Shadows (21 page)

Takahiro stopped but we were all totally listening. I kept thinking, he’s been my friend for nearly eight years and I don’t know
anything
about him. As the silence went on and got kind of heavy Takahiro glanced around at all of us: my mom, Val, and me last. Last and longest. He really looked at me. I smiled. It was probably kind of a shaky smile, but that was because I was trying not to cry for the little boy who got sent to the other side of the world to live with a dad who didn’t want him. The only sounds in the shed were the vines outside the window rustling in the breeze and Mongo’s tail still thudding (slower now) against my leg.

Takahiro said, “For a while I kept a box of instant oatmeal on the top shelf of my closet and I used to keep some made up in a jar on the floor. If Kay ever found it I don’t know what she thought, but she had no business in my closet, you know? And then I ’shifted again . . . after another bugsucking English test . . . and I found out the instant stuff
doesn’t work.
That was very bad.

“I could have figured out how to make real oatmeal, but I couldn’t have done it regularly without getting caught, you know? Kay rules the kitchen. So I told her I wanted a bowl of oatmeal as a bedtime snack—oh, twice a week or so. It gets moldy after three or four days. She was kind of surprised . . . but Kay’s not bad really. She makes me oatmeal. And we have a lot of fat wildlife in the woods behind our house. Raccoons are like
waiting
for me when I take the old stuff out.”

Takahiro had never been much of a talker—even after his English caught up with living in Newworld. I wanted to tell him, it’s okay, he didn’t have to tell us all this. But I realized he wanted to—oh, not
wanted
wanted to, who would
like
telling someone else that his dad didn’t love him? but to have someone to talk to. I sometimes thought my dad’s death might have killed me if I hadn’t had Jill to talk to—and I’d had Mom and Ran too. Takahiro didn’t have anyone.

Casimir,
I thought suddenly. Oh, drog me, I’d forgotten about Casimir! I’d
forgotten
about Casimir! I looked up at my mother. She was looking down at me—maybe just a little ironically. “Your friend,” she said in a neutral voice, “had to go to work. So I came out here to find out if—well, if things had gone all right and if so, if you might need clothing or anything.”

“He’s not going to wear anything of mine well, that is certain,” said Val, who was easily a foot shorter and twice as wide as Takahiro, although “well” was a nonstarter concerning any of Val’s clothes.

“Nor Ran’s,” said my mother. Gods, I’d forgotten about Ran too. “Ran’s at Alec’s this afternoon,” she added as if she was reading my mind again, “so I can go to the mall and pick him up on the way home. Most of it’s open till late. Tell me what you need. No, wait. First tell me what
happened.
”

Val said, “As I said, my experience with shape-shifters is limited. But one of the things anyone—anyone with my background—will learn is that physical contact—preferably unexpected or sudden contact—with someone they have a strong incorporeal connection with—for example a long friendship—will bring them back. Especially if they want to be brought back. I thought of Maggie.”

I remembered my insane urge to drag the front half of something I now knew was a timber wolf onto my lap. It was funny in a sort of death-wish way.

I didn’t remember Takahiro and me getting to be friends—mainly I remember that by the time we were both coming out from under—my dad’s death and his mom’s, and his being shipped here like some kind of package, and having to learn to live in English and in Newworld—we were already friends. Friends who seemed sometimes to exist to zap the electric crap out of each other, but still—friends.

I remembered him showing me how to make my first origami fish. That was before he was talking—pretty much at all. He sat down beside me in some class or other—I don’t remember which—and started folding, because that’s what he did all the time. He used to sit beside me because I’d leave him alone. A lot of kids would try and take his paper away from him, or flick what he was working on out of his hands. I’d sneak looks at him. It was hard to remember now that he’d been little for his age. But his hands were already big even then and his fingers really long. I used to half-imagine they had extra joints in them. I didn’t understand how he could make paper do all that. But I remember the first time I picked up a piece of notebook paper and folded it over into a triangle and then folded and tore off the end so what was left was a square. He’d stopped what he was doing when I folded my paper over. I opened it up again and held it toward him. He stared at me—it felt like a really long time. He hardly ever looked at anyone and he never stared, and that’s when I found out his eyes were the darkest darkest
darkest
brown, the barest bit not black—like he was wondering if I was just going to start teasing him too.

