Chapter One: Kaori
Kaori pulled her blue hair into two braids as fast as she could. Late, late, late!
"Kido Kaori! I'm waiting!" Her father yelled up the stairs of their stately California, USA home.
"Dad, I can't find my other shoe!"
"Wear your slippers then, your teacher doesn't care! I have to be at the office by eight!"
She scrambled into the kitchen, one sneaker clutched in her hand, the other on her foot. "Found it. I thought Mom was going to take me to school today."
"They had a script rewrite last night. She left at 5:30," he answered as they walked out to his car.
"Poor Mom."
Kaori looked a lot like her parents, with her father's blue hair and her mother's face. Her mother, Mimi, was a Hollywood actress. Her father, Joe, was her mother's agent and a doctor on top of that. She'd always lived in America, but spoke Japanese fluently, thanks to her tutor.
"I don't mind," she wrote in her autobiography-or journal, as some might call it-"I don't doubt that they love me at all. Sure, a lot of the time we're apart. But there're lots of special times. Like my birthday, every year, we go to the zoo or Knotts Berry Farm or Disneyland, someplace like that. And on their birthdays and their anniversary, we just rent movies (not ones that Mom's in though, she doesn't like to watch herself, keeps saying things like "See that? I should have put much more emphasis on the YOU than the STUPID") and order takeout and sit at home.
"I am a perfectly adjusted child. Plus, I've been the Emmys four times!"
"Have a good day, Dad!"
"I love you!"
Ah, yes, school. Kido Mimi for a mother had assured Kaori instant popularity. That and the fact that she took a movie star to the first school dance. The moment she walked in the door, her best friend-of-sorts, Celia Annerlove, came running over. Celia was the other most popular girl in the seventh grade.
"Hi Kaori!"
"Hi, Celia," Kaori said. It was November, and she was just a little tired of Celia's perkiness.
"So, the dance Friday? Who're you going with?"
She shrugged. "It's only Monday, I've got days to decide...why, who're you going with?"
Celia began jabbering away, and Kaori tuned her out. She stopped at her locker, and as she opened the door, six folded notes fell out.
"More invitations to the dance, I bet," Celia said, grinning.
"Yeah..." Kaori agreed. But her eyes were on something in the back of her locker...a little computer thing with a blinky light....
Chapter Two: Michitarou
"How was your day?" Michitarou's mother asked him as he walked into their Odaiba apartment.
"Fine," he answered, slumping into a chair by the kitchen table. His sister Kuara was sitting in the other seat, having her hair done. "When will Daddy be home?" she asked quietly.
"In an hour or so," Mom answered, holding a piece of her own hair to Kuara's. "It's amazing how close our hair color is," she said often. Not only that, but Kuara looked an awful lot like their mother when she was younger.
Michitarou was 12, and a bit loud, Kuara was 10, and quiet as a mouse. Sometimes she got picked on at school. Their mother was named Kari, with light brown hair and brown eyes. Their father was Takaishi Takeru (TK for short), and he had kind of a gold hair color, like Michitarou. But his father's eyes were blue like Kuara's, and his were brown.
Grabbing an apple, Michitarou disappeared into the bedroom he shared with his sister. He had lots of homework, but didn't feel like doing any of it.
It just wasn't fair, he'd said a hundred times. Normally, he thought his Uncle Matt was the coolest person in the world. He used to be in a ROCK band! They had music videos and everything!
And only two years ago, he'd announced he was going to move back to Japan, permanently. This'd made Michitarou and Kuara happy as they could be.
"Why couldn't he just STAY PUT?!" he yelled at his soccer ball. Must be something with traveling for so long on tours. Because Matt had just up and left, going to all the countries no one's ever heard off and therefore he's never been too. Every now and then he got a postcard, though. Thinking about it, he picked up the shoebox he kept them in.
Funny, there was this little thing; it looked kind of like one of those virtual pets.
"Must be Kuara's," he muttered, tossing it on her bed.
Chapter Three: Kuara
"People don't think I'm very smart," Kuara wrote carefully in her notebook—English, so her brother couldn't read it. "Not that they think I'm dumb, but not anything special either.
"My teacher, Yolei-san, knows differently. She's my mom and dad's friend too. She knows that I'm really good at reading and writing English, even though I don't bother to speak it, it's not that I can't. I just don't say anything." She chewed on the eraser of her pencil for a moment, then continued.
