InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ A long way home and back ❯ Arival in more places than one ( Chapter 1 )

Suzette sighed as she stared out the window of the plain. It had been a very long trip and she was exhausted, her earlier excitement had taken its toll on her energy. “Over twelve hours from Texas, USA to Tokyo, Japan, although seeing Hawaii from the sky was pretty,” she thought to herself as she waited for her luggage at the baggage claim area. She was here for a year; it had taken her mother longer than that to save up for her daughter to have this experience in life.

 

She turned around and pulled her paperwork out of the back pocket of her jeans, she needed to go to the front doors and wait for her exchange family to pick her up. She got many stares as she walked to the front doors, she pretended not to notice but she regretted her choice of foot ware, the western style boots were attracting a lot of attention, she was glad that she had forgone her usual hat.

 

Suzette was getting worried as she waited longer and longer, the sun was setting and the air was starting to chill, it was summer in Texas and was over a hundred degrees on a normal day and the seventy-five or eighty it was now. She looked at the sky line as far as she could see and sighed to herself, “I can't believe that mom actually did this for me,” she thought to herself.

 

A blue sedan style car had pulled into the lot and was slowing down in front of her. “Finally,” she thought as a car stopped at the curb in front of her. Janet, her study abroad representative opened the door and stood to face her. “Come on Suzette we need to get going,” Janet said, “Your exchange family has backed out so we had to find you a replacement at the last minute,” she said as she helped Suzette put her duffle bag in the trunk of the car.

 

“So I guess I'm not going to be staying in Tokyo then?” Suzette asked as she got settled in the back seat and searched for her seat belt, which was half hidden under the seat. “oh no hunny, it's just another place it's a shrine in fact” Janet said while she shook her head for emphasis, “We're placing you with the Sunsuto's. The Hakimoto's unfortunately are having a family emergency and they are very upset that they aren't able to host you this year.” She reassured Suzette.

 

Suzette watched the sky scrapers as they passed by them, the closest she had ever seen to this was down town Dallas and she had been there only once on a field trip, “So where is this place anyway?” she asked. Janet paused to think for a moment, she didn't want to tell the girl that she was actually going to be staying on a tourist shrine in a converted shed, “it's a nice place, really rustic; you'll be staying on shrine property in your own cabin.”

 

“That's not so bad,” Suzette thought as they were leaving the downtown area and heading into the suburbs. She watched the houses that went by, they passed a house that was elevated at the top of a set of massive stairs. As she watched she saw a young woman bound down them three at a time, as a rather peeved looking twenty something man in a crazy red outfit chased after her shouting something in Japanese that Suzette only vaguely understood from her courses at the community college. He was talking too fast for her to understand so she didn't think about it for too long.

 

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

 

As they pulled up to the shrine where she was going to stay she started to have second thoughts, the shrine they had pulled up to looked ill maintained, there were vines growing on the steps and the house needed a new coat of paint at the very least. They walked up the steps and did the introductions.

 

Suzette learned that she was going to be staying in the back shed. As she looked over her makeshift cabin she took it all in. There was a cot on one side of the room that took up half of her space and from what she could see from the light filtering though the gaps in the walls there were four shelves that ran the length of the wall opposite of her cot. Straight ahead of her was a curtained off area that she quickly discovered was a small bathroom.

 

She took it a lot better than her exchange coordinator thought she would, but Janet didn't know that it wasn't all that different than falling asleep on the spare cot in the tack room at home as Suzette had done on more than one occasion after a long day out working with the cattle.

 

After tossing her bag on her cot and being briefly amused by the plume of dust that rose around it, she walked the short distance to the house. She wasn't really sure what she was supposed to do, she was quiet and polite, said please and thank you, as well as some of the formal phrases she remembered. She spoke slowly and Mr. Sunsuto seemed irritated with her.

 

“You go to bed now girl,” he said, he wasn't thrilled with the thought of having n American teenager in his house, but his wife had wanted her there, and now she was going to go live with her mother. Leaving him to care for the girl himself, “she can fend for herself for all I care,” he thought to himself then told her. “Girl you will go to school tomorrow, I do not care what you do, I do not want to see you, you can find your own food and what not, now go.” He dismissed her.

