Kara Harper sat in the back of the classroom, trying valiantly to stay awake. The windows of Room 2-C were open, but no breeze came off Miyazu Bay that Friday afternoon. It was the third week of August and Monju-no-Chie school had been back in session for a scant handful of sweltering days. The weather had been beautiful during the holiday weeks that separated the spring and summer terms. This far to the north of Kyoto Province, so close to the Sea of Japan, and with the school situated right on the bay, it was rare for the heat to reach brutal levels.
But now classes were back in session, and the summer had turned ugly.
Kara didn’t mind so much. After the terrors of the spring, a little hot weather was nothing to complain about. She was just glad that she and her friends were all still alive to feel the heat.
During those terrifying days, she and her father had nearly decided to pack it all in and return home. Sometimes Kara wondered if they had made the right decision in staying, but mostly she was glad. It would have broken her heart to say a premature farewell to the friends she had made here-some of the best friends of her life. And though sometimes she still had nightmares, the shadows were receding.
Kara blinked. People were getting up. While her mind had been drifting, school had ended. With a grateful sigh, she stood and stretched, sticky clothes pulling away from her body. She wanted a shower, but she had hours of other responsibilities to contend with. Her calligraphy club met after school, but first came o-soji, the cleaning of the school, which students performed every day at the conclusion of classes. Japanese schools had maintenance staff to deal with blocked toilets and broken lightbulbs and such, but the basic cleaning-bathrooms and classrooms and garbage duty-was done by students.
The class started to head for the lockers at the back of the room. Kara’s friend Miho stopped by her desk and fixed her with an odd look. She often hid behind her glasses and the long veil of her straight, black hair, but today it was pulled back with a clip on one side.
“You awake?” Miho asked.
“Barely,” Kara said, in Japanese. Even with her father, she spoke Japanese nearly all the time now, to continue improving her fluency with the language. “Between the heat and Mr. Sato’s monotone, I was very tempted to take a nap.”
Miho smiled. “Really? A couple of times, I glanced over at you and it seemed like you had given in to temptation.”
Kara arched an eyebrow. “Could be.”
Since Kara had become friends with Miho and her roommate, Sakura, the Japanese girls had begun to hone their skills at American-style sarcasm. Miho had a fondness for American pop culture and she tried to persuade Kara to speak in English whenever possible so she could practice the language. She was actually starting to get pretty good at it, whereas Sakura mostly liked to learn new and different ways to say filthy things in foreign languages.
“I wish we could get out of here,” Kara said.
“You don’t love o-soji?” Miho asked, her expression innocent. Yes, she was getting much better at the whole sarcasm thing.
They put their things away in their lockers and then headed out through the open sliding door. In the corridor, they joined the rest of the herd of students who were getting their cleanup assignments. Mr. Sato gave Miho sweeping duty, while Kara and two other students had to gather the trash on the entire second floor.
As they parted ways, Kara noticed Mr. Sato watching her and Miho with obvious disapproval, and she quickened her pace. The man oozed irritation, and she wanted to avoid trouble. With her father a member of the faculty, Kara tried to stay on her best behavior so that she did not bring him dishonor. Honor was just as important in Japan as she had always read-maybe even more so.
She weaved her way around students who were filtering into classrooms to perform their appointed tasks, some already sweeping the corridor and stairs. Kara needed trash bags from the hall closet, but a group of students had gathered in the hall. One of them was Mai, a girl from her homeroom who Kara tended to avoid as much as possible.
In every school Kara had ever attended, there always seemed to be a group of girls who hid their cruel smiles behind their hands, putting themselves above everyone else simply by excluding others from their whispers. And for every clique of catty bitches, there was one who led the way and set the tone. When Kara had first arrived at Monju-no-Chie school, that had been a friend of Mai’s named Ume. But Ume had been far worse than just some bitchy high school girl; she had been a murderer.
Or close enough. When Ume learned that her boyfriend had fallen in love with another girl, she’d followed the girl down to the shore of the bay one rainy night, a bunch of her friends in tow. Whether or not they had intended to kill her didn’t really matter. They had beaten her and drowned her in the bay. The police had never found any evidence linking Ume, or anyone else, to the crime, but Kara knew Ume had killed the girl-Akane, Sakura’s sister.
Ume should have been in prison, along with all of the other girls who had helped her beat Akane that night. Instead, she had transferred to another school.
Had Mai been one of the girls with Ume that night? Kara didn’t know. Of all of the girls Ume had been friends with-the soccer club girls-Mai would have been the last one Kara would have imagined taking up the queen bitch crown in Ume’s absence, but she had filled the role as though she’d been waiting for it her entire life. Maybe she had. The girl had even changed her name. Her real name was Maiko, but now that she was queen bitch, she had started going by the nickname “Mai,” insisting everyone call her that. It had taken Kara some getting used to.
Mai took a dustpan and brush from the closet. When she looked up and saw Kara, a slanted, almost sneering smile appeared on her face.
“Bonsai,” she said, exuding false charm. “Let me guess. You’re on trash duty? How appropriate. Leave it to the American to know garbage when she sees it.”
Kara smiled. Ume had been the one to give her the nickname “bonsai,” a play on the trees whose branches were pruned and replanted to grow somewhere else. Mai and her friends used it as if it were a term of endearment, but Kara knew it was anything but.
“You’re right about one thing,” Kara said, pulling several plastic bags out of the closet. “I know garbage when I see it. Unfortunately, some kinds of trash are more difficult to get rid of than others.”
As Mai started to reply, Kara turned and walked into the nearest classroom. The girl thrived on nastiness, and Kara had no interest in wasting another second with her. After the cleanup, she had a calligraphy club meeting, and then she was free until Monday morning. She wouldn’t let Mai-or anyone else-ruin that.
Kara had never been the New-Agey, burning incense, feng-shui type. She knew a couple of girls back home in Medford, Massachusetts, who talked about their chi and had gotten totally into yoga as if they’d been brainwashed into a cult. Not that yoga wasn’t good for you. Kara had tried it for a few months and enjoyed the sort of meditative state it put her into. But she liked her exercise sweaty and rigorous, and preferred to keep any chi-cleansing activities private, except for playing her guitar, which she also did on her own most of the time.
Calligraphy had been a kind of revelation for her. It soothed her. Using the different brushes to inscribe kanji characters onto the hanshi paper properly took both skill and artistry, both concentration and a freedom of expression that made stress evaporate.
Now that they were in the second term, the club’s faculty advisor, Miss Kaneda, had begun to work more closely with beginners on the variation of line thickness and the effects of certain stylized flourishes. The fiftyish, gray-haired woman had a slow, drowsy voice that reminded Kara of the way hypnotists spoke to their patients in old movies, trying to lull them into altered states of consciousness.
Sakura sat beside Kara, occasionally whispering to their friend Ren, whose seat was in front of hers. Ren had thin, clever features, so he looked almost like a fox, and his bronze hair-which he insisted was its natural color-only added to his unique appearance. Last term, Miho had nursed a crush on Ren, but she seemed to have gotten over it, which relieved Kara and Sakura of having to break the news to Miho that Ren didn’t like girls.
“Hey,” Kara whispered, while Miss Kaneda was busy helping another student at the front of the room.
“What?” Sakura said.
Kara arched an eyebrow, and kept her voice low. “Some of us are trying to concentrate.”
Sakura and Ren exchanged grins and then both sat up a bit straighter, adopting mock-serious expressions, holding their brushes straight, arms stiff. Good-natured snickering followed. Several other students glanced around at them, including a snooty senpai -or senior-named Reiko, and Sora, a girl from Kara’s homeroom.
