Eight Million Gods-eARC (2 page)

There was a fire escape outside the window. She had tested it out—once. The open steelwork triggered her mild fear of heights. If she could get a head start, she could be to the subway station before Officer Russell caught her. She needed him out of the room.

“Here.” She pushed the gym bag into his hands. “Oh, my pills. Can you grab them from the medicine cabinet?” She pointed toward the bathroom and scooped up coins from the dresser top. The one time she attended high school, she lived in dorms. There was a prank that involved the heavy room doors and coins. She had never tried it out on the apartment doors.

“Pills?” Officer Russell’s eyes went a little wider.

“Medicine. Mental patient. I know you guys all are a little jumpy about mixing the two. My birth control is in the medicine cabinet with some of my roommate’s prescriptions.”

“Y-y-yeah.”

She followed him across the hall.

“Birth control?” her mother cried from living room—as far as possible from the dogs as she could get while staying within supervision range of the bathroom.

“Trust me,” Nikki said. “None of us want you to be a grandmother.”

Officer Russell snickered and opened up the crowded cabinet. “Whoa.”

“It’s in the back,” she said unhelpfully, pulled shut the door, and pushed coins into the space between the wood and the jamb.

“Hey!” Officer Russell yelped as he found the door wedged shut tight.

“Nikki!” her mother shouted.

Three steps and Nikki was in Shiela’s bedroom. She hit the latch on the dog kennel even as her mother cried, “You stupid idiot! I told you that she was dangerous!”

Yip and Yap came bounding out, nearly levitating with their excitement. They ignored Nikki; she was familiar and thus boring. Barking madly, they charged toward the living room. Nikki slammed shut the bedroom door and flicked the lock. Two more steps and she was to the window and then out onto the fire escape.

Nikki’s heart lurched as she forced herself out onto the steel catwalk and then down the rickety ladder. She couldn’t let her fear of heights slow her down. She hit the street and started to run. She didn’t stop running until she was in Japan.

2

The OMG Baseball Bat

She was living in Japan. Osaka, Japan, to be exact. Two months and it still startled her in a way she found weirdly uncomfortable. She had moved dozens of times before in the States, from suburban mental hospitals, to a dormitory at a private high school in the middle of nowhere, to walk-up apartments in gritty inner city neighborhoods. Never before had she constantly felt like she was being hit in the head with a baseball bat labeled “OMG.”

Some days it seemed like everything triggered the feeling. Waking up lying on a futon on the floor.
Whack!
Going pee at a public restroom by squatting over a ceramic trough.
Whack!
Wandering up and down the levels of a bookstore with thousands of interesting-looking books without being able to read a single word.
Whack!
Walking through an entire shopping district, surrounded by people, and unable to guess or even ask where to buy a basic cooking knife.
Whack!
One minute she would be steaming along, enjoying the adventure of living on her own, and then the “OMG” baseball bat of cultural shock would catch her smack between the eyes.

By lunchtime, she was slightly punch-drunk by the number of hits she’d taken. The only reason she didn’t suggest meeting at KFC or McDonalds was somehow the combination of familiar and uniquely Japanese that the two food chains represented would have been more unsettling than the little hole-in-the-wall traditional
okonomiyaki
shop. At least the act of taking off her sandals in the restaurant’s foyer, putting them in one of the many cubbyholes, bowing to the waitress, and stepping down into the sitting area around a grill-topped table was now comfortingly familiar despite being totally foreign.

Nikki waved off the menu that the waitress was trying to offer her. “
Sumimasen,
” Nikki tried to remember the Japanese word for “menu.” “English—English . . .”

“Ah!” The waitress smiled as she realized what Nikki was trying for. “English menu.
Hai
! One minute.”

The waitress disappeared into the impossibly small kitchen hidden behind a half wall where a cook was already standing.

Her best friend, Miriam Frydman, laughed in greeting. “One of those kinds of days?”

“God, yes.” Nikki tossed her backpack onto the seat beside her. “There are days I could just kill my mother. All this would be easier if I’d been able to stick to our plan and learn Japanese.”

