CHAPTER ELEVEN

蜘蛛の糸

The morning I was to leave for school, Emi and I sat in the back of a sloping convertible car to rural Saitama. The skies smothered me, the cloying summer humidity made no better by our escape from Tokyo.

If I asked you to picture a factory in your head, you would likely imagine some tower-laden monstrosity in the middle of a metropolis, belching smog onto the cobblestones of Dickensian London. Factories like this would soon dominate the skyline. For now, the centre of all the Mashiro wealth was a plain, brown longhouse. If it were a person, it would be a monotonous girl with a huge forehead and no talents.

When I was little, I had pretended that my little inheritance was a giant corpse. Her innards gutted of anything interesting, only the metal bones remained: the steel rafters, the great wheels that reeled the silk thread, and the two rows of looms that served as the beast's double spinal cord. All her employees were unmarried women between the ages of thirteen and thirty. The Depression had hit farming families in the country worst of all – or so I would learn, later. At the time, I only wondered why their faces were all so pinched. In my crepe day-dress and duster, I suddenly felt like Marie Antoinette ascending the paddock to the guillotine.

A broad hand appeared on my shoulder, bangle glinting from the overhead electrical lights (implemented upon the realization that lighting would extend productivity well past dark in the winter months.)

"Good. You're here," my mother said over the shhh-shhh of reeling silk and the clatter of the shuttles. There had been an attempt to dress softly, I noted. The single bracelet. A floaty bias-cut dress under the armoured overcoat. She guided me up the stairs, and together we rose beyond the grey drudgery of the looms and vats to the mezzanine floor.

Waiting for us at the top of the stairs was an unremarkable man in a hilariously impractical all-white three-piece suit. Silly man, I thought to myself. Factories are dirty.

"Hotori-sama," my mother said, hand still on my shoulder. "My daughter."

At first glance, I had dismissed Three-Piece-Suit as being old enough to be my father. Upon closer inspection, he looked a little younger. There was only a vague suggestion of lines. Thirty, thirty-five? Too foppish to be the overseer. And why did I know that name?

"Pleasure," he said, with a vague sort of smile. "How did you like the car?"

Every girl from a certain age and a certain station has been coached on how to behave during a preliminary marriage interview, of course. The short answer is to mimic Nadeshiko's finer public persona as well as you possibly can. The long answer is: talk as little as possible. Don't show your teeth. If you must laugh, titter behind your sleeve. Be modest. Do not meet anyone's eyes. Try not to sneeze. Or breathe. No jokes. No dropping a frog into the unlucky boy's drinking glass. Answer in only yes or no and bows, and the occasional closed-mouth smile if you're feeling lucky.

I caught Mother's eyes, begging for another explanation. I tried to channel Nadeshiko's indomitable coquettishness.

"Yes," I said. That wasn't the answer to the question. I hastily tried to cover it up with a bow, but he noticed; his eyebrows flew up a little, politely.

I had the idle fancy to sabotage this whole thing. I mustn't think that. He wasn't bad-looking, after all, he just wasn't… my type.

The Utau of my mind's eye looked at me, unimpressed. 'Yeah?' she said, flipping a ponytail. 'So what is your type?'

Boys young enough to step on, I supposed. Or old men with a large fortune at death's door, or…

Without even trying, a vivid fantasy entered my fevered brain of a beautiful woman with dark hair and a cloying smile, swooping in to save me from all my money troubles and take me for long car rides with the top down, to the opera, comedy shows, even, perhaps, just for Nagihiko's sake, a kabuki performance or two. She would have to find me uproariously funny, obviously, and want my opinion on everything…

"… State of the art," my mother said, briskly, gesturing to the looms below us. "We employ half the women of Saitama and find that there is no shortage of workers."

Three-Piece-Suit Hotori-sama stroked his clean-shaven face at this, inspecting the silk. He was not at all what I had expected (a lecher off to make a child-bride of a seventeen-year-old) but quieter; pensive. He asked insightful questions. He took interest in the massive industrial looms, commenting on how efficiently they could spit out a full skein. He took little offense when the rotund mouser, nicknamed Mister Stupid by the factory girls, rubbed up against the legs of his three-piece suit and meowed like a death rattle. He expressed gentlemanly concern over my presence in the boiler-room where bubbling vats boiled silkworm cocoons to death.

