Xander and the Lost Island of Monsters (5 page)

Peyton stood up as if pulled by a wire in the ceiling. “I'm all finished, sir.”

Yes, Peyton calls his dad “sir.”

Peyton's dad glanced sideways at me, and I felt a blush spread over my face.
Little ne'er-do-well
.
Not even in GATE.
I'd never forget that as long as I lived. I wanted to run out of there, but I couldn't abandon Peyton.

Mr. Phasis pulled back the quilt and blanket and inspected the sheet. He took a quarter out of his pocket and threw it down on the bed. Peyton and I held our breaths. It bounced up, high. Mr. Phasis smiled and clapped his son on the back. “Finally. This is how a bed should look. I knew you could do it, son. Like I say, all you have to do is put your mind to something. Not give up. Not cry about it.”

I sighed inside. Great. He was getting ready for a good long lecture.

Peyton opened his mouth. “Xander actually…”

Helped.
He was about to say
helped.
“I've got to go,” I said quickly. “Peyton really did a good job on that bed, huh, Mr. P?”

Peyton closed his mouth and shot me a grateful look.

Mr. Phasis's face relaxed into a real smile for once. “Peyton, I think you've earned a couple of hours of R and R. You can stay, Xander.” He turned and left the room.

Anyway, that's why I can't let Mr. Phasis find out that Peyton is ditching practice today. Especially not to spend time with me.

Peyton tips the bag of Cheetos into his mouth and we walk up to my house. It sits on top of a hill, set back a half acre from the road. Behind us is the Laguna mountain range, rolling hills of pine stretching out like a sea of trees. Above it is a sky so blue that I've mistaken it for ocean. We're about forty minutes outside of the actual city of San Diego, and one of the few places in the county that actually has seasons—and snow.

There isn't very much to the town of Oak Grove, which suits some people, like my grandmother, just fine. Me, not so much. It's boring to have to visit the same three places over and over again (school, library, convenience store). There's no movie theater or bowling alley or anything like that. There are two churches, where most social events take place, but we only go on major holidays. And besides, Lovey goes to our church, too, and I'd rather not have to see her in youth group on top of seeing her at school.

Peyton pokes my shoulder and points at my house. Up in the living room window, I see my
obāchan
watching us. Her X-ray trouble-sensing vision can probably read the note crumpled in my pocket. Shoot. “There she is,” I say under my breath. “Maybe if I ignore her she'll go away.”

Peyton and I pause and eat the last of the Cheeto crumbs. The bright orange powder makes my lips sting. “I have my laptop.” Peyton pats his bag. “We can play
CraftWorlds
.”

“You mean we can take turns watching each other play.” My dad's a laptop hog. I hardly ever get to play on it.

“It's better than nothing.” Peyton starts walking up the hill.

My grandmother bangs on the window with her palm, gestures
Hurry up
.

“Think she knows?” Peyton asks.

I shrug. “Yeah.” My stomach flutters, but I'm ready to meet my doom. Knowing Obāchan, she'll use it as an excuse to make me stay inside.

We walk up the steep driveway, past the many plastic jugs of water Obāchan stores by the garage, next to the black trash cans crammed with canned food and medicine.

My grandmother's what they call a “prepper.” If she could, she'd build us an underground bunker. She says the world's going to end soon. “Look at the climate change. The earthquakes. The floods. The wars and evilness,” she says. “It's coming.”

She's been saying this since I was four, when she left Japan to come live with us.

Not that I mind her, most of the time. She's a really good cook, and she makes sure I have clean clothes and stuff like that. My dad, the absentminded professor, forgets to bathe half the time. I'd definitely be dead by now if it wasn't for Obāchan.

I don't know how old she is. Her face is still pretty smooth, but her back has a hump in it. She usually says, “Somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred.” Then she tells me it's impolite to ask ladies their age.

I open the door.
“Tadaima!”
I yell, though I know my grandma's standing right there. We always say this. It means
I'm home!

“Okaeri,”
my grandmother replies. This sounds like “oh-kai-ree” and means
Welcome back
. Obāchan closes the door behind us. “Get inside. Bad weather coming.”

I glance out the window at the clear sky. The rain's long gone. “Um, okay, Obāchan.”

She locks the door. Double dead bolts. Like anybody's going to bother coming up this steep hill to steal our bottled water.

We kick off our shoes, sliding them to the side of the door. Going shoeless in the house is one of the habits we have that others sometimes find strange. It's Japanese.

“Peyton can eat dinner with us,” Obāchan says. “As long as he doesn't complain about my cooking.”

“He did that
once
. We were
four
.” My grandmother will never let Peyton live that down. “To be fair, you made tofurkey.” Tofu-shaped and flavored to taste like turkey that she'd cooked as long as a real turkey. I know some people eat it, but my grandmother made up her own recipe and it was capital-
A
Awful. It tasted like a post-Thanksgiving burp mixed with glue.

“I promise I won't. Thanks for inviting me,” Peyton says politely. He takes off his baseball cap before she can remind him to. Obāchan is old-school: gentlemen remove their hats when they come indoors.

She smiles up at him, pats his shoulder. “Good boy.” She looks at me. “Your father wants to talk to you. He's in his office.” Obāchan disappears into the kitchen.

Great. If anybody's seen an e-mail from Mr. Stedman, it's Dad, since he's been sitting in front of his computer. We go upstairs. Peyton walks ahead to my room. “Good luck,” he says.

