S2 Week 2 Bonus Story: Roots

That's Love For Ya

Welcome to Trainwrecks: Season 2 (2005-2006)! If you haven’t read Season 1, please start there! Trainwrecks is a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.

Friday posts are for paid subscribers. For $5 a month or a discounted rate of $50 a year, readers will get bonus content each month that delves further into character backgrounds or expands the current narrative. This bonus content is not needed to understand the main story. Money made from paid subscriptions gets reinvested into the series in the form of art and advertising!

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August 10, 2005

Duke had not stopped eating since he got off the plane at Honolulu International Airport. His parents, wanting to make a date of it and revisit the place where they’d fallen in love, had booked them a room at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Beach Spa and Resort, and Duke would have protested their staying in town had he not been within spitting distance of the beach. He’d spent his first night back just standing in the surf, letting the water lap at his ankles, grounding himself to home.

And then the feeding frenzy had begun. He felt like he hadn’t gone an hour without shoving something in his mouth: malasadas, onigiri, an entire loco moco plate lunch, mackerel and miso soup, poke, kalua pig, sushi, McDonalds spam and egg plate, poi, more malasadas, and every imported snack that had yet to make its way to Uwajimaya. “Ah, how nice it is to have a teenage metabolism,” his mother lamented.

“You can let yourself go, babe,” his father told her. “I’ll love you no matter how fat you are.”

Duke rolled his eyes and bit into a piece of mochi. Damn honeymooners. They were strolling along the beach at sunset when his mother pointed back to the hotel. “You see those open windows over there? That’s the patio where your father and I met.”