"Surely the young Miss would rather wait outside, for the sake of her nerves?" he said to my mother.

Ridiculous. Hotori-sama and I were both more than capable of watching a pupa boil to death before it could open its wings. I saw it in his eyes.

Emi and I waited outside.

It was less a meeting, in the end, and more a tour of the mill between two business partners. Emi and I lagged behind Hotori-sama and Mother. Given I was to be marrying him, I imagined it might have been nice to let me at least walk astride.

"Would it be alright to see the threads after dyeing?" Hotori-sama asked, straightening his tie with a watery smile. "I would love to have a small sample to bring home to my wife."

I straightened up. His wife?

"Of course," my mother said, gesturing to the next room where the barrels of boiling dye were kept tended to. The last room was where the fine thread was balled, and the long yards of fabric rolled for shipping. As a child, Emi and I used to throw them at the wall and shriek when they bounced off, throwing fine silk thread all over the place until we were tangled up in it, like insects in a multicoloured spider's web.

Hotori-sama, like me, seemed overwhelmed and a little indifferent to all the colours. Trusting (or so I speculated) in the taste of a lady, he turned to me.

"Which colours do you like?"

His wife?

I was breaking all the rules of a good marriage meeting. Why must he ask my opinion? What did it matter, anyway?

"I have an unrefined girl's taste," Nadeshiko might say. I could hear the inflection perfectly, and could mimic it, if I wished. "But this one makes me think of you…"

My eye passed over a dianthus-pink spool of thread. The colour was quite literally called nadeshiko-iro. It was prized by embroiderers for its cold undertones, like a bruise.

"I lack an eye for these things," I tried, faking humility.

"Nonsense," said Hotori-sama. I glimpsed a fatherly twinkle in his eye and thought I saw what his children must see: the indulgent spoiler, not the businessman who watched silkworms boiled alive.

I pointed to the Dianthus pink. Once my finger was out, I couldn't rescind my decision.

I added casually, "What sorts of colours does the wife of Hotori-sama like?"

I looked at Mother pointedly, looking cross. I was nobody's mistress. Was she hoping he'd file for divorce? Was Mrs Hotori on her deathbed as we spoke, croaking out her last breaths?

"I could not tell you," Hotori-sama said, with a bit of an ironic smile. "A woman's heart is an ocean of secrets, is it not?"

I privately thought that a woman's heart was only an organ that pumped blood. I gave a polite, Marriage Meeting titter behind my leather glove.

"Now, was it only this one..." Hotori-sama mused, taking two balls of it off the cubed shelves. "Or were there any others?"

I paused. I looked at my mother. Then to the shelf.

Then a violent red-orange, the kind of colour Emi wore, but I couldn't. My eyes darted down the little cubicles, seeking out anything that called to me. A chartreuse that reminded me of Seiyo's damp grass in spring, a soft off-white that reminded me of my yukata. I was dizzy. The lilac, for Nadeshiko, again. A turquoise, like the sea in Tokyo Bay.

The red, the green, the white, the purple. I pointed to them all, and he got down two spindles of each. To my utter indifference, he handed me half of his spoils, with a strangely fatherly smile.

"Take them," he invited me. Then he turned to my mother, and took out a long, leather book. "Let me write you something for these."

"Please," my mother said, crisply. "A gift."

"I insist."

They went back-and-forth like this for some time, and eventually settled on a vastly lowered price in a gesture of goodwill. I stood there, Emi hastily taking the skeins of silk thread from my hands and stuffing them away, like a monkey. What was happening?

Finally, the strange, quiet Hotori-sama with a wife and a three-piece suit tipped his hat to me and my mother, as he stepped into his car.

"It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance," he said to me. "You ought to meet my son."

His son! That was it. He was canvassing me for his son.

He turned to my mother.

"Think about my offer, Mashiro-san," he said, eyes roving over the silk mill. Our big, ugly factory shrunk to a sparrow in the viewfinder of a gun, ready to be shot. I decided that I didn't like him.

"I fear that soon, we may need parachutes more than silk."


There was no time for a sit-down lunch. I would take the four o'clock train back to Seiyo Girl's Academy instead of the morning nine o'clock, which meant I would be arriving after dinnertime. For the first time, my mother found time in her busy schedule to monitor every step of my transfer into Fujisaki-sensei's talons, either personally or by proxy. I wondered if it was because I had blossomed from a burden into a bargaining chip.