Nikki had met Miriam the only time she attended “normal” high school. Not that you could really call Foxcroft ‘normal’ as it was an expensive private boarding school. Miriam always had a fascination for all things Japanese. Nikki just wanted to have half the planet between her and her mother. She and Miriam had come up with the detailed plan that would have had both of them fluent in Japanese, employed by the same company, and sharing an apartment together. Her mother, though, had yanked Nikki out of school in her senior year and ruined every later attempt to keep to the plan.

Miriam tilted her head and squinted in deep thought. Her bright pink-dyed hair, gathered into quirky pigtails, and her high-school outfit were both part of her own battle with all things Japanese. She’d confessed that she had come to the conclusion that as a
gaijin
—an “outsider”—she would never fully fit in, so she had decided to stand out. Nikki would never have the courage to dye her hair or wear anything as short as Miriam’s miniskirt, but Miriam was fearless. “Nah, I think you’d still be reeling even if you’d learned Japanese first. I felt the same way for the first six months. Really? The toilets alone break all language barriers when it comes to cultural shock.” She slid her glass slightly closer to Nikki’s side. “A stiff drink does help.”

Nikki snorted. “I’m actually tempted. Much as a drug addiction scares the willies out of me, knowing that something like valium would make it—make it
seem
better—for a while . . .”

Miriam dragged the glass back to herside of the table. “My bad. Sorry.”

The waitress came back with a sketchily translated menu and slightly better phrased “What do you want?”

They picked their
okonomiyaki
toppings, Nikki pointing to her selection on the English menu and Miriam ordering from the Japanese one.

Nikki tentatively added her drink order. “
Mazu
?”

The word got a muffled giggle from Miriam and a blank stare from the waitress.

From behind the hand covering her mouth, Miriam murmured, “Water is
mizu
.”

Nikki winced, wondering what she had actually said to the waitress. Hopefully nothing obscene. “
Mizu kudasai
.”

The waitress smiled. “Ah, yes, water!”

“
Mizu. Mizu
.” Nikki repeated softly after the waitress left. Miriam might be right and being fluent might not stop the cultural shock, but she was tired of being clueless of what was being said around her. Her whole life had been a series of being completely helpless and at her mother’s mercy or heavily dependent on the kindness of friends. “The plan” was for them to live together but Miriam was locked into a lease for another four months at a place where she couldn’t have a roommate. For the first time, Nikki was living alone, buying her own clothes, and cooking her own food. She loved being independent but this constantly being lost and confused the moment she ventured out of her apartment was frustrating the hell out of her.

The waitress returned with their drinks and two mixing bowls with the ingredients for the
okonomiyaki
. They watched as the waitress mixed up the batter and poured it onto the hot grill. She used a large steel spatula to round the batter into a thick pancake.

Why
okonomiyaki
was considered Japanese “pizza” still mystified Nikki; it was shredded cabbage mixed with flour and topped with barbeque sauce and mayonnaise. The only similarity was that it was circular and came with countless toppings. Personally she thought of them as very weird pancakes. She had discovered early on that the shrimp came with their heads still attached and she couldn’t quite deal with having her dinner stare at her with accusing eyes. The other thing that slightly creeped her out was the fact that the shaved
bonito
on top wriggled as if still alive.

Once the waitress had both “pizzas” in place, she motioned that they weren’t to fiddle with the dough with the little spatulas that were in lieu of forks and spoons. “Ah—cook—don’t touch.”

The
shoji
-style front door slid open, triggering a call of “
Irasshaimase
” from the two employees. The new customer was one of the impossibly slender
salarymen
, looking like he would only weigh over hundred pounds if you dipped him and his two-piece suit in one of Osaka’s many waterways. It still freaked Nikki out that, at five foot three, she could look down at a goodly number of the Japanese men, the newest customer included.

He took off his shoes and tucked them into a cubbyhole next to her sandals as the waitress hurried across the twenty feet between the kitchen and the foyer to greet him properly. Waitress bowed,
salaryman
bowed back. It was like watching anime come to life; a good, happy moment that Nikki desperately needed at this point.

The
salaryman
was installed in the booth beside theirs and the grill-top of his table fired up to get ready for cooking.

