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Show A week later I called my mother and told her I was engaged. She cried. I met John the fall after the Winnebago trip. He was one of the graduate advisors for the university programming board I had joined. We were introduced in the hallway of the student union, light bouncing off the linoleum tiles, students rushing past carrying backpacks full of books with unbroken spines. I was 20 he, 25 and living with a woman named Lisa. His eyes were the color of the sea. Throughout college, I kept my Hawaii driver's license as well as the Hawaii plates on my car in an effort to remain connected to the most geographically remote piece of land on the planet. Because I was an oddity at the University of Nebraska-everyone I knew was from the state-I had a kind of celebrity status. People mistook my dark hair for Hawaiian blood and often assumed I was native. Only rarely did I correct them. In actuality, I was a resident of Nebraska, a state in which I could not tell hay from alfalfa, could not locate Paxton or Alma on a map, had never seen a game in Husker stadium. My father retained his residency in Nebraska while my family moved around the country, thereby securing in-state tuition for me. When it came time for me to go to college, Nebraska was what he could afford. The first day of classes I walked into a lecture hall and was overwhelmed by how fair everyone was, rows and rows and rows and rows of blonde-haired haoles. I had no idea where to sit. For the first two years I didn't date. At first because I was pining for my high school boyfriend, had, in fact, erected an altar to him in my dorm room, wrote him every day while my peers played quarters at the ATO house, and then 215 |
