Imo Scrimger

Chasing Foxes

Novel extract

My first babysitting experience was about to set a record: fastest lost child. Half an hour was all it took. I stood at the beginning of the “traditional Japanese shopping street” we’d both entered ten minutes ago and stared down the hill. Two storey shops of white brick and dark wood crammed together to border a line of salmon-coloured asphalt. Faded awnings protected the outdoor tables of handmade bowls, chunky jewellery, and t-shirts from the sun. A thick stream of tourists browsed happily. Blissfully unaware of the major calamity befalling the girl at the top of the hill. At first I didn’t want to believe it. I’d only been looking at the souvenir keychain rack for a second. They didn’t have any Amelia’s and now I didn’t have any Brittany. 

In any other situation, I would have texted her. But I had dropped my phone at one of the too many airports that it took to get from my small Ontario town to Tokyo. Dropping my phone is a biweekly occurrence. And normally it bounces back quickly, so to speak. Apparently airport floors are made of electromagnets and adamantium. My phone now needed to be plugged in permanently to work at all. So I had to leave it in my hotel room, which made me feel like I was walking around without any pants on. Not that Brittany would have given me her number even if my phone was working. She wanted to talk to me about as much as I wanted to talk to her. But now was not the time to be thinking about who was stuck with who. 

Phoneless, I dove into the large crowd clogging the already narrow street. Sharp body sprays duked it out with baked goods and artisanal soaps. I set my eyes to “orange hair and pink sweatshirt”. My head moved back and forth while I walked, like I was slowly disagreeing with something. Brittany was not perusing the racks of patterned handkerchiefs or buns with bean paste inside. My desperate eyes jumped through the windows and into the crowded stores I passed. Ornamental fans, postcards with cherry blossoms and temples, hanging prints of painted birds looking serine and wise. The exact opposite of how I felt. Still no Brittany.

Even though I was walking downhill, I was sweating. The mid March sun was starting to move from high to low noon. Cowboys would be finished their standoffs and Brittany and I would have to think about finding the restaurant where we were meeting our parents for dinner. Originally I had been worried about finding the place without Brittany’s help. Now I was worried about showing up to dinner without Brittany. 

After the three blocks, my fear was growing mould spores of panic. I was at the bottom of the small, safe shopping street and looking at the bigger, scarier, multi-lane road. Cars thundered past me. Probably looking for unattended tweens to run over. If Brittany hadn’t become orange and pink roadkill, then maybe she had simply left me. She had a working phone. She was the one who had guided us to the shopping street from the hotel, despite my best efforts to figure out the old paper map my dad had found for me. But it meant that Brittany could be anywhere. 

Desperation was creeping in. Dad had been kind and worried enough to circle helpful locations on my map. One of them was the conference centre that he and Brittany’s mom Gloria were going to be at for the next week. I could run there. I could explain that Brittany had gotten lost, somehow. I had been taking pictures, like I was supposed to be doing for my high school newspaper, and when I looked up, she was gone. And now I needed help. Would they be mad? Maybe. Would they be surprised? Maybe not.  

My breathing was quick. My eyes were starting to sting. A bus roared behind me and I jumped forward unintentionally. On the walk from the hotel to the shopping street, it had been exciting seeing how different Tokyo was to the small North American town I was from. Rounded roof tiles, vending machines everywhere selling everything, bold and colourful Japanese letters that could have been saying anything. Now, the slight differences around me made me feel like I was in another world, far from home. The urge to run to Dad for help was strong. But I didn’t want to. I had agreed to look after Brittnay to prove that I wasn’t the irresponsible teenager that everyone thought I was. Yes, I’d neglected my university applications. And yes, I was only in Tokyo to take photos for the school paper to add some last minute extracurriculars. But maybe if I could keep myself and Brittany alive for a week in another world then I could show everyone how responsible I was. After I found her, of course. 

A fortune cookie once told me that a sign of insanity was doing the same thing more than once and expecting a different outcome. It had seemed like a lame fortune then and so I was choosing to ignore it now. As I prepared to go back up through the shopping street hoping for a different outcome, I noticed something at the top of the hill. Small, grey, and moving quickly. A cat was coming down the street. It wasn’t a wayward twelve-year old but it was enough to distract me, not that I was hard to distract. Keeping my eyes on it was hard, though. It wove through shoppers’ legs and table legs, under plastic bags and behind rolling luggage. I lost sight of it a few times until it got halfway down the street. I lost sight of it completely when it turned and seemed to vanish into the space between two shops.  