 

Later as Suzette sat on her cot in the dark shed she wondered if her mother would want her to come back. “She saved so long so I could have this,” her internal monologue told her, “don't complain and let her think that you're happy, because you are happy. You're in Japan girlfriend! Enjoy it!” Suzette smiled to herself and lay down and closed her eyes.

 

The next morning Suzette dressed in her school uniform and looked in the mirror, she was tempted to use a hot iron on her hair but thought better of it, she didn't want to risk frying her hunny blond hair on her first day of school, she looked at herself in the mirror and started talking to herself, “how you got blond and blue out of red and green and brown and brown I will never know,” she made a face at herself and laughed, “always start the day with a smile.”

 

Suzette followed other teens that were wearing the same uniform. She felt uncomfortable in the short skirt and sailor shirt, she spent her entire walk to the school holding the skirt as low as she could, she really didn't want to show off her scar. When she was seven Suzette and some of the boys from down the road went out one night to scare the cows, what they hadn't known was that her Aunt and Mother had let the bull sleep in the field with the cows to breed, which they soon found out. As Suzette had tried to make the hasty climb over the barbed wire fence she got caught half way leaving a long interestingly shaped scar running from just above her pubic bone, wrapping around her inner left thigh and just under her left buttock, right where the skirt line was.

 

The day at school had been rough, she did however notice that the girl who had been arguing with the strange boy in the crazy red outfit had the same English class with her, and she had offered to help her with her home work. From what she understood from eaves dropping on the conversations she had with the girl's friends the girl was sickly. So she decided to introduce herself to her.

 

She walked up to the girl and her friends and said in the best Japanese she could, “my name is Suzette, I am new to Japan, I like to be friends to,” She hoped that they would get the just of it. “My name is Kagome, I saw you at the Sunsuto shrine earlier today and I thought that you might be an exchange student,” Kagome smiled at her and Suzette could only say one thing after all that. “a little slower please.”

 

She was so embarrassed, she had spent months learning the language in the classroom but they spoke so fast she just couldn't keep up. Kagome just smiled and repeated herself slower. Suzette smiled and they talked a while.

 

Kagome walked home with her and was appalled at Suzette's description of her living arrangements. “you are going to help me with my English tonight right?” Kagome asked waiting for Suzette to translate and answer, “of course I will Kagome it is my home language after all,” she smiled at Kagome as they mounted the steps to the Higurashi shrine.

 

Kagome's mother was as upset at Suzette's situation as Kagome was and sent the girls up to her daughter's room while she talked to her father.

 

Suzette had been trying to help Kagome translate her homework before she gave up on trying to learn through memorization of phrases and quickly made flash cards for her. After a few hours they were making some progress Kagome had started to not need to look on the backs of the cards when Mrs. Higurashi came in. “Suzi I have spoken with Mr. Sunsuto and he has said that he would prefer if you would stay here. You can stay in our quest room.” Suzette was speechless and very appreciative. “I should go and get my bag then, I will be right back,” she smiled as she ran down the street, her little skirt showing off her underwear as she mounted the steps to the Sunsuto shrine, and again as she bounced back down them.

 

She finally finished climbing the steps at the Higurashi shrine and was more than a little breathless as she did she watched Kagome carrying a very large yellow back pack to an out building, I have to go tell her how thankful I am that her mom is letting me stay here,” she thought to herself as she opened the door to the building.

 

Suzette's duffle bag fell to her elbow as she grabbed Kagome's back pack and tried to heave the girl back over the lip of the well, she wasn't going to be able to hold her for much longer, “if I can lower you enough you won't get hurt too bad ok,” Suzette told her as she lowered them into the well. She had one hand on the lip when a purple-blue light pulled on her.

 

“What the hell is this thing?” she yelled as she was pulled into the purple-blue light, her grip was slipping and she could feel the wood splintering beneath her nails as she let go.