"Last year, she gave me an English book to read. The kind those six-year-olds in America read. I was done with it pretty fast, and Monday, yesterday, she gave me this book. It's called Flying Solo, by someone named Ralph Fletcher. One girl in it hasn't said a word in six months, since the day a boy who liked her died. The last thing she said to him was something kind of mean. Isn't that horrible? I'm on chapter eight. Maybe I'll be finished with it by the end of this week. Maybe I should become mute. I haven't said anything today except "I love you", "cereal", "here" "When's Daddy coming home" and "stop". I'm keeping a list of my words every day."
"Those mean kids at school started to bother me today, but Yolei-san stopped them. They were flinging these tiny rubber bands at my arms and they stung. That's when I said stop. I wish they could just leave me alone."
The living room slider door opened. Kuara looked up.
"Honey, dinner'll be ready in about five minutes, okay?" Her mother said. "Your father called, he's just dropping something off at Aunt Sora and Uncle Tai's, so we'll eat when he gets home." Kuara nodded.
"More later," she scribbled, then shut the book. Looking in the slider door in her bedroom, she could see her brother, Michitarou, with the postcards from their Uncle Matt all spread out around him. Two matching some things with flashing lights were lying on her bed.
She wondered what they were.
Chapter Four: Natto and Emika
"I've decided I want to be more independent," Emika said, right in the middle of her third math problem.
Natto looked up from his own homework. "What? Why?"
His sister, younger than him by a year, shrugged. "Because. It's a good thing to be, isn't it? And then you're not a burden to anyone else."
"What's a burden?" Otoyoku asked from where he was sitting on their couch. Since he was only eight, he was already done with his homework (if you could even call it that) and was playing video games. "It sounds like a backpack."
"A burden is…something you don't like, I think, or something like that. Anyway, that's not my point."
"Just think of it as a backpack filled with rocks you have to carry," Natto suggested. "That's what I think of. Emika, you're not a burden to anyone."
She just kind of looked at him blankly. "What about Mom and Dad?"
"They're supposed to take care of you, duh," Otoyoku said. "They're your parents."
"But I'm eleven now. I have my own house key. I want to buy my own clothes and stuff like that."
Natto sighed. He understood what she was thinking.
Last night, his mother, Sora, and father, Tai, had called a family meeting. They'd explained that money was short, and so they were going to have to cut back.
"Don't worry, everything will be fine," Dad had assured them. "This'll only last until I get my next paycheck. There was a delay, and we want to make sure we don't dip into our savings. Okay?"
"You're blowing this way out of porpation," Otoyoku said. He liked using large words, but almost never got them right.
"Proportion," Emika corrected. "And I'm just saying that—"
"We know what you're saying. But there's nothing wrong with depending on your parents, even when you're eleven."
She didn't say anything. More than anything, Emika wanted to figure herself out. Example: When people asked about her cousin, Kuara, they said, "she's nice, very shy and quiet though." Emika wasn't either of those things. Or when they talked about her brother? "Very smart. He loves to read, and his grade hasn't slipped below a B+ since third grade!" Otoyoku was just plain cute, and he played up to it all the time. Like those big words---she was sure he could pronounce them if he actually tried.
But Emika? "She and the youngest one's hair looks sort of like yours," said someone once while talking to her father, at the Christmas party at her mother's work two years ago. That was about it.
"I have no personality," she said to her mirror the next day. Since then, she'd spent the better part of two years trying to figure out what she was. She'd tried being quiet, like Kuara, but she had just too much to say. She couldn't keep her mind on her studies like Natto. She knew she was too old to be cute. Her other cousin, Michitarou, was cool. She'd tried being cool, in the more girl-ish sense of the word, but her mother flatly refused to let Emika use her makeup and Emika didn't usually have enough money to buy it herself, it always disappeared into bets with her brother and older cousin.
She did buy some silver lipstick once, though.
Chapter 5: Otoyoku and The First Discovery
Otoyoku was, as his sister said, cute. He was short for his age, making him look only six or so, with a large amount of thick brown hair that stuck out in odd ways. He liked to mess around with the sounds of words, which started the habit for him of mispronouncing things. Drove his teacher crazy, but everyone else thought it was adorable.
"Darn it," he said, smacking his handheld video game, "lost again. I have to go all the way back to phase one!"
His brother and sister seemed thoroughly uncaring.
"I'll be right back." He jumped up and ran into his room that he shared, and looked through his drawer for the game cartridge he had in mind.
Beep!
Otoyoku stopped.
Beep!
After another moment of fumbling, he found what appeared to be beeping. A little electronic boxy device, which gave another loud beep as he picked it up. He noticed a kind of a line drawing on the side, looked sort of like a lighthouse or something. "Where are you?" flashed on the screen.
"Odaiba, Japan," he said, then pressed a button, to see if it would stop beeping. His words appeared on the screen, then disappeared.
"Too weird," flashed now.
