I said.
A thatch of salted hair appeared behind the kitchen window and two incredulous eyes. I left the Juicie on the bench and hurried onto the lawn.
‘What are you doing?’ Brook emerged from a feijoa bush. ‘I can’t believe you’re talking to him.’ She had a bucket in one hand filled with sand and a chisel in the other. She used a shoulder to brush at the hair on her face.
She was ruining this. I couldn’t be bothered with her any more.
‘I’m done,’ I said. ‘I’m over it. No more pranks.’
Brook dumped the bucket and chisel on the grass and folded her arms. ‘Are you kidding me? You’re such a flake.’
I stared out at the water.
‘Alright, fine,’ she said, and her voice shook. ‘Do what you like.’
Not long after Brook left, I did as well. I left feeling like some small part of me had opened a door and emerged into a bright unknown. A new start, or some sort of change.
Aqua stayed at the Whitfords’ all afternoon until the sun faded and the air turned a translucent shade of blue. Mum clicked the stove on for dinner, but I slipped out into the dusk and walked the paths to the Whitfords’ house. Through the windows I saw Amy and her mother lounging in front of the television. I wandered down to the grass by the beach; in the distance were two silhouettes walking up from the shore.
Aqua’s hand was wrapped up in David’s.
‘We’re going out,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘Out, like boyfriend and girlfriend.’
I laughed then shut my mouth at the look on her face.
‘Don’t start, Kai. Don’t you dare start. Anyone who does or says anything mean has me to answer to.’
David wrapped his arm around her shoulder.
The glass doors banged open, and Amy Whitford flapped onto the lawn like a gull scenting a carcass. I hadn’t been this close to her in over a year. She smelled pink and sickly—a teen-girl perfume. Eczema crinkled at her eyes. ‘Have you lost your mind?’ She hushed the words at David between her teeth. ‘She’s one of them.’
‘Come on,’ he said. He hooked arms with Aqua and they walked together, blending into the shadows on the sand.
‘I don’t believe this,’ Amy said. ‘She’s going to hurt him. She’s one of you.’
A fat drop of rain landed on my head. The smell of fish rose from the shoreline.
‘Who freaking pees on someone’s sheets? What’s wrong with you?’ Amy stepped closer, and every muscle in my body clenched. It was laughable that she was sticking up for herself, being a Whitford. I stepped backwards.
‘I heard about it,’ she said. ‘All the shit those kids gave you. Did you pee on them too?’ Raindrops fell on my face.
‘Who names a kid Kai? What’s wrong with your mother? No wait, that’s obvious, she’s a mess.’ Droplets were sliding down her skin and darkening her hair, but she didn’t move. She was waiting, urging me to respond, as though she’d whacked a cricket ball into my stomach and was poised for me to whack it back.
Words slipped out from between my teeth. ‘What did my dad see in any of you?’
‘He was smart to leave. I’ll bet he has a new family now. Pretty kids and a wife who doesn’t make him want to slit his wrists.’
Something inside me leapt at her.
‘Shut up,’ I yelled. ‘Shut up.’ I grabbed her shirt. ‘Shut up, you bitch. I hate you.’ I shook her. I shoved her to the grass and her head thunked back. ‘I hate you.’
She pushed me over, and a pain pierced my side. I howled.
Amy leapt away.
I yanked the hairbrush from my pocket and pointed it at her. At her frightened, confused Whitford face. Rivers ran past my eyes, and I blinked through them. My clothes stuck to me.
‘What?’ Amy laughed. ‘Is that a hairbrush?’
‘Pathetic,’ I whispered. ‘You’re bloody pathetic, all of you.’ I dropped the hairbrush and ran from their lawn, drenched, with the dark sky in front of me, dark behind me and dark under my skin and in my chest.
‘Do you want people to accept you as you are, Kai?’ she shouted behind my back. ‘Or do you want them to like you? It’s one or the other.’
I crashed into our living room and the smell of it hit me—wilted petals, crisping pages, old family photos and junk. My house stank of its own soul, of everything built up and stored and coated with dust. Nalu was there, waiting in the middle of it all, as if she’d known. She went for a towel, while I made a puddle that flashed silver-blue from the television screen. My shadow was there, looming over everything, rippling in a steady beat of drips.
We tried to ignore the Whitfords for the rest of the summer. We ignored David and Aqua’s long strolls on the beach. She hardly said a word to any of us. She tried to keep him safe from us, I think. Wouldn’t look at me at dinner, just ate then left.
Things had changed in other ways too. Mrs Whitford came over with Amy’s needle-spiked hairbrush in her hand. She threatened to call the police. Brook only glanced at me once, before she shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘So what if I did?’
Brook was grounded after that, but she had stomach cramps anyway and wanted to stay indoors. Nixie hid in the pōhutukawa fort and wouldn’t talk much to any of us except Nalu.
Nalu and I reinstated our pact, the one we first formed at school when they hurt her, when she was around the back of the toilets and someone said, ‘Go quick,’ and my shoes suctioned into the muddy grass as I ran. The toilet block was yellow like turned milk, and the crowd buzzed as if an invisible force cracked whips to spines and heckled in whispers, up necks and into ears. Karen Rosewood was there. From the back she looked broad and thick-necked. A long, beige ponytail dangled between her shoulder blades.
Nalu was pressed against wooden beams and had shit on her, smeared across her cloudy skin. She was crying, struggling away from a boy with a razor blade. ‘Hold still,’ he said. ‘It’s just a tattoo. Won’t hurt much.’ His face was red and sweating. Another boy put weight on her legs.
I was about to run towards her, to stop them—I was—but someone yanked my arm, and I whiplashed into a sea of legs and mud. ‘Hold still, drip.’
‘We need to brand her. Just like we do all our cows.’
Nalu’s eyes were panicked. Blood ran down her calf into the mud.
A shoe kicked me. ‘You need branding.’ The puddle in the grass reflected clouds and Karen Rosewood’s shadow.
I never knew why she hated me. I did everything she wanted me to. I agreed with her until my own opinions tangled into knots, and my emotions disappeared. She pinched my skin, and I told myself Karen Rosewood is funny and clever. But even though she hated me, she loved me too. I could see it in her face when she walked up to me in the mud—the love and the hatred, mixed.
I turned invisible. I became a cloud. I floated upwards and slipped and fell.
‘Drippy Kai,’ she said. ‘Who’d want to eat you?’
On one of those days, back then, Dad picked me up from the principal’s office. He never picked me up, but there he was. I had an ice-pack on my knee, and sallow patches of yellow-black spread like ink over my skin. He was as big as the doorframe, and his jacket smelled like a tackle-box. I burst into salty tears. I cried so much in the car I had hiccups, but I couldn’t stop.
Dad shifted his weight in the driver’s seat. ‘Do you think you’ve brought any of it on yourself?’ He flicked a finger at my feathery hair, glanced down at my muddy socks—my shoes were gone—and then stared out the car window as if he couldn’t look anymore.
Mum would yell at our teacher, at the parents, and cry, and slam the car door. Brook gave Karen a shiner once, bigger than three plums, before they expelled her. Nixie stared, wide-eyed, when I bumped a scab and a gush of red trailed towards my ankle.
At night, Nalu slipped off the top bunk, and we huddled in the dark. Sometimes I dreamed of knives that ripped at the sky, of fish blood and white scales torn down the middle, entrails uncoiling in loose spirals. A boat would tip and sway beneath me and there was something steady about it, calm. We floated there in the water, me and the other fish, under the wounded clouds.