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“Who are you?” Tomo asked Jared.
“This is Tomo,” Kami said, even though Jared knew this, just so she could add, “It’s been seven years since the evil fairies sent him to us as a curse. We’re still not sure what we did to offend them. And this is Ten. He is ten, and yes, we know how horrible that is. We are going to throw the biggest birthday party for him the Vale has ever seen when he turns eleven.”
“How many months to go?” Jared asked.
Shy Ten gathered his courage in both hands and replied in a tiny voice: “Nine months.”
“That’s rough, buddy,” said Jared.
Ten went limp with relief. He shrugged his shoulders and bent his head back over his book.
“What are you doing here?” Tomo wanted to know. “I’ve never seen you before! Do you know any Snoopy songs?”
“Uh, no,” said Jared. “Sorry.”
“Stop bothering my guest,” Kami ordered.
“If I do …,” Tomo began his bargain. “If I do. Can I have four glasses of lemonade?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you drank four glasses of lemonade, you would explode,” Kami said. “Dad would come downstairs and ask, ‘Where is my youngest born?’ and I could only point to the floor, where all that remained of you would be a pool of lemonade and a heap of sweetened entrails. You can have one glass of lemonade.”
Tomo gave a cheer and leaped from the sofa, heading for the kitchen at top speed.
Kami sighed. “The current theory is that he is a lemonade vampire. C’mon.”
“Nice to meet you,” Jared said awkwardly to Ten, who went red and muttered something into the pages of his book.
“He likes you,” Kami commented.
“Oh yeah,” said Jared. “I could tell.”
“He once hid under the sofa from a cocker spaniel,” Kami said. “You’re doing fine.” She opened the door to the kitchen, and once more it was like seeing familiar things for the first time, wondering what Jared thought of them: the red stone tiles that were worn orange in places, the swags of dried herbs swinging over the wide wooden counter, the round table and the fat green sofa strategically placed in the square of sunlight that came through the window. And, of course, her brother doing what appeared to be a mystical lemonade dance.
Strangers said Tomo looked like Dad, although Dad’s black hair stood up straight as a brush and he had cheekbones that could cut glass, while Tomo had a black silky cap of hair with a face as round as a dish. They looked nothing alike, except that they both looked Japanese. Ten did not look even slightly Japanese, and Kami was the only one who looked like a mix of both, like she wouldn’t quite fit in on either side of her family.
Kami stood on her tiptoes to get the high cupboard open. The lemonade was kept in the highest place they had. Keeping it in the fridge had resulted in finding Tomo curled on the floor in sugar delirium, clutching an empty bottle, one too many times.
“Here,” Jared murmured. He reached up and took down the lemonade.
Kami glanced around and saw the way he’d leaned, angled so his body would not brush hers. “Thanks,” she murmured back, and went to grab glasses.
“You are a tall person!” Tomo announced approvingly, pausing mid-dance. “How did you get that scar on your face?”
“Tomo!” Kami said.
“Broken bottle,” Jared told him curtly.
“I’m sorry,” Kami said, once Tomo had pranced off with his glass of lemonade.
Kami, it’s fine, said Jared. He looked especially tall in her kitchen, big and edgy and out of place here as he had not been in the woods. “I thought I made all of this u
p,” said Jared, very quietly.
Kami heard what he left unspoken, the things people had said to him: Creating a fantasy life to compensate for the situation at home, not able to deal with reality, some faraway ideal of what he imagines a home is like. Not real. Not real.
