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The crochet, as well as almost everything else her family shoved onto her, was yet another attempt to try to tire her out.
Sure, they said it was to better her fine motor skills and patience, and they said it was a cheap extracurricular with some real use in everyday life, but they never forced Maui into it the same way they did with her. One could argue it was because this sort of stuff was supposed to be women’s work, but that argument fell apart once you knew the person who taught her this fiddly bit of yarncraft in the first place was her dad.
The same person who made all her beanies and most of her baby toys.
So yes, it was just another activity they dropped into her lap to try get her to be quieter and more behaved, and they all had an understanding that was the thing she needed to conquer. That and her terrible handwriting, which they reckoned the crochet would help with because it was all about controlling her hands. It was just like the netball, the Samoan dance groups, and the constant chores: just there to help Moana slow down. Not that any of it worked. If anything they probably just gave her the stamina to be even more energetic afterwards.
But she’s not talking today, not with this project. Maui’s turning fifteen soon and other than a few coasters she still needs the practice making things in the round. He’s not really a beanie person but with her skill level it’s either this or a scarf, and he’s even less of a scarf person. But he’d appreciate the thought, right? So here she is, stopping and starting over for what must be the fourth time because either this pattern’s wrong or she’s misread the thing again.
He likes green, doesn’t he? He wears it a lot, and it just seems to pop nicely against his skin.
It’s almost enough to drive her to just trudge to Gramma Tala’s room and ask her for help with the pattern when she hears a familiar slam and squeak against the wall and a wail of frustration from Maui’s half of the room.
She’s still holding the hook and project when she peers over at the battered rubber duck on the floor. “All good, bro?”
He’s typing away at his computer again but she can feel him frowning, same way he always did when she called him that. But what else would she call him, besides his name? He was still her brother, even if they weren’t related by blood.
“Yeah, nah, don’t worry about it, Princess,” he says, waving her away that’s actually going to do anything to make her leave him alone. “Just worked out something.”
“What’d you work out?”
There’s a pause like he’s actually going to tell her, before he simply answers, “Nothing,” and continues to type with that special keyboard he bought with money from doing other people’s homework.
“If it was nothing, you wouldn’t be throwing things.”
“Mo—”
“Come on, bro, I can listen, too,” she says. “Better than that duck you keep talking to, anyway. I actually got ears.”
“Moana—”
“And I’ve been reading,” she says, puffing her chest. “I’m bored with the books at school. I’ve been trying to read your books. You can talk to me now.”
She has. And they’re hard. But that just comes with the territory with Maui, him and his little dragon horde of books spilling out from his wall shelf and out onto the floor and every available surface on his side of the room, the piles topped with trophies because the trophies and medals and ribbons are almost beginning to outnumber the reading material. Which includes a framed news article here and there.
Maui reads. He doesn’t look or act like the type to read but he reads more than anyone she knows. He’s always asking questions, and books are just one of the places that seems to shut him up for a while so he can look for answers. And a fair number of the books in English are so hard to follow, filled with symbols she’d never seen in school and things that look like English but aren’t English, but also definitely aren’t any of the other languages he reads in.
None of her friends’ brothers skipped that many year levels. None of her friends’ brothers could do what he could.
So it should be a little victory that she could obtain even the tiniest bit of his knowledge.
“You?” he says, actually turning to face her, confusion and delight in his voice. “You’ve been reading my books?”
There’s a heat in her cheeks she feels less often than she has, but more often than she should, when she sees the look on Maui’s face like he’s trying not to laugh. “Don’t make fun,” she says. “I’ve been trying.”
“I’m not, I’m not,” he says. “I just wanna know which ones.”
“Fine, don’t tell me what you found, then,” she says, and goes back to work, wondering how she’d have to adjust the pattern for it to fit his big stupid head in the first place.
Maui’s sigh is loud and dramatic, just like Maui in general, and he leaves huge, gentle footfalls in his wake as he makes his way over to her side of the bedroom, the side full of stuffed toys and sporting and dance equipment and a couple of Most Improved certificates her parents actually thought deserved framing.
“Hey,” he says, his voice all quiet just for her, “hey, you know I didn’t mean anything by it, right? That was just a surprise, that’s all. I never see you reading. But if you wanna read my books, come read my books.”
She’s frogging the beanie again, watching the stitches she worked so hard to keep even melt away as she pulls at the vivid green yarn.
“Hey, stop, that was good!”
“It wasn’t!” she says, and hides away the pattern under a pillow. “The rows aren’t increasing right. I keep getting distracted. I keep losing count. Can’t even read the stupid pattern, all the symbols keep mixing up and moving.”
It takes all her willpower to not just blurt, I’m not smart like you.
He frowns, like he’s filing away something for later, and as he sits beside her his eyes are on the disappearing beanie.
“What are you working on?” he says, as the rows come undone.
There’s a pause where she actually considers telling him, until she remembers his big stupid brain probably figured it out anyway and she instead simply answers, “Nothing,” before she continues to pull at the yarn.
“Tell you what I’m working on if you tell me what you’re working on.”
