Girl Fights Back (Go No Sen) (Emily Kane Adventures) (9 page)

It was getting colder as she
climbed down from the rock. She got the pack off the bike, hoisted it on her
back and made her way through the forest toward the main buildings. In the
depths of the forest, away from the beaten path, she heard the whirring of a
camera motor panning. Were they still running? Was anyone watching at the other
end? She had reacted instinctively. It hadn’t picked her up she thought. But
she would have to be alert. At the edge of the woods, she could see the north
lawn well before she cleared the cover of the trees. She sat in the underbrush
and scanned the area. There were new cameras in the trees, and they were
definitely operating. She spotted four of them, all placed so as to scan the
grounds away from the buildings. There were probably a couple more on the other
side of the house watching the main gate and the front drive. But they didn’t
seem to be set to cover the buildings themselves. If she could slip past them,
she could move about the garage freely.

Once inside, she went to the attic
and brought down two large duffles. She put all the socks and underwear she had
in one, as well as whatever she could find of her shirts, pants and shoes. But
then she went down to the basement passageway and made her way to the storage
closet under the main house, hoping the fire hadn’t gotten all the way down
there. It was dark, and she couldn’t risk a flashlight. There was no power in
the upper basement. The floor boards had been partially burned away over the
rec room, but everything else seemed to be intact. No significant smoke damage.
In the store room, everything had been turned out of drawers and boxes and
strewn across the floor. She was looking for Michael’s wife’s clothes. She
wouldn’t have taken her fall and winter clothes to Naxos. Emily wondered about
wearing her mother’s clothes, but they would never fit her. Yuki was a full
four inches shorter, and at least twenty pounds lighter. Andie was about her
height with a similar build. Emily was probably slimmer, because she was so
much more physically active, but that wouldn’t matter much. The important thing
was that Andie had a completely different style. Lots of long elegant things,
form fitting pants, and loads of really nice shoes.

Emily grabbed whatever she could
find and stuffed it into the duffle bags. She paused over a box of underwear.
Andie had really nice stuff! It was silky soft and smooth, totally unlike
anything she would ever think to wear. She grabbed a fistful, and then another:
bras, panties, shirts, stockings, whatever. Just as she was about to go, she
noticed a turquoise wig. She grabbed it too, stuffed everything in the duffle
and made her way back through the passageway to the garage. Her dad kept a
pickup truck at the far end. She tossed the duffles in the back, as well as her
dad’s sleeping bag and a two person tent. She went back up to the apartment and
collected her school things and the keys to the truck. Her dad kept the papers
for all the vehicles in a cabinet in the garage. It had been rifled through,
but apparently was not of any interest to anyone except her. She took all the
paperwork for the truck and the motorcycle and stuffed it in the glove box.
Last of all, she got a screwdriver and removed the license plate from the back
of the truck. She didn’t know if this was a useful precaution. They may have
already gotten all this information already. But on the off chance they hadn’t
bothered, she saw no reason to let the cameras pick up the plate number as she
was leaving.

The far garage door slid up with a
minimum of clatter. The truck was heavy, but not too heavy for her to push, and
the slight slope of the driveway would be in her favor. She didn’t want to
alert anyone who might be watching until the last possible second. She paused a
moment for the moon to pass behind a cloud. Everything grew much darker. One
last heave got the truck rolling again and she jumped into the driver seat.
With the ignition in the on position, she pulled the side mirror flush to the
side of the truck and steered down the drive. So far she saw no obvious signs
that an alarm had been triggered. The gate was closed, and probably locked.
Either way, she didn’t want to risk stopping to open it. She knew a spot about
twenty yards to the right of the gate where the hedge was thinner, no trunks,
just small branches. It might just be wide enough for the truck to squeeze
through. She eased the shifter into second gear, gave the gas pedal a tap and
pulled back sharply on the clutch pedal. The engine lurched and then sprang to
life. She turned off the pavement, put the gas pedal to the floor and plowed
through the hedge. Branches snapped and screeched along the side of the truck,
but she crashed through with no significant damage. There didn’t seem to be
anybody waiting on the street side. She turned right and sped off without
headlights.

