Shadows

  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.

  “He works at P&P,” I said, trying not to sound like a teenager being asked personal questions by her mother, and also failing. “We met, um, today at the park.”

  There was a little silence as we went through the kitchen door. Casimir hadn’t remotely hinted anything to her about the new cobey or she’d have been all over me with panicky-mom questions. I owed him for that. She thought we were having a standard mother-daughter conversation. It was still better than Hey, who would have guessed Takahiro was a werewolf?

  “Casimir told me he’s from Ukovia,” Mom said finally. “His English is very good. He sounds a lot like Val.”

  “He’s heard of Val,” I blurted out. “He said ‘Valadi Crudon?’ like it was some big deal.”

  Mom turned and looked at me. The day before yesterday I’d’ve said it like an accusation. Today I was just frightened. Her husband was an ex-magician who had killed his best friend because his government had told him to. Except that he wasn’t ex-. One of my best friends was a werewolf. I had an invisible humming creature with too many legs and eyes wrapped around my throat. There had been a cobey in the park—the park less than two miles from where we lived. A cobey that Casimir, who had heard of Val, recognized as a cobey. A cobey that I . . . I . . . I looked at my poor algebra book, lying on the kitchen table. You could see the gap the missing pages made, a little black hole against the spine, and the closed cover lay at a slight angle. Mom hadn’t noticed, or she’d’ve gone ballistic—textbooks are expensive. But she wouldn’t expect me to be a book mutilator. And how was I going to explain?

  Two days ago Mom would have heard the accusation in my voice and shut me out. Two days ago we hadn’t met Hix or seen a werewolf in Val’s shed. Or heard why Val had been exiled. Today she said, “I knew there were things Val hadn’t told me. But there were things I hadn’t told him too; why should he tell me everything? I had even guessed—before last night—that Val was more important in his old life than he wanted to talk about. And I can’t imagine anyone who has moved so far away, and to a new country, wouldn’t have some mixed feelings about what they’ve left behind. Until last night it hadn’t occurred to me that anything he hadn’t told me might be dangerous.”

  Mongo, not getting the response he wanted merely leaning against me, was licking my hand. I sat down abruptly on the floor and started petting him fiercely with both hands. He lay down and stretched out to make this easier. His feathering—the long stuff on his neck and belly and legs and tail—needed brushing. His feathering always needed brushing. His eyes said, Don’t stop. Hix flowed down one arm and across Mongo’s ribs. His eyes moved—I guess he could see her better than I could. She curled up under his chin, and he raised his head not only as if he knew exactly where she was, but as if she took up space, which I still wasn’t clear about.

  Mom said carefully, “Casimir seemed to think you were a bit special too.” I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything. Mom waited and then added, “Something a little unusual. About a prophecy.”

  I exhaled. I reminded myself that us Newworlders did believe in coincidence. And that he hadn’t mentioned the cobey so I still owed him. But maybe a little less. “That’s just some dumb folk tale. It’s a joke.”

  “I don’t think . . .” Mom began, and stopped. I was thinking about my grandmother turning green and scaly. I was thinking about magic winning over science. I was thinking about Takahiro. I had a headache.

  “Oh—a thousand dead batteries,” I said. “Clare was expecting me—”

  “No, she’s not,” said Mom. “I phoned her while I was waiting for you to come home. Whatever happened with Takahiro, I didn’t think you’d make it to the shelter this afternoon.”

  “Oh, poor Clare,” I said. “I wonder who—”

  “She told me to tell you that she wasn’t surprised, that everything was a hot wire this afternoon, and that she’d already called her brother.”

  Clare’s brother was still pretending to be a farmer with a few acres at the other end of what had used to be their family farm, but he earned his living as a legal aide for a family law practice specializing in abused children. They both had the rescue-things gene, speaking of genes. He and Clare shouted at each other a lot but he always came when she needed him. I relaxed as much as I could relax. Which wasn’t very much. I’d much rather have spent the afternoon cleaning kennels because nothing else was happening.