Otoyoku gulped. "Natto…come here…."
Natto and Emika both appeared at the door. "What's wrong?" his brother asked.
"Is this yours?" he held up the computer.
"No…where did you find it?"
"It was beeping at me when I was looking through here! I picked it up, and it said "where are you?" on the screen. I said, "Odaiba, Japan," and---
"Hold up," Emika interrupted. "You answered it? How did you do that? And why did you tell it where you are? What if some whacko was on the other end?"
"I just said it!" Otoyoku exclaimed. "It typed it itself! Then it said, 'Too weird'."
"Yeah well, that's what this is all right," Natto said. "I think we should show this to Mom and Dad."
Chapter Six: Communication
"What is this thing?" Kaori wrote in her biography. "How did it get in my locker? Why does it seem kind of familiar? Those were the thoughts that were going through my head as I said at the lunch table, purposefully ignoring Celia's ever-going chitchat. There's a little picture on it, but I'm not sure what it is." She stopped writing as a small red blip appeared on the screen, surrounded by little lines that looked a lot like a map. "Where are you?" she wondered out loud.
There was a pause before "Odaiba, Japan," formed on the screen. In Japanese, she noticed.
"Too weird." Pause. "Natto? Who the heck is Natto?"
"Did you say something?" Celia asked, looking at her.
"No. Uh…I have to go make a phone call."
"Okay, but hurry back," Celia said. "I need you to help me decide who to let take me to the dance."
There were only two phones available to the students of her middle school, other than the one that the secretary had. She walked quickly (since the halls were filled with students and teachers) to the nearest one, worried she would lose her nerve for what she wanted to ask before she got there.
Blll-eeeeeep! rang her mother's cell phone. Blll-eeeeeep!
"Hello?"
"Mom?" She clutched the phone. "Mom, it's me."
"Kaori?" Her mother's voice became worried suddenly. "Is everything okay?"
"Yeah, everything's fine. I just have something really important I wanted to ask you."
"What's that?"
Kaori gulped, and wondered why she felt so compelled to do this. "Could we go to Japan? Like, this afternoon?"
"For how long?"
She grinned. Most other parents would say something like "Well, how about this weekend?" or even "We just took a vacation two months ago! Can't you wait for winter break?"
"I'm not sure. A few days, at the least?"
"Sure. I've got some old friends there I haven't seen since you were a baby, I'd love to go for a visit. Grab your suitcase when you get home, okay? I'll book us a flight."
"Simple as that?"
"Well, you can take a break from school, can't you?"
Kaori giggled. " I don't mind at all. Is Dad going to agree?"
"That's questionable, but you've never been to Japan, and it is a very important part of your heritage. I'm sure he'll understand if I talk to him long enough."
"Oh, thanks Mom! See you after school!"
Chapter Seven: The Second Discovery
Kuara tapped her brother on the shoulder. It was some time after dinner, and she still hadn't said anything else.
"Huh?" Michitarou asked, twisting his head around to look at her. She pointed to their room and beckoned. He got up and followed her.
"What are these things?" he asked, picking up the small computers things. Kuara shrugged.
Michitarou was used to his sister's quietness. She had a way of saying more with her face than most people. "Look--this one has the same drawing on it as the necklace Mom gave you."
She picked up the necklace, gold, with a pink middle and a darker pink design on that. A star. She really liked it.
"This one has a different thing on it…looks familiar, though I can't remember why."
Kuara pointed to the postcards from Uncle Matt. In the corner of each one was the same design.
"That's it! I wonder if Uncle Matt sent us these. I found one of them in my shoebox, but didn't recognize it…. Let's show Mom." His sister nodded.
Kari was sitting on the couch with T. K., watching the evening news. Michitarou had been sitting with them before Kuara came to talk to him. Figuratively, anyway.
"Mom? Dad?" he turned down the volume on the television. "Have you ever seen anything like this before?"
Both their parent's mouths dropped open.
"Did I say something wrong?"
"No…honey, I need to talk to your father about something," said their mother, somewhat forcefully dragging T. K. into the kitchen.
"I'd say this means something," Michitarou said. Kuara nodded.
Chapter Eight: Last but not Least
Natto ran his hand under his pillow. He knocked something out on to his bed. "Ha-hah!"
"Is it one of those…things?" Emika asked. They had decided to check for any others before going to their parents.
"Yeah, I think so!" He looked it over. "This one's got a different design on it."
Otoyoku came in, holding the portable phone in one hand and the computer thing in the other. "Michitarou just called! He said he and Kuara found those things too. Two, one for each of them. And they recognize the pictures on it. One looks like a necklace their mother gave Kuara, the other their uncle draws a lot or something."
