She perks up at my suggestion—and I mean, really perks up. For a heartbeat, the putrefied spirit standing by my windowsill fades, and a beautiful brown-eyed girl in a simple kimono looks back at me.
It takes a tremendous amount of concentration for Okiku to will herself into the form of the teenager she used to be. It’s easier for her to keep old habits and the horrifying face she’s worn longer than she was alive. But when the moods suit her, she makes the effort. And every time she does, I can’t stop my breath from hitching in my throat. The sunlight leaches away the remains of the revenant I know and adore to reveal the girl beneath the ghost.
“Thank you.” Even her voice sounds different—no longer the coarseness of sandpaper, but light and clear. She smiles at me one last time before allowing her features to be reclaimed by the night. Pale death and decay steal back her face.
I leave her to her own thoughts and head down to breakfast. Mrs. Lippert is the closest thing we have to a housekeeper. She comes in mornings and does a bit of cleaning. More importantly, she’s a fantastic cook. As I slide into my seat, she lays down a breakfast fit for a king—or a hungry seventeen-year-old boy: sizzling bacon, ham-and-cheese omelet, freshly squeezed orange juice, oven-baked bread, and her special homemade jam. My stomach rumbles its approval.
“All set for spring vacation?” she inquires as I dig into the bacon.
“Yup,” I say, mouth full. Despite constantly switching schools and states, this is my senior year, and the one thing I’m looking forward to is graduation.
“How are your grades doing?”
“4.0 GPA, last I checked.”
“And your SAT scores? They came back yesterday, right?”
“Yup, 1570.” Mrs. Lippert beams at me from across the table. Mom died a couple of years ago, and with a dad away for weeks at a time, I’m not bashful about taking whatever praise I can get.
I return to my room to retrieve my bag, but not before taking a quick detour. In the back of my closet, I dig out a small plastic container, pick out two random dolls, and stuff them in my backpack along with my emergency sewing kit and tape recording of Shinto prayers. You never know.
“I’m ready, Ki. Let’s—”
She steps into me…
She runs along the river.
Lights twinkle before her, bobbing up and down along the stream, beckoning her to follow. It is not supposed to be a joyous occasion, but her laughter carries in the air. She runs, stopping only when she hears her mother’s voice call out behind her, telling her to slow down.
One of the lights comes to a stop on the riverbed, sputtering, struggling against the reeds. She pauses beside the water’s edge, crouching down to study it more closely.
It is a chochin, a lantern, the paper so delicate that clumsy hands would tear at its surface. There is a short inscription on one side, where someone has written down their prayers and secret wishes, a common practice among the villagers before these chochin were surrendered to the river.
I wish for happiness, it reads.
So do I, she thinks. I, too, wish to be happy, forever and ever and…
A careful push sends the little lantern on its way to join its brethren sailing several meters ahead. She watches it for a while, long enough to ensure there are no other obstacles in its way.
I wish for happiness.
She waves at the chochin. In a way, it’s also her chochin now. She begins to run again—
“—go.” The vision clears as my brain slams back into my body. Almost immediately, the exhaustion from my poor night’s sleep drains away, and I feel sharper, more alert. More complete.
I can feel Okiku humming, even as I leave the house.
***
I may not pass for popular, but I’m still not the statue to everyone’s pigeon. I don’t think most people in school know what to think of me, much less to which end of the high school spectrum I belong.
Take, for instance, the BMW Z4 I park in the school lot. Dad bought the Bimmer for my sixteenth birthday and for passing my driver’s test. You’d think the car would put me in with the cool kids, because it’s practically considered unpatriotic to ridicule anyone with a nice car at Pembrooke High.
But it doesn’t. The reason lies mostly with Okiku, though I can’t blame her for being protective of me. I’ve talked with her numerous times about curbing her enthusiasm for mayhem, but I’m not sure how much of it she’s taken to heart. After a mirror inexplicably splintered, slicing through the arm of a quarterback who was about to deck me, and when a water fountain exploded on some jocks who’d had problems with my Asianness, people stopped trying to bully me.
Rumors spread about strange events at my previous schools, that my mom had been locked up in a mental asylum and died under unusual circumstances, not to mention claims by the rare, insightful few who could glimpse Okiku around me when her guard was down. Nobody really believes what those kids say anyway, but the general consensus is that something’s not quite right about me. They’re scared of me and would rather not have anything to do with the creepy Japanese-American outsider.