"Dear, I have something to tell you."
"What is it Mama?"
"We're moving."
"Really? Can we move near Lyssie?!"
"No dear, we aren't moving across town, we're moving to Japan."
"WHAT?!"
Insert line.
My name used to be Sadie. I used to live in New York City, New York; my favourite city in the world. A city where I was practically the top of top, the crème de la crème. We lived on Park Avenue in a skyscraper on the 42nd floor in a huge apartment. I had been in 6 Broadway shows, 12 ballets, and 10 musicals off Broadway and I was only fifteen. My performing career was extremely successful. I was also considered fairly pretty. I had huge blue eyes, golden waist length curls, porcelain skin, was quite curvy ,as things went, and not too tall but not too short. I dressed fashionably. I spoke Spanish, Japanese and French fluently because I had taken lessons since age five for no other reason than my mother wanted me to be worldly.
My mother was the perfect woman and socialite. She went out with her lady friends and drank cocktails at least once a week. She wore Manolo Blahnik's every day and for my fourteenth birthday she gave me a pair of my own perfect white patent leather Manolo's.
My father was a successful businessman on Wall Street with a side career in teaching a specialized course in Risk Management at NYU, which meant between his two jobs he was almost never home, which was fine with me because even though my father was a very smart man, he didn't understand me or my interests. Suffice to say we have never gotten along.
Last week my mother told me that we were moving to Japan, because father was being transferred by the company to jumpstart the Japanese branch, and he was resigning at the university. And that I was going to go to a new elite private school when we got to Japan. We were moving in a week and a week after that I would start at the new school, even though it was the middle of September and school had already been going for a month and a half.
She expected to simply drop my performing career, leave my friends, school, and my city. I would even have to go by my Japanese name. I would become Suki Hanako, a name awarded to me by my absolutely fabulous godmother, who I was also being forced to leave. I didn't want to go, but I had no choice.
On Tuesday morning we were packed, Tuesday afternoon we boarded an Air Bus, First Class. After what felt like a billion hours later, my family staggered off the plane in Japan and into a town car which took us to our apartments. I collapsed into the bed not caring that I was in a foreign country practically alone. I simply had to sleep and so I did.