“Oh, we are twins!” Donny answered with a laugh.
I discovered then that my Japanese listening comprehension had gotten way better over the years since we’d moved to Tokyo. Even though Donny and Dad spoke way faster than my classroom teachers, I laughed, understanding what they said. And I could even tell that the guard spoke with a foreign accent.
Chinese, maybe. Like the boy I would be tutoring, the one who wanted to learn ASL so that he could go to college in the USA someday.
Donny opened the door for us just like the doorman downstairs. But this time, my dad hung back.
"I'm going to go take care of your jacket. See you at home, okay?" He gave me a significant look as he said this, one I easily translated: “Be cool.”
Wait. My father was really going to leave me alone here? With these weapon-checking strangers? I wanted to call after him. Beg him to stay with me like I did my mom the first day of kindergarten.
But he was already halfway back to the elevator. And I didn't want to embarrass him. Or myself.
Taking a deep breath, I walked through the door that Donny was holding open for me.
My first sight of the apartment replaced the alarm bells with utter amazement.
This place had to be at least ten times as big as the one I shared with my family in Adachi-Ku. The living room alone looked like it could fit our entire apartment inside it. The same gorgeous wallpaper from the hallway covered the walls. And I was no interior design expert, but all the furniture looked expensive and ultra-modern. It was all sparkling white with sharp edges.
"Right this way," Donny said, interrupting my gawk fest. He led me down another hallway, but this one wasn't wallpapered. In fact, it was completely bare.
No pictures of family or A+ homework on display like at our apartment. Just two white walls. Japanese minimalism, maybe?
But something told me it wasn’t. I thought about how my father never gave the downstairs doorman a name. Also, how Donny pretty much invited me, a seventeen-year-old he'd just met, to call him by his first name. Sure, he was Chinese, but that was almost unheard of in Japan.
Whoever lived here, they were rich and very, very anonymous, I concluded. As crazy nice as this apartment was, there were no personal touches. The residents didn't seem at all interested in letting visitors know who they were.
"Victor is right through there," Donny told me, raising a hand toward a set of open double sliding doors at the far end of the hallway. " You can go right in. He’s expecting you."
So that was his name. Victor.
I started down the hallway. Alone.
And to think, I was so irritated about having to read Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll last year. Sixteen-year-old me thought it was too childish and simplistic. But seventeen-year-old me was totally identifying with the confused and lost Alice as I walked down that long tunnel of a hallway.
You need to calm down, Dawn, I told myself. It's just a kid. Don't worry. You’ve totally got this—
I came to a dead stop when I reached the open doorway; my mouth fell open.
I totally didn’t have this.
Two guys were fighting with wooden sticks inside the room. I mean, just going at it, like they were trying to kill each other!
They moved blindingly fast, and the sound of their wooden poles banging against each other filled the air. To me, who'd never seen anyone physically fight with sticks before, it looked like one of those kung fu movies Byron loved. They were grunting and swinging with extreme force. It honestly appeared like somebody was going to be broken or dead before the battle was over.
One of the fighters was broad and with heavy muscles, and the other was tall and lean. They were pretty evenly matched, I concluded after watching them go at it for a while. Muscles’ swings looked way harder to block. But the lean one had a further reach, which allowed him to get in quick jabs from farther away.
I stood there, frozen in the doorway, not sure what else to do but watch. Were these the older brothers of the boy I was supposed to be tutoring?
A gray-haired teacher I didn't notice before suddenly yelled something out in a language I was pretty sure was Chinese. And the two fighters stopped on a dime, lowering their sticks.
They bowed to each other and then to their teacher. Then both fighters immediately turned toward me.
My stomach flipped, weird and clumsy, like that one time my mom tried to put me in gymnastics.
Obviously, Donny had pointed me to the wrong room. And now the two fighters—the…wow…unbelievably hot fighters were walking straight toward me.
My breath hitched as they approached.
The lean one had long but somehow also spiky hair, an impossible combination that I had only ever seen before in anime. He was insanely gorgeous, and his unbothered lope told me he was used to girls staring. Confidence radiated off of him in waves.
