“Well, you have to,” Jill said decisively. “He’s foreign. He’s from—um—wherever he’s from. It’s up to you to help him feel welcome.” She started telling me that Diane was having a party at her house next weekend, and she was sure Diane would be happy to invite him, but really I should see him a couple of times before I risked him in a group. Yeah right. I tuned out. There was a silverbug at the intersection between Zorca and Laburnum. I pointed my phone at it and clicked the coordinates on to Watchguard. Let them deal with it. If the niddles were taking over the big stuff Watchguard would have plenty of time for silverbugs. Jill was still talking. One of the banner boards was streaming about the cobey, but Jill wasn’t paying attention.
We got to school just in time, before being mildly annoyed with each other for each other’s dumb attitude escalated into a real fight. Eddie was standing with the rest of our crowd and flirting like mad with Becky. Ginevra was hesitating at the edge of the group looking confused and unhappy. I thought, Right, Jill, you’re so clued in about romance.
Nobody seemed too stressed about the cobey, although I heard “Copperhill” a couple of times and Laura had also seen a silverbug on her way to school, not the one I’d seen. That made two on this side of town this morning. That was at least one too many.
I saw Takahiro coming through the school gates as the first bell rang. I waved and he waved back. He lived on the far side of town and wasn’t a morning person either and usually caught the bus after the bus he should have caught. (I didn’t know why he didn’t have a car. Taks and his brainiac friends did computer stuff for money and Taks’ dad could’ve just bought him a car. But Taks used the bus.) Maybe I could get him to invite me over for an origami evening so I could tell Diane I had other plans. You never knew with Takahiro: sometimes he was almost human. Sometimes you might as well try to be friends with a cobey box. That was how Jill and I had started using Japanese phrases—to try and get some kind of reaction out of him when he reverted to dead-battery mode. It didn’t work, but Jill and I liked saying stuff our teachers couldn’t understand so we kept doing it. Also, isn’t sumimasen just better than boring old “excuse me”? It sounds more like “excuse me” than “excuse me.” Also we were pretty sure it wired Takahiro. Probably because we got it wrong. But if he wouldn’t help us, how were we going to know any better than what we got off the webnet?
I started to wait for him, but then I saw one of his gizmohead friends beetling toward him so I didn’t bother. I’d catch him during morning break and check what kind of mood he was in, not that that would mean anything about how he’d be next weekend. To give the warumono credit, he kept his promises. If he had promised you something—like that he’d give you an origami lesson—he’d do it. It’s just that if he was in one of his moods when you showed up you wouldn’t want to stay.
There was an announcement over the PA system in homeroom about the cobey in Copperhill. How it was no big whizzy deal but just in case it was a deal and the niddles weren’t admitting it we were supposed to keep an extra-sharp eye out for anything unusual. They didn’t say what unusual was, of course. Two silverbugs on the same side of town in the same morning? And, added the PA system, if we didn’t have to go to Copperhill, don’t. Huh. That almost certainly meant the niddles weren’t telling us everything. A whole town shouldn’t shut down because there was a new cobey. That’s why we had cobey units and the Overguard.
If it hadn’t been for the announcement we probably wouldn’t all have looked around and started counting Copperhill kids. So I wasn’t the only one who noticed that probably half of them weren’t here today. Big cobey then. Like maybe the kind that ran along deep lines. There was a deep line that ran from Copperhill to Station. But we didn’t even have regular scans any more because this area didn’t have cobeys or any of the weird pre-cobey stuff that scans supposedly pick up. We didn’t have silverbug swarms either—like we’d had two of this summer.
First class was geography and Mrs. Tarrant isn’t nearly as anal retentive as Mrs. Andover, so we could sit where we liked. I was staring resentfully at my gigantic algebra book when Takahiro dropped down next to me. He dumped his shiny new geography textbook on the desk, but his hands were busy with a little piece of paper, folding and folding and folding. Taks was amazing. I’d been watching him fold for nearly eight years and he was still amazing. He got more amazing.
Even I remember that when he first moved here he was folding origami all the time, and I wasn’t noticing anything right after Dad died. Taks was the shortest kid in the class that year, so there was this tiny boy crouched over these almost tissue-thin sheets of colored paper, his long-fingered hands going so fast you could hardly see them. I knew about origami, although I’d never tried it, but a lot of the kids had never heard of it, which made him even more exotic. Station has lots of Southworlders and almost as many Midworlders but not many Farworlders.
I guess the teachers had had a memo or something to be nice to him because they didn’t stop him folding even during class. It might have been the uncoolest thing ever—and Taks dressed all wrong at first, of course, and he had too many pens and pencils, which he always lined up very carefully at the top of his desk, just before he went back to his origami—but his paper figures were so fabulous that everyone forgot about cool and wanted one. He must have made hundreds of cranes, and pretty much gave one to anyone who asked, including the teachers. Cranes are the first thing everybody finds out about when they finally learn that origami exists, which is maybe why he made them for us clueless Newworlders. The beaks and wings and tail tips of Takahiro’s cranes are always knife sharp. If you’ve ever made an origami crane you know what I’m talking about.
Takahiro still made cranes, but he mostly made other things. He was making something else today although I couldn’t figure out what it was. When the bell rang he put it down. He was a fully plugged-in member of the senior class and had to pretend to pay attention to the teachers like the rest of us. (He was also now too conspicuously tall to get away with much.) I don’t know if he was paying attention to Mrs. Tarrant or not (it was an Oldworld unit, and Oldworld geography is much harder to study than Newworld, because Oldworld cobeys keep jerking it around), but my eyes were drawn to the little paper thing on Takahiro’s side of the desk. Its body was long and curvy and its neck—supposing that was its neck—was arched like the general’s horse in some memorial statue, and it had a spiky crest a little like a horse’s mane blowing in the wind. I was sure if it was alive, whatever it was, it would prance. It had plenty of legs to prance with. Absentmindedly I put my hand to my neck. Yes. She was still there. I didn’t hear a lot about whatever Mrs. Tarrant was talking about. (Maybe I didn’t want to, with a new cobey in Copperhill.) When the bell rang again Takahiro picked up the little paper thing and kept folding while everyone else was picking up their books and moving toward the door. There were more little paper legs, and the mane got spikier. I found myself thinking of the Hands Folding Paper figures I’d made in my sleep recently. I put my ’top and my notebook in my knapsack really slowly so I could keep watching Takahiro. It was typical of him that he hadn’t said a word to me.
He stood up finally, holding it in his hand. It almost did prance—if I blinked fast enough: it turned its head toward me, shaking its mane and dancing on too many feet. Okay, maybe I was blinking too fast. Or maybe I shouldn’t have had that third mug of coffee for breakfast. There was a faint breath of sweet-smelling air against my cheek, like a little feathery or hairy foot had just brushed it.