Spirits of the Noh (7 page)

At length, he seemed to decide on another question, and Kara froze.
No
, she thought.
Don’t do it. Don’t ask
.

“Have you ever seen anything strange at this school, Miss Harper?” Mr. Yamato asked.

Kara glanced at her father, saw how intently he was studying her, and wondered what he must be thinking and if the principal had already explained to him what wild things Mai had accused her of being a part of.

“I don’t understand,” she lied, turning back to Mr. Yamato, no longer feeling an ounce of guilt. This was about protecting herself and her father and her friends. “How do you mean ‘strange,’ sir?”

The man opened his desk drawer and slid out a thick sheaf of paper that had been clipped together. Kara didn’t have to ask what it was. The rich, dark colors of the first page of her and Sakura’s manga stood out on top.

“I asked Aritomo-sensei for a copy of this manga you have done with Sakura Murakami.”

Kara nodded, hoping her totally freaked-out, you’ve-gotta-be-kidding me smile would come off as sheer enthusiasm.

“
Kyuketsuki
. Yes, sir?”

Mr. Yamato hesitated. He swallowed, contemplating, and glanced at her father, which made Kara realize that the principal might have told him some of what Mai had said, but not all of it.

“Miss Genji claims that you and Miss Murakami based your manga on real events that took place here, at this school, several months ago.”

Rob Harper apparently couldn’t help himself, for he scoffed a little, then tried to cover by pretending to be clearing his throat.

Kara reached up to tuck a loose strand of her blond hair behind one ear. She’d been in a hurry this morning, and hadn’t gotten the elastic quite right for her ponytail. For some reason, her sailor fuku uniform itched awfully today.

“That’s true,” she said.

Mr. Yamato’s serenity broke then. Astonishment was the first real expression she’d ever seen on his face.

“What?” he demanded.

“We weren’t trying to do anything in poor taste,” Kara said quickly. “But when those students died during the last term, and then we ran across the old Noh story about Kyuketsuki, we sort of had an inspiration. I think it really helped Sakura to draw the story, too. After her sister was murdered, she had been having a really hard time, and doing the manga was …”

Kara glanced at her confused father and switched to English. “Dad, what’s the Japanese word for
therapeutic
?”

Rob Harper supplied something Kara only barely caught. Her mind was awhirl as she spun out this alternate version of the truth. None of it was really a lie except for her pretending not to know what Mai was talking about. She had also committed major sins of omission, but she was on solid ground now. These were lies she and Sakura had told before.

“Aritomo-sensei made sure we were very careful to follow the original Noh play,” Kara went on. “The manga is very faithful.”

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Yamato said. “But it isn’t …”

He let the question trail off, looking at a loss. Kara felt sure he had been about to say
real
. But how could he ask that question without implying that he believed such things were possible, and that Mai’s story was something more than either delusion or spite toward a rival. After the odd deaths in the spring, he might well believe—no matter how he conspired with the police to explain the unexplainable—but he did not dare admit it.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Kara said. “It isn’t what?”

Mr. Yamato took off his glasses and tiredly massaged the bridge of his nose. He set the glasses on his desk and waved the question away.

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” he said, standing. He nodded to her. “You’re dismissed, Miss Harper.” The principal turned to her father. “Thank you, Harper-sensei.”

Mai didn’t attend classes that day. When Sora—the cute guy with nice eyes who sat to her right—got up to do
toban
, taking attendance, Mr. Sato did not address the silence that followed the calling of Mai’s name. Sora exchanged a glance with the girl who sat in front of Kara—also, and confusingly, named Sora. Kara had often thought that if the two of them ever dated, their lives would be chaos.

As with Daisuke’s disappearance, everyone already seemed to know about Wakana going missing the night before. In the breaks between classes, Kara overheard their mutterings and realized that in some ways, rather than making them more anxious, Wakana’s vanishing had soothed the fears of many of her classmates. The two missing kids had been, if not boyfriend and girlfriend, at least “together.” With Wakana now gone, it seemed much easier to accept that they had run away together, though no one could supply anything that sounded like a reasonable explanation as to why they might want to do so.

