1001 Cranes (9 page)

“What’s not to like?”

When we arrive at the flower shop, somebody all dressed in white is sitting at the front door. The girl, Rachel Joseph. She gets up immediately when she sees Gramps’s van, but her face falls when she realizes it’s me, not Grandma Michi, in the passenger seat.

Gramps parks in the back, next to the tool shack, and starts to unload the flowers from the van. Rachel rounds the back corner of the shop.

“Where’s Auntie Michi?”

Since Gramps doesn’t acknowledge her, I feel that I have to say something. “She’s at home working on a last-minute display,” I say. I figure that she will leave now, but she remains in front of me, pulling at her orange belt.

“Well, do you know when she’ll be coming back?”

Oh my God, what a pest. Emilie complains about her little sister and brother, but I never took her that seriously before. I shrug, thinking that now Rachel will go for sure, but instead, she runs to the back of the open van, picks up a plastic container full of pink carnations, and begins to follow Gramps into the shop.

“Hey.” I pull at the container. The water sloshes and drips onto my Vans. “You’re not supposed to do that.”

Rachel has opened the back screen door and positions one leg inside the shop, one leg outside on the welcome mat. I don’t know what an orange belt means, but I have to admit that she’s strong for her size. “I help Uncle Nick all the time,” she says. Her grip remains strong around the container’s handle.

Now, I don’t know why, but this little girl is making me mad. This is my Gramps. My Grandma Michi. Not hers. I know it sounds stupid—I mean, I’m old enough to know better and I’m not sure how much I even like my grandmother—but I feel that I have to fight or I won’t have anything left anymore.

“Leave it.”

“No.”

“I’ll take it.”

“No.”

My fingers are getting red from tugging so hard on the container’s handle. “I’m not kidding,” I warn her.

“Me either.”

“Listen, why don’t you go back to your
own
family?”

Something I’ve said works, and Rachel releases her grip. The container falls onto the welcome mat, soaking it and part of Rachel’s
gi.
The screen door snaps closed, breaking the stems of the carnations.

“See? See what you’ve done!”

Rachel’s brown eyes are filled with tears. First I think she’s just mad or spiteful. But I soon realize that she’s scared.

I feel totally bad now. And ashamed. Before I can say anything else, Rachel has run out of the parking lot.

“What happened here?” Gramps asks.

“Uh—I—”

Gramps kneels down and picks up the heads of the broken carnations. “Ah, not to worry. I can use these for the boutonnieres for the Lopez wedding.”

Tony

After we unload, I go back inside the shop and try not to think of Rachel Joseph. I mean, she was just getting in the way, right? She didn’t have any business being at the flower shop. Grandma said that I should be nice to her, but I wasn’t that mean to her, was I?

I eat a bologna sandwich at the shop counter. I fold probably twenty C cranes before Gramps reminds me to get ready to walk to the Buddhist temple. Grandma has drawn a map for me, plus I skateboarded there that one time, so I know exactly where it is. I want to take my skateboard this time, too, but Gramps says it’s a bit unprofessional. Besides, he tells me, I have to carry the sample design, all plotted out on graph paper, and the swatch of glued cranes.

He puts those items into a manila envelope for me and I wave to him before I leave.

I turn the corner at the liquor store, and a skateboarder squeals to a stop, almost crashing into the left side of my body. I don’t know if it’s because he surprises me or because it’s
him
—yes, the guy from the schoolyard—but I loosen my grip on the manila envelope. It slips through my hand, down a hole by the curb, and into the gutter.

“No, no!” I scream loudly, and I almost don’t even care that I’m embarrassing myself in front of
him.

The boy obviously has fast reflexes, because before I’m finished screaming, he’s down on the pavement, his cheek pressed against the ground, to try to retrieve my package for Kawaguchi. He desperately waves his hand toward the sad manila envelope, which is soaked in gunk and surrounded by trash in the gutter. But his arm is not long enough.

I cover my face. “I can’t believe it. What am I going to tell Gramps?” I say, but I’m really wondering what I’m going to tell Grandma Michi.

“What’s in there?” The boy stands and brushes dirt from his jeans. He misses something dark on his left cheek, but I say nothing about that.

“Oh.” I sit against the wall of the liquor store building. “It’s really hard to explain.”

“I have time,” he says, kneeling down beside me.

“I make these cranes,” I say.

“You mean the origami kind?”

“You know about them?”

“I’ve made some before.”

It seems that the boy can easily read my face. “Boys can do origami, too.” He smiles and I notice that one side of his mouth goes up a little higher than the other.

“Anyway, my grandparents have a business to sell these one-thousand-and-one-cranes displays for weddings and things like that. That’s why I’m here—to help them.”

“That’s cool. So that’s origami down there.” The boy points to the gutter.

I nod. “It was a sample, only about twenty silver cranes. And a diagram of the design on graph paper. I’m supposed to meet her—” I fish my cell phone out of my pocket. “Crap. In ten minutes.”

