“Catch you later!”
It baffled Marigold how her classmates found him funny or why the teachers liked him. He clowned around in class, reading comics behind his binder or doodling rockets in his notebook. Marigold didn’t think much of him. She was a rocket herself, but she wasn’t stopping at the moon.
While she’d been a good student before, lately she’d begun to shine. Her teachers noticed her reading while she walked from class to class, and during lunch she was in the library learning shorthand so she could take notes as fast as her teachers talked. At home, she was just as intense. She borrowed books on accounting and took over the bakery’s finances for her parents,effectively becoming a bookkeeper at age fourteen. Sometimes the work took hours after school, but the minute she finished and ate dinner, she went up to the attic to study more.
“Bad enough you’ve got glasses, soon your hair will turn white from studying so hard,” Helen would cry.
“Go outside with your sisters,” Philip encouraged. Neither parent could believe they were telling their child not to study so hard.
“Maybe later,” Marigold would say. “I like my books.”
It was the truth. People were a tangle of moods and wants and emotions, and she was always one thin layer from being swept away into their memories.
Books, though, books were safe. Marigold had a soft spot for fantasies where she could travel beyond her little attic into castle keeps and goblin forests, where assistant pig keepers became high kings and oddball girls like her could train to become enchantresses. Worlds like Prydain, Narnia, and Earthsea, where she could imagine herself fitting in, at least more than here.
It was thanks to books that Marigold didn’t mind being an outsider at school. Things were a bit more complicated, however, for Kenji Yamamoto.
Even in a town as bohemian and free-loving as “Berzerkley,” being Japanese in 1970 was still a thorny existence. Which was why Kenji went out of his way to be American.
Within a month, he shortened his name to Ken. He went around the cafeteria dipping into his endless arsenal of baseball jokes and drawing caricatures of people in his notebook in an effort to charm them. The jocks took him in, the nerds affectionately called him “A-minus Ken,” and everybody else adored him because he volunteered for everything—car wash fundraisers, bake sales, even traffic squad. By February, he wasrunning for class president. One by one he won over everyone in their grade.
Except Marigold.
Because of the proximity of their last names, their lockers were side by side. Most days, she managed to fetch her textbooks without any verbal exchange. She wasn’t allowed to talk to him anyway; Philip had instilled in his daughters his own implacable rancor toward the Japanese. Whenever they so much as passed by a sushi restaurant he invoked the air raid that had murdered his mother and sisters and cousins.
Just her luck, Kenji decided hers was the next vote to collect.
“What’s the skinny on the gloves?” he said, greeting her. “You’re always wearing them. Marjorie?”
That made her look up. “It’s Marigold.”
“I know.” Kenji put on a stupid grin.
“If you know, then why’d you call me Marjorie?”
“It got you to look at me.”
He was right, which irritated her. She swung open her locker door, effectively barricading herself from any more unwanted conversation.
A-minus Ken didn’t take the hint. “Alien or superhero?” he asked.
“What?”
“The gloves. Are you an alien like the Silver Surfer, or a superhero like—”
“Superman?” He was the only superhero she knew. “Neither. I’m a girl.”
“Technically, Superman’s both alien and superhero.” Kenji cleared his throat. “There’s girl superheroes, too.” He reached for the thick stack of comics crowding the top shelf of his locker, holding them out. “Look, Wonder Woman. Invisible Girl, Black Ca—”
Marigold startled. “Invisible what?”
“The Invisible Girl. Have you heard of the Fantastic Four?”
Marigold grabbed the comic, scanning every panel for Susan Storm, aka the Invisible Girl, who could disappear at will.
Disappear at will.Wasn’t that what her mother could do? Or was it something that came upon her involuntarily? Marigold realized she had no idea.
“How did Susan Storm get her power?” she asked.