Kara herself said little about it, except to Miho, to whom she spoke softly during each break, telling the tale of her morning meeting with Mr. Yamato in pieces. It wasn’t until lunch that they were able to discuss it at length. They retreated to a corner of the room, back by the lockers, having barely picked at the lunch in their bento boxes. Even then, they had to whisper much of their conversation. It had not occurred to Kara that Mr. Yamato might actually believe any of what Mai had told him, that the deaths caused by the ketsuki in the spring might have been mysterious enough to force him to consider a supernatural cause. Now that this seemed to be the case, should they bring what they knew to the principal?

“We have to talk to Sakura and Hachiro about it,” Miho told her, glancing around to see that no one was close enough to eavesdrop. “But I don’t know why you would want to discuss it with Yamato-sensei now. If there is no sign of anything … strange, then why should we bring it up at all?”

Kara let out a breath, nodding. “You’re right. I guess I just hate carrying this around like it’s some big secret.” A frown creased her brow as she thought of her father the previous night, telling Miss Aritomo that he was falling in love with her. “Secrets only end up hurting people eventually, and I don’t want it to hurt us.”

Miho paused in the midst of unfastening a clip in her hair. She drew it out and let her hair fall in a curtain across her face, then stared at Kara, one eye entirely hidden.

“This isn’t just about the curse, or about Yamato-sensei, is it?” Miho asked. “What’s wrong?”

Kara nearly told her right then, but though no one seemed to be listening, she did not feel comfortable talking about her father’s love life where any of his students might overhear.

“I’ll tell you about it later,” she said in English. “Just stuff with my dad.”

The look on Miho’s face made Kara wince inwardly. She assumed that Sakura and Hachiro would react the same way. Kara had always had such a good relationship with her father, and her anger obviously came as a surprise, especially since Miho and Sakura seemed to look at her and her father as proof that parents and their kids could actually
like
each other.

Once again, Miss Aritomo canceled the post-Noh club meeting. Apparently, progress had been made on the set by the club members, and the performers were still practicing on their own, as they were intended to. But the volunteers were told that they wouldn’t be needed until the following Tuesday, which was just fine with Kara. She had been doing her homework later and later, and wanted to get an early start. More than that, however, she just wanted a little time for herself, when she didn’t have to think about classes or curses or her father’s feelings for her art teacher.

During o-soji, Kara and Miho had talked to Hachiro and Sakura, but the two of them had only echoed the conversation they’d had earlier. Still, as she walked the short distance home from school, Kara could not prevent curiosity from tickling at the back of her mind. Why had Daisuke and Wakana run away, and where had they gone? Where could a pair of high school kids go in Japan, without a bundle of cash, where they wouldn’t be reported or discovered? The mountains? Could they have gone camping? Were they holed up in some seedy Miyazu City hotel?

Either way, their situation would turn ugly soon enough. They’d run out of money, and roughing it would lose its appeal fast. Kara’s friend Paige Traficante had run away for three days freshman year to escape her parents’ constant alcohol-fueled battles, but even that had not been enough to keep Paige away when her money ran out. Prostitution and drugs had seemed like things that only happened to runaways who weren’t smart about their plans, and it had turned out that Paige had not been as smart as she believed.

Daisuke and Wakana would be back.

Unless, of course, something bad happened to them. With runaways, it was always a risk. Walking home in the fading heat of the August day, Kara shuddered a little, but didn’t allow herself to consider what other dangers the runaways might face in Miyazu City. A chill rippled up her spine but she ignored it, and told herself she had nothing to be afraid of.

Still, she shifted her backpack from one shoulder to the other and picked up her pace, and in another minute she reached her front door. In that afternoon time of long shadows, with evening not far off, the windows seemed very dark. It would be a little while yet before her father came home, and Kara felt a tightness in her chest as she let herself in, turned on a lamp in spite of the soft light coming through the windows, and locked the door behind her.

