Shadows

by Robin McKinley

  Ran’s obliviousness was comforting. I don’t think he even noticed that Takahiro was wearing a dressing gown, let alone Val’s dressing gown. Mom handed Takahiro most of the shopping bags and he went off to the bathroom to change. The gruuaa seemed to stay in the kitchen. Maybe they were interested in the stew too. I ran after him a minute later, with scissors for the tags: “Thanks,” he said, reaching a long bare arm around the door. “The nail clippers weren’t working so well.”

  The way he was standing I could see his reflection in the mirror over the sink: that golden-pearl skin gleaming on a long naked back and butt. Oh. Wow. Great butt. Not that I’d seen a lot of other teenage boys’ naked butts to compare it with . . . but I was pretty sure this one would still rate. I don’t think he knew, but I still turned away really fast, giggly with embarrassment.

  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, wa
s 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—”

  “I’m Japanese,” said Takahiro. “Half.” He was enjoying this. For about a third of a second I was furious. And then I thought, Okay, I guess he’s earned it.

  “Wa’,” I said tentatively, which maybe meant “wow,” and he laughed.

  “Ee, sugoi,” he said. “Yeah, amazing.” And picked up his coffee mug.

  By the end of the game (he won and Val was second by three points) Taks was beginning to look and move more like himself again. His shoulders had dropped by at least two inches and he no longer looked like he was sitting on the edge of his seat because he was expecting to have to run away somewhere. As I put the game away Ran was telling him unbelievably lame thirteen-year-old-boy jokes and Taks wasn’t offering him even minor violence, which is pretty sugoi.

  And the gruuaa weren’t juddering around so much. Hix had dangled over my shoulder for most of the game like she was watching. Mongo had been asleep and was now cruising. He was cruising in that I’ve-slept-long-enough-I-want-something-to-happen way. After I put the game away I went to fetch a few more dog biscuits. I had three choices: I could take him for a walk, I could give him something to do, or I could watch while he started running through his repertoire, hoping for the trick that this time would make praise, petting and dog biscuits appear. If none of his tricks worked, then in his despair at discovering he was no longer loved and appreciated he’d look for something someone—probably Ran—had carelessly left at dog level and destroy it tragically. (I have been known to accuse Ran of leaving something at dog level for Mongo to destroy. Like those fabulously expensive sneakers he then decided he didn’t like. Very old history. But it made my job as dog trainer harder. As I pointed out to Mom when she stopped me from gnawing off all of Ran’s top surfaces.) I usually managed not to let it get this far. And Mongo was a lot saner than he’d been as a puppy but he was still the same dog. It was hard to believe he was almost eight years old. He was already doing pirouettes as I closed the cupboard door.

  The radio had been burbling away for the last hour with gardening tips and the health benefits of bicycling to work, and I heard a plug for Clare’s shelter. We had a bunch more kittens to find homes for and usually managed to move a few grown-up cats as well during a kitten rush. And then there was the kind of pause that isn’t supposed to happen on the radio and totally gets your attention, and then a new crisp official voice was saying, “I have an announcement. While General Kleinzweig wishes to emphasize that there is no cause for anxiety, he has decided it would be prudent to leave additional patrols in the area overnight, and to reassess the security of the situation in the morning. Please do not be alarmed if you should see soldiers on your street; they are there in your best interests.”

  The radio went back to burbling but we sat in silence. Some of the gruuaa climbed up the wall and started doing their spiky dance—the dance that had so freaked me out that first night Val had come to dinner. I looked at Val: the heavy lines down the sides of his mouth seemed even deeper and heavier than usual. The gruuaa had climbed higher and higher on the wall behind him and were making a kind of pointed filled-in-arch shape. All of it kept moving and seething and little bits of wall flickered through as—I don’t know—legs and bodies and heads moved and left gaps, but the overall shape remained weirdly steady. Usually when the gruuaa threw themselves around they just threw themselves around. Val’s grim face and the dark pointed arch behind him made him look like Evil Cobra Man or something. I didn’t like it. It was only two days ago that Val was still my worst enemy.

  Val moved, like someone jerking himself out of a bad dream, and the gruuaa fell back down the wall and made thornbushes over the baseboards. I knew that jerk: Jill did it when her foresight was hurting her. I stopped not-liking and started worrying.

  Takahiro stood up and said, “Thanks for”—and his eyes fell on Ran and he finished—“everything. Dinner was great. Sorry I ate the last brownie.”

  “You aren’t sorry,” said Ran.

  “I’m not sorry,” agreed Takahiro. “Maggie, the bus stops at the end of your street, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ll take you home,” said Val, standing up like there was a cobey regiment on his shoulders. There wasn’t, but there were a few gruuaa.

  “I can catch a—”

  “Yes, you can, but I’m going to drive you home.” Val snagged the car keys off the hook on the wall.