Emi belted my black skirt tightly around my waist as my mother smoothed the middy shirt flat against my collarbone and turned to cope with my hair, which was gleefully beginning to swell up in the humidity again.

"Emi, a ribbon," my mother said, holding out a hand with a sigh.

"I didn't like Hotori-san," I said, staring at my own lashes.

"Hotori-sama," my mother corrected me, sharply. "He's a viscount. It doesn't matter if you like him."

I puffed out my cheeks. Emi was packing for me, throwing things haphazardly into my suitcase. A stacked pair of wooden boxes lay in the middle of a handkerchief, which I already knew to be my packed lunch and dinner to eat on the train. Cress sandwiches for lunch, I guessed, and beef wellington for dinner.

"As it happens," my mother continued, with a roll of her eyes, "You are lucky. The Hotori family is aristocracy, and they have only one son, who will inherit it all. You lack rank to be suitable."

She finished off the plait with a length of ribbon around my head, and I grimaced.

"Why bother, then?"

"A good businesswoman networks as much as she can, even if the meeting seems to have little immediate usefulness," said my mother. "Besides, he's interested in the mill. Don't ask any more questions."

A suitcase was foisted into my hand, and then into a rickshaw, where I sat cheek-by-jowl between Emi and Mother all the way to Tokyo Central Station.

I handed Emi my suitcase and hat-box. To my mild surprise, my mother tucked a loose, sun-bleached curl behind my ear.

"Safe trip," she said.

Then, more meaningfully. "Behave yourself."

The train car seemed emptier than usual. The sky faded from periwinkle, pink to blood-red as the train roared through the dusky fields of Aichi Prefecture. I gazed at Emi across from me, swinging her legs happily, feet inches from the floor.

She caught my eye, frowning. Perhaps a stay-over from childhood, Emi did not like to see me brooding.

"Something bothering you, Miss?"

I blinked, turning away from the sky outside. "Why should there be?"

"Your face is all scrunched-up and frowny," she said. Then, with a bit of a wicked grin this time: "Is it that boy?"

"What boy?" I said.

Emi goggled back at me. "The cool one! The one who visited you! You let him into your room! And now they're setting you up with someone else! Kek!"

I mutinously recalled the mix of helpless anger and exhilarating smugness that Nagihiko making declarations brought. It made me cross all over again.

"I'll box your ears if you tell Mother," I said.

"Shan't, then," she replied, promptly. "She'd box my ears too."

I pressed my forehead against the cool window. My brains rattled around in my skull from the train's shaking.

"What're you going to do with the thread, Miss?" Kusukusu's voice in my ear, again.

"My own business."

"But you brought it with you," the brat pointed out, slyer still. "Has your embroidery improved so much?"

I focused my gaze on the diminutive little orange figure opposite, gleefully chowing down on a rice ball. She caught my eye, and smiled, toothy.

"You could make a craft with it," she said in a sing-song to herself, hopping from note to note. "Do-you-remember? The thread balls we used to make as children?"

"That was a long time ago," I said.

"Yeah," she said, softly. "It was."

"I liked those," I said. "We would put rude messages in them."

"Some of them looked good," Kusukusu informed me, with some degree of mirth. "But I think you only wanted to make them to throw them."

"Of course," I murmured, absently. "What else are they for?"

The knot of dread in my stomach grew only worse as we lurched into the empty station by cover of nightfall. The train was nigh-empty; it was only me and a small-town businessman getting off at this stop. The stars leered down at me. In Tokyo, I was as large as I liked, on roads and walks made for me. In the countryside the sky gaped from horizon to horizon with no buildings to punctuate its breadth. I did not care much for feeling small or insignificant.

"Shall I leave you here, Little Miss?" Emi asked me tentatively. She dismounted under the weight of my worldly possessions: a silk hat-box, a needlepoint carpetbag with my immediate travelling necessities, and the considerable suitcase that held most of my clothes.

"Are you stupid?" I said. "Help me take my things up the hill."

Kusukusu gnawed her lip, casting her eyes about the crisscrossing tracks. She delicately covered her mouth with the hat-box.

