My gaze wanders to the garden connected to the room. I’ve loved this garden since I was a kid, its bristly shrubs and stout rock formations offering so many of those magical shadows for me to sink into. I try to mentally sink into them now, to breathe deeply and calm myself.
One time when I was twelve, I snuck in while the garden was technically closed, nestled myself under the twisting limbs of the biggest tree—I’m not sure what kind it is, but it’s always looked to me like it came from another world, its long flowering branches flowing to the ground and forming an enchanted canopy to hide beneath. I sat there and read about onryo well into the night—until Auntie Och hunted me down and yelled at me for disappearing without telling anyone and nearly giving Auntie Suzy a heart attack.
I’d been swept up in my stories—I was fascinated by the fact that so many onryo were women, so many of them were truly wronged in life, and so many ended the story by getting the vengeance they sought. Their long, tangled waves of hair reminded me of the branches of the big canopy tree, flowing and curving in all different directions, wild and unrestrained. From then on, I referred to that tree as “the onryo tree.”
And it’s still one of my favorite hiding spots, honestly. It absorbs my temper like nothing else.
I’m so caught up in thinking about the tree and onryo and how Grace is her own kind of onryo that I don’t even notice when freaking Henry Chen sneaks up behind me and whisper-yells, “Hey!” in my ear.
“Blagh!” I yelp, nearly jumping out of my seat.
Uncle Hikaru shoots me another admonishing look. Belle murmurs something soothing to Nak, while Rory rolls a ball of anko and mochi between her palms, her brow furrowed in intense concentration.
I whip around and glare at Henry Chen.
He’s sitting in the seat directly behind me, wearing a baseball cap pulled so low, it nearly conceals his eyes. Guess he’s doing the incognito-celebrity thing again. And it seems to be working, since the Aunties around us are paying him barely any attention. (Now they’ve forgotten about Grace and how disruptive I am and are mostly waiting for an opportunity to speak up about the clearly subpar mochi-making going on at the front of the room.)
“What are you doing here?” I hiss at him.
“Come outside with me,” he says, giving me one of his smug-ass grins.
“What?!”
“Rika, look!” Rory calls from the front of the room. “I got it to be perfectly round!”
I turn back around to see Rory proudly brandishing her mochi ball. I give her a thumbs-up.
“It’s still too big,” Uncle Hikaru sniffs, scrutinizing her work.
“Perhaps if you could get the mochi to be the proper texture, Hikaru,” one of the Aunties heckles from the audience. “Then she would not have to roll so much together to get it to stick.”
“Or if your anko was real anko and not premade paste from the market,” another Auntie chimes in. “You should always make it from scratch.”
“I did make it from scratch,” Uncle Hikaru growls.
“Well, I thought this one was pretty good,” Rory mutters, looking down at her apparently very controversial mochi ball.
“No.” The first Auntie shakes her head. “Too big and lumpy. You might as well start over.”
“I think it looks perfect!” I cry—attracting a death-glare from nearly everyone in the audience.
Okay, I really need to stop with the disruptions. But god, I hate it when stompy little Rory looks even a tiny bit discouraged. I want to turn myself into an onryo, float up onstage, and wreak vengeance on everyone making her feel bad. (And maybe there will be a little vengeance left for Craig Shimizu, if the onryo has time.)
“Come outside with me.” Henry Chen is now leaning forward so he can whisper directly at my head, his breath tickling my ear. I picture his annoying, constantly amused grin, and my cheeks warm. “I got something. From Grace.”
My stomach drops, and all thoughts of mochi balls and busybody Aunties evaporate.
“Okay,” I mutter back. “But we have to be stealth about it, or all everyone will be talking about for the next week is how I was involved in multiple disruptions of the mochi demonstration, just like I was involved in the total disruption of the parade—”
“No worries,” Henry says, his voice easy. “I got it.”
I hear rustling behind me as he leans back in his seat and mutters to one of the Aunties sitting next to him: “Is that dog eating the mochi?!”
My eyes go to Belle. Who is just straight-up feeding Nak mochi now. He looks like he’s in heaven.
“Hikaru!” the Auntie behind me bellows. “Are you letting dogs participate in our sacred tradition?!”
“What?” Uncle Hikaru whirls around to look at Belle. “Belle Rakuyama, I told you . . .” He shakes his head and turns back to the audience. “You all heard me tell her—”
But it’s too late. The Aunties explode with disapproving activity, some of them rising and bustling up to the table.
“Really, Hikaru, if you cannot keep control of this demonstration—”
“You’ve become so permissive over the years, the shame of it all—”
“I still think you bought that anko from the market—”
I hear Belle exclaiming, “Nak is part of the court!” over the din.
“Come on,” Henry says, jiggling my shoulder.
As the chaos rises, he grabs my hand and pulls me out of my seat, dragging me toward one of the exits.
“Wait!” I bark. “You don’t know where you’re going!” We switch course, me pulling him, so we can escape out the other exit, into the garden. I pull him behind the onryo tree so we’ll still be hidden from view when the chaos dies down.
“That wasn’t stealth at all,” I say, shaking my head at him, the flush rising in my cheeks. My kaiju-temper flares—it does not seem able to keep itself under control when confronted with Henry Chen. “The demonstration was still totally disrupted.”
He shrugs. “But it