“So?” Miriam nudged at Nikki with her socking clad foot. “Who’s dead?”

“Hmm?” Nikki studied the salaryman in the guise of cleaning her hands with the wet wipe. He was thin and delicate like a sparrow. She couldn’t tell how old he was; he was so tiny he seemed like he should be only thirteen, but most likely he was a college graduate and in his twenties. Certainly, he made many manga storylines about boys passing as girls more believable.

Miriam nudged her hard, forcing Nikki to give up her study of the
salaryman
. “You’re wearing your shirt of mourning. You only wear that after you kill someone. Who’s dead?”

Nikki tented out her Goth Lolita shirt. It was the most beautiful thing she ever owned, all black silk with long sleeves, and lace everywhere. She’d bought to cheer herself up after the Brit vanished out of the novel. Did she really only wear it after a murder? “I blogged it. Didn’t you read it?”

Miriam covered her mouth as she yawned. “I had an
nomikai
Friday night. God, only the Japanese would require employees get hammered together on a regular basis. I spent most of yesterday in zombie mode. I did see your blog on doing your laundry but nothing on you killing someone off.”

“I posted the murder later.”

“Who did you kill?”

“The expatriate, George Wilson,” Nikki told her glumly. “The idiot pervert.”

Miriam laughed. “What does this make it? Three love interests you’ve killed before even getting to the sex? You have to stop killing people.”

“I’ve tried! I just can’t stop myself. One minute George is drinking sake in his Umeda apartment, getting ready to go out, and the next he’s taking an eight hundred dollar Blendtec blender to the guts.”

“A blender?”

“Yeah, ever notice how sharp the blades are on a blender? I broke the glass container against George’s head and set the blender on puree.” Nikki made the sound of the blades spinning and twirled her index finger in a tight circle. “Blood all over the white countertop.”

“Cool. I approve.”

Nikki laughed. “I thought you would. The color contrast was stunning.”

“Where did he get the blender?” Miriam pointed out the one thing that worried Nikki about the murder.

“I think he brought it from the United States. Does it really matter? It’s not like it’s a sword or firearm.” It still geeked her out that the Japanese had more laws controlling swords than guns.

The waitress returned to flip over their pancakes. They were nice and golden on the cooked side. As Miriam asked the waitress something in Japanese, Nikki realized that the office worker was staring at her in utter horror.

Oops.

It was something she kept forgetting; since English was taught in Japanese schools from first grade up, Japanese people normally understood a lot more English than she understood Japanese. She played back their conversation and winced. How was she going to explain?

“I didn’t really kill anyone. I’m a writer.” Was that what the Japanese called authors? “I write books. Novels? Miriam, help.”

Miriam laughed and said something that made the man bolt from the booth, grab his shoes, and run still in his stocking feet out of the store.

“What did you say?” Nikki cried.

“I told him you don’t kill nice little
uke
like him, only big bad
seme.
”

“Miriam! I don’t kill people—real people.”

The waitress returned with the
salaryman
’s drink order and eyed the empty booth with confusion.

“Ix-nay on the urder-may,” Nikki said. “I don’t want a burned
okonomiyaki.
”Miriam smiled innocently. “You know, you could just delete the scene. George had real promise as a hero. Rich. Handsome. Alive.”

“No, I couldn’t,” Nikki grumbled. “You know that. George is now dead to my hypergraphia. When characters are alive, everything just flows. All I have to do is occasionally nudge things into place with a little research on the details. Once they’re dead, it’s blank page time. I don’t have time to be staring at blank-pages. Besides, he was turning out to be a completely sick bastard.”

It had been the sale of her first novel that allowed her to continue on with their plan despite the fact she couldn’t speak the language, hadn’t gone to college and had no work experience. Her advance on royalties arrived two days before her mother. It had gotten her to Japan and into an apartment, paid for a laptop and all the things she needed day-to-day, like clothes, with enough left over for her to survive for over a year. Even better, her publishers asked her to write a second novel. Unfortunately, they wanted the book within a year’s time. She needed to deliver it on time because she ran out of money shortly after her deadline. It was a race to see if she could finish writing before her funds ran out.