"It's really late," she said, muffled. "And dark. The last train is in a half-hour. If I'm late, your grandmama will be really mad."

"I can't very well carry these things myself," I said sourly.

But Emi was right. It was dark. As I searched for something to convince Emi otherwise, another solution appeared in front of the post-office window: a vague male-shape with a bag over his shoulder, handing something to the train ticket-taker.

"You," I said, "Boy."

He turned over his shoulder, with the air of someone who was used to being addressed by gender only.

"Ma'am?" he inquired, tipping his hat a little and standing up straighter, as though trying to look older than he was. The smile was pure insecurity. The empty letter-bag slung over his shoulder jogged my memory: it was Sōma-kun, the boy who delivered everything up to Seiyo from the post office.

"Are you able to take my things up the hill?" I said, gesturing to the suitcase, the hat-box, the carpet bag.

There is a certain kind of man, as I had demonstrated to Nagihiko, that will drop everything to help a small, pretty girl. I called it the helplessness-to-beauty ratio. Sōma-kun was not one of these men. I don't think he noticed I was a girl at all: his eyes were fixated on the bags. I made a split-second assessment.

"They're somewhat heavy, so if you cannot manage, I will ask someone el…"

"No need!" He picked up the heaviest suitcase with a salute. "Leave it to me! Man, this weighs nothing."

I repressed the urge to roll my eyes, and instead delicately handed him the hat-box. I decided that because the challenge of the thing was the reward, I didn't have to waste breath thanking him.

I didn't waste any breath at all. Sōma was evidently not struck shy by the presence of girls, either. It was as though I was a fellow construction worker.

"Lucky you caught me out this late," he said, whistling through his teeth. "Was just returning from a last-minute telegram run up to Seiyo Academy. D'you go there?"

"Yes."

"They're usually for Fujisaki-sensei. Tonight, it was for another teacher, though. And extra of the Evening Post, 'course. Everyone's glued to the papers these days. It sure does get your blood pumping, doesn't it?"

"Mm," I said.

"There's gonna be all sorts of work, now, even here. Hell, I might not be here much longer. I wanna get out there, serve, y'know?"

"Ah."

"They say we've taken the coast of China already, and Shanghai by next month. I wish I could have been there to see it! But what I really want is to get up in one of those planes…!"

"Oh, the one Princess Chichibu got to ride in," I murmured, absent-mindedly. "The kamikaze-go, Mitsubishi Ki-15…"

"Yeah!" Sōma-kun interrupted, excitedly. I glanced up from my dirt-staring, surprised at his fervour. "Yea-ah! Eleven thousand feet in the air! Ninety horsepower! You know the Ki-15? Woah, you don't look the type!"

"No," I said. "What are we talking about?"

"The kamikaze planes! They're all out over China as we speak!"

"China?" I asked, bleakly. Sōma seemed to realize the extent my ignorance.

"Japan declared war on China a whole month ago," said Sōma, nonplussed. "You really didn't hear about it?"

He put down my carpetbag, ("Mm," I said) reached into his letter bag, and unrolled a newspaper. In the dim twilight, I made out:

THE FULL STORY ON THE DEMLITARIZED ZONE PEACE PRESERVATION CORPS MUTINY1

Its sub-headline:

CONCENTRATED BULLET FIRE ON KINSUI WATCHTOWER
UNPRECEDENTED BRUTAL CONDUCT
2

"I don't know what this means," I said, but the sinking feeling in my stomach did not need a translation.

Sōma himself had to read the headline again (or pretend to read?) to make sense of it, but when he spoke, the note was final.

"The Chinese slaughtered us," he said. For the first time, I saw him wilt. "They went after the Japanese families in Tongzhou district. Who does that? Based only on where they're from…"

There was no us or we—Sōma was being overemotional. I had nothing in common with the now-dead Japanese but an identical passport.

The single gas lantern on the awning of Seiyo's main building twinkled over the hill in promise of rest. Though summer was ending, a few cicadas stubbornly screamed on in the bushes. Sōma's eager face swam before my face in the darkness, waiting for an answer.

My eyes returned, passively, to the dirt.

"I see," I said. "My bag, please?"

To Sōma's credit (and Kusukusu's disservice), he insisted on walking me right into the foyer and through to the little administration office.

