“You awake now?” he asked.
“Define ‘awake.’”
Rob Harper didn’t even crack a smile. That was when Kara knew the morning had brought trouble. And even as that thought entered her mind, she remembered the night before, listening to her father and Miss Aritomo outside as they said good night after their date-hearing her dad tell the art teacher that he loved her. Her own smile vanished, and now they regarded each other with mutually grim expressions. Last night, he had knocked as if to ask her permission to enter, though he hadn’t. This morning, it seemed any reluctance he might have felt about confronting her about her eavesdropping, and about his feelings for Miss Aritomo, had passed.
“We need to talk,” her father said.
“Dad,” Kara began. “It’s not like I was eavesdropping. You guys were hardly even whispering, and my window is right there. I couldn’t help-”
But he frowned, waving away her concerns. Anything she might have to say about the prior evening would apparently have to wait.
“You need to get up, honey. We’ve got to get you over to the school right away.”
For the first time, Kara bothered to look at the clock, and realized he had woken her nearly an hour before she normally would have gotten up. The light coming through her window had seemed dim when she had opened her eyes, but she had assumed they were in for another overcast day. Now she realized that it was only the hour that made it seem gloomy in her bedroom.
“What is it?” she asked, searching her father’s dark eyes.
“Mr. Yamato wants to speak with you,” he replied.
Which was when she realized that her brain wasn’t translating. She cocked her head to study him. “You aren’t speaking Japanese.”
He gave a small shake of his head. “Not this morning, I’m not.”
Startled, she flinched. “Wait, are you angry with me for something?”
“Not now, Kara.”
“I didn’t do anything. I already said-”
Irritated, he sighed and stood, throwing up his hands in surrender. “Could you please just get in the shower? If you saw or heard something you didn’t want to last night, that’s going to have to wait until later. Right now we have more important issues to deal with.”
More important than you falling in love? she wanted to say, but didn’t. Obviously, as far as her father was concerned, this-whatever it might be- was more important. That started her thoughts churning.
Kara threw back her sheets. The sun had started to brighten outside and the breeze that came through the window felt almost too warm. Judging by the morning, Thursday was shaping up to be an absolutely brutal day.
“Fine,” she snapped, climbing out of bed.
Her father blinked, a glimmer of regret in his eyes, perhaps reminded by her tone that they were supposed to be allies, not enemies.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just an ugly situation, and we’re supposed to be there in forty-five minutes.”
Frustrated, Kara cocked her hip, staring at him. “What is an ugly situation? You’re talking in riddles!”
His expression turned darker still. “It looks like we have another runaway.”
Kara froze, icy fingers closing on her heart. The shadows seemed to shift with malign intent in the corners of her room. Outside, the sky had brightened and the air felt close and thick around her.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“A girl named Wakana something. She lives in the dorm. From what Mr. Yamato said, some of the students are suggesting she was Daisuke’s girlfriend, that it’s likely they ran away together. Her parents live in Tokyo, but he’s a local boy, and his family apparently didn’t approve of him dating. I don’t know. I don’t have all the details, but-”
“But it sounds plausible,” Kara interrupted.
“As much as anything.”
For a moment, she felt relieved. There was some logic to these theories. She could imagine it happening that way, and that made her feel a little better, until she remembered that her father had said Mr. Yamato wanted to see her, specifically.
“What does that have to do with me?”
Rob Harper regarded his daughter with concern, but she saw other emotions in his eyes and wondered if any of them were suspicion.
“Wakana’s roommate flipped out, apparently. She’s told some wild stories. She also claims that if Mr. Yamato wants to know what happened to the missing kids, he should ask you.”
Kara’s mouth dropped open. It took a moment for her brain to start working again, and then she narrowed her eyes, nostrils flaring. “This roommate? Are we talking about Mai Genji?”
He nodded. “That’s her.”
“She’s nuts,” Kara said, wondering just how much detail Ume had given when she had told Mai about the events of the spring.
But her dismissive, angry tone didn’t seem to influence her father. Instead, he appeared troubled by her speaking Mai’s name. Then it struck her just how much damage something like this could do to his standing at the school. Simply to have his daughter called in to see Mr. Yamato was an embarrassment to her father, but if the principal thought Kara had anything at all to do with these students vanishing, it would dishonor him greatly. It might even endanger his job.
“How bad is this for you?” she asked, switching to Japanese for the first time that morning.
He hesitated before also changing to Japanese. “Go on,” he said. “Jump in the shower. We’ll talk more on the way over there.”
Kara did as he had asked, hurrying to get cleaned up and dressed. At first, all she could think about was the missing girl, and what might have happened to her, and what Mai might have said to Mr. Yamato
… and the trouble that might cause. But as she wolfed down the little bit of cereal that her father had poured into a bowl for her, other thoughts and feelings began to interfere, memories from the night before.
When all of this was done, another conversation awaited Kara and her father, and she wasn’t looking forward to that one, either.
In the corner of Mr. Yamato’s office nearest the window, a burbling fountain stood on a small round table. Loose, round stones were piled on the edges of a dozen pagoda-like levels, and the water sluiced around them, running down to the base, only to be drawn back up through the throat of the fountain and begin the course again. A single, lovely scroll hung on the wall behind the desk, bearing the image of a crane standing proud among some bamboo, and the kanji for the word “wisdom.” On a simple, three-tiered black shelf sat half a dozen bonsai trees of varying sizes. A smaller shelf held perhaps a dozen books of such age that their spines were worn and cracked, and any titles long since faded.
Kara had never been in the principal’s office before. In truth, she’d paid him as little attention as he had seemed to pay her since she had started at Monju-no-Chie school. Mr. Yamato had struck her from the moment she’d laid eyes on him-though struck certainly wasn’t the right word-as totally average for a middle-aged Japanese man. Thin and well groomed, a bit of white in his black hair, fussy with his small, square glasses, he was the picture of orderliness, and thus, completely boring.
Now, though, looking around the office, she wondered if the whole boring routine was just an act. Could anyone really be this bland? This calm? The room screamed “Serenity now!” as though it had been calculated to do exactly that.
On the other hand, so much of Japanese culture was about the appearance of order and conformity and control. If Mr. Yamato’s ordinariness was a facade, he had perfected it. She glanced at the bonsai trees and smiled inwardly. Her friends only ever called her bonsai when they were teasing her, but students who didn’t know her, or the soccer girls and their circle, still used it as a derisive thing sometimes. Kara liked it, actually. She owned it. There could be no denying the truth-she was a bonsai-and she didn’t feel the need to argue the point. The little trees were beautiful and elegant and proud.