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best to fill. In my mind, she lived in a close-knit traditional Japanese family, with a geisha-looking mother and a father who wore a business suit even at home. I imagined their lives to be satisfyingly structured, as clean and clear and uncluttered as their bamboo-matted rooms and white paper walls.
    My own family situation was more ... chaotic. When we weren't at each other's throats, we still lived uneasily with each other. My dad was drunk most evenings and mean even when he wasn't. And there was always the threat of violence with my mom. She never hit me that much—and, truth to tell, it never really hurt—but her moods were so volatile, and her anger was so fierce, that I lived with the constant fear that she would explode, beating me unmercifully. This feeling became worse after my dad's arrest, and I believe it was the same for Tom, though the two of us never spoke of it.
    Kyoko's school also seemed a lot more tranquil and less rancorous than mine. I wondered if that was a cultural thing or if she was just one of those people who breezed easily through life, smart and pretty and popular, floating above the problems that plagued lesser mortals.
    No.
    She was a normal kid, neither exceptional enough to draw attention to herself nor distinctive enough to differentiate herself from the crowd.
    It occurred to me that I liked the fact that I didn't know a whole lot about Kyoko's life. She was, in a way, a blank slate, and I could project my own needs, wishes and aspirations onto her depending on my mood.
    The letters flew back and forth between us. One special Saturday, I even received three of them at once, a harmonic convergence that left me feeling exhilarated for the whole week.
    Despite the holes in my picture of her—or perhaps because of them—I grew to care about Kyoko much more than I thought I would, and much more than I intended. She was still a stand-in for my beloved Miss Nakamoto ... but she was also a person in her own right (or in her own write). I liked her, and strange as it might seem, she was my best and closest friend. I could tell her anything without fear of being laughed at or judged.
    I grew bolder in my letters, bolder in my lies. The president of the United States was my mother's cousin. I might be making a trip to Japan soon because my dad had invented a supersecret camera that the Japanese government was extremely interested in obtaining. I'd just taken first in my age group at the Huntington Beach surfing championships and would soon be competing against the top high school finalist in the state.
    But in my real life, things weren't going so great. Dad got picked up again for drunk driving, and the precious Tom was caught vandalizing a neighbor's house with two of his loser friends. You reap what you sow, my grandmother used to say, and I would have thought that a prime lesson to be learned here. But of course all the shit came down on me. It was somehow my fault that the two of them had screwed up. I was the whipping boy, and my mom yelled at me, my dad gave me a completely pointless and hypocritical lecture, and I was grounded for a week—despite the fact that I had done nothing wrong.
    I had fantasies of bashing my dad's head in with a rock, putting rat poison in my mom's food and watching her bloat up before puking her bloody guts out.
    At school, I got into my first fight. Or almost got into my first fight. Brick Hayward, a big dumb kid who'd been held back a year, decided at recess one day that he was going to kick my ass. I knew Brick by reputation, but he'd never been in any of my classes, and the two of us had never had any sort of contact. But he imagined that I'd looked at him the wrong way when we'd both happened to be in the library earlier, and he wanted to extract punishment. He confronted me on the playground, catching me by the drinking fountains.
    "Right now!" he demanded, clenching his fists. Robert and Edson carefully backed away from me.
    My panicked brain tried to think of