Val shook his head. “My experience with shape-shifters is limited. But we didn’t have many options. Takahiro, how do you usually shift back?”
Takahiro grinned. Fiercely. “Oatmeal,” he said.
“Oatmeal,” my mother said blankly. She slid inside the shed and shut the door behind her. Val put an arm around her, but he almost had to, there was so little floor space left.
“Yeah. That’s something my mother taught me. Human food you have strong reaction to will probably give you way to shift. Not if you’ve just ’shifted. You have to wait till you’ve kind of—settled into that body. Then if you eat something you think of as really, really human it’ll probably bring you back. When I still lived with my mom, umeboshi used. It was what she’d used when she was first learning to do, when she was little girl. After she died . . . umeboshi hard to find here is, and it so much part old life was. It was so much a part of my old life. I wanted something Newworld. I loved umeboshi . . . I hate oatmeal. But Kay—my dad’s housekeeper—kept trying to make me eat it because she thought I was too small and thin.”
I remembered Takahiro when he’d first come here. He had been too small and thin.
“I was too stunned, right after my mom died. I felt nothing—not even grief at first. That got me through—everything. And it got me here. But after I began to get it that I was going to have to stay here . . . I ’shifted once after—it was one of those placement English exams. I think they wanted to put me in special school, and my dad say, ‘No way, he can speak English.’” Takahiro closed his eyes briefly. “Kay was supposed to bring me home. It was after normal school hours. I run to boys’ restroom, there when change hit. I had to get out—went through window. But I was only cub then, you know? Anyone who saw me, think it was student joke. They might report it, but they’d report big puppy.
“I got home all right—your sense of direction amazing as wolf, and you can run what feels like forever—but I had to shift back before Kay got home in car. . . . I was clawing my way through kitchen, looking for anything that might shift me back. I didn’t really have any idea what I was looking for. I was also sure I’d failed test, and my father would be furious. I knocked over trash bin and there was morning’s oatmeal. It rolled out, big congealed lump, and went splat. It was so gross, like somebody’s brains. I thought about how much I hated it—then thought yeah and ate it—and ’shifted.
“I just got to my room and into pajamas before Kay arrived—bringing knapsack I’d left behind in test room. I don’t know what anyone thought about the wrecked clothes on boys’ room floor, but I guess there wasn’t anything that made them mine—jeans, T-shirt, cheap sneakers. Nothing in pockets but lint. I didn’t have much trouble being so out of it I couldn’t answer any of Kay’s questions—and then I think my dad got to her because next day she left me alone. Oh, and I passed the test. I didn’t pass it very well, but I passed it.”
Takahiro stopped but we were all totally listening. I kept thinking, he’s been my friend for nearly eight years and I don’t know anything about him. As the silence went on and got kind of heavy Takahiro glanced around at all of us: my mom, Val, and me last. Last and longest. He really looked at me. I smiled. It was probably kind of a shaky smile, but that was because I was trying not to cry for the little boy who got sent to the other side of the world to live with a dad who didn’t want him. The only sounds in the shed were the vines outside the window rustling in the breeze and Mongo’s tail still thudding (slower now) against my leg.
Takahiro said, “For a while I kept a box of instant oatmeal on the top shelf of my closet and I used to keep some made up in a jar on the floor. If Kay ever found it I don’t know what she thought, but she had no business in my closet, you know? And then I ’shifted again . . . after another bugsucking English test . . . and I found out the instant stuff doesn’t work. That was very bad.
“I could have figured out how to make real oatmeal, but I couldn’t have done it regularly without getting caught, you know? Kay rules the kitchen. So I told her I wanted a bowl of oatmeal as a bedtime snack—oh, twice a week or so. It gets moldy after three or four days. She was kind of surprised . . . but Kay’s not bad really. She makes me oatmeal. And we have a lot of fat wildlife in the woods behind our house. Raccoons are like waiting for me when I take the old stuff out.”
Takahiro had never been much of a talker—even after his English caught up with living in Newworld. I wanted to tell him, it’s okay, he didn’t have to tell us all this. But I realized he wanted to—oh, not wanted wanted to, who would like telling someone else that his dad didn’t love him? but to have someone to talk to. I sometimes thought my dad’s death might have killed me if I hadn’t had Jill to talk to—and I’d had Mom and Ran too. Takahiro didn’t have anyone.
Casimir, I thought suddenly. Oh, drog me, I’d forgotten about Casimir! I’d forgotten about Casimir! I looked up at my mother. She was looking down at me—maybe just a little ironically. “Your friend,” she said in a neutral voice, “had to go to work. So I came out here to find out if—well, if things had gone all right and if so, if you might need clothing or anything.”
“He’s not going to wear anything of mine well, that is certain,” said Val, who was easily a foot shorter and twice as wide as Takahiro, although “well” was a nonstarter concerning any of Val’s clothes.
“Nor Ran’s,” said my mother. Gods, I’d forgotten about Ran too. “Ran’s at Alec’s this afternoon,” she added as if she was reading my mind again, “so I can go to the mall and pick him up on the way home. Most of it’s open till late. Tell me what you need. No, wait. First tell me what happened.”
Val said, “As I said, my experience with shape-shifters is limited. But one of the things anyone—anyone with my background—will learn is that physical contact—preferably unexpected or sudden contact—with someone they have a strong incorporeal connection with—for example a long friendship—will bring them back. Especially if they want to be brought back. I thought of Maggie.”
I remembered my insane urge to drag the front half of something I now knew was a timber wolf onto my lap. It was funny in a sort of death-wish way.
I didn’t remember Takahiro and me getting to be friends—mainly I remember that by the time we were both coming out from under—my dad’s death and his mom’s, and his being shipped here like some kind of package, and having to learn to live in English and in Newworld—we were already friends. Friends who seemed sometimes to exist to zap the electric crap out of each other, but still—friends.
I remembered him showing me how to make my first origami fish. That was before he was talking—pretty much at all. He sat down beside me in some class or other—I don’t remember which—and started folding, because that’s what he did all the time. He used to sit beside me because I’d leave him alone. A lot of kids would try and take his paper away from him, or flick what he was working on out of his hands. I’d sneak looks at him. It was hard to remember now that he’d been little for his age. But his hands were already big even then and his fingers really long. I used to half-imagine they had extra joints in them. I didn’t understand how he could make paper do all that. But I remember the first time I picked up a piece of notebook paper and folded it over into a triangle and then folded and tore off the end so what was left was a square. He’d stopped what he was doing when I folded my paper over. I opened it up again and held it toward him. He stared at me—it felt like a really long time. He hardly ever looked at anyone and he never stared, and that’s when I found out his eyes were the darkest darkest darkest brown, the barest bit not black—like he was wondering if I was just going to start teasing him too.