He pulled out a fresh piece of already-square origami paper, folded it over, and opened it again like I had. I nodded. Then he started showing me what to do. After I made a horrible mess of my piece of squared-off notebook paper he gave me a piece of origami paper to mangle. Then he gave me a second one. The second one actually turned into a fish.
There’s a really big gap between being able to make origami fish and hats and boats and those fortune-telling boxes where you write silly things under paper folds and make people choose one, and your first crane. I wasted a lot of time (and paper) trying to fold a crane. I could follow the directions—by this time I had my own How to Do Origami book at home—but the results were always smudgy and lopsided and bent-looking. And then one day I got it. The folds were all crisp and sharp and right first time and the little hole in the bottom was centered and square and when I set it down it stood up straight. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so happy—probably not since Dad had died—maybe the day we brought Mongo home. I went racing into the dining room and the Lair to show Mom—Ran had been totally unimpressed but he was still pretty little. Mom got it although I think she mostly got it about something making me happy.
“What are you going to do with it?” she said. “We could make space on a shelf somewhere.” Mom has a collection of family china and stuff that takes up most of the corner cupboards in the dining room. The gaps and corners had silted up over the years with stuff like report cards with gold stars on them (not a lot of these) and family photos and candles too pretty to burn and tiny vases that weren’t at that moment holding deadheading accidents from Mom’s garden and a few of my china dog statues although by unanimous vote Mom and I made Ran keep his car models in his room. The crane would have looked right at home.
I thought about it. “No,” I said. “I’m going to give it to Takahiro.”
Mom didn’t say anything about how Takahiro must have made millions of cranes and the last thing he’d be interested in is another one. She nodded. “He’ll like that.”
I took it to school the next day in a box, I was so afraid of crushing it. I found Takahiro on the playground—off in a corner by himself, folding paper. I knelt beside him. He looked up, startled. I opened the box and took my beautiful crane out. It suddenly looked a lot less beautiful than it had the day before on the kitchen table where I’d made it. It was the cheapest origami paper and the red on the colored side was streaky, and there were flecks of white on the borders where the ink hadn’t quite gone to the edges. And it was just a crane. Takahiro had made millions of them. Just like Mom hadn’t said.
My hand shook a little as I took it out of the box, but it was too late now not to do it. I held it out to him. I know my voice shook. “It’s for you,” I said. “It’s the first crane I’ve ever made that isn’t awful.” I’d looked up how to say something like “Please take this, it is a gift for you” in Japanese on the webnet, but all of it but the “please” had gone out of my head: “Dozo,” I said.
He took my crane gently, as if it was beautiful. He looked at it and then he looked at me again. I think it was the first time I’d ever really seen him smile. I was staring straight at him—terrified he’d laugh or be bored or something—and I saw his mouth say “thank you” but I don’t think he said it out loud.
“You’re welcome,” I said, hugely relieved. (I’d looked the Japanese for “you’re welcome” up on the webnet too but I couldn’t remember it.) “Um—do you want the box?” He nodded, and was putting the crane carefully back inside it when the class bell rang. We stood up together and just before we turned to the school door he bowed and said clearly: “Domo arigato gozaimasu.” Which means “thank you very much.”
Of course it took me about fifty more cranes before I made another one that was anywhere near as good. But a crane did finally get put on the dining room shelves: Mom gave me some patterned origami paper after I’d been doing it about a year, and I made her a crane out of the prettiest pattern, and a peony out of the pinkest. I also made Ran a Tyrannosaurus rex and a racing car, although he went on and on about what kind of car it might be (the book I got the pattern out of didn’t say) till I was sorry (I told him) I hadn’t made him a guillotine instead. (There was a pattern for a guillotine on some extreme-origami site I’d looked at—you can make anything out of paper if you’re good enough. A guillotine is probably beyond me, but Taks could make one.)
I looked at Takahiro now. He was looking at me with an expression I thought I remembered from that day I’d given him the crane: surprise. Wariness. Hope. Although there’d been an awful lot of chain-yanking between him and me since that day. The weeks he suddenly wouldn’t talk to me—which were pretty dreeping aggravating anyway, and worse when he’d been helping me study algebra and it was like he made me look like the bad guy when I wouldn’t let him help me any more just because he wasn’t talking to me. Or I’d see him at Peta’s after school with his geek crowd and when I waved he’d look straight through me like I was, I don’t know, a nongeek. Which I was of course.
That’s how Jill and I started using Japanese phrases—when he wasn’t talking to me he wasn’t talking to Jill either, and it was Jill’s idea to speak Japanese to annoy him, since he never did—speak Japanese, I mean. That thank-you when I gave him the crane was probably the only Japanese I’d ever heard him say. And that was before I started needing to annoy him. Then it kind of caught on. It was all Newworld girls and their ’tops—Steph joined the Annoy Taks group when she had a crush on him and he looked through her too, and then Laura and Dena did because they were tight with Steph, and he ignored all of us. But I like to think we were irritating. Also, some of us—Jill and me anyway—just liked the way the words felt in our mouths. Like sumimasen. Shimatta was a lot more satisfying than damn. And sugoi is a whole different kind of amazing than amazing.
I guess I was maybe feeling a little guilty now. “I was thinking about you teaching me origami. And that crane I gave you.”
He nodded. “I still have it.”
“You do?” I said, astonished.
He glanced at me and away again. “It was the first time anyone I’d ever showed how had actually gone on with it and done stuff. It was the first day I . . .” He didn’t finish what he was saying, but I thought I could guess: I’d probably been his first friend. He didn’t start hanging out with his geeks and gizmoheads till his English was up to arguments about servebots and why physwiz did or did not rule (there’s a gizmohead tough-guy thing about physwiz). At the beginning though it was just me and origami. And the origami was really visible. It could have gone either way: the rest of the kids could have exiled me the way they’d exiled Takahiro. That they didn’t was mostly Jill. If I liked Takahiro then she did too. And everyone liked Jill. It was Jill who first got him talking (in English) at all. She just started talking to him and I don’t know how she did it, but she made it seem like they were having conversations, till they were, till he started talking back. He showed her how to fold paper too, and she was pretty good but I was better. It was a pity I couldn’t take Enhanced Origami instead of Enhanced Algebra.