Chapter One

The fight was long and I wasn't overly fond of travelling by airplane to begin with. My mom met me at the airport at two in the afternoon. Well. She met a tired and very impolite version of her normally very civilized and happy daughter. Walking off of the airplane and into the humidity made me grumpy enough, but standing in customs for an hour and a half after that definitely didn't help. I hadn't wanted to make this move in the first place, but at sixteen, I legally had to move with my mother.

"Hey, baby!" my mom greeted me, with a happy grin on her face. Like always, she had gotten all dressed up just to leave the house. I had to repress the urge to roll my eyes at my mother. She couldn't leave the house without caking on the makeup and squeezing into her tight, fashionable clothes. She ran over to me, her heels clicking on the floor. I had no idea how she managed to run in those without killing herself. She was wearing a white halter top and the shortest, tightest green shorts I'd ever seen. They were high-waist shorts with gold buttons. And they were cute, but she looked way overdone. Her hair was done in lone, bottle blonde waves and her perfectly smooth skin was an enviable shade of tan. She smiled and pushed her big, white designer sunglasses on top of her head, revealing her dark green eyes. She pulled me into a hug.

"Hi there, Mom," I said, in a much less enthusiastic tone. I patted her back a couple of times and waited for her to let me go.

"Did you get your bags yet, darlin?" she asked. I could hear the slightest hint of her Alabama accent in her perfect LA voice.

I took a step back and spread out my arms to my sides. "Does it look like I have my bags yet?" I asked, raising my eyebrows.

She smiled and wrinkled her nose before flicking mine. I jerked my head away from her, wrinkling my nose as well. "Don't you sass me, young lady," she said. "Aren't you excited to be here?"

I laughed a little. "Ecstatic, Mom," I said, grabbing one of my giant suitcases as it came around the conveyor belt. "You know how I begged you to move here."

She smiled a little. "Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor," she said.

I smiled and grabbed my next suitcase, rather than reply. I didn't feel like arguing with her. About two months ago, my mother had been offered a job teaching English at a college in Japan. Rather than discuss it with me, she'd announced about two weeks ago that we were moving to another country. She'd already withdrawn me from my school after the term ended and enrolled me in a school in Japan. She'd bought the plane tickets and had scheduled a moving company to ship some of our furniture to us. The rest had been packed away in a storage unit. It would be an understatement to say that I was unhappy to hear the news.

But, two weeks after being informed, here I was, standing in an airport in Japan. I was wearing jeans I'd had for two years now that were full of rips and covered in my friends' signatures and notes. They'd all decided to sign my jeans when I'd told them that I was moving. I hadn't taken them off for about three days now. I was also wearing a tight black tank top and black flip flops. Nothing close to what my mother would have suggested wearing – even on a plane. My hair, which I usually kept straightened, was down and in messy, slightly frizzy waves. The humidity hadn't helped that. I had on no makeup, which my mom was quick to point out as she teased me, while helping me with my suitcases, all the way to the taxi.

I threw my four large suitcases into the back of the van-sized taxi and then climbed in next to my mother. She started talking to me about her new job. As scatterbrained and irresponsible as my mother could be, teaching was something that she loved and was very enthusiastic about. She'd been teaching for as long as I could remember. She spoke Japanese, Spanish, and French. She also owned two retail stores, which had always kept us in a nice house, in nice clothes, and given us the ability to go on decent vacations every year or so.

By the time we arrived at the house, I was so carsick that I couldn't wait to get out of the car. While I got my things out of the taxi, my mother paid the driver. I dragged my suitcases inside and left them by the door. Then I lay face down on the couch and groaned.

"You lazy little snip," my mother said, the first word she could think of that sounded a little bit like an insult.

"Mom!" I complained when she poked me with the toe of her shoe. "I'm so tired and so car sick!"

"Well, you can't sleep," she said, almost laughing.

"Yea?" I asked, turning my head to look at her. "And why is that?"

"Well," said my mom, in a very matter-of-fact way. "If you sleep after a long plane ride like that, you'll get your sleeping schedule all out of whack. There's a time difference here. We wouldn't want that, would we? You start school in five or six days, right?"

"Don't remind me," I groaned. "You would think that moving to a new country, I would get to avoid school for at least a month. Or a year."

My mom laughed. "You know, you're ridiculous," she said. "But, really, don't get your sleeping schedule all messed up. Here," she pulled some money out of her wallet. "Go on a walk. Go left. Turn left again and at the light a few blocks down, you'll run into some shops. Get some vegetables from the marketplace for dinner. Look around. Whatever. Have an adventure, baby."

"Is that an order?" I asked, standing up and taking the money.

My mother laughed. "Yes," she said. "It's an order."

"Fine," I said. I started towards the door.

"Aren't you going to change?" asked my mom.

I turned to look at her. "Is there something wrong with the way I look?" I asked. "Maybe I'm going for a grungy sort of rock star vibe," I joked.

My mom looked me up and down and said, "Well you've definitely gotten the grunge look down."

I laughed and walked out the front door.