While I Was Away Read online

  Wrong.

  If you saw “一” just out there in the wild, you might pronounce it ichi.

  But put it next to the kanji for “day” like this: 一日 . . . and it’s pronounced tsuitachi, which is the term for “first day of the month.”

  Depending on context, it could also be pronounced “ichi nichi,” which means “one day.”

  Sometimes it’s used as a name for a firstborn son, like it was for my older brother Hajime (weird, I know—but I’m one to talk with a name like Waka). Then it’s pronounced “ha-ji-meh.”

  And that’s just for “one.”

  As I went through the cards, I scraped my fingernails over pieces of our cracked living room sofa, its fake leather coating lifting up in little brown squares as I peeled them off. The state of our sofa embarrassed me when we had guests over, but Dad wouldn’t buy a new one because he kept saying we’d move back to Japan in three years.

  I continued picking at the sofa, thinking about Obaasama. I know for some people, living with their grandma might sound like a lot of fun, but not for me. When we visited before, she didn’t greet her grandchildren, who she hardly ever saw, with hugs and open arms. She didn’t even talk much with us. Granted, our Japanese wasn’t great . . . I mean, maybe she didn’t think we could speak Japanese—even though we could—so she mainly talked to my mother about us. I didn’t really mind, though. Talking with adults always felt so awkward and forced. But since it was going to be just me this time, and for five months, I’d have to talk with her.

  I scratched at another sofa scab. This one was a little stubborn. My mom wasn’t easy and relaxed around Obaasama either. Her language was more formal around her, not like the Japanese she used with us kids. Would I have to watch what I said too? I thought. No, because I’m not going, I told myself. I can’t let this happen. The sofa fabric finally came off in one satisfyingly long strip.

  “Waka, what are you doing?” Mom, of course, chose this moment to walk in, and not when I was studying kanji!

  I scrambled to hide the pieces of sofa skin and bent down to pick up a flashcard. “Studying my kanji.”

  Mom’s narrowed eyes traveled from the ratty sofa arm to the stack of books sitting next to me. “Aren’t those the books Daddy used to read you?”

  A balloon of pride filled my chest and lifted me up. “Now I can read them by myself!” I waited for her to be impressed. She frowned instead.

  “I’m glad we’re sending you to Japan. These are books for first and second graders! Not a sixth grader like you.”

  The balloon inside me popped. Mom shook her head and sighed as she picked up the jacket I’d thrown on the floor in my rush to look studious. That was not the reaction I hoped for.

  When winter turned to spring and a whole set of new clothes I didn’t have to beg her for appeared in my closet, I started to panic—really panic.

  I knew something was up because normally, I had to pull teeth to get my mom to buy me new clothes. “Here, wear your sister’s,” she always said. But my sister didn’t have the cool acid-washed Guess jeans some of the girls at school wore. When I asked Mom for those she said, “Fifty dollars for faded and splotchy jeans? I don’t think so.”

  She wouldn’t even spring for a pair of leg warmers! I wanted nothing more than to pull those colorful knitted tubes over my calves to keep them warm (and fashionable!) during recess.

  “Now why do your legs need scarves?” Mom asked.

  The spirit of mottainai was strong at our house. Mottainai basically means “what a waste!” It was what my mom said when I wanted the new sixty-four pack of Crayola crayons with the built-in crayon sharpener because my old crayons were nubby and broken. “Who cares if they’re broken? They still color just fine,” said Mom.

  We never threw socks away; my mom mended them. When they were so threadbare they couldn’t be mended anymore, we kept them for rags.

  My mom sewed a lot of my clothes with fabric she bought at a discount. Then, even after she had sewed me a dress or jacket, she kept the scraps to use for patches later or for . . . something, because throwing away perfectly good scraps would be mottainai.

  So when I saw a bunch of new skirts and shirts hanging in my closet, sewed from brand-new fabric too, my stomach knotted up. There was only a month and a half left until the end of May—when they said they would send me.

  I ran out of my room to find my mom. To see if these clothes meant what I thought they did: that Plan Ruin Waka’s Life was in its last and most devious phase.