“I need it.” I don't even know what I should say. Yeah, I was mad at Lovey. Yeah, I did laugh. But I honestly don't remember making the drawing. Maybe I need a brain scan. Maybe I'm losing my mind.

This isn't going to go over well with Dad. I'd overheard him talking about me to Obāchan just last night. “I'm worried about Xander,” Dad had said in a low voice, in the kitchen, where they think I can't hear them. “He's not working up to his potential.”

“It's because his mother left,” Obāchan said in an even lower voice. “You were never like that.”

“She couldn't help what she did,” Dad said sharply. “You know that.”

Obāchan changed the subject. She and Dad always did when someone brought up my mother. She sputtered out a long breath. “Xander is just a daydreamer. He's young. He's not you. Give him time.”

Dad had sighed. “That might not be an option.”

After that I didn't want to listen anymore.

Now Dad sits behind his beat-up metal desk, tapping away on his laptop. Books are bursting out of the shelves. His office is cluttered, but Dad claims to know where everything is.

Near Dad's feet, our dog, Inu, sees me first and thumps his baseball-bat-size tail.
Inu
means
dog
in Japanese, so yes, we have a dog named Dog. He's a big goldendoodle with maybe some Great Dane mixed in, because he's pretty huge. One hundred-and-forty pounds. Weighs about sixty pounds more than I do. He's got soft, curly golden hair all over, and I can't remember ever not having him around.
Woof
, he says in his deep voice. A doggie hello. He lumbers over, his black lips seeming to smile. Some slobber drips off his beard onto my shoe. “Eww, Inu!” I say, but I don't mind. That's just him. He whines softly, wanting attention. His head comes up to my hip. I rub him between the eyes, the way he likes. He wags his tail madly, wiggling his entire body and sending a few of Dad's papers flying. Inu always greets me like I've been away for a hundred years, even if I've just gone to the bathroom.

I flop into the ancient leather easy chair and brace myself. I really hate the expression Dad has when I do something wrong. Sad, like that one football kicker who lost the Super Bowl because he missed. Dad looks like that every time he sees my report card.

His blue eyes focus on me from behind thick glasses. With his long silver-gray ponytail, he looks like a Japanese hippie. But his body is wiry and as strong as iron from hours of hiking and rock-climbing. “Xander-chan, how was school?” He folds his sinewy brown hands—like tree roots—in front of him.

“Fine.” I'm not going to give him any extra information. I pick up a thick leather-bound journal and flip through it. It's filled with Japanese handwriting I can't read, and some rough illustrations of fairy-tale monsters. I'm used to finding stuff like this in his office. He's the professor of folklore at a local college. It's hard to believe somebody can make a living by talking about made-up things. Maybe I can get his job when I grow up. “We're on break now.”

“Oh, that's right. I forgot. Well, now that you have some extra time”—he opens his desk drawer and takes out a comic book—“maybe you'd like to read this. Do you know the Momotaro story?”

“Yeah. The peach boy.” He hands me the comic, and I check it out. It looks kind of familiar. Maybe I saw this when I was little. It's an old fairy tale about a little boy some old people find in, well, a peach. He grows up and goes to fight some demons. “Isn't that for little kids?”

“Not this one.” Dad stares at me, the way he does when he asks me a math question he expects me to know the answer to. I don't know what he's trying to see.

Feeling uncomfortable under his gaze, I fiddle with the framed photo of my mom that he keeps on his desk. In it she's holding me, baby Xander. My mom's red-blond hair poofs around her freckled milk-white face. I remember yanking on her hair when she carried me, because I liked the color. She would grab my hand and say, “Be gentle, Xander,” in a soft voice. I don't think she was ever mad at me, come to think of it.

Then why did she leave?

Dad gently removes the frame from my grasp. “You don't have to read it if you don't want to,” he says softly.

I shrug. “Maybe I'll read it.” I say it just to make him happy. I probably won't have time.

Inu stands up and barks at the window like crazy. There must be a rabbit or something outside.

“Inu, shush,” Dad says, and he waves me off.

I roll up the comic and stick it into my back pocket. It's spring break. I'm going to play some video games.

I
go into my room and throw the comic book on the bed next to Peyton. He's lying there looking at the drawings I stuck all over my walls. So many drawings that you can't see the actual wall anymore. They flap in the wind coming through my open window. He picks up the comic. “What's this?”

I shrug. “Momotaro. A Japanese fairy tale.” I pick up his laptop, which is already open to
CraftWorlds
. I settle down on my stomach. “May I?”

Peyton nods, opens the comic.

I'm in Challenge Mode. That means the computer sends things to attack you at night, and you have to fight them. Werewolves and zombies and feral pigs, oh my.

I've made a farmhouse and have blocky-looking pigs and horses and chickens. I need to feed them their pixelly food. But I don't see my humanoid character, Bob. “Did you change my game?”

“I never log in to your game.” Peyton flips open the comic book.
“Mukashi mukashi.”

I squint at him. “You know Japanese?”

“It's written out.” He shows me. It's true—it isn't printed with the symbols of the kanji alphabet, which I can't decipher. Huh.

“Mukashi mukashi. It means
Once upon a time
,” I say without thinking. I don't know how I know that. My grandma used to read me stories in Japanese. I'm sure she must have told me at one point.

Anyway, I have more important things to worry about. In my game, I still can't find Bob, so I start creating a new figure.

Peyton props the comic on his chest and reads it aloud.