Chapter Three
BY MEMORIAL DAY weekend, Takaketo, New York, was practically a ghost town.
It always amazed Xander to see how much the city shrank—though calling it a city was a generous move, only something someone from his hometown of rural Pennsylvania would do. With students, Takaketo was thirty thousand people. Without them, it was more like twenty-four thousand.
For Xander, who’d grown up in a city of nine thousand, both versions of the college town were pretty substantial. For the editor of the student magazine, born and raised in Brooklyn, Takaketo was a joke, and he wasn’t happy to be staying. Jacob Chen usually spent his summers helping his family at their bodega or deli or whatever their restaurant was called in the city, but it had closed, so now he was here in Takaketo working three part-time jobs.
When Jacob called Xander to ask him to help the rest of the staff pack up and haul the boxes because they were being moved from Tori Hall, Xander had braced for Jacob to be a total bear. But outside of grumbling about how the college had no respect for such an established institution like Lucky 7, Jacob was in fairly good spirits. It probably helped that his best friend, Cory Brandon, the print and layout guy, kept cheering him up. As they finished their work and got ready to go their separate ways, they talked about how they were going to make things great no matter what, and about how they hoped when the construction crew opened up the building, they found a shrine.
Not every student at Benten College believed in the myths of their academic institution’s founding, but it was practically a job requirement for members of the Lucky 7 staff. The legend, as Xander had been told, was that in the 1870s a group of rich, eccentric friends from New York toured Asia and fell in love with Japan. They came home full of half-baked Shinto beliefs and a passion to start a Japanese revolution in the US. When their efforts to instill Japanese philosophy didn’t take, they decided what they really needed to make their ideas catch on was an academic institution to further their interests, and thus Benten College was born.
Except by the time the college was actually founded, it was the late nineties, they’d grown older and more eccentric, and in the case of several of them, significantly poorer. The few who still had money had held on to it by being less mad with their ideas, and they insisted the college had to appeal to the masses. Compromises were made. In the end, Benten College was just another run-of-the-mill academic institution, except that this one was radical enough to accept men and women. All Eastern traces were gone.
Unless you knew where to look.
Xander had never seen one of the hidden shrines, but he’d searched for them. What self-respecting art student at Benten hadn’t? He wanted to see one, half for the lore, half for hope of some kind of legacy artwork. That would make construction at Tori Hall worth it, if one turned up.
He doubted one would show up, though, because in all his years at Benten, he had yet to see any. The college was rich with Japanese culture, though bizarrely low on people of actual Japanese heritage, and it had always been that way. Occasionally in the college’s history they’d had Japanese instructors for the Japanese language and culture classes, and there were Japanese international students when the college recruiters did their job properly, but mostly the college was a bunch of rich white people, a handful of people of color, and an explosion of Japanese culture that made no sense when you looked at it from the outside. Not much from the inside, either, to be honest.
Xander didn’t care. In fact, he was one of those, as the frat boys liked to whisper, one of the geeks who came armed with a love of manga and anime and rushed to sign up for the Japanese language courses because he wanted to read his favorite series without having to download pirated scans online. He’d always felt more at home in the envelope of Japanese pop culture than he had in his own, and the idea that he could go to a college that celebrated Japan, even in a quirky way? Bring it the hell on.
And outside of his encounters with the frat boys who came here because they couldn’t get into their Ivy League first-choice schools, Xander’s experience at Benten had been excellent. Capping it off with a shrine find would be perfect, yes, but he wasn’t going to push his luck. He’d accept simply surviving his BFA.
Right now, though, Xander’s dreams extended no further than getting a shower, but when he arrived at home, a note from his landlady was on his front door.
Hey, kiddo. Need some help with an order for a shop. Could I borrow you for the evening? Will pay your usual rate plus a meal and conversation.—P
Pamela Stolarz had been a professor and celebrated modern artist back in the day, and she’d been married to one of Benten’s most famous Japanese literature and language professors, Takahiro Oshiro. She’d bought the convoluted old Victorian house she lived in with her husband’s life insurance money when he passed, and named it the Palace of the Sun because she said it had the best view of the sunrise in town. The fact that it sounded Japanese and reminded her of her recently departed and beloved spouse didn’t hurt anything, either.
But Pamela was lonely in her huge, ramshackle house, and though she made a brisk business selling her folk art at events and collecting commissions through area shops, she had difficulty keeping up because of arthritis in her hips and shoulder. So when she found out Xander’s scholarships didn’t quite cover all his costs and he needed a more economical place to live and a part-time job, she offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse. She dictated to Xander what she wanted set up, he did the heavy prep work and even some of the base painting, and then she did the artwork she loved to do. In return he got to live in her attic apartment with a steal of a deal on his rent and utilities.
She was already there waiting for him when he arrived in the garage, standing in the middle of a stack of cement slabs. She smiled as she heard him enter. “Good afternoon, honey. How are you?”
“I’m well.”