He pulled out a fresh piece of already-square origami paper, folded it over, and opened it again like I had. I nodded. Then he started showing me what to do. After I made a horrible mess of my piece of squared-off notebook paper he gave me a piece of origami paper to mangle. Then he gave me a second one. The second one actually turned into a fish.

There’s a really big gap between being able to make origami fish and hats and boats and those fortune-telling boxes where you write silly things under paper folds and make people choose one, and your first crane. I wasted
a lot
of time (and paper) trying to fold a crane. I could follow the directions—by this time I had my own
How to Do Origami
book at home—but the results were always smudgy and lopsided and bent-looking. And then one day I got it. The folds were all crisp and sharp and right first time and the little hole in the bottom was centered and square and when I set it down it stood up straight. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so happy—probably not since Dad had died—maybe the day we brought Mongo home. I went racing into the dining room and the Lair to show Mom—Ran had been totally unimpressed but he was still pretty little. Mom got it although I think she mostly got it about something making me happy.

“What are you going to do with it?” she said. “We could make space on a shelf somewhere.” Mom has a collection of family china and stuff that takes up most of the corner cupboards in the dining room. The gaps and corners had silted up over the years with stuff like report cards with gold stars on them (not a lot of these) and family photos and candles too pretty to burn and tiny vases that weren’t at that moment holding deadheading accidents from Mom’s garden and a few of my china dog statues although by unanimous vote Mom and I made Ran keep his car models in his room. The crane would have looked right at home.

I thought about it. “No,” I said. “I’m going to give it to Takahiro.”

Mom didn’t say anything about how Takahiro must have made millions of cranes and the last thing he’d be interested in is another one. She nodded. “He’ll like that.”

I took it to school the next day in a box, I was so afraid of crushing it. I found Takahiro on the playground—off in a corner by himself, folding paper. I knelt beside him. He looked up, startled. I opened the box and took my beautiful crane out. It suddenly looked a lot less beautiful than it had the day before on the kitchen table where I’d made it. It was the cheapest origami paper and the red on the colored side was streaky, and there were flecks of white on the borders where the ink hadn’t quite gone to the edges. And it was just a crane. Takahiro had made millions of them. Just like Mom hadn’t said.

My hand shook a little as I took it out of the box, but it was too late now not to do it. I held it out to him. I know my voice shook. “It’s for you,” I said. “It’s the first crane I’ve ever made that isn’t awful.” I’d looked up how to say something like “Please take this, it is a gift for you” in Japanese on the webnet, but all of it but the “please” had gone out of my head:
“Dozo,”
I said.

He took my crane gently, as if it
was
beautiful. He looked at it and then he looked at me again. I think it was the first time I’d ever really seen him smile. I was staring straight at him—terrified he’d laugh or be bored or something—and I saw his mouth say “thank you” but I don’t think he said it out loud.

“You’re welcome,” I said, hugely relieved. (I’d looked the Japanese for “you’re welcome” up on the webnet too but I couldn’t remember it.) “Um—do you want the box?” He nodded, and was putting the crane carefully back inside it when the class bell rang. We stood up together and just before we turned to the school door he
bowed
and said clearly:
“Domo arigato gozaimasu.”
Which means “thank you very much.”

Of course it took me about fifty more cranes before I made another one that was anywhere near as good. But a crane did finally get put on the dining room shelves: Mom gave me some patterned origami paper after I’d been doing it about a year, and I made her a crane out of the prettiest pattern, and a peony out of the pinkest. I also made Ran a
Tyrannosaurus rex
and a racing car, although he went on and on about what kind of car it might be (the book I got the pattern out of didn’t say) till I was sorry (I told him) I hadn’t made him a guillotine instead. (There was a pattern for a guillotine on some extreme-origami site I’d looked at—you can make
anything
out of paper if you’re good enough. A guillotine is probably beyond me, but Taks could make one.)