  When I finally found her, she was in the basement using our rickety old Ping-Pong table for her sewing work surface. Scraps of tissue-thin brown patterns, thread, and fabric scraps covered the table.

  “Ah, Waka,” my mom looked up. “I was just about to look for you.” She held a half-finished green skirt up against me. “Hold it, please.” My mom marked a line at the bottom of the skirt with a waxy fabric crayon.

  “Skirts?”

  “Waka,” she said through lips closed enough to hold the pins she needed for her sewing, but open enough to deliver bad news, “when you’re in Japan, you’re going to need these.” She crouched down to adjust the fabric near my knees.

  My mom pierced the skirt hem with a pin. She said “when you’re in Japan,” not “if.” The pin felt like it pierced my heart. I swallowed, my throat dry.

  “I don’t like skirts.”

  “When you see how all the other girls dress, you’ll be glad to have them. And how ungrateful you are! If I had taken that tone with my mother . . .”

  “Why? What would happen?” I felt my pulse speed up. I didn’t like how my mom was making my grandmother sound. After all, this was the woman they were forcing me to live with.

  My mom continued to pin the hem of my new skirt. “She’d whack me on the head with a pair of scissors.”

  “What? Didn’t that make you bleed?”

  “No, no, not the blade. The handle. Not your uncles, though. She’d hit them with a broom instead.”

  My parents were sending me to live for five months with someone who might hit me with scissors or a broom?!

  I stared at her thinking, Are you crazy?

  My mother paused, looking up at me. She stopped sewing and took the pins from her mouth, poking them one by one into her red pincushion, shaped like a tomato.

  “But that was right after the War, when she had to raise all of us on her own,” she said, as if this would reassure me. “It was a very stressful time for her. She’s not like that anymore.” She backpedaled as fast as she could, but it wasn’t fast enough.

  “Do you think,” I began, “I could go next summer? Not this one . . .”

  The third and final phase of Operation Stay in Kansas: Delay. A weak one, I admit, but I couldn’t think of any other options.

  “No.” My mom didn’t even take a second to consider my request. “The younger you are, the easier it is to learn the language. Every year you wait, it gets harder. And we just bought your tickets.”

  Her answer was like a one-two-three punch, a knockout win for Plan Ruin Waka’s Life. Operation Stay in Kansas had failed.

  I stared at the pincushion, not meeting Mom’s eyes. The colorful round pin tops began to blur. My parents were going to send me across the ocean to live with a mean ol’ grandmother who was like a stranger to me.

  “Waka,” said Mom.

  I still didn’t look at her. In my efforts to keep from crying, I could feel my face get as red as the pincushion.

  “You’ll be fine,” she assured me. “Just be yourself, but . . . more polite!”

  What? I was always polite. I was the politest, most well-behaved student in my school. Sure, I called my older brother a “fart-face butthead” yesterday, but he was trying to suffocate me under a beanbag. My mom had to know I would never use that kind of language around Obaasama. I began to feel worse and worse about this trip.

  “I saw some cute blouses at Richman Gordman’s the other day,” she blurted out, trying to change
the mood. “I thought they’d look nice on you. You can pick out a few! It doesn’t even matter if they’re on sale.”

  I always wanted new clothes. But not today. Five months away from home, away from my friends. Five months spent living somewhere I didn’t want to be. That was mottainai.

  Two

  Squished between my best friends Annette and Kris on the forty-five-minute bus ride to our middle school, I shared what my parents had in store for me.

  “FIVE months? But what about our summer?” shrieked Annette.

  “By yourself?” added Kris.

  “It’s so unfair!” I groaned.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to Japan again.” Kris pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her nose.

  “I can’t even get mine to take me to Disneyland,” grumbled Annette as she blew a wayward strand of orange hair out of her eyes.

  Normally during recess we’d swing as high as we could or play tunnel tag with the other girls in our grade. But on the breezy spring day I delivered the bad news, we just moped around the playground, dragging our feet on the black asphalt. Telling my friends about my trip made it real. Really real.

