I don’t know where to sit. Eating with Afton or Jenny Wong and her family feels like a bad idea, considering how much I’ve got bottled up inside. So I make sure Abby is settled in with them and then lurk around for a few minutes before walking over and slapping my bento box down on Nick Kelly’s table.

Sweet, clueless Nick.

He’s playing a game on his phone with earphones on. I assume he’s the safest bet for a quiet, no-fuss dining experience.

I’m wrong. He pulls his headphones down around his neck the instant I sit across from him. “Hi.”

“Hi. Can I join you?”

“Let me think.” He looks deliberately thoughtful for a second, then smiles, a flash of crooked teeth. “Okay, just this once.”

“Thanks.”

It’s quiet for a minute. Then Nick says, “White people suck.”

I swear, that’s what he says.

I stare at him. I mean, Nick is about as typical a Caucasian teenage boy as they come. “Uh, what’s that?”

He points with his thumb at Kahoni a few tables away. “You know, how the white explorers brought mosquitoes to these islands? Oh, and tuberculosis. Rats. Syphilis. If you ask me, Captain Cook had it coming.”

I haven’t been paying attention to Kahoni’s history lesson. I’ve been too busy stewing over my own disasters.

“I did think it was interesting, though, when he said they traded nails for sex with the native women,” Nick adds.

And we’re back to talking about sex. Everybody is so fixated on sex.

I sigh.

“Nails, like, iron nails. Like what you build houses with,” he continues.

I’m not sure what I can say to that.

“You don’t talk a lot, do you?” he says.

“I’m just trying to eat, I guess.”

“Right. Sorry. I’m not usually this loquacious, either.” His cheeks turn pink, then his ears. “Sorry. I’ll let you eat. The food’s actually better than it looks.”

I pull off the lid of the bento box and stare inside. There are three compartments: one that holds a piece of fried chicken, another with a bunch of unidentifiable chunks of meat, and the third a large pile of white rice with shredded seaweed on top and what look like two large, bloated zombie fingers, but what turn out to be a type of purple potato.

I spear a zombie finger with my fork and eat it. It’s not bad, so I move on to the mystery meat, which I decide is teriyaki pork.

“Nene,” Nick says then.

It’s like we’re not even speaking the same language.

“What’s nene?” I ask.

“Hawaii’s state bird. It’s a goose, actually.”

I promptly spit the meat back into my napkin, and then it’s Nick who’s staring at me strangely. “You don’t like it?”

“I didn’t sign on to eat a goose!”