("There's been some weird guys hanging around this summer," he warned me. I was too tired to point out that nobody was going to attack me in my own school, unless Fujisaki-sensei counted.)

I gazed around Fujisaki-sensei's assistant's office, liking it lesser still after my third time here. As though remembering the unconscious memory, my back muscles tensed, and my shoulders hunched up around my ears.

Sōma's real motivation for walking me through Seiyo wiggled out of the woodwork— or rather, it leapt up from her desk to rumple Sōma's hair, smacking him playfully across the cheek.

"Kukai-chan, you wicked boy," Shion crowed, losing roughly three years in appearance. "What are you doing wandering around in here? Your mother will be missing you for dinner."

"Haaaah?" he scoffed, rubbing his jaw as though willing stubble to grow there. "She can spare me for one night! Besides, the little miss challenged me. I bet her I could carry her stuff all the way up Seiyo hill!"

He thumped my back. I coughed.

Shion had me initial next to my surname on the roster to indicate that I had arrived in one piece. The surname of every girl in Seiyo Girls' Academy was beneath my hand as I signed. My friend's names all leapt out at me, all ticked off by Sanjō's handwriting. The name Yuiki was left blank. My heart sank.

"Shion-san," I said, looking at the list. "Did a Yuiki-san sign in this morning?"

Shion paused through her laughing with Sōma, leaning over to read the sheet upside-down.

"If it's not on there, I'm afraid not, Mashiro-san," she said, sympathetically. "Perhaps she's arriving tonight, like you?"

Emi had said the last train was departing in half an hour. I doubted it.


The room was the same as I had left it at the beginning of summer: splintery floors, fragile curtains, two stripped beds, and one wooden seiza-desk (my knees ached). The beds seemed closer together than I had first noticed. Barely an arm's length— less than that. If I really stretched my short arms, I could probably caress Nadeshiko's face in her sleep.

Which meant she could rip my face off in mine! I braced my body unsuccessfully against her bed, trying to shove it closer to the door.

Nadeshiko had come and went. The smell of camellias lingered, and a flower arrangement had been left ominously next to her bed. The roar of multiple faucets and ghostly voices echoed from the end of the hall. Everyone must be washing up for bed.

I peeled off my sweaty stockings and washed up in the bathroom. Then I flopped back down on my bed, wrapping my hair around me like a shawl.

I was bored. I wondered what made Nadeshiko think she was so important as to simply vanish, especially after her hoity-toity speech about loyalty and other dishonesties. Then, I wondered why Yaya wasn't at school when I missed her so sorely.

The black-and-white headlines stole into my mind by the glow of the oil lamp, mocking me. Japan declared war on China a whole month ago!

But Yaya's mother and little brother were subjects of the emperor. They were safe from the rapacious Chinese soldiers over the ocean, and Yaya was the daughter of a diplomat. It was something stupid, I thought, like she threw a tantrum and hit her head so hard she got a concussion… We'd laugh about it when she came back, and she'd stick out her tongue and scratch the back of her head…

"Y-You didn't, Nadeshiko! Tell me you didn't!"

"Oh, dear," a dark mirage said smugly, sweeping into the room with aplomb. "I only said that I have a friend who admires Hotori-san, and that he ought to meet her."

"That's not true at all, no way!" Amu spluttered after her, wet fringe sticking to her forehead. "D-don't say it like that! I don't admire him—I don't even…—what kind of dumb, cheesy…"

"Amu-chan, Amu-chan, Amu-chan," Nadeshiko cooed, having not yet taken notice of me. I watched her ponytail fan out from its confines with mingled horror and irritation.

"Men have such pliant egos. A few white lies, a bit of flattery here and there… if it's disguised under what seems like the purest of intentions, it will nurture a man's warm feelings. That is, of course, if you don't admire him? Because if you do, it's hardly a lie, you see."

"Rima!" Amu said with relief, zeroing in on me as the perfect distraction. "When did you arrive?"

Nadeshiko immediately stiffened and turned, as though gossip about Hotori was top-secret information I wasn't supposed to be privy to. I looked back with dislike.

"Not long ago," I said, trying to appear as though they had rudely interrupted me enjoying my own company. "Whose ego is this?"

"Did you have a safe journey?" Amu said, ignoring my question.