  I’d known Kris since kindergarten when we bonded over Legos. I watched my first horror movie and made my first prank call at her house (“Is your refrigerator running? You better go catch it!”).

  Annette lived five houses down from me, so we played with each other all the time from preschool on. During the summers, we climbed trees, picked mulberries, and swam in her pool. On the weekends, we explored houses in the middle of construction, checking out their concrete basements and the bones of the walls before they were finished and painted. After dinner, I would dash back to her house to swim again or catch fireflies until it got dark.

  Sometimes, her parents would bring me and Kris to Annette’s softball games and buy us grape-flavored Laffy Taffy—I loved it. I could never find it anywhere else, just the concession stand at her softball games.

  Now we wouldn’t get to do any of that. Well, they could. They’d have all the fun without me, while I was stuck in Japan, in school.

  At the end of recess, Annette pronounced, “We’ll just have to make the most of the time we have left then.”

  Kris nodded and fixed her earnest hazel eyes on mine. “Let’s have enough fun to last until you come back.”

  And we did. Sixth grade meant we weren’t the youngest kids at the middle school anymore. Sixth grade meant we still had recess. Sixth grade meant having Mrs. Davenport—the best teacher in the school—as our teacher. Sixth grade ended up being the best year ever . . . only to end two weeks early because of this stupid trip.

  On my last day of sixth grade—which was not everyone’s last day, like it should have been—Mrs. Davenport gathered us all around.

  “Everyone, as many of you already know, Waka will leave school a little early this year. She’s going to Japan, so today is her last day.”

  “Japan? Is that, like, in China?” asked Jen, a quiet blond girl who sat across from me.

  “Man, you are so lucky!”

  “No fair! You’re missing the last two weeks of school?” shouted Patrick, a rowdy red-faced boy from the other side of the room.

  “Actually, Waka will attend school this summer. Because in Japan, they have school in the summer too. Isn’t that right, Waka?”

  Mrs. Davenport looked my way and smiled so her eyes crinkled in the corners. “Crow’s feet” is what Annette called them. She said her mom bought all sorts of creams to make sure she didn’t get any, but I liked them. If you had crow’s feet like Mrs. Davenport, it meant you smiled and laughed a lot.

  The class fell silent.

  I nodded.

  “Oh man, you’re not lucky,” responded Eric. He was a boy I used to like, but sometimes I thought was a big ol’ jerk-face. Like now.

  “Oh, Scrapper,” said Terri, one of the girls from my basketball team. She looked at me with her sad blue eyes. I earned that nickname because I was scrappy. Shortest kid on the team, but I jumped like I could dunk if I just tried hard enough.

  “Does that mean you’re going to miss the auction?” asked Patrick.

  That’s right. I would miss the best part of the school year: when all the kids became so antsy for summer vacation that the teachers basically gave up and filled our days with fun activities like movies, goofing off, and the end-of-year auction—where Mrs. Davenport gave all the students pretend money to bid on cool things like stickers, bouncy super balls, and Slinkies.

  “When are you coming back?” squeaked Jen.

  I couldn’t even bring myself to answer this one, so Annette did it for me.

  “Not until the end of October.”

  “October? But school starts in August!”

  This sucks.

  During my last recess on my last day, I didn’t feel like talking with anyone—not even Annette or Kris—so I swung on the swings the entire time. Even if you’re on them with friends, it’s hard to talk when you’re swinging. Annette was the daredevil—she liked to swing higher than I was comfortable with and leap off mid-swing, but not this time. I was the one swinging higher and higher. I thought about the school I would attend in Japan. As much as I didn’t want to go to the local Japanese school, I did make a friend there during my last visit. Her name was Midori. I hoped she was in the same class I was in. Would she be as good a friend to me as Annette and Kris were? After all, it wouldn’t be hard to pick up our friendship where it left off, right? Even though a couple years had passed?

  Not only was this my last recess of sixth grade, but it was my last recess with my friends, ever. It was a well-known fact that next year in seventh grade, we’d give up our recess and get lockers instead. I guess that’s growing up for you.

