Thomas Randall - The Waking

“I don’t have the talent for the game. But I will cheer when you play.”

Kara took a deep breath, reminding herself that not everyone would be like Ume. Japanese, her father had taught her, often consisted of saying things that were the precise opposite of what you actually meant.

She followed the flow of students into the genkan -a large, square, functional room lined with lockers. With so many voices speaking Japanese at one time, she found it impossible to interpret what anyone said. But that was all right. Since none of them were talking to her, she’d only have been eavesdropping.

All of the students were taking off their street shoes and stashing them in the lockers. From their backpacks, they all retrieved uwabaki -which meant “inside shoes,” though they were really more like slippers.

A smile touched Kara’s lips. Ever since her father had first told her about this custom, she’d thought it so strange, but sort of fun, too. The idea of all of the students wearing slippers made her think cozy thoughts of home-though there was nothing cozy about the genkan. The boys wore blue slippers and the girls pink. If there’d been even a single other American at the school, she could’ve made a joke about wearing pajamas to school, or carrying the dusty old teddy bear that sat in a box somewhere in storage back home. But she couldn’t be sure the kids at Monju-no-Chie School would get the joke, or would think it was funny even if they did get it.

Still, it amused her enough. She had a smile on her face when she looked up and caught two boys watching her intently. Kara gave them a nod of recognition, and they grinned, one of them waving at her.

She let out a breath. All right, so not every kid here is going to be nasty or bizarre.

Bizarre meant Sakura.

Kara felt badly that she’d let herself start thinking negatively of the girl. She glanced around but saw no sign of her. With her hairstyle and attitude, the cigarettes and the patches and pins, Sakura was working hard to give off a rebel vibe. She might as well have tattooed Tough Chick on her forehead. But she’d been cool and accepting to Kara without putting up the walls that everyone else seemed to have built around themselves. So what if she seemed like trouble? Sakura’s sister had been murdered. Grief could cause a person to do all kinds of things they’d never have done before.

Stashing her shoes in an empty locker, Kara leaned against it to put on her slippers. Now that the initial surprise of her arrival had rippled through the room and everyone had gotten a good look at the gaijin girl, they seemed to have gone back to their preparations for the start of the school year. She felt herself begin to exhale.

As strange as it all felt-Kara couldn’t imagine any of her friends from home making it through an hour at this school without totally freaking out-an odd happiness began to spread through her. She and her father had talked about this adventure for years. It had taken her mother’s death to make it more than a dream, and so the feeling was bittersweet. But Kara had vowed to herself that she would make her father proud, and be the girl her mother had always told her she could be.

I can do this.

Live and learn.

Someone bumped shoulders with her. She opened her eyes in time to catch the pained, embarrassed expression on the face of a tall, stocky boy with unruly hair.

“Excuse me,” he said with a quick bow. “I’m very clumsy.”

“We have that in common.”

She’d said it only to make him feel better. The typical boy at Monju-no-Chie School was slender, even petite, compared to the guys Kara had gone to school with back home. To his schoolmates, the one who’d bumped her would seem like some kind of giant. She liked his face, and there was a sweetness in his eyes, but when he smiled, she felt a little tremor in her chest.

“My name is Hachiro,” he said.

She smiled in return. “I’m Kara.”

Hachiro nodded. “Yes,” he said, in English. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Kara smiled. Most of the students here could speak English to some degree. When Sakura had done so, it had been because she’d assumed Kara’s Japanese wouldn’t be very good. Hachiro did it as a kindness.

“And you,” she said in Japanese.

They walked together along the corridor, near the back of the herd of shuffling students. Kara had been concerned about finding her way to the morning assembly, but even without Hachiro, she could have simply followed the parade.

“I’m looking forward to having your father as a teacher,” Hachiro said. “Last year we had several American scholars as guest speakers, but this will be the first American teacher we have for a full term.”

“He’s an excellent teacher,” Kara said. “He always makes me want to learn more.”

They entered the gymnasium, where lines were forming as the homeroom teachers gathered their students. Hachiro spotted his teacher and headed toward her line.

“I’ll talk to you later, Kara.”

“Bye,” she said. She was sorry to part company with him. He really did have a great smile.

After a few seconds standing around feeling foolish, she figured out which of the teachers was her sensei, Mr. Matsui. With his white hair and square face, he would have seemed grim if not for his oversize glasses and the kind eyes behind them. Mr. Matsui took her in with a glance, gave an almost imperceptible nod, and then proceeded to treat her with the same dour disapproval he showed her classmates. Mr. Matsui turned his back on them and faced one end of the gymnasium, and all of the students followed suit.

The principal, Mr. Yamato, and several members of the school’s board of directors addressed the students from the front of the room. The sheer ordinariness of the remarks surprised Kara. So much of the culture in Japan felt entirely new to her, but it turned out that boring speeches were pretty much the same around the world.

Numb after only a few minutes of this, she stopped mentally translating and let her thoughts and her eyes wander. Two rows over, she caught sight of Sakura and stared at her until the girl felt the attention and turned. Kara gave her a tiny wave. Sakura smirked in a way that could have meant Yeah, isn’t this boring, or Oh, great, weird gaijin girl thinks she’s my puppy now.

Suddenly self-conscious, Kara turned her eyes front to find Mr. Matsui watching her with his eyebrows knitted together. His only comment was a stern throat-clearing; he couldn’t quite manage a glower.

The voices of authority finished their declaration of the school’s glory and the ominous drone about their expectations of their students, and then the assembly mercifully ended and the teachers led their charges to their homerooms.

Mr. Matsui’s classroom-2-C-was on the second floor. Kara counted twenty-seven students in 2-C, herself included. Once again she found herself thrown off by the familiarity of the first-day rituals. Seats were assigned-her desk was third row, right in the middle-and then Mr. Matsui explained that each morning began with announcements and attendance. The class would rotate those responsibilities according to a schedule called toban.

When her teacher-her sensei-looked at her, she thought he might give her the toban duties for the first day, but instead he chose a girl from the front row named Miho. Though Miho’s glasses were much smaller than Mr. Matsui’s, Kara wondered if they were what made him choose the girl. Her long, black hair was pulled up on one side with a clip, and she sat stiffly, like she was in church. Kara listened to the names as Miho took attendance from a list the sensei had given her, but she knew she would forget most of them. One boy had dyed his perfectly combed hair a bronze color, and when Miho called his name-Ren-she blushed.