When Arrietty came back from using the bathroom in the morning, her overalls were gone.
Her first panicked thought was that someone had Borrowed them. She looked all over the room in case they'd fallen in between some junk, but they weren't there. Her shoes were still tucked under the cut, but the socks were gone. Finally, reluctantly, she had to go back downstairs in her pajamas. She had peeked around corners and run the first time and so escaped detection, but now there was no avoiding it; Human Beans were going to see her in her night clothes.
Sadako met her on the landing with a bundle in her hands. "Here, Harriet. I had Haru come up and get your clothes for the wash. Would you like to borrow this dress for the day? It's a little old-fashioned - eh, and probably short on you - but, well, I think it's cute."
Well, at least it had been Sadako and not Sho or - perish the thought - Haru. Arrietty ducked into her room and changed, leaving the pajamas neatly folded on the cot. When she came out, Sho's door was open.
"Good," she heard Sho saying. "I slept through the night."
She wondered if he remembered waking up and wasn't telling, or if he just didn't remember. Maybe it was better if he didn't.
"Hmm, and your temperature is improved. Well, good. Do you think you can eat today? Come down and have breakfast then. Hm? Harriet? Oh yes, she's up."
Then, "Oh, dear. Arrietty, Arrietty. Not Harriet. Of course."
Arrietty sighed. She had a feeling that 'Harriet' was going to stick. But at least she wasn't in her pajamas anymore. The dress was a nice coral color, with a wide scoop neckline and a white collar underneath. The sleeves came down to her elbows in old-fashioned ruffles. It was short around her ankles, like the overalls had been, but it was better than pajamas.
Sho came down to breakfast looking pale but happy.
"Did you sleep well?" Arrietty asked anxiously.
"Yes, I did." Sho slid into a chair across from Arrietty. Arrietty felt herself relax now that he was in the room. Sadako was nice, but Haru still made her nervous. She could let herself look around the room now. It was richly furnished, with nice cupboards full of pretty dishes and tables set with vases of flowers on doilies. To her left was a part of the room that jutted to the outside farther than the surrounding walls; this held three large windows over three sections of a window seat with a pleasant view of the garden. She could see the big rock where Sho liked to read in the sun. She wanted to eat there, but Haru had set out places on the big table, so that was where the food was going to be.
"What do you want to do today?" Sho asked eagerly, as Haru served breakfast.
"Nothing too exciting, all right Sho?" Sadako reminded him, but she was pleased at the new life in his voice. "You're still recovering."
"Then, can we go window shopping, Aunt Sadako?" he pleaded. "I bet Arrietty would have fun!"
Fun, bug's eyes. He just wanted to rub in how many Human Beans there were. Again.
"How nice of you, Sho," Sadako said. "Would you be interested, Arrietty...?"
"Yes," Arrietty heard herself say, then kicked herself at the sight of Sho's superior smile. She kicked him too, literally, under the table, but he saw it coming and pushed his chair back for an overdone yawn and stretch, so she missed.
"And I have some errands to run. It's settled then. Where would you like to go, Sho?"
"The mall," he said immediately. "We can see a lot without having to walk very far."
"Good idea, and you can get food too. All right, let's go after breakfast."
"After breakfast" turned out to mean after all the dishes had been cleared, Sho had had his blood pressure taken with a funny cufflike plastic device that went around his arm and squeezed rather hard (he was not a big fan of this, Arrietty saw, but submitted with as much good grace as he could be expected to muster), Haru had been given a list of things to do for the day while they were gone, Niya had been fed, and Sadako had sat down and made a list of what she wanted to do in town. In short, by the time they were in the car, it was almost eleven.
"There will be a lunch rush soon," Sho grumbled, but Sadako was distracted by a group of schoolchildren out on a field trip and didn't hear him.
"Sho, when you get better, maybe you can go to regular school."
"Hmm." Sho was politely noncommittal. Arrietty, giving in to curiosity, crawled up the chair shoulder - with her hands - close to his ear.
"What's a lunch rush?" She imagined plates and forks and tea cups jumping up and dashing around in the kitchen, but surely that wasn't it.
"You have lunch, right? Borrowers do, I mean. Am I right?"
"Of course we have lunch."
"Right, with the three of you. But imagine if there were... say... a hundred Borrowers, all living in the same place, and they all took lunch at once and wanted to eat in the same room."
She tried. It was hard. A hundred Borrowers? She had exactly four faces in her mind, four that were Borrowers. She tried to multiply that, but she simply couldn't fill in the gaps. Then she tried using Borrowers she'd only heard about, like her Great-Grandfather, instead of inventing personalities on the spot. That worked better. She imagined the other families who used to live in the Sadako house, and their cousins and aunts and uncles who had emigrated. What would it be like, if they were all together - visiting, eating, maybe Borrowing together?
The vision held together for a few splendid seconds, then crumbled. There weren't any other Borrowers, not nearby, not anymore. Maybe a few hiding in a barn and a few hiding in other houses. There were so few of them that they couldn't find each other any more.
Sho was still looking at her expectantly. She shook her head. "It's hard to picture," was all she would say.
He patted her arm. "Aw, don't worry. You'll see what I mean."
Arrietty held on for dear life while the car whizzed through an overpass, terrified lest the vehicle slide to the side and fall off, but she hid it well. Only her knuckles went white. Then they came to a place where all the roads ran together like a tangle in thread, and she was sure they would die, but Sadako nudged the wheel deftly this way and that and they made in through without a nick. Arrietty thought she must be the bravest Human Bean alive, but then Sho didn't seem fazed by all the hubbub either.