"Welcome home, Rima-chan," Nadeshiko fluffed, pinching Amu's shoulder. She said it like I was her husband coming home from work, or something. "Waah, did your hair get longer since I saw you, last? It looks so much thicker!"

"If you're going to talk so loudly," I said, "You ought to let everyone in on the conversation. It's rude."

"You see," said Nadeshiko, turning to Amu and ignoring me. "Women are such suspicious creatures. Unlike men, Rima-chan knows when one is lying."

"I see…" said Amu, eating up Nadeshiko's bungled thesis essay on men.

"You were lying?" I said crossly. I inspected my hair in the mirror.

"It looks thinner," said Nadeshiko. "Have you been tearing it out?"

"Every moment in your presence," I snapped.

"I think it looks nice," Amu supplied, angelic of heart.

"Have either of you seen Yaya yet?" I asked, giving up on Hotori-san's idiot son.

Amu had to think about it.

"No, now that you mention it…"

"Nothing," Nadeshiko finished. "Perhaps she's arriving tomorrow, for afternoon classes?"

"Maybe."

"Oh—h, Nadeshiko," Amu sighed, clambering over Nadeshiko's bed to look at the dumb flower arrangement. "Waaah… it's so pretty! I could never do this kind of stuff."

"It's just flowers in a vase," I said, envious again. "If you want flowers so badly…"

"Oh, Amu!" Nadeshiko glowed back, generating their own weird, rosy atmosphere. "Do you like it? It's…"

A loud THUD resounded through the building, and several girls screamed from the washroom.

"ONE minute to LIGHTS! OUT." A voice bellowed. "You HAVE. A FULL DAY of CLASSES TOMORROW."

"Crap!" Amu muttered, scrambling off the bed and waving both her hands at us. "Gotta go, I guess.

"I'll see you at breakfast tomorrow?"

"You better," I muttered, as the door shut behind her.

A chorus of shushes rippled through the walls.

As the heels creaked past our door, Nadeshiko moved to the oil lamp on the sill without speaking, lifting its glass chimney to blow out the flame. I glanced up from my pillow, sleepily. Even her footsteps were dancing. She had the smallest stride I had ever seen, rolling from the ball of her foot to heel so she barely made a footfall.

"… It's a begonia," Nadeshiko finished, quieter.

She gazed at them through the threads of smoke at the foot of my bed, as though waiting for an answer to this pronouncement. I fell back onto my pillow, eyelids fluttering shut.

"Did you know," I murmured, more asleep than awake, "That begonias mean 'beware' in floriography? I read it in a book."

There was no response. Nadeshiko could have returned to bed for all I knew, or simply stood there, stricken by this information.

"Oh," said Nagihiko's voice, strangely high-pitched. "I didn't know."

My head lolled to the side, already asleep.


Morning brought clear skies and yet another dancing lesson, much to my unending wrath. I would have been counting down the days to the end of term if being home wasn't worse.

Morning also brought Utau, looking meaner than ever— but not Yaya, to my now-mounting perturbance.

"What happened to Fujisaki-sensei?" Utau muttered, using her height to gaze over everyone's head.

"Maybe she died," I said hopefully.

"Nah," Utau said. "It's some guy."

"A man?" I said, with disgust.

Nadeshiko joined us then, bony wrists sticking out through her uniform's cuffs like a colt's wobbly new legs. There was no time to sew a new uniform in-between growth spurts, I supposed. The skirt now barely grazed her knees. True to my prediction, I had already heard the slimy moss-ball (Momino?) express flustered awe at Nadeshiko's now-considerable height by women's standards. I forecasted rolled-up skirts by next month.

"Our teacher's Amakawa-sensei today," Nagihiko whispered to me, face glowing. "From Kouen Military Academy."

"He's a military instructor?!" Amu moaned in dismay.

"I can't see," I said, in the idle hope that Amu would pick me up. I didn't have to look at him to know who it was. Fujisaki-sensei's old astrologer— the weird guy in the woods.

"Good morning, girls," I heard the mild voice say. The sailor collar in front of me began to quiver with giggles. The room erupted in laughter. I hoped Amu shared my horror, but she seemed to be frowning at Amakawa to herself, as though considering it.

When the inane giggles finally subsided, the gist of it came out: in anticipation of the ball at Kouen Military Academy in October (several squeals), we were to go over basic Meiji pair-waltzes.