“Just call your grandparents. Tell them what happened.”

“You don’t know my grandma. She’s going to be pissed. She’s going to tell my mom, and my mom’s going to be pissed. Everyone’s pissed right now. My mom hates my dad, my dad’s left, and everything’s all messed up.” I don’t mention anything about yelling at Rachel Joseph, but that’s on my mind, too. Everything comes out so fast I don’t realize that I’ve violated my family’s rule about not sharing secrets with outsiders.

“That sucks,” he says. And for some reason, those two simple words make me start to cry.
I’m really not a crybaby,
I want to tell him. But the fact that I’m crying will make that sound stupid. My nose starts to run and I’m horrified. I wipe away my snot with the side of my index finger, but there’s still more, like lines of a spiderweb.

“Here,” he says, pulling his sleeve toward me. “Use this.”

“I don’t want to mess up your shirt.”

“Use it. I’ve had worse things on my clothes.”

I duck my head toward his arm. His skin is nice and tan, like a perfectly roasted marshmallow. I gingerly take the bottom of his sleeve and lightly brush the tip of my nose with it. His sleeve smells like burnt leaves and sweat. I like the scent.

“Thanks,” I say, and I mean it. Not just anyone would let a perfect stranger wipe her nose on his clothes. “Now what am I going to do?”

He gets up and offers his hand to me. He helps me stand and says, “I’m Tony, by the way.”

“I’m Angie,” I say back.

“I know.” He smiles again. “I think I can help you.” He leads me around the corner and into the liquor store I stopped at a couple of Sundays ago to buy gummy worms. He waves to the elderly man behind the counter. “That’s my uncle Carlos,” he explains, leading me past rows of potato chips and refrigerated drinks.

We go into a back room that’s dark and musty-smelling. He tells me to sit down at a Formica table and then he leaves for a moment. He returns with a package of graph paper and a roll of aluminum foil.

“Do you think you can remember what that design looks like?” he asks.

Tony says that he loves to draw and wants to be a cartoonist someday. I tell him that I want to be a writer of manga books, and he jokes that we should collaborate. I draw the star on one corner of the graph paper and he works fast to replicate it on the entire sheet. Meanwhile, I’m supposed to fold cranes with squares of aluminum foil. It’s not going to work that well, but I do so anyway.

I don’t even check the time because we’re working as fast as we can. Before we know it, we’re finished. I’ve taped the malformed cranes to a piece of cardboard and he has graphed Kawaguchi’s family crest. I’m surprised, because his drawing looks almost as good as Aunt Janet’s. For a moment I think that I can pull it off.

Tony borrows his uncle’s bicycle, an old three-speed with a dorky basket on the front of it. Before we leave, I tell him about the dirt on his face. “You have something here,” I say, pointing to my cheek.

He rubs his face but he misses. “Where?”

I brush the dirt away with the tips of my fingers. His face feels warm, like he’s been out in the sun.

He holds the bicycle still so I can sit on the handles with my thighs hanging over the basket. Tony has put our designs in a backpack for safekeeping. When we arrive at the Buddhist temple, he steadies the bicycle so I can get off. He’s strong, much stronger than he looks. He unzips his backpack and it smells like cigarette smoke. He then hands me the crane-taped cardboard and the graph paper.

“Thanks,” I say. I cannot believe how nice he’s been.

“Do you want me to come in with you?”

I shake my head. There’s already enough explaining I have to do. How would I explain Tony?

“Come to the school this Sunday.” He presses down on my wrist, and my arm begins to tingle.

I make no promises, but I know that nothing will keep me away from him on Sunday.

M
ICHI’S
1001-C
RANES
F
OLDING
T
IP
N
O
. 4: Be careful about the edges and the corners of your origami. Those are the places that are the most visible.

Broken
Butsudan

For some reason, when I’m nervous or doing PE, I don’t sweat where most people do. All my sweat goes through my body and lands on my nose and my upper lip. Like right now in front of the Buddhist temple. Salty drips run down the middle of my face onto my T-shirt. I know that they are salty because some of my sweat lands on my lips and goes into my mouth.

I hesitate a moment in front of the gate and then open it before running up the concrete stairs. Once I reach the temple building, I almost crash into a man wearing a polo shirt and shorts.

“Sorry, sorry,” I tell him. He’s Japanese American, with skinny eyes and big, thick tree-trunk arms. “I need to find Mrs.—I mean Ms. Kawaguchi. She has a meeting here.”

“You look like you’ve been running in a 5K.” The man laughs. “I don’t think she’s here yet, but you can wait for her in the sanctuary.”

I beat Kawaguchi? I could have spent more time gluing the cranes! There isn’t anything I can do about it now, though.

I walk down a hallway with the man.

“Are you her niece?”

“Oh, no,” I say, maybe a little too emphatically. I made it sound like being her niece would be horrible. Well, actually, it might. But I wasn’t trying to make Kawaguchi out to be evil. Really.