When they finally pulled into the mall parking lot, Arrietty was disappointed. It was a desert of asphalt with white lines and yellow lines painted on it and light posts sticking up like the masts of shipwrecks, stretching out so far it must be able to hold all the cars in the world. As for the mall, it was just a long, boxy concrete building that barely poked up out of the ground.
"This is the 'mall'?" she whispered to Sho, as he held the car door for her. "It looks like an upside down litter box. There aren't even any windows."
"Maybe not the kind you're expecting. But wait until we get inside."
She felt sweat trickling down under her ponytail as they walked, and walked, and walked. Sadako had parked as close to the building as she could for Sho's sake, but Sho had been right and many people had been ahead of them. Their cars were filling up the parking spaces next to the building in the way that the falling blocks in a Tetris game soon plug up the bottom. The heat of the sun was doubled on the asphalt. Other people, too, were parking and walking, parking and walking; people of all shapes and sizes and ages. When Arrietty veered off from the group because she was staring around so much, Sho took her arm and tucked his hand in her elbow so she could rubberneck as much as she wanted without walking into the back end of a car.
"Doing all right, Sho dear?"
"I'm fine, Aunt Sadako." And he smiled angelically. "Thanks for walking slow for me."
Sadako was not exactly the fastest walker in the world, being well on in years. She didn't mind slowing down for Sho in the least.
There were windows after all, of a sort, Arrietty saw when they got closer. The glass was so dark that they looked like black rectangles set into the concrete walls. There weren't many of them. And, in fact, she realized when one of them swung open and several people walked out, they weren't windows; they were doors, doors made of solid black glass.
Sho caught the door and held it open for her and Sadako. "The inside is a lot better than the outside," he assured Arrietty, when Sadako was a few feet ahead and couldn't hear them over the ambient noise that echoed off every wall and floor and ceiling panel inside. "This is an old building and they haven't refurbished the outside yet."
Inside, Sho had to take her elbow again. They had entered through a major clothing store, and she was shocked by the hundreds of garments hung everywhere. Colors, colors, and more colors - though there were whole sections of them that were solid black. When she said as much to Sho, he grinned. "Black is in style right now. Give it three months and it'll be something else."
Sadako led the way down an escalator to the lower level of the store. Arrietty stared some more. Now, they were among summer dresses. It was as though they were walking through rows of enormous flowers. Sadako paused to look at a rack of scarves, then turned to the children.
"Sho, I'm going to buy some tea next door. Then I'd like to run some errands in town. Why don't you meet me at the ice cream shop at two-thirty?"
After making sure her watch's time matched Sho's, Sadako stepped out into the mall walkway and was lost in the crowd.
Arrietty bit her lip. "How will we ever find her again?"
"I know where the ice cream shop is. She took me there after all the doctor visits - if I could keep anything down." Sho's mouth twisted at the memory. "Don't worry. It's not as hard to find people here as it looks."
Arrietty worried the ends of her fingers. "But there's so many people," she murmured. Never, in her wildest imaginings, had she conceived of there being so many people in the world. This wasn't one hundred, nor two hundred, nor a thousand... it had to be more than that, many more.
Sho grinned at her, studied the ever thickening crowd, and took her hand. "We'd better stick together." He didn't want her getting separated and panicking, alone, here. She had no ID, no papers. Who knew what might happen to her.
Too soon, they were out of the clothing store and in the main body of the mall. Arrietty sucked in a breath. She hadn't realized, from outside, how enormous the building was; indeed, from outside, there was no way to tell, because most of it was underground. And she didn't realize that she had stopped until someone bumped into her from behind.
"Excuse us," she heard Sho say. He looked for openings in the crowd - it was getting packed with the lunch crowd, as he'd predicted - and slithered his way to a bench and some potted trees set near the glass railing, taking Arrietty with him.
"There," he said, and sank down on the bench. "Now you can see better."
She heard the catch in his breath. "Are you okay?"
He flapped a hand. "I'm fine. Just a little winded. I haven't walked that far for a long time. Go on, look."
She compromised and settled on the bench on her knees, so she could be next to him but still sit up and look over the railing. The world she saw there was as far removed from her Borrower childhood as the moons of Mars.
Down the center of the mall was open space bordered by more clear glass railings like the one she was hanging over. This was especially dizzying when she looked up, all the way up to the diamond-shaped skylights that made up the spine of the far away ceiling. There was a story above them; that was the ground floor. They were one level underground, and there was yet another level beneath that. The floors and walkways were made of creamy white tiles alternating with occasional black strips and patterns. Seating areas, storefronts, billboards, merchant booths, a food court, entire trees in planters; she didn't know the words for all these, but still her instincts gave her a sense of what they must be. After all, Borrowers were good at figuring out what things could be used for. It was a little overwhelming, to go from a three-person village to knowing a few Human Beans to walking into a sea of moving bodies. She hadn't known there were that many arms and legs in the whole of creation. She could see people from the side on this level, but on the bottom two it was mostly shoulders and the tops of people's heads. It wasn't the scale of the place that amazed her - there were plunging canyons aplenty for Borrowers between the walls of Human Bean houses - but the fineness. No protruding nails, no dirt, no sawdust; no rats.
"You know what I think?" Sho had caught his breath and felt better.
"No." Arrietty was startled out of her reverie. "What?"
"I think we should buy you some clothes."
"Buy? But... I don't have any money." She might not have it, but she knew what it was. Human Beans didn't give things away for free, except maybe Sissy and Sho, and she wasn't too sure about Sissy.
"That's all right." Sho winked. Unbeknownst to anyone, he had gone suitcase diving early this morning and found his wallet. It was fat. One good thing about divorced working parents who never visited was that they tended to send large allowances. "You can Borrow some of mine."