My gut reaction was to call my eyes liars. Yes, all the stores were connected like pieces of a really long KitKat bar. And yes, the cat had gone between two stores and not returned. But thinking words like “vanished” and “mysteriously” weren’t helpful. I’d simply lost sight of the cat. No one else was freaking out, so everything was fine. Everything. Was. Fine. My calming mantra was sadly interrupted when something brushed against my leg. A black cat trotted past me, got halfway up the street to the same place between the two shops and didn’t come back. Almost like it vanished mysteriously. 

I was trying to rationalise the need for a store to have a cat door when a small flock of sparrows flew close over my head. My eyes bulged as I tried to follow their flight path, but there was too much in the way. They wove in and out of store awnings, thick telephone wires, and red flags with giant painted Japanese letters. I could just see the cluster of brown specks get halfway up and banked left. Between those shops. And not stop. The straws my brain was grasping at were getting slippery. 

Was there a portal to another world wedged between the two shops? For animals? Or had Brittany also fallen through and was now in a different dimension? As it was my first time babysitting I wasn’t prepared for interdimensional issues. 

Giggles brought me back to my own world. School children were being wrangled on the sidewalk beside me. Teachers yelled at them in German. I didn’t understand the words, but I still got the message. Pay attention. And don’t get lost. Cats and birds could do what they wanted to with their chemical makeup. Brittany was here somewhere and I was going to find her.   

I walked back up the street. Slowly. Because I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything. The crowds of shoppers still flowed up and down. I ocularly interrogated as many of them as I could. But my eyes kept drifting farther ahead and to the left. To those two shops halfway up the street. When I was a few stores away I could see that the first was a fabric shop and the other sold candles. But that was all I could see. The navy blue awning and loud flags of the fabric shop were blocking much of my view. A crowd of kids my age were below the awning blocking more of it. Other tourists slowed down as they passed the fabric shop as well. They all had their phones pointed at the giant green and gold kimono in the window. In another, calmer life, I too would have stopped to admire the craftsmanship and maybe snap a photo. But once again, something distracted me. 

A butterfly hovered unnoticed above the kimono crowd. Its yellow wings were delicate and vibrant. It bounced in the air above the hungry cameras. As it moved towards the candle shop, my pace picked up. So did my heart beat. I was only a few stores away, but there were moving obstacles. I dodged around couples and large groups, children and knapsacks. My t-shirt clung to my back. I had stopped apologising for bumping into people. My eyes never left the butterfly. Something was calling me. A need to see where it went. To see what happened to it. To see if I was allowed to believe in something as childish as a portal to another dimension. The butterfly bobbed in front of the space beside the fabric shop. Being on the shorter side, I still couldn’t get a real view of where it was going. Shuffling sideways around the teenagers and underneath an outstretched camera arm, I burst past the fabric shop. 

A thin alley. That was it. If you were frantically looking for a lost child, you’d probably miss it. There were no swirling vortexes. No cracks in the wall revealing another dimension. Just an ordinary alley between two buildings. One small store on one side. One vending machine on the other. And one orange haired, pink sweatered girl in the middle looking unhappy to see me. 

*

The journey from my small town of Walled Lake to Tokyo had taken almost exactly twenty four hours. A train to Toronto, a plane to San Francisco, another, bigger plane to the outskirts of Tokyo, and then another train to wherever our hotel was. After literally a day of travel, I had been in Tokyo for about an hour. My brain was a little out of it. Seeing Brittany standing casually in the middle of the alley was not helping.  

“Brittany,” I almost yelled as I closed the gap between us. “Where were you?”

She looked at me like I had asked if the sky was blue. She then took a Mars bar out of one of the two plastic bags she was holding.  

“The moon,” she said and took a bite of chocolate. I’d known Brittany for about as long as my lunch period at school. She had not said much to me during that time. Unless she was patronisingly telling me things I hadn’t asked about Japan, she was being sarcastic. It had been a long day and we had a whole week left together.

