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the rails it wouldn’t be funny. But you? Codie, you don’t need it.”
    “Luz, you don’t know that. You don’t know what it’s like in my head.”
    “Tell me, Codie. Make me understand.”
    “I got people in line behind me waiting for this phone. They won’t give us back our personal ones for another month. Can’t you just accept that this is my choice? It’s what I choose to do.”
    “Or maybe you’re just doing what Mom programmed us to do.”
    “You got the same programming and I don’t see you rushing out to enlist. Come on, Luz, be happy for me. For the first time in my life I don’t feel like a retard loser.”
    “That’s the thing; you never were. You said it yourself so many times. It was because we moved so much. By the time a teacher figured out that—surprise!—even if you spelled ‘stop’ ‘pots,’ you were really fucking smart, and even if, maybe, next year, they’d get you assigned to the right class with the right teacher, we’d be gone by then.”
    “Boo-fuckin’-hoo. It is what it is.”
    It is what it is?
I can’t believe she uttered the ultimate Gung Ho statement of idiocy in any way except making fun of our mother, who says that exact thing way too often.
    “Is Mom around? I need to ask her if she knows my DI.”
    Though I knew what a DI is, I tried to shake her out of Gung Ho mode by asking, “Your what?”
    “Drill instructor. Is Mom there?”
    I put our mother on and she barked, “What’s the sit rep?”
    She meant “situation report.” Mom was still wearing her camo BDUs, her hair pulled up tight into a French braid that didn’t extend more than the three inches in bulk that the air force authorized. They talked to each other in the foreign language that I’d resisted my whole life and my sister had secretly become fluent in, and it was all MTIs and MEPs and BMC.
    “Forget that HUT! Two, three, four, shit,” my mom advised. “It’s HUT! Twop! Threep! Fourp! Put that ‘puh’ in and you’ll get the cadence right.” Talking to Codie, my mom was happy and animated in a way I could barely remember her ever being with us. A strange mix of jealousy, sadness, and revulsion forced me to leave.
    After Basic, Codie went into Security Forces training, where, besides learning to direct traffic and what to do about barking dogs in base neighborhoods, she studied capture and recovery of nuclear weapons, IEDs, and military operations in urban terrain. Codie was good at everything, but utterly excelled at BEAST, Basic Expeditionary Airmen Skills Training, the week when they all went
Lord of the Flies,
lived wild in the field, and made war on one another. Codie was elected leader of Reaper Zone, and, in spite of being half the size of most of the guys on her team and still wearing full body armor and humping a pack containing three MREs, all her MOPP gear—chemical warfare suit, gloves, boots, and gas mask—and carrying two canteens and an M-16 rifle, she was officially credited with the most kills. Because she was not only an honor graduate but got a ribbon for highest small arms marksmanship,
and
made Warrior Flight, Codie was rewarded with the assignment that everyone dreams of, Hickam Air Force Base, right next to Honolulu and across the bay from its sister base, Pearl Harbor.
    Meanwhile, I was surviving my junior year at Pueblo Heights as best I could. Which, without Codie, was not too sparkly good. Codie had always been the filter between me and the world. Doing school without her was a root canal minus the Novocain. I killed two birds—social group and numbing the pain—with one group of Quasis, the stoners, when I discovered how easy it was to hang with the slouchy kids who liked to get high. How open and welcoming they were. How essential and mood-elevating their drugs were. My favorite of this crew were the kids who were bused in from the rez. The sweet-faced Navajo girlswho carried their weight in their tummies and favored low-rise jeans on their skinny legs