“We’re both working on nothing, I thought.”
Maui chuckles. “See, I can never keep up with that mouth of yours, Moana,” he says. “Where do you get that from, Gramma?”
She shrugs. “Maybe I was adopted like you.”
“Permanent care, Mo. Adoption is different, it’s—Never mind,” he says. “Besides, Mum and Dad brought me along to hospital when you were born. I waited with Gramma. You’re definitely theirs.”
Which isn’t as much of a reassurance as he probably thinks it is. Mum and Dad fostered the genius and let him into their lives. It was Moana they didn’t choose, Moana they got stuck with.
Maui, as always, notices her reaction and reacts accordingly.
“Right, I’ll talk first, then,” he says, and he heads back to his computer like he’s leading her into some sort of cave of treasures. He points at the profile picture of a palagi girl on screen, around Moana’s age so between seven to nine, smiling under a silly flower crown filter. “See her?”
“Yeah?”
“People have been telling me she’s in some trouble, with some people online,” he says, a hardness in his voice like he’s barely holding in the urge to strangle these people. Which he probably could, the way he’s been outgrowing his clothes lately. “They’re like a little gang—wait, not a gang, gangs are actually scary. Nah, they’re like a murderous little band of kids dressing up as pirates. Bored little babies with nothing better to do than play tricks and hassle people.”
“You play tricks and hassle people.”
“Not these kinds of tricks, kiddo,” Maui says.
“How’ve they been hassling her?”
Maui shakes his head, and it takes him a while to find the words. When he does they come out measured and far too calm. “They found out she was scared of some things,” he says, “so now they keep sending her pictures and videos of the things she’s scared of. As a joke. They found all her profiles, they found her phone number, they even found her house. They think she’s making everything up for attention. They think it’s funny when she cries.”
“That’s … not good,” Moana says.
“No,” Maui says. “It’s not.”
She moves closer to his half of the room and peers at the second screen he bought with his own money, even though she has no idea what’s going on on either of them. The flash drive he specially changed to look like a bone fish hook pendant glows gently blue from one of the front ports of his CPU.
“So what do they want you to do?” she says. “The people who told you about this girl?”
“They want the hassling to stop, basically,” Maui says. “So I have a plan, so they really learn their lesson.”
Moana leans in closer, like she actually has a chance of understanding anything going on on screen.
“You gonna delete all their profiles?” she says.
“Better,” Maui says. “I’m gonna save the really nasty bits from their profiles, and send it to everyone they know. Starting with their schools and jobs.”
Moana’s eyes widen.
“And then I’m going to delete all their video game data,” Maui says. “Both their purchase records and their save files.”
Moana gasps. “Even the paid games?”
“Especially the paid games.”
“Shotttt,” she breathes.
Maui smirks, and takes a little bow from his chair.
He tells her he did other things, too. Tracked down a man who filmed himself throwing kittens into a raging river, found some people behind an attack in another country, even stopped a website selling some pretty bad stuff from ever doing business again.
Moana, impossibly, is nearly speechless before he’s even halfway down the list of the things he did when he wasn’t out getting awards.
She knew he did something with his computer. Maui’s smart, and computers could do almost anything these days, so as far as she knew he was basically magic, but she didn’t think it meant things like this, helping people and fighting off baddies. Which somehow made him even more magic. Or better. Like, a superhero or something, swooping in to save the day.
“But don’t tell Mum and Dad, yeah?” Maui murmurs. “They think I’m just doing odd jobs and uni work. We don’t want them to know all this other stuff.”
She shakes her head, and makes it a point not to ever cross her brother.
“That why you’ve been yelling at the duck?” she says.
“Nah,” he says. “That’s just something they do in America, aye? You talk to one of these if you get stuck. I didn’t think it would help but it does.”
“So why d’you throw it?” she says. “If it’s there to help you, why does it make you cross?”
“Because I’m cross at myself, aren’t I?” he says. “I’m mad I didn’t see the answers sooner.”
And now Moana really gasps, nearly falling off her bed. “That happens? With you?!” she says. “I thought you just got bored and needed something to throw!”
Maui laughs. “Everyone gets stuck, Moana!” he says. “You know, people used to think I was stupid before Gramma sorted me out. They said I’d never read at the same level as anyone else, I’m a handful, I’m a liar, there’s no point trying to get me into school. But I showed them.”
Moana almost falls right onto her hook. “They said what?”
How was he ever seen as anything but basically magic?
“Look, the point is everyone gets stuck,” he says. “By the way, we need to tell Mum and Dad you’ve been seeing letters jumping around. That can’t be good.”
He continues. “But yeah. Just because Gramma says I’m a genius—”
“A super genius!” she sputters, even though Gramma did say never to tell him she said that.
“Gramma says,” Maui insists, “doesn’t mean I don’t need help with my work sometimes.”
Something about him cracks, and it’s like she’s seeing a side to him he would usually make sure to hide around her.
“But I need to keep going, you know?” he says. “Everyone only started treating me better when they found out I was smart.”
