The sun had nearly disappeared by the time Kat made it back to the house. It was cool and dark, but the quiet ended when she walked through the front door and the floorboards crackled. She locked up and closed the blinds. There were still a few hours until she could use her magic. She had to keep herself occupied until midnight so she wouldn’t obsess.
She ironed her clothes while she listened to the radio. She had grown a large wardrobe since coming to Philadelphia. Dozens of silk shirts hung in an array of colors, many of them blue or teal. She had a lot of pants too. The dresses and skirts got pushed to the back due to infrequent wear.
Kat had spent most of her life wearing dresses and skirts. Growing up, she’d been told to stop climbing trees or running around or sitting with her feet up in the chairs. Her skirt would ride up, and she’d be exposed indecently. The obvious solution was to change her wardrobe instead of her behavior. Pants were more forgiving when sitting with your knees up. And it wasn’t like she had grown out of running around or climbing in obscure places. That was part of her job.
Despite infrequent wear, she kept all her dresses. Partly because she sometimes needed a dress to fit in. But also, because she couldn’t bear to get rid of her clothes again. Even if she didn’t wear them often, they were still her clothes.
Every article of clothing she had brought from California was stored safely in the back of her closet. She couldn’t wear most of it anymore. She no longer had the body of a sixteen-year-old. The only pieces she could still fit into were a few of her grandmother’s dresses she had salvaged.
Kat changed into her pajamas and washed off her makeup. Two more hours until midnight. She sat in bed and read her Radclyffe Hall book to pass the time.
She had to force herself not to obsess over the time. Reading, gardening, or laundry were acceptable time passers. Kat couldn’t waste her whole evening waiting for it to be midnight. Even now that it was for her job, it didn’t put her in the best headspace.
In the concentration camp, magic had been her only comfort. It had given her some semblance of power. But then it had festered into an addiction, only worsening her anxiety. Not that magic was the sole culprit behind her terrible mental state in the camp. But it was one of the few things she’d had control of in Manzanar.
She couldn’t control where they were sent. Her family was shoved on a horse stall train car and taken to the godforsaken desert. There was a reason nobody had built a town where the camps were. Because nobody wanted to live there.
The summers were unbearably hot. The barracks had been constructed hastily out of wood and black tar paper. Four cots were crammed into the room for her, her parents, and her aunt. No running water, yet it was considered a living space. It was hardly livable. The black tar paper absorbed the heat from the sun, creating an oven. White corpses of insects littered the floor. Even creatures that naturally inhabited the desert died inside the barracks.
Kat spent the days outside in the gardens so she wouldn’t suffocate like the insects. But the sun soaked into her black hair and seared her scalp. She often wore her hair up to cool off her neck, but it came at the price of getting burnt. Her skin always prickled with heat and became excessively oily. Her hands were always grimy. Her lips were always chapped. Her eyes burned the entire time. If it wasn’t from the brightness of the sun, it was from the wind.
The wind always carried dust, scratching her entire body because her skirts and shorts exposed her legs. Thousands of grains of sand stabbed her calves like tiny needles, resembling the prickly pain of limbs falling asleep. Except sharper. The dust coated her body, inside and out, leaving a sticky, salty film in her mouth and throat. It clogged her ears. It burrowed under her eyelids, causing her eyes to ceaselessly water. No amount of tears or rubbing or rinsing would alleviate the burning torment. It was always f-ing windy, so it was always f-ing dusty.
The dust embedded in her clothes and shoes and the beds and the barracks. Outside, everyone’s hair and eyebrows turned white from it. During meals, her teeth would crunch on gritty sand. The water didn’t always run clear. Every now and then, a murky haze would spout from the shower pipes.
The only thing worse than the dust was the lack of privacy. The showers were in a giant room with soggy floors. Pipes lined the wall, with punctured holes for water to spit down. No knobs to turn it on or off. No knobs to change the temperature. And no stalls or curtains either.
Kat refused to strip completely naked in front of strangers. Instead, she showered in her undergarments, which still left too much exposed. She refused to wash for as long as possible, going almost two weeks before she couldn’t stand the putrid reek of her own odor. She waited until nearly the end of curfew, when the fewest people showered. She scrubbed herself quickly with the harsh soap provided, shivering under the water. It was the one place she was allowed to cry.