Wasn't the likes of western dancing verboten? I wasn't about to complain about a change from the dragging, boring kaguras that Fujisaki-sensei insisted on, but something about it made me uneasy— as though a government employee was watching.

The second the words "I will ask you to get into pairs…" left Amakawa-sensei's mouth, I moved quickly, lunging for Amu's arm.

"Gah!" Amu barked, caught off-guard. "R-Rima!"

Nadeshiko had her hand raised, as though about to ask Amu the same. Upon catching my eye, he hastily lowered it. I made a nasty face at him, sticking my tongue out and pulling my eyelid down.

"Amu," I said, sweetly, before she could catch me leering, "I want to dance with you."

"Ah— OK! But just so you know, I'm kind of clumsy…"

"The Viennese waltz is simple," Amakawa announced, with the self-assurance of any fairy-footed twit unaware of others' shortcomings. "It comprises the natural turn, reverse turn, and blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah, blah blah blah blah…"

Amakawa-sensei was an engaged teacher. Unlike Fujisaki-sensei, who liked to stand in the corner and call out criticisms, he made his rounds to each couple, gently moving our arms around until our limbs were in the correct places. He passed Nadeshiko and Morono, clasped together, with an approving nod. At Amu and I, he paused, moving my hand more firmly under Amu's shoulder blade.

"Your foot a little to right, Mashiro-san," he added. "You can start with the lead, and then we'll switch off."

If Amu was clumsy, I was a bloated house held up by stilts. I rapidly discovered that a waltz seemed to mimic the heliocentric model. Like a pair of moons, we rotated clockwise round each other, but counter-clockwise around the floor.

I stepped forward while Amu stepped back. I immediately stepped on her foot.

"Oops," she whispered. "Sorry."

"It's okay," I said, swaying. There was a moment when we caught each other's eyes and smiled at the foolishness of the whole thing. I was suddenly very grateful I wasn't paired with Nadeshiko, who would have thought I was terrible, or Utau, who would have also thought I was terrible.

Step two was a rotate, of some kind, and then a crossing of one foot over the other. Brow furrowed, I stepped forward confidently, only for Amu's back to thud against the wall.

Moomino and Nadeshiko glanced over at us from their elegant rotation. Utau gave me her familiar huffy look, and a few classmates giggled. Amu looked as though she hoped the floor would swallow her up, but I gazed back, impassive.

"Oh," Amakawa jumped in, hurriedly, and returned everyone to starting position. "This happens when the turn is overdone. It should only be roughly ninety degrees. Let's start again?"

"I don't know why it has to be so complex," Amu said an hour later, rubbing her ankle. We had come to know that after the first stupid rotation, called a set, came even more variations upon variations: two rows on either side of the room conjoined, then moving into a circle. We had all gotten along terribly, but me worst of all. I told myself it was only stupid dancing, but I was the slightest bit ashamed all the same.

"That was kind of fun," Nadeshiko said, warmly. "It's been a while since I've done a waltz."

Amakawa-sensei had cautioned us not to worry so much about the man's steps, as the Kouen students would be leading us. The man always led. I looked sideways at Nadeshiko, whose cheeks were still flushed, as though out-of-breath. Her eyes were still on Amu.

I went mutinously back to my rice. The others continued talking about the stupid Kouen ball. I wondered if I could fake sick. Then I wondered if I could handle everybody talking about what fun they had while I languished in bed, keeping my forehead warm using an oil lamp in case someone should check on me.

I couldn't do it. I would have to learn how to do a stupid Vietnamese wash or whatever. If Amu was so googly-eyed over the Hotori twit, I had to see him for myself. Neglecting to mention that our parents had tried to set us up, of course.

A flurry of girls had begun to swarm around the doors like basking flamingos, indicating the arrival of Sōma-kun and the newspaper again. I didn't pay any heed to it, until I heard one of them cry, "Where have you been, Yuiki-san?!"

I looked up, and there she was: perhaps cackling less than usual, but there nonetheless. I pelted myself directly at her gut, to which she let out a loud "OOF."

"Rima-tan!" she gagged, putting on a brave smile despite the damage my thick skull had evidently done to her ribs. "That hurt!"

"Hm," I said. "Where were you?"