  I swung and swung. Maybe I would swing so high I’d disappear into the clouds.

  When I came in from recess, all my classwork from the past few weeks was piled neatly on my desk. While I packed my papers away in my canvas tote bag (decorated with cats!), Terri and Jen leaned over to watch.

  “Oh my God, everything’s an ‘A’!”

  “You’re such a brain.”

  “Maybe someone else can win the spelling bee since you’ll be gone,” teased Eric.

  Mrs. Davenport made her way over just in time. She knelt down so her twinkling blue eyes met my own black ones.

  “I sure liked having you in my class,” she said. “And I hope you have a wonderful time in Japan. It’s such a great opportunity!”

  I nodded even though I totally disagreed. This was no opportunity. My friends were preparing for the end of school. But me, I had to prepare for starting at a new school before I even got to finish the year at this one. What kind of opportunity was that?

  Then Mrs. Davenport said in her most encouraging voice: “I heard you’re staying with your grandmother. That will be a lot of fun for the both of you!”

  I nodded and tried to smile. Mrs. Davenport was so nice. I wondered for a second if my teacher in Japan would be as nice. But there was no way. Mrs. Davenport was the best.

  “What are you looking forward to most once you’re there?”

  Looking forward to? I thought. Coming back, duh. But I knew I couldn’t say that. I wished I could be as happy as Mrs. Davenport wanted me to be.

  “Um . . . my mom said she’d buy a trampoline when I got back.”

  Even if that wasn’t the answer she was looking for, Mrs. Davenport winked and gave my hand a little squeeze before she glided away.

  The night before I had to leave, my mom made me my absolute favorite dinner in the world: tomato soup with noodles. It wasn’t just any ordinary tomato soup, like the Campbell’s kind my friends’ moms poured from a can and heated up on the stove. My mom simmered chicken bones with chopped vegetables for hours. Then, she strained everything out so only a rich, flavorful broth remained. To that she added shredded chicken, sweet corn, thinly sliced onion, chopped tomatoes, parsley, and lots of curly noodles.

&nb
sp; But I could barely eat it. Even though I knew I wouldn’t have it again for five whole months.

  “You could be a diplomat!” my father said as he sipped his soup.

  I stirred the contents of my bowl and fished out a noodle with my spoon.

  “One day you’ll be grateful,” my mom assured me. “Just you see, when you’re able to speak both English and Japanese, it will open up so many doors for you.”

  Mom was wrong. I would never be thankful for this. The only doors I wanted opened were the ones to Kris’s and Annette’s houses. The ones here, at home.

  I tossed and turned that night, barely sleeping at all. I woke up tired and jittery with nerves.

  Suitcase packed, red-and-white backpack stuffed to bursting, the time had come for me to go. Part of me still couldn’t believe my parents hadn’t changed their minds about sending their twelve-year-old daughter halfway around the world by herself.

  “Bye,” my sister Aya said to me. “Have a good time.” She gave me a little smile, the kind you give when you’re sad but don’t want to show it.

  “Bye,” my older brother Hajime said to me. He looked smirky.

  “Bye bye, Wakky,” said Taiga, my five-year-old little brother. He held his stuffed baby chick close. “Wakky” is what he called me and his stuffed baby chick.

  My Siamese cat, Neko, purred as she wove around my legs and luggage.

  The closest international airport was an hour and a half away, so we left early in case there was traffic, which there never was because it was Kansas. Maybe my parents couldn’t wait to get rid of me.

  Highways here go on forever. Each time I looked out the window it was all the same. Trees zipped by in the distance and green plains and farmland stretched for miles—all under the blanket of the blue Kansas sky. Normally, the drive to the airport felt like it lasted for weeks, but on this day, as I hurtled toward my fate, it seemed to only last a few minutes. When we slowed down for the tollbooth on I-70, I knew the airport was close. Kansas City International, with its crescent-moon-shaped terminals, soon loomed ahead of us, filling me with dread.

  We checked my big blue suitcase, but I kept my red-and-white backpack close.