Chapter Three Ren #2
No one is loading it into the underside of the bus with the rest of our luggage.
It’ll be left behind. My fox has gone silent, but my heart races.
None of us have anything but our stuff. We’ve been made thin.
Our houses—even the crappy apartment Mama rented—took up room on lots, just as our desks took up room in classrooms, and our cars, children, pets, and shops took up room on the streets.
That’s gone. We wear only our bodies and the things we carry and the clothes on our backs.
If the bus leaves, the box will be thrown away.
Whatever he is—old, young, who the hell knows—the man will be even thinner.
I inhale sharply. Stand.
“Ren?” Emi asks, alarmed. “What’re you doing?”
“Sit,” Mama commands. She reaches across Emi to grab at my shirt. “Sit.”
Ignoring them, I sidestep into the aisle and move up the bus.
Every step brings me toward the front. There’s a lever by the door.
One pull and the door swishes open. It feels like a portal to another world.
A doorway of sunlight awaits, and cool air beckons me forward, cleansing away the stale bus air. Three more steps. I’m off the bus.
I reach for the box.
“Hey! What are you doing?” Hands come from nowhere.
I’m thrown violently against the unforgiving aluminum siding.
Something gives in my shoulder. I’m yanked away, and there’s a dent in the siding.
I hear Emi’s voice, muffled from inside the bus, cry out.
I try to lift my hands in surrender but my right shoulder hurts so much that I can only raise the left.
Hopefully it’s enough. Guards surround me.
“I’m just getting the box. Whatever we can carry—we were told we can bring whatever we can carry.” I’m reciting their rules back to them. I hate it. I force away the urge to slug the nearest guard, busted shoulder or not.
“No one is allowed off the bus,” a guard blares in my face. Four soldiers gather around me, their shiny shoes ringing me in. “Act like a lunatic and you’ll get yourself shot. We’re trying to keep this calm, sonny.”
My face burns hot, fire raging inside me. I stand completely still, trying not to combust, waiting to see what they’ll do.
“I can arrest you right here,” the guard continues.
That sure as hell gets my attention. If I get separated from Mama and Emi when they need me most, I’ll never forgive myself.
He pauses and glances around. The other families waiting for buses and loitering around are quiet, watching. He points to the bus. “Go on, then.”
I pick up the box with my good arm. Climb back onto the bus.
Uncirculated air reclaims me, and my muscles tremble.
It isn’t with relief. It’s with anger. I swallow hard, forcing myself to breathe.
A man takes the box from me and carries it to the back, where its owner is still unconscious.
I return to my seat next to Emi. My adrenaline starts wearing off, which is when the pain from my shoulder really kicks in.
“Baka!” Mama’s hand reaches around Emi to slap at me. I try not to wince as her palm connects with my shoulder. I’m not successful. It sends her to another level of frenzy. “Stupid boy!”
“Calm down, Mama,” I say stiffly. “I’m fine.”
“Are you all right?” Emi’s voice is thick with worry.
“You’re hurt.” Mama sounds accusatory, like she’s bringing me up on official charges. Her necklaces swing as she half rises in her seat.
“I can take a look,” the nurse says, glancing up from where she and Mr. Nomura are still working by the unconscious man.
“Come here, Ren,” Mr. Nomura commands. His face is stern, but he and the nurse look way too excited that their patient roster is about to double.
“Go!” Mama and Emi chorus together.
“I swear I’m fine.” I’m regretting getting the box.
Not because of the injury or the incident but because of the amount of attention I’m suddenly getting.
I try to slink down on the bench, but my fate is sealed.
Emi and Mama shove me out into the aisle.
Resistance is futile. These two are rarely united, but when they are, they’re formidable as a tank brigade.
I’d take my odds against ten guards over Mama and my sister any day.
The nurse motions me over to the newly founded bus hospital. I slouch up the aisle. When I reach her, she probes my shoulder, and my breath catches. Pain radiates down my arm and up my neck, straight to my brain.
“Dislocated,” the nurse announces.