The showers weren’t the only violation of privacy. The toilets were just as vile. No doors or stalls. Just a few rows of long planks of wood with half a dozen holes carved out to defecate over pans. The pans weren’t rinsed daily, so the smells would stagger. Her barrack’s assigned latrine was shared among a few hundred other people, and there was never a time they were completely empty. Kat minimized how often she’d need to use the bathroom, holding her pee for hours and limiting her water intake. Though the summers made dehydration dangerous.
The desert made people go crazy. Perhaps it was the unbearable heat. Or the continuous dust storms. Or perhaps it was the fence.
There was no other town for dozens of miles. Nowhere to run to. Nowhere to escape. Yet they still built the barbed-wire fences around the camp. They still built the machine-gun watchtowers. They still shot anyone who tried to run.
Kat hadn’t been at the camp long. Maybe a couple months. She was in the garden with her aunt Hideko, kneeling in the slimming shadow of the barrack as the sun shifted overhead. The heels of her feet pressed against the tar paper as she savored every second of shade. Screams erupted ahead.
“Don’t shoot! Please, don’t shoot!”
Her aunt grabbed her arm and hauled her back to their barrack. A man had jumped onto the fence, climbing toward the barbed wire. Someone tried grabbing his legs to yank him back. Others fell to their knees in front of the soldiers, pleading with them to spare him. The machine guns tore his body apart until he fell off the fence.
It wasn’t an escape attempt. Not in broad daylight. Something inside him had snapped. His wife and five children were still missing. They’d been taken elsewhere, and he needed to find them. Not that jumping the fence would have solved it—but in his mind, he had to try. He was unwell. However, the soldiers called him crazy. They said he was dangerous. He was a threat. They had no choice.
No displays of hysteria were tolerated. And if anyone couldn’t control themselves, they hid in the hospital. An inconsolable mother watched her toddler die of tuberculosis and wouldn’t stop screaming. A man who didn’t speak English tried to run toward the fence. A teenager had a breakdown in the showers and kept striking at the pipes. Their neighbors brought them to the hospitals before the soldiers found them. Before the soldiers intervened.
The hospitals were run by imprisoned doctors. They trained others who could help. And the doctors needed all the help they could get. They had enough children dying from measles, patients suffocating from asthma attacks brought on by the dust, outbreaks of food poisoning from the mess hall. The doctors couldn’t watch more people get shot. So they sedated the crazy people—for their protection. So they wouldn’t scare the soldiers. So they wouldn’t be shot.
Kat wasn’t allowed to be crazy. Nothing was allowed to be wrong with her. In fact, she should be grateful.
She had it better than others. Young couples were forced to marry quickly for better chances of going to the same camp. But nothing was guaranteed. Families were split. Children were separated from their parents. Others were taken from their country. Peruvians and Bolivians and Colombians with Japanese ancestry were taken and imprisoned too. Many spoke no English and understood even less of what was happening, what they did wrong.
Kat was supposed to be grateful for how lucky she was. She was still together with some of her family. And she’d gotten to keep at least some of her belongings.
One suitcase. That was all they’d been allowed to pack. What didn’t fit had to go. Including all of Kat’s late grandmother’s belongings. Kat had sobbed when they’d given away her grandmother’s clothes. Dresses and shawls and shoes she had wanted to hold on to. Clothing she had hoped one day to grow into and wear herself. She had wanted to keep it all, but it hadn’t fit in the suitcase. Kat couldn’t even fit all of her own clothes.
Clothes weren’t all that was lost. Family heirlooms had been taken too. Kat’s great-grandfather had brought a painting of Mount Asama with him to America. The edges had yellowed, but the colors were still vivid, the sky a delicate gradient of pinks and blues. A road weaved through a small village, the mountain in the distance remained a bold blue.
Maiki’s father had been devastated when it was sold. That was the first time Kat had seen her uncle Tsukuru cry. Before, he had always joked around and laughed. He would pick up her and her cousins and throw them onto the couches when they were younger. He would play games with them. When someone fell and got hurt, he would joke around until they were so busy giggling that they stopped crying. He would draw with them, coloring on paper and then folding it into animals. He was the fun uncle. He never cried until the painting was gone.
Books were too heavy to bring. None of the furniture could be moved. Their kitchenware was too bulky. Kat’s mother lost her favorite cast-iron pan. Her father lost his camera. He had saved everything to buy that camera, and then it was gone in an instant. They lost all their radios. They lost anything that looked like a relic. They lost the house—the house they had all grew up in. The house her great-grandfather had built. And they lost the flower fields. They lost the strawberry fields. Crops they had spent generations tending to. They sold everything at a fraction of the cost.
