Under the Blood-Red Sun Read Online Free Page B

other.
    I started reading my science homework, but my mind kept wandering back to my same old daydream of how it would feel to beat up Keet Wilson. Sometimes I wanted that so bad, just to punch him once, or even just to shove him, if that’s all I could get away with before he smashed me into the dirt. Sometimes it was almost impossible to just swallow trouble the way Papa demanded.
If you make trouble and lose face
, he told me so many times that I heard it in my sleep,
you shame yourself. If you shame yourself, you shame all of us. Be above it, Tomi … that’s the only way
.
    Criminy. He must have been made out of steel.
    We got off near the grocery store at the bottom of the valley and hiked up to where we lived, on a narrow road with big white houses hidden back in the trees. When we passed Keet’s house, Billy and I both glanced up the long, curved driveway. You could see the porch and the glass windows on the first floor, but the top half was hidden in the jungle of trees between the road and the house. Somewhere in there, Mama was mopping the floors or making somebody’s bed.
    Before we got to Billy’s house we headed into the trees, following the dirt path that stumbled through the weeds and jungle to my house in the far corner of the Wilson estate. Keet called it a shack. But Papa said if our house was a shack, then where he grew up back in Japan was a chicken coop.
    When Lucky saw us coming, she dragged herself upand trotted down to meet us, walking stiff-legged and crooked, her belly poking out to the sides. Her tail stood straight up, like a flagpole. She was supposed to be called Rocky, but no one in my family could say that word.
Locky
was the best they could do. So I changed it to Lucky. Anyway, Billy told me she was mostly beagle. But she could have been mostly lizard and it wouldn’t have made any difference to me. Papa found her down by his boat and she was the best present he’d ever given me.
    “Boy, she getting kind of fat,” I said.
    I stopped and bent down to pet her, then looked around the yard. Quiet. Kimi and Grampa were probably up by his chickens.
    Lucky leaned against Billy’s leg, then scratched her belly, her hind leg flying. Billy reached down and rubbed her neck. Lucky yawned, her eyes stretching to slits.
    Billy waited out in the yard with Lucky while I went up the stairs and into the house. In all the years I’d known him, he’d never asked if he could come inside. I guess I could understand that—Mama didn’t encourage it. And I guess I didn’t either. Mama was a very private person.
    But for me it was different. I was kind of embarrassed, mostly about my room. Billy’s room was three times bigger, at least. And when I was at his house, his mother never made me feel anything but welcome. She was a nurse at Queen’s Hospital and wasn’t always home, but when she was, she always asked about Mama and Papa. And even Grampa, sometimes. Then she’d help us find a snack and send us up to Billy’s room where we’d sit around and look at magazines.
    At my house we didn’t even have
one
magazine. All Ihad in my room was Grampa’s tatami mat on the floor and four orange crates me and Grampa shared. We stacked them up and put our clothes in them. And I had a metal bed that was only a mattress on a wire mesh attached to the frame by rusty metal coils that squeaked. It was the only bed in the house. Everyone else slept on the floor, like in Japan.
    Under my bed, wrapped in a silky
furoshiki
scarf and a burlap bag, was Grampa’s treasure—the family
katana
, or samurai sword. He even had an oil cloth neatly folded in a box in the burlap bag, to keep the blade sharp and clean. The
katana
had been in our family for over three hundred years. Grampa wasn’t sure, but he thought someone had been killed by it a long time ago.
    If I ever became worthy, Grampa said, he would pass it down to me. He spent many hours telling me about how important it was, trying to prepare me for the day he