She found her way around to the
south end of the estate, far from the lawns, just thick woods and a stream
culvert running under the road at this spot. It took only a moment to pull the
truck off the road and out of sight. She entered the forest at a dead run,
following the stream bed for a little over a mile, which led her directly to
the base of Promontory Rock. A quick kick-start and the dirt bike sputtered
back to life, and carried her down the stream bed back to the truck. The bike was
a little too heavy for her to lift by herself, so she backed the truck up
against the embankment and let the tailgate be her ramp. She secured it on its
side in the bed.

Emily Hsiao spent the night in a
motel in Warm Springs, having paid in cash. After a moment’s hesitation leaning
on the bathroom sink, she worked up the nerve to cut her hair. Shoulder length,
just long enough to be able still to gather it into a pony tail, but short
enough to wear it loose without much annoyance. As she looked at the pile of
black hair on the bathroom floor she thought of Yuki. Her mother would cry to
see it. It was about eighteen inches worth of hair, all jet black and perfectly
straight. Then she thought of what her father had said about how these people
might be looking for a gene mutation
in
her
. She swept up all the hair and
put it in the dumpster behind the building.

She woke up Tuesday morning,
rummaged through the duffle bags and put on some of Andie’s clothes. Just some
cotton pants, a white cotton blouse and some light shoes. She barely noticed
how they looked, but she was amazed by how they felt. The shoes were so light
and comfortable, so unlike the sneakers or hiking boots she usually wore. The
pants and blouse felt like half the weight of the blue jeans or cargo pants and
t-shirts or sweat shirts she used to favor. The most striking thing, however,
was the bra. She’d been wearing only sports bras for years, and this felt so
much better. Andie had really great clothes!

She ate the
continental breakfast in the lobby, loaded all her stuff into the truck and
went to school.

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Chapter 8:
School Days

Back in school, everything was
normal, disturbingly normal. She’d only missed a day of school. She forged a
note from her father to the effect that she had to miss school on Monday
because of a family emergency over the weekend. It was sort of true. No
extraordinary official notice was taken of her absence. Just another bit of
ordinary school business. Bells rang, teachers yelled, kids shuffled from
classroom to classroom, lockers opened and closed, big kids picked on little
kids, everyone ate lunch. This was perhaps the most momentous weekend of her
life. Earth-shattering events had shaken her to the very core of her being. She
had emerged on the other side intact, whole, with new enemies of frightening
dimensions, but also a new sense of her own identity, and stronger than she had
ever felt before.

And no one seemed to notice. The
girls who resented her, still resented her. But they were looking at her
differently. In fact, they were staring.

“Whoa! You look different,” she
heard Danny exclaim as she stood at her locker. She looked at him in puzzled
silence. He looked like he was afraid he had offended her. She hadn’t ever
invited him to talk to her like she was a girl before. Had he crossed a line?
Should she call him on it? “Best to blunder on,” he must have concluded.

“No, I mean you look fantastic,” he
tried again.

She blushed a little. He didn’t
notice. She realized he was looking at the new her, at Michiko. An odd feeling
rushed over her. She enjoyed his attention. His gaze felt to her like an
appropriate analog to the way it felt to wear Andie’s clothes. She recovered
herself.

“You know, I just felt like making
a change,” she ventured nonchalantly. She hoped he would believe her show of
indifference. He seemed to.

“Your hair looks cool. You goin’ to
the dojo after school?”

She hesitated. It was strange
enough hiding in the ordinariness of school. But at the dojo, she might have to
tell something of what happened to Sensei, and she wasn’t certain she was ready
to do that. What could she tell him, after all? The facts were so extravagant
as to seem preposterous. As soon as she tried to imagine herself describing the
events to him, she couldn’t help seeing how absurd it all sounded even to her.
And she had been there, seen it all!