For a moment, she considered making dinner, but there were no messages on the answering machine, and her father hadn’t called her cell phone to say he would be late. If he hadn’t asked, she wasn’t about to volunteer. Instead, she retreated to her bedroom, and her guitar.

As she picked out the first few chords of a song, the tension she’d been feeling since her father had woken her that morning began to ease away at last. Her muscles relaxed, and soon she lost herself in the song, opening her mouth to sing.

Halfway through, she heard the front door open and her fingers faltered on the strings, making a discordant jangle that she cut off with the flat of her hand. The rush of anger that came up from within felt unexpected, but a moment later she realized she should not have been surprised. Amid the anxiety about Kyuketsuki’s curse and the numb shock that came with lying to the principal’s face, the real source of her anger had been simmering since the night before.

A soft knock came at her bedroom door. Last night, she hadn’t answered. Now she sat up, rigid on the edge of her bed.

“Come in.”

Her father opened the door and poked his head in. He looked wiped out, even a little pale.

“Hey,” he said. “You doing all right?”

Kara held the guitar tightly, silenced. “Fine.”

“You ready for dinner?”

“I’m not very hungry, actually.”

That stopped him. He frowned, apparently trying to sort out what to say next. “That song sounded really pretty. Why did you stop?”

Kara could not think of a reply, so instead she let her fingers begin to drift over the guitar’s strings again, picking up the song roughly where she left off, but she didn’t sing. She hung her head, tuning him out and the song in.

“I know we need to talk,” her father said, stepping farther into the room. And why the hell was he doing that, when she’d made it so obvious that she wanted him to leave? “I figured it could wait until dinner, but maybe it can’t.”

Kara looked up at him. “Can’t what?”

“Wait.”

She kept playing, the haunting tune soft, lyrics in her mind if not on her lips. She hated girls who got all drama queen over something minor like this, but couldn’t help herself.

It isn’t minor
, she told herself.

“Kara,” her father said. “Look, you need to talk to me. Nobody in the world knows you like I do. This morning, in Yamato-sensei’s office … I know you were hiding something. You weren’t telling him everything, and that scares me. Not to mention it puts me in a situation that could get really awkward. I’m not saying you’ve done anything wrong, except for not telling him whatever it is you know—”

Her hands fumbled a discordant note and she turned to stare at him.

“Are you kidding me, Dad? Seriously?” Kara shook her head. “You could have prepared me better for this morning. You could have warned me. When we were in there, you could’ve taken my goddamn
side
! I haven’t done anything wrong, not that you even care about that, and you just let him interrogate me like that?”

Her father stared at her like she was a stranger. He cocked his head.

“I did take your side, if you recall. And Yamato-sensei called me on it. I don’t know what this is really about, Kara, but you can’t distract me from the fact that you’re hiding something by lashing out.”

Kara stood up, swung her guitar around to hang across her back from its strap, and turned to face him.

“Oh,
I’m
hiding something? I guess that means I’m the one who promised we’d start over together, that we’d be a team. Wait, no, I don’t think that was me after all. Just like it isn’t me telling the first woman to come along that he’s in love with her, but not letting his daughter in on that little detail. So much for the team supreme!”

Her father flinched. “That’s what this is about?”

Kara grabbed her keys and cell phone off her bureau, stalked toward him, and faced off with her father at the threshold to her room.

“Remember what you said, Dad? You said we were doing this for Mom as much as we were for us.” She gritted her teeth to keep from crying, hating the uncontrollable emotions surging up inside her but unable to put the brakes on. “So much for that!”

She started toward him and her father stepped aside, then seemed to think better of it and pursued her down the short hall and across the living room toward the front door.

“Kara, stop. You’re not going anywhere,” he said, voice stern.

At the door she turned, guitar still hanging across her back. “I need some me time, Dad. But you’re all
about
the me time lately, so I’m sure you understand. I’m going to go find a quiet place to sit and play my guitar.”

“I’m not sure it’s safe,” he said. “I don’t want you out after dark, Kara. Those kids—”