They piled their belongings outside the house to sell or give away. It grew into a mountain range, and in places, it was taller than Kat. She couldn’t breathe at the sight of it. Her mother told her not to look through it because it would only hurt her to see how much they were losing. But Kat needed to know. She snuck outside at night and sifted through the piles. She rummaged through chests full of blankets and pillows, boxes of kitchenware and plates and the silver, dressers with drawers full to the brim with more clothes. Kat pulled out a few of her grandmother’s dresses she couldn’t lose. She found a way to keep what really mattered.
In her grandmother’s nightstand, the drawer was full of miscellaneous hair pieces, a hairbrush, clips, ribbons, and silk fans. And the old compact mirror with a peony etched in its center. The dull bronze had lost its sheen. Scratches were scattered across the surface. Kat used to play with this compact mirror when she was younger. She didn’t know why her grandmother had kept it, because it was useless. The insides were a foggy white. The material had an iridescent quality despite its lack of a proper reflection. But her grandmother had said it was special. Peonies told secrets. Peonies were good fortune to those brave enough to pursue it. Kat didn’t understand what that meant, but she took it as a sign. She took the compact and kept it in her pocket. She didn’t realize it was a relic until a year later, when she was in the camp.
The barrack’s lack of insulation made sleep impossible. If it was summer, it was too hot, but if it was winter, it was too cold. Kat’s family didn’t own any winter clothes, and the temperature drops chilled her whole body. Her fingers and toes and nose were numb throughout the weeks around her birthday. Regardless of the temperature, it was never quiet.
Sound carried through the barracks. Kat could hear everything through the walls. All the voices and thumping and the sand raining on the wood. Often, she fiddled with the compact while she tried to drift off. She would open and close the lid, the rhythmic fiddling grounding her and the sound comforting. On one particularly noisy, restless night, she saw it happen.
The white stones inside the compact illuminated with a pearlescent glow. Kat shoved it under the blanket and held her breath. The bright light disturbed her aunt, but Kat kept the compact under the covers until her aunt quieted down. When she peeked back, the light was gone. It took her a few nights to realize it glowed at midnight.
After several months, Kat figured out what her grandmother meant. Peonies tell secrets. If she asked a question within the minute after midnight, the compact would reveal the truth. It never appeared directly, though. Instead, a flower emerged in the light of the stones. Each flower had a meaning, and Kat kept track of her nightly questions and the flowers that appeared in answer. Eventually, she cracked the code. The compact had predicted the future, unveiled the past, and exposed secrets about her family and strangers. It was never wrong.
Her family didn’t know she had kept the compact. They couldn’t know it was a relic. Otherwise, they would’ve protected it better—or gotten rid of it so as not to incriminate themselves. They certainly wouldn’t have let Kat have it. But she deserved it. She was the one to rescue it from the junk pile. Her grandmother would’ve wanted her to have it. Kat’s mother was the oldest child, and Kat was the oldest grandchild, so it would’ve been hers anyway. Why else would her grandmother have told her about peonies? It was hers. It was her right to keep it.
Over the months and years, her fascination with the magic had grown into nausea. She couldn’t tell anyone she had it. The last thing she needed was for the guards to confiscate it. Or shoot her or her family. The paranoia ate at her. Whenever she didn’t know what a new flower meant, she assumed the worst. She obsessed over it. All she wanted was for the days to pass. For midnight to come so she could ask another question.
Some questions terrified her. Would they ever get out? Would she ever see the rest of her family again? Would her father come back? Would the war ever end? Would America win? The unknown scared her, but some truths she was more terrified of knowing. If this was the end of the world, she didn’t want to know.
Over the weeks and months, Kat’s paranoia morphed into delirium. Her heart rate wouldn’t slow down. Her tears would fall on their own, and her weeping became louder and more frequent. She couldn’t be crazy. They’d kill her or put her to sleep. She couldn’t leave her mother. Not after her father left. Kat couldn’t control what happened in the camps, but she could control how she used her magic. She gave herself three conditions, which she still followed.
First, she couldn’t tell anyone she had it. Not her mother, not her cousins, not Emrah. Second, any question she asked had to be about something she could control. No pondering about death or the fate of the world. And third, she could only ask questions for others. She couldn’t puzzle over her own fate or curiosities anymore. Instead, she used the compact to solve other people’s problems.
Being a private detective had restored Kat’s sanity. She could focus on something else, anything else. Not what was lost. Not what happened to her family. Not her feelings. She could do good for others, and they would see she wasn’t a threat. She could help people—people no one else was willing to help.
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