“I dunno. Maybe. See ya later,
okay?” She turned away and walked to her next class. “I like your shoes, by the
way,” he called after her. She smiled. Maybe he wasn’t so hopeless after all.

At lunch, she had to go through the
line. There hadn’t been any time to prepare something to bring with her from
the motel. She was beginning to see all sorts of domestic tasks that were about
to devolve to her: meals, laundry, driving, shopping, etc. No one else in
Virginia would or could do them for her. She could see that a motel was not an
adequate solution. Neither was camping in the woods. She needed to find a
regular abode.

She got the rice and succotash,
refried beans and a cheese enchilada. It was an uninspiring meal, to say the
least. Usually she brought a bento box from home, something Yuki cooked up for
her. Rice and curried lentils, maybe, or tofu, some pickled ginger on the side,
maybe some
daikon
, or some
kim
chee
.
It was all very strongly flavored, and probably a lot healthier. At least, it
was a lot less greasy than the repast that lay before her today.

She sat alone at a table in the
corner and looked down at her tray. She ate the rice and beans, and idly poked
at the enchilada with her fork. Danny came and sat at her table a moment later.
He usually sat with her at lunch these last few weeks. No one else had the
temerity to approach her on most days. If it was raining and the patio was
unusable, it would be more crowded and other kids would have to squeeze in at
her table. But today, for some reason, Billy Codrow plumped down across from
her, and Wayne Turley came in right behind him. She knew them all from the
dojo. But Billy and Wayne had never sat with her before.

“Hey, Em. Nice look. It’s like a
whole new you,” Billy offered. He wasn’t certain how it would be received. But
she smiled at him graciously. Billy was also on the football team, one of the
cornerbacks on defense. He wasn’t very big as football players go, not even
much taller than her. But he was very speedy, and quite agile. In the dojo, he
was only a mediocre student. His legs weren’t very limber, so he did everything
quite stiffly compared to the rest of the class. As a result, he ended up focusing
too much on the strength and speed exercises, since these came easiest to him.
His dad was a dentist and his mom managed the office for him. They were pretty
well off.

“Thanks, I’m trying something new,”
she replied graciously.

“Mrmmph,” grunted Wayne as he tried
to stuff two tacos in his mouth at once.

“Whajya say?” asked Danny.

“You using that pudding?” Wayne
demanded.

“What the hell, man. I was savin’
that,” Danny shot back, half in jest.

“It’s goddam tapioca. You hate
that. And it came with your pizza for free,” Wayne roared. “Give it here.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever.” Danny slid
it across the table. Wayne made as if to devour it in one huge gulp. Then he
shifted rhetorical gears and pretended to savor each tiny spoonful he took,
pinky pointing skyward. “Exquisite. Velvet lumps, good nose, vanilla aroma with
just a hint of cinnamon,” Wayne diagnosed. “Savorous!”

They all laughed. Even Emily. She
had never really paid any attention to what boys said to each other before. Her
previous experience, narrow as it was, had led her to believe they never said
anything worth listening to. But here she was laughing along with these three.
They were probably her closest friends, and she felt she hardly knew them. Of
course, they were totally captivated by this new Emily. Until now, she had
always been an intimidating figure for them, even a little scary. She was
friendly enough, but her conversation was always very clipped, measured. They
never felt close to her. But here she was, sitting with them, laughing at their
jokes, and beautiful. Every other guy in the cafeteria was staring at their
table and wondering why she was sitting with them. At least that’s how it must
have felt to them.

Wayne was a large, chubby kid.
Probably six foot six, and over two hundred fifty pounds. He wasn’t very fast
and didn’t have much stamina. But he always seemed to be a little more limber
than people expected him to be. And his katas were among the best in the class.
He was really good at all the precision aspects of
shotokan
. When he first started coming to the dojo he was
enormously overweight. He’d been at it for about a year and a half now and had
probably lost some sixty or seventy pounds. As he lost weight and his stamina
improved, the other kids began to realize he was really strong, too. His
nickname in the dojo was the Rock.