“Dislocated!” Mama repeats angrily, as though adding it to my charge list. She remains half standing, her necklaces sending a rainbow of colorful shards around the bus as the light prisms through them.
“Don’t worry, woman,” Mr. Nomura chimes in. “We can set it. Take off your shirt, young man.”
The nurse helps me lift my shirt over my head. Despite her gentleness, I bite my lip, stifling a groan. My shoulder is flattened just below my collarbone, forming a sunken step into my arm. Mr. Nomura takes my wrist. The nurse braces me. Damn, I think, this is gonna hurt.
“On the count of three, we pop it back in,” Mr. Nomura barks, sounding like he’s commanding a fleet of soldiers, not one displaced nurse.
Nausea adds another dimension to the pain as Mr. Nomura lifts my wrist. Everyone on the bus is watching, even the baby in the mother’s lap.
I swallow hard, determined not to humiliate myself by throwing up.
Frantically, I look down the aisle for something fixed and sturdy to distract me.
My fox buzzes, pulling my attention to the window. Oh, so you’re alive now?
“One!”
I’m seeking an anchor but find the opposite. A girl, about my age, in a black dress trimmed with some sort of frilly white material stands right in my view outside the bus.
“Two!”
There’s nothing fixed or sturdy about her. In fact, she’s nothing but motion. She’s talking to an older woman, her mother, most likely. The girl’s lips move quickly, along with her hands. A breeze messes with her hair and tugs at the label attached to her dress. She sways slightly.
“Three!”
Suddenly, her gaze cuts toward me just as Mr. Nomura yanks my arm upward.
The shoulder slips neatly back into its joint.
I fall to my knees despite my every effort not to react.
Woozy lightheadedness crashes over me, but I can tell that my shoulder is back where it belongs.
I stagger to my feet, biting my lip, determined to look unaffected but likely failing.
Immediately, I glance back out the window, searching for the girl.
She’s gone.
The unconscious man lurches upright with a wordless cry, commanding our attention, even as I keep looking out the window, hoping pathetically that the girl will reappear. She doesn’t.
“Say, you okay, old-timer?” Mr. Nomura asks. “Take it easy.”
“Old-timer?” the man says. Scorn drips from his voice, which doesn’t sound aged whatsoever. At least not to me. “You insult me. I’m eternally in the full blossom of youth.”
Mr. Nomura and the nurse glance at each other and shake their heads.
“Get some rest,” the nurse says in a soothing voice, and she mouths dementia to Mr. Nomura, who gravely nods.
Using two hands, the man gathers his hair up into a topknot.
The underside of his head is shaved close enough to show the whiteness of his skull.
He binds his hair at the crown with practiced ease, folding one half under the other.
It’s a chonmage, an ancestral style. An intricate, long gold earring hangs from one ear.
I make my way to my seat and look back, eyeing him suspiciously. Then I realize my fox is basically as dead as a doornail again. I realize what the difference is. My fox is often silent. This goes way beyond that. It’s…playing dead? Like a possum?
It’s hiding.
I frown and stare at the man.
In a way, he does seem to be in the…what did he say?
Full blossom of youth? His hair is black as night, without a single thread of gray, and his skin doesn’t have a single wrinkle or crease.
Strangely, the idea of age doesn’t seem to apply to him.
It feels as though I’m trying to gauge the age of the sun, something ancient yet burning as bright today as it did eons ago.
He isn’t human. The ridiculous thought blazes in my mind.
His eyes meet mine and the pupils narrow into vertical slits like a predator. Something tells me to stay still, to not reveal my fox pendant.
Because, for whatever reason, my fox doesn’t want the man to know it exists.
An antsy feeling settles over me, along with a sense of irony.
I thought getting the box was dangerous because it pissed off the guards.
But maybe it was dangerous because now that I’ve crossed paths with this guy I’m on his radar.
When I steal another look at him, he’s still staring at me. I almost shudder.
I face forward, slumping down a little in my seat, and try to block him out. A hazy cloud of pain settles over me, and I feel myself slipping into a daze. Still, even as my thoughts grow fuzzy, I know his eyes are on me.