  The default position in this household was that you boiled water and made a hot drink. Mom filled the kettle and put it on the stove. She took four mugs out of the cupboard and lined them up on the counter. The kettle began to make that faint far-off hissing noise that means it will produce hot water before you die of thirst (probably). Mom stood staring at the cupboard. There is a long time for thinking thoughts you don’t want to think while you’re waiting for a kettle to boil. She got the milk out of the refrigerator and put a lot of it into a pan. It was going to be hot chocolate then. That meant it was serious.

  Well, it was serious.

  CHAPTER 8

  WE HEARD THE SHED DOOR OPEN, FOOTSTEPS—one pair with shoes, one pair without—and then a hand turn the kitchen door handle. Val’s dressing gown went nearly twice around Takahiro but didn’t quite reach his knees. He’d wrapped the belt round and round and tied it in front, like a samurai’s obi. He looked almost as unhappy as he had as a wolf: all curled in on himself like he used to be eight years ago, and it made my heart ache. I wanted to believe that it didn’t make any difference that he might turn into a wolf any time he was stressed out—but it did, you know? It meant he was in danger all the time. Which meant that his friends were also in danger all the time. There was no way the niddles wouldn’t believe we all knew. I said I didn’t know Takahiro at all. But I did in some ways. I knew that was one of the things he was thinking about right now. Because now some of us did know. No wonder he’d never really finished becoming one of us. We just thought it was because he was half Japanese, and lived in a huge house on the other side of town with a dad who was never home and who none of our parents had ever met. And possibly because he was an arrogant moody stuck-on-himself creepazoid. And here he wasn’t even a real gizmohead. He was just a grind. And a werewolf.

  The kitchen was starting to smell of chocolate. It was probably my favorite smell in the whole world, and all I could think of was that we’d just had it last night, and I’d thought last night had been serious-enough-for-an-emergency-hot-chocolate-ration enough. I looked down along the floor. There were gruuaa everywhere. I could see them more and more easily even when they were hidden by normal furniture-and-people’s-legs shadows. I didn’t know if that was Hix’s influence, or that I’d stopped trying to ignore them—or stopped hating Val—or what. There was a heap of them in the shadows under the table and a coil of them wrapped around and through the bottles in the tall skinny bottle rack between the edge of the cupboard and the refrigerator. There were several more o
f them winding around Mom’s flour-sugar-coffee-tea canisters at the back of the counter by the sink. (Which contained, of course, two kinds of pasta, rice and dried beans.) I wasn’t going to mention this. Mom was kind of a hygiene freak and I didn’t know if shadow feet could carry germs or not. Hix had moved slightly to between Mongo’s front legs and he was dementedly trying to lick the top of her head. If that was her head.

  It was. Her three eyes blinked open to look at me. “Hey, sweetie,” I murmured, which tended to be what I called all friendly critters. All the long-term residents at the shelter knew their name was “sweetie.” Hix’s eyes still glittered but they didn’t look like silverbugs to me any more.

  Mom brought the tray with four steaming mugs and a plate of cookies to the table. She picked up her mug and chugged it. “I’d better get going,” she said. “Takahiro, can you stay for supper? I’m stopping by the deli.”

  “Buy twice as much as you think you need,” said Val mildly. “Changing is hard work.” Takahiro gave another wild shiver, almost a spasm, looked at Val and away again, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll do that,” said Mom. “Er—do you need—er—meat? Our usual from the deli is their tomato and chickpea stew.”

  “It’s just calories,” Takahiro muttered to the table. “It doesn’t matter what kind.”

  Mom patted Takahiro’s arm and my shoulder, dropped a kiss on the top of Val’s head, and left.

  The cookies disappeared in about forty seconds. Val got up and started making sandwiches. “A question, Takahiro,” he said. “May I ask?”