"There must be one more," Emika said. "I'm not about to be left out of this, whatever it is!"
"Look under your pillow or something," Natto advised.
She did--nothing. Under her bed--nothing. In her dresser drawers--still nothing.
"There just has to be one more," she said, sitting down on the edge of her bed, somewhat sadly.
Her brothers sat down and tried to comfort her. "Let's all go to bed, okay? It's late, and we have school in the morning," said Natto, being reasonable.
"We'll find it soon! No one wants you to be left out, Emika!"
She smiled a little. "Okay." Rubbed her eyes. "Hai."
Beep!
Emika's eyelids fluttered slightly.
Beep!
She rolled over.
Beep!
Groaned. "Wha…t…?" Something was bumping into her hip, and it hurt. "I must have been lying on it," she said, sitting up and hitting her lamp switch. Otoyoku and Natto stirred from their beds on the other side of the room divided by a curtain.
"Guys, wake up!" exclaimed Emika as she pulled out the thing in her pocket. "I found one of those…things!"
"Shhh," Otoyoku reminded her exaggeratedly, his eyes bleary. Natto slept on, snoring softly.
"Come here, Otoyoku," she said, beckoning. He stumbled over and looked at the strange device.
"Why do you think these things are so important?" he asked, turning his over.
"I don't know. Maybe we'll find out soon. Did Mom ask you to come home right after school tomorrow?"
"Yeah, when she was tucking me in and you were brushing your teeth. Said Aunt Kari and Uncle T. K. are coming over with Michitarou and Kuara. Someone else too---" his words were cut off by a huge yawn. "Can I go back to sleep now? I'm exhoustid."
"Exhausted," Emika corrected. "Yeah. I just wanted you to see this."
"I'm happy we all have one now," he said, curling back up in his bed.
"Me too."
Chapter Nine: Flight
"I loved flying," Kaori wrote in her autobiography as they waited in the airport terminal for their luggage. "Plus, it's so cool being in public with my mom. People--tourists, mostly--run up to her and ask for her autograph. Some people recognize me or my dad too, I was in a Disney Channel movie that came out last month. Acting is really cool, but I think I want to draw more. Maybe I'll do both.
"Anyway, on the flight I listened to my walkman a lot and tried to sketch the clouds. Celia called my mom's cell phone (can you believe that?) and wanted to talk about boys and stuff, but really, I'm not into that. I'm waiting to meet someone.
"Still waiting. For that AND my luggage."
Slap! went the pages of Kaori's book as she slammed it shut. "Dad, I'm tired…where are we staying?"
"Your mother was so excited you wanted to come here she went ahead and rented an apartment," he said, pretending to be exasperated, but smiling. "I know my dad," Kaori wrote once in her autobiography, "he usually acts like Mom's spending money bothers him, but really, he doesn't mind. He's just glad she has money to spend, and she isn't selfish with it, not really. She loves to send huge checks to charities. 'What else is this money for? I already have everything I need, you, your father, and so much money YOU could retire right now, Kaori.'"
"There it is," her dad said, pointing to a pink suitcase and two black ones coming on the conveyor belt. They grabbed them and made their way through the crowds to the exit. "I hope your mother's found us a taxi," Joe said.
"Over here!" Mimi exclaimed, beaming. There was a man holding up a sign that said "Kido" on it in kanji.
He was standing next to a limousine.
"I don't believe you," her father said as they loaded the trunk.
"Isn't this cool?" Kaori exclaimed. "Does it have a television? What about a refrigerator?"
"Yes, it has all those," Mom said, "but we don't need them right now, we're just going a little ways."
Kaori busied herself with looking around. The very AIR smelled different here! And it was cooler than it had been back home, when she left, anyway. Maybe because it was painfully early in the morning.
"Now, when we get home, we'll all take a nap," her mother was instructing, "and then, I've made plans for us to visit Sora. She says Kari's coming over and bringing her kids too. They must be near your age now, Kaori! Except Otoyoku, I guess he'd be about seven. Well, anyway. We're going to have dinner there---"
"Mom?" Kaori interrupted. "Do you know these kids?"
"Well, no, but I know their parents very well."
"But…they all know each other, don't they? I just hope they don't leave me out of everything." She frowned a little.
"Don't worry about it," her mother assured her. "Even if they do, I'm sure they'll warm up quickly." She looked over at Kaori's father. "Wake up, sleepyhead. We're almost there."
"Uhh," Joe mumbled. His glasses were sliding down his nose.
Kaori opened her autobiography and scribbled a note to herself. "Kaori, be glad you don't have to wear glasses. And if you do get them some time, get contacts."