And his eyes grow vacant, lost in some sort of memory. “Without my gifts, I’m nothing.”
There’s an anger in Moana that her family always told her to keep under control, and she’s not sure where to direct it but she knows it needs to go to whoever told him that. “That is not true,” she says. “Who said that to you? I’ll smash them. I’m small. They’ll never see me coming.”
Maui snaps out of it and he shakes his head, smiling. “Easy,” he says. “I’m not having you go out and fight people you don’t even know.”
“But bro—”
“Stay,” he says.
Moana huffs, and her attention span brings her back to the rubber duck, lying sadly on the bedroom floor, its yellow skin scuffed and scratched from years of abuse. “Why the duck?” she says. “That doesn’t fit you at all.”
Maui shrugs. “Couldn’t be bothered finding anything better,” he says. “I’m more of a hawk person. Or a pigeon person. Just, generally, better birds. I’d even take a better duck.”
Moana glances down at what’s left of the beanie, a lonely slipknot and a curly nest of green pooled over her crossed legs. She glances at the few badly-rewound balls of black and brown yarn in her shelf, stuffed next to the toy chicken her dad made for her when she was three, and in a different corner is some off-white she’d only used for stitch practice.
And she gets an idea.
“So,” Maui says, “your turn, Princess. Tell me what little nothing you’ve got going on, then.”
But she’s out the door before he can so much as ask where she’s going, yarn trailing behind her as she races to get to the shared computer in the family room before she can forget her little flash of brilliance. Pua the rescue dog scrambles after her once she runs by him in the hall.
“Gramma!” she squeals, careening into the sofa to find her gramma already at the computer, looking up from some trendy new zombie game. “Gramma I need your help with a pattern!”
They choose a free standard pattern from one of the sites, something rated Easy that she could get done in time for his birthday if she could stay still long enough to finish it. So she does. Or at least, she tries. If working in the round was the thing she had trouble with then there was no better training than a pattern almost completely built on working in the round. The main section takes maybe a couple of days (of crying and restarting), but as she goes on it gets easier. Unlike the beanie this is all single crochet, so at least most of the work is getting the increases and decreases right.
It helps that her dad finally teases the information on the secret project out of her, and offers to do the section she couldn’t find a pattern for. Gramma Tala, smiling indulgently, offers to do the hair. Mum, who doesn’t know the first thing about this craft, settles with reminding Moana to do the reading exercises the counsellor assigned after Maui told their parents she’d been seeing letters move around. It’s still hard to read, but at least now she knows it’s not her fault that it’s hard, and somehow that’s made all the difference.
He made her better. She just wants to return the favour in some way.
Maui bursts into laughter as he removes the present from the gift bag she stapled herself.
“What’s this?” he says, his face split into a grin that shows off the gap in his teeth. “Is—Moana, is this me? Did you make a little me?”
Moana beams, while her parents and Gramma smile knowingly in her direction. “I call him Mini Maui!” she says. “You can talk to him when you get stuck! When you’re not talking to me, anyway, ‘cause I actually got ears.”
The tension of the stitches fluctuates here and there, there are pocks and bulges where she got the stitch count wrong, and it’s obvious which parts she had help on, but it’s undeniable who it’s supposed to be.
The bright green lavalava pops against the brown of the skin, and a mane of black curls bursts from the head, where Moana insisted on sewing the button eyes and stitched nose and mouth. In one of his hands is a giant fish hook, which Dad accidentally made almost taller than the figure because Moana forgot to mention what size hook she used for the rest of the project.
“Is that my flash drive?” Maui says.
Dad smirks. “Your weapon.”
Maui’s laughing again. “My what?”
“To beat the baddies with!” Moana says.
Mum giggles. “She thinks you’re a superhero.”
Moana’s not sure she’s ever seen her brother blush that hard before.
Her hands drift upwards to play with her hair, gathering it into bundles and before her fingers run through it. She had to stay still a lot for that project. She had to count over and over again, and try to read the pattern right. She likes to think it came out okay, but she needs to hear it from the genius.
“You like it?” she says, and she’d be lying if she said that wasn’t the same smile she’d use whenever she needed him to reach for something or buy her a potato top pie.
There’s a softer look there for a second, before he looks back at her as the normal Maui, all swagger and sarcasm. “Better than that duck.”
And somehow that’s better than any ribbon or trophy she could get, just to know she made something her magical genius brother would treat just like any of his other, fancier awards. She squeals, and before she knows it he’s scrambling to catch her as she jumps onto him in a hug. “I’ll make some more, then.”
He blinks. “What?”
Her voice comes out muffled against his shoulder. “I’ll make a hawk.”
“Ha,” he says. “Okay, Princess.”
Her eyes fly open as she realises yeah, yeah, she could absolutely make more. “And a pigeon.”
“I don’t think I need that many—”
“And a fantail!” she says, scrambling down to run back to their room.
“Moana—”
But it’s too late. She’s already shooting through the hall and towards the room, a confused but excited Pua in tow. “Bird friends!” she says. “And a shark!”