  Takahiro hesitated.

  “I’ll come too,” I said. “If I stay here, Mom’ll make me clean up the kitchen.”

  “Or do your homework,” said Mom, but she didn’t mean it. She was worried about Takahiro too.

  I waved to Mongo, and he shot out the door in front of us, trailing gruuaa. I didn’t know what happens if you shut a car door on gruuaa and I couldn’t see them in the dark, so I left my door open while I clipped Mongo into his car harness next to me and put my seat belt on. Then I closed the door so cautiously I had to do it twice. Nothing squealed. I really had to learn about doors and gruuaa. Both Taks and Val had just got in the front and closed their doors.

  We were on a corner lot of a street near one edge of town, and we had to go clear across town and out the other side to where Takahiro lived. We saw a car turn and come down our street, and several passed by on the main road as we drove toward it. Val stopped at the intersection.

  “Look,” whispered Takahiro.

  There were three soldiers standing on the sidewalk, watching the cars pass. They had the big orange cobey unit badges on their hats, and one of them was holding something like a video tablet or ’tronic desk up and looking at it.

  All three of them turned their heads and looked at us.

  Suddenly the car was full of a smell. I can’t describe it, but anyone who has spent as much time at an animal shelter as I have knows smells like it. It’s a clean smell—it’s not about dirty bedding or food bowls or anything—but it’s a critter smell. I reached forward and put my hands on Takahiro’s shoulders. And squeezed. Hard. “You’re okay,” I said. “You’re here, you’re with us, you’re okay.”

  His hands came up and grabbed mine. Really hard. “I shouldn’t have eaten so much,” he said in a muffled voice. “This has never happened before. But if I were still weak and hungry I bet I couldn’t . . .”

  “You’re not going to,” I said, trying to remember how Ms. Dunstable—who was also Mom’s friend Joanna— made her voice go all solid-state when she was talking to the full school assembly. “You’re going to stay the way you are right now because while Val and I are okay with you no matter what, these soldiers aren’t.” Takahiro was panting—way too much like a dog. Or a wolf. Mongo whined. The soldiers were sauntering toward us, like daring Val to step on the gas and make a run for it. Val was looking out the window, his hands motionless on the steering wheel. I thought, Oh, gods, he’s performing for them. Mongo whined again. Just before the first soldier leaned down to tap on Val’s window Takahiro let go of my hands. I sat back but twisted around and slid my right hand between the car door and Takahiro’s seat, and his hand dropped and grabbed it. Mongo whined a third time and with him straining toward the front seat I could just reach the snap, and flicked it loose. He was through the gap between the seats in a flash, sitting in Takahiro’s lap. Takahiro’s lap was nearly big enough. I saw Taks’ other hand rise, as if involuntarily, and run down Mongo’s silky head and back.

  Val opened the window. “Good evening,” he said.

  “Good evening, sir,” said the soldier with a kind of ugly politeness that reminded me of a teacher who is about to destroy you and is enjoying making you wait for it. “Our orders are to stop cars at random and our random
-number generator chose you.” He showed his teeth and held up his box.

  If that’s a random-number generator, I thought, I’m a werewolf. That crawly, itchy, something-behind-you feeling was so strong with him standing next to the car shoving his box almost through the window at Val that I thought I might very well morph into something myself—a gopher or a chipmunk maybe. Takahiro was still breathing in little sharp jerks like he wanted to pant—I could feel it through his hand—but he had his mouth closed. Possibly because Mongo was licking his face.

  “And you are, sir?” said the soldier with the box. One of the other two soldiers aimed a flashlight in through the window. The blaze gave me the excuse to keep my eyes down.

  “I am Valadi Crudon,” said Val. “This is my stepdaughter, Margaret, and her friend Takahiro.”

  Val sounded perfectly calm, as if being stopped and cross-examined by soldiers was all a part of daily life, while I was thinking, What the bugsuck is it to do with you, assface! maybe almost loud enough for their hot machine to pick up. The gruuaa were all crammed against the floor of the car—a lot of them had come with us. Hix was between me and the back of the seat. I was at such a peculiar angle, hanging on to Taks’ hand, that if she was trying to stay hidden, there wasn’t that much shadow for her to disappear into. I was sure the soldiers couldn’t see her, but maybe the box could. The rest of the gruuaa, I realized, were eeling forward, to cluster around Takahiro.

  “And you live, sir?” said the soldier with the box.

  “Margaret”—nobody called me Margaret; it was like he was talking about someone else, which was maybe just as well—“and I live at the end of this street, 87 Jebali Lane. Takahiro lives on Sunrise Court. We are taking him home.”

  “Out late on a school night, sir?” said the soldier with the box, smiling a smile as ugly as his politeness.

  “Takahiro is an old friend of the family,” said Val, still calm. “And the school year has only just begun. There is little homework yet.”