“No,” she said, pushing a strand of her long hair away from her face, “but if you know a way to arrange it, I’m in.”
Kara gave a low laugh of surprise. Miho didn’t really mean it, in spite of her fascination with American boys, but there’d been a time when she wouldn’t even have joked about it.
“All right, so what’s your big news?” Kara asked.
Miho shot her a dark look, and for a second, Kara thought the girl might truly be angry with her. But then Miho’s expression lightened and she reached out and gave Kara a light punch on the shoulder.
“Like you don’t know. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”
Sakura glanced at Kara, who only gave a confused shrug. For a second, she wondered if this had to do with Ren, if somehow Miho had her wires crossed and had gotten the impression Ren wanted to go out with her or something, even though Miho hadn’t talked much about her interest in him for months. But that didn’t make any sense.
Miho huffed and rolled her eyes. “Hello?” she said, an affectation she’d picked up from Kara, who often translated her American idiom slang into Japanese. “I just got out of a Noh club meeting.”
“Ohhhh,” Kara said, smiling. Now she got it.
“Oh, what?” Sakura asked.
Miho grinned at her. “Aritomo-sensei just announced that this term, the Noh club will be producing and performing an actual Noh play! Everything! The acting, the music, the sets! I can’t believe it. I knew she was cool, but I never thought she would let us do something like this, especially since she takes Noh theater so seriously. That she’d entrust us with an actual performance… it’s just amazing!”
“That is great news,” Sakura said. “Of course she trusts you all with it-the club takes it just as seriously as she does. Especially you, Miho. Why did you think Kara already knew about this?”
“On the way out of the meeting, Aritomo-sensei told me she did,” Miho said, looking at Kara, once again sweeping her hair back from her eyes. “In fact, she said she’d suggested you two do the same play as your next manga.”
Sakura crossed her arms. “So why am I just hearing about it now?”
Kara shrugged. “Aritomo-sensei told me about it when she came over to my house the other night. She and my father were making dinner together. That was strange enough. Anyway, she swore me to secrecy about the play until she had announced it to the Noh club, which” – she made a flourish of her hands-“she now has.”
Without conferring about it, the three of them fell into step together, working their way around the baseball field, heading back toward the dorm. Kara waved to Hachiro, who grinned but kept his baseball glove down, focused on the game.
“So what is this Noh play, anyway?” Sakura asked. “Why does Aritomo-sensei think it would be a good manga for us?”
“Apparently because you’ve already done one gruesome manga,” Miho said. “This one is a horrible story about a woman driven mad by love, who becomes a flesh-eating snake demon.”
Sakura smiled thinly. “Lovely.”
“It really would make a cool manga though,” Miho said, a bit defensive of anything having to do with Noh. She adjusted her glasses. “The Hannya is fearsome and the story is tragic.”
“Aren’t they all?” Kara asked.
Sakura bumped her purposely as they walked. “So your father and Aritomo-sensei are getting pretty close.”
Kara nodded. “Looks that way. But I’d much rather talk about anything else.”
A look of concern crossed Miho’s face. “I didn’t know it was bothering you so much.”
“I’ll be fine,” Kara said. “I want my father to be happy, and I really like Aritomo-sensei. It’s just, I don’t know, weird.”
They reached the dorm and Sakura used her ID card to open the door. She turned to Kara. “You still want to do a new manga, though, right? This awkwardness with Aritomo-sensei won’t keep you from working with her?”
Kara smiled. “Not at all. I was worried that you wouldn’t want to start a new manga right away, that you might need a rest first. I’ve got the easier job, after all. Illustrating the pages takes a lot more time than writing them. And anyway, Aritomo-sensei knows everything there is to know about Noh theater, and almost that much about manga. She’s a huge help. No, I’ll adjust. The awkwardness will go away eventually.”
“Good,” Miho said, as they walked up the stairs to the second floor. “Because I already asked Aritomo-sensei if you two could help out for the play. Noh club will be running late, so if you want, you could come down after calligraphy club and work with us. It might help with your manga.”
Sakura and Kara exchanged glances.
“I’m up for it if you are,” Sakura said.
Kara nodded. “Okay.” Then she looked at Miho. “I’m just surprised, I guess. Doesn’t it seem a little strange that she would choose such a violent play after what the school has been through this year?”
“I had the same thought,” Sakura said.
“Maybe a little strange,” Miho agreed. “But, after all, it’s only a play.”
In Miho and Sakura’s room, they looked through the finished pages of the manga Sakura and Kara had done about ketsuki, and then-as Miho told them the story of Dojoji, the Noh play that the club intended to perform-Sakura began to sketch what the characters might look like in a manga version. As she drew the lines that would make the demon serpent woman, Hannya, Kara shuddered. She’d had enough of monsters for a while.
With a private smile, she chided herself that she was being silly. Miho was right, after all. It was only a play.
Kara is at home, in her bedroom in Medford, Massachusetts. The walls are a pink wash and the curtains are sheer lace. A breeze washes through the windows, billowing the curtains, the smell of an imminent rainstorm in the air. The room is just as her mother decorated it for her, right down to the hand-painted fairies above the headboard of the bone-white sleigh bed.
They share a love of fairies, Kara and her mother.
She lies in bed, a sleepy smile on her face, turns over and settles deep into her bedclothes, relishing the cool breeze and the distant rumble of thunder. It’s heaven. Her mother created this little slice of paradise for Kara when she turned seven, as a present, and painted those fairies herself. This isn’t right, of course. Kara redecorated in the eighth grade, painted the walls white-too old for pink, now-and her mother even helped her brush thick, eggshell finish right over the fairies. That was not long before…
This isn’t right, but it’s perfection.
Bliss.
A soft rap comes at the door, punctuated by a crack of thunder, the rainstorm coming nearer. Sprinkles patter the windows as Kara rises on her elbow, genuinely curious.
“Who is it?”
The knob turns, the door opens a crack, and from deep inside her there comes a sense of painful longing, of fluttery, excited certainty that her mother is about to enter the room, perhaps to tell her that breakfast is ready.
But the door swings open on darkness. Green eyes-cat eyes-stare out at her from the black shadows, growing huge-a massive, bent, bestial silhouette separating itself from the deeper darkness. The face dips into the room, shadows coalescing around it, but she can see the horns and the twisted mouth and jutting fangs of Kyuketsuki, the demon whose ancient whispers spoke a curse upon her.
Terror seizes her, but all Kara can do is burrow deeper into the bed, a little girl again. Her breath catches in her throat and she bites her lower lip, tasting blood.
Something tumbles from the shadows, as though spilling from the Kyuketsuki’s own darkness, and sprawls to the floor.
Hachiro. Dead. Limbs twisted up like some castaway doll, eyes open, dull and glassy.
Kara opens her mouth to scream, but no sound emerges.
“It’s all right, sweet pea,” a voice says beside her.
Hope surges through her, and love, and a kind of lightness of spirit that she has forgotten is even possible. Kara turns in bed and looks up into the face of her mother, her sandy blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, blue eyes