I looked at Takahiro now. He was looking at me with an expression I thought I remembered from that day I’d given him the crane: surprise. Wariness. Hope. Although there’d been an awful lot of chain-yanking between him and me since that day. The weeks he suddenly wouldn’t talk to me—which were pretty dreeping aggravating anyway, and worse when he’d been helping me study algebra and it was like he made
me
look like the bad guy when I wouldn’t let him help me any more just because he wasn’t
talking
to me. Or I’d see him at Peta’s after school with his geek crowd and when I waved he’d look straight through me like I was, I don’t know, a nongeek. Which I was of course.

That’s how Jill and I started using Japanese phrases—when he wasn’t talking to me he wasn’t talking to Jill either, and it was Jill’s idea to speak Japanese to annoy him, since he never did—speak Japanese, I mean. That thank-you when I gave him the crane was probably the only Japanese I’d ever heard him say. And that was before I started needing to annoy him. Then it kind of caught on. It was all Newworld girls and their ’tops—Steph joined the Annoy Taks group when she had a crush on him and he looked through her too, and then Laura and Dena did because they were tight with Steph, and he ignored all of us. But I like to think we were irritating. Also, some of us—Jill and me anyway—just liked the way the words felt in our mouths. Like
sumimasen.
Shimatta
was a lot more satisfying than
damn.
And
sugoi
is a whole different kind of amazing than amazing.

I guess I was maybe feeling a little guilty now. “I was thinking about you teaching me origami. And that crane I gave you.”

He nodded. “I still have it.”

“You do?” I said, astonished.

He glanced at me and away again. “It was the first time anyone I’d ever showed how had actually gone on with it and done stuff. It was the first day I . . .” He didn’t finish what he was saying, but I thought I could guess: I’d probably been his first friend. He didn’t start hanging out with his geeks and gizmoheads till his English was up to arguments about servebots and why physwiz did or did not rule (there’s a gizmohead tough-guy thing about physwiz). At the beginning though it was just me and origami. And the origami was really visible. It could have gone either way: the rest of the kids could have exiled me the way they’d exiled Takahiro. That they didn’t was mostly Jill. If I liked Takahiro then she did too. And everyone liked Jill. It was Jill who first got him talking (in English) at all. She just started talking to him and I don’t know how she did it, but she made it seem like they were having conversations, till they were, till he started talking back. He showed her how to fold paper too, and she was pretty good but I was better. It was a pity I couldn’t take Enhanced Origami instead of Enhanced Algebra.

But then Taks grew about two-and-a-half feet, discovered geekery, and periodically forgot how to talk again. I think he’d always been like this, it’s just we only started noticing after he was talking
sometimes.
And you never knew what was going to set him off. You’d think you were having a conversation and then you’d ask him something like what he thought about the movie the other night and he’d go silent and then just
walk away.
If this happened to you (as it happened to me) in the middle of the corridor at school with a lot of other people seeing it happen you felt like a
total
dead battery. But you know that thing about how a friend is someone you could call at three o’clock in the morning if you needed to? I could call Taks at three a.m. if I was in trouble. It was the day-to-day “hi, how are you” stuff that wasn’t so good.

Mom was writing down the sizes Takahiro gave her and then said, “Wait a minute,” went away, and came back with Val’s dressing gown. “Come along, Maggie,” she said. “Leave the boys to cope.” Mongo, after what was evidently a terrible struggle, came with me, after wildly licking Takahiro’s wrist one last time.

“Are you okay?” Mom said softly to me. “Er—it’s been a rather harrowing day. Again. And I don’t even know what happened to you at the park.”

“I think I could sleep for a week,” I said. “But I’m okay.”

“How do you—you and Jill—know Casimir?” she said, trying not to sound like a mother and failing. I knew she didn’t approve of college kids hanging out with kids still in high school: imbalance of power, she called it. And Casimir was
terrifyingly
good-looking. What did a nineteen- or twenty-year-old who looked like Casimir want with a seventeen-year-old who looked like me? I didn’t think I could tell her about the
mgdaga
stuff; even to mention it was dinglebrained and woopy. And he had come in with me and talked to my mother. That would rate with her.