“I had no idea where you were. Something could have happened.” I was standing beside her now, enjoying being taller than someone for once. 

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something bad. Don’t wander off.”

“I wasn’t that far. I was still on the street.”

“Not really.”

“It’s on the same street. Like ten feet away.”

“That’s way more than ten feet. Do you even know how big a foot is?”

“Do you?”

I clenched my fists, my teeth, and my eyelids. No one else was in the narrow alley. The chatter from the busy shopping street sounded like it was in another room. I opened my eyes.

“It doesn’t matter. I didn’t know where you were and I’m supposed to take care of you. If you get lost or something, it’s on me. I’ll get in trouble.”

As soon as I said it, I felt like I was ten years old. When I couldn’t find her, was I worried about what Dad would say or was I worried about what bad thing had happened to her? Was getting in trouble really my biggest concern if something happened to Brittany?

Brittany didn’t say anything but looked red and angry and small. I unclenched my fists and wiped the sweat on my pants. At least it was a bit cooler in the shade of the alley. 

“I was just worried.”

“About getting in trouble.”

She had me there. 

“I’m sorry. That was…stupid. It’s been a long day. I don’t know if I’m sleepy or hungry or one of the other dwarves.”

The rough draft of a smile appeared on Brittany’s face. It was the first time I’d seen her even attempt to look positive. Not that we’d known each other long. Our forced introduction happened in the hotel lobby about forty five minutes ago. That’s when our parents revealed their master plan. Brittany wanted to see her dream city, Tokyo, but her older brother had been too sick to make the relatively shorter trip from Vancouver to Tokyo. Enter Amelia, also alone in Tokyo while she takes photos for her high school newspaper. Why don’t we get these two kids together? Brittany can see the city she’s always wanted to visit while staying safe with a responsible adult. Amelia can work on adding an extracurricular to her totally not-forgotten-about college applications while proving that she is in fact a responsible adult. With my phone now broken, Dad and Gloria joked about how Brittany was going to be the one leading us around Tokyo. She had successfully led us to the shopping street. But her leadership style was less “helpful” and more “since you screwed up I guess I have to do it now”. Neither of us was happy. Her soupçon of a smile was giving me hope.

The lights inside the store behind Brittany turned on. Shelves of anime monsters and wizards and witches and girls in sailor suits became visible. A street light in the alley also came on. Even without a phone, I knew it was time to go find our dinner. 

“Did you get everything you needed in there?” I said, looking from the blank plastic bag Brittany was holding to the anime store. 

Her eyes widened before shooting straight down to her unnaturally white Adidas. She shrugged and took another bite of candy. The orange glow of the streetlight made Brittany look like a girl who’d only eaten carrots and Cheetos her whole life. Despite the Tropicana lighting, I thought her face got a little flush.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Great. We have to go. Now. To the restaurant.” 

“I’m eating. You can’t walk and eat in Japan. It’s considered rude.” She took another bite. 

“Of course.” I shook my head. “You shouldn’t be eating now anyways. You’ll ruin your dinner.”

Brittany sighed and I went from feeling ten years old to about a million. 

We stayed where we were in front of the anime store while the slowest Mars Bar eater ever worked on ruining her dinner. But I had found her. A big worry crossed off my list. My heart rate chilled out and body parts relaxed. I leaned against the white brick of the kimono shop behind me. The coffee vending machine hummed beside me. It was the only other noun in the alley. The shopping street flowed past the entrance. Snippets of conversation slid towards us like ham being put through a commercial deli slicer. Some people looked in but no one was curious enough to enter. I thought of Moments-Ago Amelia and smiled. Thinking that there was some other dimension or magical animal transporter or something here. It was just an alley between stores. The animals had wanted to come this way. My smile sagged as I tried to come up with the reason so many creatures had been travelling in the same direction. I looked at the end of the alley. There was no happy fauna sanctuary with cats and birds and butterflies frolicking as I had hoped. Just an empty back road with a little fenced-in park. Why had all those animals come this way? And where were they now? Even if there was no portal to another dimension, the mass migration was still odd. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Part of me wanted to figure out the mystery. But another part of me was yelling about how ridiculous I was being and that it was of course all a coincidence. Besides, we had to get to dinner on time.