She didn’t look up from her work, but she nodded at a large box sitting on the bench beside her. “Another package came for you from your mom. It said perishable, so I brought it out of the sun. I assume it’s cookies again.”
Xander saw the familiar red-and-white label and sighed. “She just sent a box two weeks ago.” He took in the sight before him, assessing. There had to be at least fifty six-by-twelve two-inch-thick cement slabs stacked on wooden pallets. “Do you want to paint them yet, or are you still thinking about what you want to do?”
“Still thinking. I don’t think I have enough time to do anything with them for the June show, but we could make some nice hay with them for the fall festival, and of course Christmas.”
Pamela—and by his turn, Xander—made bank on folk art at Christmas. “You’re the boss. Tell me what you want done, and I’m your guy Friday.”
“That you are.” She patted his shoulder. “All righty. Let’s start with the fence pieces you brushed down yesterday. If you could give them a nice white patina—not too much, just enough to give me a surface, that ought to be enough to keep you busy.”
It did at that—her instructions were vague, but Xander had both enough experience with what Pamela wanted and enough artistic sensibility to understand what she meant by a “nice white patina”—she wanted that distressed look that would make it seem as if the fence pieces had been once painted white and then left out in the rain to peel away over time. In fact, what he ended up doing was using a thin layer of white house paint and sometimes scraping away bits with the edge of a trowel—this was all work she could do herself, but why should she, when she could pay him to do it for her?
When it was time for dinner, Pamela had a bowl of soup ready for him, and a sandwich, which he ate on a stool while he watched her work on some smaller boards he’d prepped for her the week before. Her artistic style was markedly different than his, and her folk art style wasn’t the same as some of her oil paintings he’d seen in the house, but folk art paid the tax man and kept her in trinkets. “Plus it keeps me social,” she was fond of saying.
Xander curled his lip over the rim of his spoon just thinking about being social at a folk art show. She’d tried, many times, to get him to help her sell her wares, offering him more of a cut if he came along, but he’d always declined. Not his cup of tea, he told her. Over and over.
“So.” She smiled at him as she paused mid-brushstroke. “My day has been full of exciting blood work and doctor’s appointments. What have you been up to today?”
He finished chewing before he replied. “Helping the editor of Lucky 7 pack up our supplies. We have to move out of Tori Hall.” He frowned. “Blood work? Is everything okay?”
“Just routine checkup stuff. Nothing to worry about. I forgot they were renovating Tori Hall this summer.” She waggled her eyebrows. “Maybe they’ll find a shrine.”
“Have you ever seen one?” She’d worked at Benten for twenty-five years. She might have.
“Takahiro and I looked, but we never found anything. We used to take Lucky 7 staff on hunts, back in our day—he was their academic advisor, you know. But we never got anywhere.”
Xander didn’t even know who their academic advisor was now. “Do you honestly think the shrines exist?”
“I want to believe they do, so yes. Belief is powerful and important. Without it, we’re nothing but ants crawling across the dirt.” Her face took on a faraway, sad look as she continued to paint. “Takahiro always used to say that. I’d roll my eyes at him when he did, and now here I am, saying it for him.”
Pamela talked about her late husband a lot. Xander didn’t mind, except that he hated how lonely Pamela sounded when she did. “I wish I could have met him.”
“Oh, you’ve met him. We were soul mates, he and I. He’s with me every day. He’s just invisible now. Nagging me to stop being such a sad mouse and enjoy the life I have left.” Her lips pursed, and she painted with a touch more terseness. “To which I tell him I’d like him to try being the one left behind and see how he handles things.” She rolled her eyes. “Though he’d only wave his hand at me and tell me I’m doing fine. Takahiro was type A, like you. Maddeningly calm.”
Pamela believed in the Asian blood type personality system and referred to it often. Xander, not so much. “I’m not calm.”
“You are, though. You’re calm and you avoid confrontation, as much as I, a type B, seek it out. And look, I knew I could erase that scowl, at least for a second. You were plenty cross when you came in here. Did they threaten to make your manga digital again?” When that brought his scowl back, she laughed. “Oh, there I go, ruining my own work.”
Xander swirled his spoon in his soup. “I understand it would be easier for everyone else, and cheaper. But it changes my work in ways I don’t like. Mostly I want them to wait one more year to switch so I don’t have to deal with it.”
“Unfortunately life likes to hand us challenges on its timetable, not ours.” She glanced at him over the top of her glasses. “Not to get your back up, but wouldn’t it be a good skill set, to learn how to use the digital software?”
“I already know how to draw digitally. I’m getting my BFA. I’ve had four digital drawing courses, and I own a drawing tablet of my own. It’s not that I don’t know how to do it. It’s that I don’t like it. It’s not the same feel as marker or pencils, and I don’t like that I have to look at the screen while my hand moves on the pad.”
“Fair enough. Well, I wish you luck in your campaign of resistance.”
Xander hmpfed and picked up his bowl to drink the remainder of his broth. He had a feeling he was going to need all the luck he could get.