Mom had turned the radio on and clicked it to the local station. Every time an announcement-type voice came on the conversation faltered as everyone but Ran stopped to listen. But it was only ever about weather and traffic reports and big bargain sales at the mall. With the armydar still thumping away this began to seem kind of surreal. Or maybe . . .
“Hey, Ran,” I said. “You can feel the armydar, can’t you?”
Ran gave me one of his little-brother looks. The one that says, You are so clueless a creepazoid, but Mom’ll get mad if I say so. “You think it’s some kind of critter, and you want to take it to the shelter?” And then he laughed like only a thirteen-year-old boy can laugh.
I was very good. I didn’t say anything that would make Mom mad either. I said, “So you can’t feel it.”
“What do you mean, feel,” said Ran. “It’s airwaves. It’d be like feeling the radio signal.” He reached his hands out and made clutching gestures like a zombie in a horror movie.
Takahiro rejoined us and ate and ate and ate and ate and kept eating. Finally even Ran noticed this, probably because Ran believed himself to be in a permanent state of semi-starvation due to grown-up stinginess. “Holy electricity,” he said to Takahiro, half-admiringly and half-resentfully. “You’re really hungry.”
“Hard day,” Takahiro said offhandedly, and poured more stew into his bowl. Mom had bought the feeds-twelve size and it was almost gone. Val got up and began slicing more bread. I fetched the peanut butter. Val hadn’t adjusted to the Newworld addiction to peanut butter, and Mongo had had the last slice of chicken. I wondered what Casimir thought of peanut butter. I thought of Casimir with both a thrill and a flinch. Already what had happened in the park seemed to have happened to someone else in another century. And I’d only met Casimir yesterday.
Takahiro had been my friend for nearly eight years. I looked up and Taks’ eyes were on me. He looked back at his bowl immediately.
The radio eventually reported blandly that a cobey unit was making a sweep through our town as part of the standard backup procedure after a cobey has been successfully contained. “General Kleinzweig has declared the all clear for the Copperhill event, but further states that a military presence will remain in the area for a few more days.”
Takahiro waited till Ran was “helping” Mom do some mid-meal cleaning up to say quietly, “I bet General Kleinzweig isn’t happy about whatever happened in the park today. Which may be why the fancy armydar is still on.”
“Which might mean another round of knocking on doors and asking innocent civilians difficult questions,” said Val. “Yes.”
Takahiro’s eating was finally beginning to slow down (perhaps because there wasn’t anything left to eat) as Mom put a big platter of deli brownies on the table. “Mom, you’re the best,” I said, and she grinned at me. I felt like I hadn’t seen her grin in years. It made even the armydar less gruesome for a couple of minutes.
She said to Takahiro, “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like, but shouldn’t you call your dad or someone and tell him where you are?”
Takahiro said in that blank, flat voice he’d used when he told us about being a werewolf, “Dad’s not home. I don’t know where he is. He hasn’t been around in a few weeks.” He glanced up and I guess we were all staring at him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Kay says he’s phoned a few times. And I call her if I’m going to be really late, and she leaves the porch light on.”
Okay, we were really retro, we’d had these sit-down-and-talk-to-each-other dinners at least twice a week my entire life—which had been fine till Val happened—but I was aware that not everybody did this. Steph used to say she didn’t recognize her mom after she had a haircut, she saw her so rarely, even though they lived in the same house. Becky said that it was really a good thing she had to watch her weight because there was never any food in her house. So my family was weird. But I could see the shock on Mom’s face and Ran even stopped talking.
Mom hastily passed the brownies around again (like any of us needed reminding) and the moment passed. And then we played Scrabble. On a board you take out of a box and unfold, and little plastic tiles with letters on them. Val really liked Scrabble. He said it helped with his English. He’d been totally language-school and academic-seminar fluent when he came here, but living in it is different. It was Val, Takahiro, Ran and me. Mom had brought work home but rather than locking herself away in the Lair she propped her ’top and her cardboard folders at one end of the kitchen table. We had to fish under papers for lost tiles.
I was almost embarrassed. But I didn’t want Takahiro sitting around by himself right now, and if we took him home that was what he’d be doing. I’m who got the Scrabble board out. I knew Val would play, and Taks would be polite, and Taks was Ran’s new hero because of how much he could eat. There’d been a couple of years after Taks started teaching me origami that I’d brought him home pretty often, but that had mostly stopped when we got older and started hanging with different people—and Takahiro had turned into a moody jerk. But now I knew he had reason.
About halfway through the game—while Ran was agonizing over his turn, which involved a j and a z—I got up to make coffee. I’d been pulling Takahiro’s chain for so long I didn’t think about it: I sang out, “Taks-san, kohi ka?” Do you want coffee? He’d say yes or no or he’d ignore me, and then I’d pretend I’d scored another point against all those times he’d looked through me at Peta’s. There’s another joke about this—the English adjective much in Japanese is takusan, which is pronounced “Taks” plus the standard honorific san. Jill started calling poor Taks that when he cracked six feet in ninth grade.
There was a pause, and I remembered what I was doing, and then I was really embarrassed, and promptly made it worse, the way you do, by saying sumimasen, and then I was so embarrassed I wanted to die, and couldn’t remember any words in any language.
“Hai, arigato,” Takahiro said. “Kohi kudasai.” Yes thanks. Coffee please.
I gaped at him. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him say even one word of the language he’d grown up in. My few words of Japanese instantly deserted me, of course. I wasn’t up to conversation. Jill and I just used a bunch of words and phrases we’d looked up on the webnet. I also had a paper copy Japanese dictionary in my bedroom, but I didn’t admit to it. “Oh—um,” I said. “Daijobu.” All right. I probably made more noise with the coffee machine than was strictly necessary.
“Dozo,” I added—the one word I’d managed to remember eight years ago when I gave him my first good crane—and put the mug down in front of him.
“Arigato,” he said. His voice sounded rusty, as if Japanese was a door that hadn’t been opened in a while. “Ii nioi ga shimasu,” he said thoughtfully, as if listening to himself. He looked up at me and smiled. “Smells good.”
Mom only had a vague idea of the Japanese thing. You don’t really discuss winding your semi-friends up with your mom. But she’d raised her eyes from her ’top screen and was looking at us. And Val, who didn’t, or anyway shouldn’t, know anything about it at all, was watching us carefully. Maybe it was just the Japanese words. I didn’t think so. Grown-ups, so clueless most of the time, occasionally catch on at really the wrong moment. (Ran was still going “Zaj. Jaz. Zja.”) I said, “Sorry. Jill and I learned a little—really a little—Japanese a long time ago. Because—er—”