"Let her sit down, at least!" Utau barked. Yaya swung a leg over the bench, squeezing in between Nadeshiko and I.

"Papa was busy," Yaya said, as though this explained everything. "We were waiting on a telegram from Mama, and then he was called to Tokyo over some horrible telephone call. Then he forgot I had school."

I looked up. To my surprise, so did Nadeshiko, glancing at me over Yaya's head.

"And is everything quite well?" Nadeshiko asked, with delicacy.

"I guess so," Yaya sighed, taking a clump of rice from my bowl and cramming it into her mouth.

"Your mother," Utau ventured.

"Is well," Yaya said brightly. Her eyes were focused on my rice. "Tsubasa, too.

"Are you…"

"No," I said, pulling the bowl away and delicately fanning myself. The weather was still hot for September. I wondered if the embroidery teacher would let us go outside for class, where we could take our stockings off and dangle our feet in the cool Ochi River. I would likely lose my needle in the grass, but that was trifling.

Yamabuki Sāya strode by behind us, flanked by two bootlickers. She paused for effect, regarding our table contemptuously.

"I can't believe they allowed her back," she said in a loud undertone to a crony.

Sāya was always making bizarre pronouncements like this. I privately thought she thrived on the chaos left in the wake of some of her more outlandish statements, hoping they would get her the attention she craved. This time, however, I really had no idea what she was talking about.

"When we don't know how many Chinese rebels are hiding in Taihoku,"3 Sāya continued, louder. "It's dangerous. And shameful."

Utau raised an eyebrow but made no move to say anything. Nadeshiko's eyes remained locked on her lap. To my utter disgust, so did Amu's, submissively following Nadeshiko's lead.

Yaya was not clever like Nadeshiko, who could take and trade a verbal barb. Nor was she as confident as Utau, who had the seniority to invite a disrespectful girl to drop dead. Witnessing Yaya's confusion hurt worse than rage or sadness. She knows it's supposed to be insulting, I thought, but isn't sure how.

I lolled back in my seat. My knuckles went white on my chopsticks.

"After the terrible koto performance Yamabuki-san gave at the summer festival," I said, raising my chin to the sky and speaking to the ceiling for best possible projection, "It's a miracle Fujisaki-sensei allowed Yamabuki-san back at all. It was like trying to keep tune next to a screaming horse. Things like this make the whole school look bad."

Sāya's perm whirled over her shoulder, face beet-red with fury. I stared back at her, daring her without speaking.

There was three of them. Five of us. Most onlookers would never come to my aid. But I was sitting across from Amu, and we were in direct view of both Kichiga- and Sanjō-sensei, still in their seats.

She hmphed, striding off huffily.

As soon as I was positive she had vanished into the kitchen, I got to my feet. Amu's eyes were on me, shining with an admiring expression I had never seen before, but I was too angry to take any joy from it.

"Have the rest of my rice, Yaya," I said, coldly.

As I walked away from the table, I realized someone was shadowing my footsteps. At first, I hoped it was Amu. Then I thought it must be Nadeshiko, come to feed off my emotional vulnerability. But as I stacked my bowls in the sink, I realized it was Utau, expression stoic as usual.

"That was stupid, Mashiro," she said curtly, dumping her bowls next to mine with a clatter.

"Did you stalk me all the way over here just to say that?"

"Yamabuki Sāya's the daughter of a general. That was really, really stupid."

I turned to grab a broom. "I'm not scared of Yamabuki's extended family."

"You should be," Utau snapped, grabbing a rag and running it under the tap. "You know why we all kept our mouths shut?"

"Because you have no spines."

Manami squeezed in between us to put her bowl down, and we both fell into an angry silence. When she left, Utau leaned forward, in a lower voice.

"Because she's in a place now where she can ruin your life. You don't get it, do you? How d'you expect to help Yuiki if you're so conceited you can't let one comment slide off your back?"

My eyes flashed.

"You've been goading her all summer," Utau continued, relentlessly. "She might seem like an easy target, but unlike Fujisaki, she's stupid, vengeful, and doesn't think it's charming."

"What does Nadeshiko have to do with this?" I said, riled by the sheer mention of her name.

"I warned you, didn't I?" Utau said cryptically, "Back in the spring. You can't say I didn't."

She turned on her heel and returned to the others, spattering me with tiny droplets in her wake.