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“Just a little bit.” Alice pushed the mirror back into place and turned to Jude. “Gotta highlight and emphasize what the good Lord gave me.” For extra emphasis, she cupped her breasts and pushed them together comically, showing Jude her cleavage.

The girls laughed and then fell quiet.

“I feel like college is going to be the first time in my life when I can really be myself,” Jude admitted, looking through the windshield at the pool of light that the streetlight cast on the pavement.

“How so?”

Jude lifted her shoulders. The good thing about Alice was that she liked to have fun, and she never required you to tell her too much. If Jude felt like not talking, they just drank and laughed instead. But this question felt real, and she could sense Alice watching her and listening intently.

“I came here right after Pearl Harbor,” Jude said solemnly. “I left Japan on a ship and my mother sent me here to live with my father and his wife after the U.S. declared war on Japan. She thought I’d be safer.”

“Wait.” Alice said the word like it was a complete sentence and then they sat there in silence for an elongated moment that stretched out between them. “You’re Japanese? Or…” She was obviously trying to put the pieces together in her mind, and Jude didn’t want to leave her hanging.

“My mother is, so I guess I am. Yes. But she raised me to speak both languages, and she never let me forget that my dad was an American, so when I came here, all I had to do was try to blend in. For the first few months I barely talked to anyone. I was afraid I’d accidentally say something in Japanese, or that I’d have an accent. My stepmother got my hair done in a way that made me fit in better, and I dressed like everyone in my classes, and…eventually it kind of stuck. I felt American. I still do.”

Alice stared at her like she’d just revealed that she had a secret love child with Bing Crosby and had sent the child to live with nuns in a Swiss convent. “Where is your mom?” Alice probed, her voice both accusatory and disbelieving. “Is she still in Japan?”

Jude regretted ever telling Alice the truth about her life, and she would have given anything in that moment to take it all back. “I think so,” she said softly, her words barely audible. “I guess she is. I haven’t heard from her in years.”

Alice shook her head a few times. “Unreal,” she said, her eyes never leaving Jude’s. “You’re aJap.”

The word felt like a slap to Jude’s face. She physically recoiled. “I?—“

“No, there are no ‘buts,’ Jude—you’re a Jap. Your people bombed Pearl Harbor, and my uncles both died. That’s all there is to it.”

Jude’s eyes stung with tears. She’d never revealed her truth to anyone, and she suddenly understood why her mother had been so fearful for her, and even, to some extent, why her father and Bea had insisted she try so hard to fit in. She finally got it.

“It’s not like that,” Jude whispered to Alice. She was holding a half-drunk bottle of brandy between her knees as they sat there on the bench seat of Alice’s car. “My dad is American.”

“But you’re not,” Alice spat back, reaching over and grabbing the bottle of liquor from Jude’s lap and holding it to her chest like it was a valuable possession. “Get out of my car. Go. I can’t believe I ever put my mouth on the same bottle as you.” She looked at the bottle in her hands that had, just moments before, felt so important to grab. She thrust it back at Jude, bumping it roughly against her arm. “Here, take it.”

Jude collapsed inside--her heart folded in on itself. She fumbled for the door handle and nearly fell out onto the sidewalk, leaving the bottle of brandy behind.

Alice reached across the bench seat of the car, sweeping Jude’s purse with her hand so that it flew across the seat and out the door, landing on the pavement and scattering its contents everywhere. A tube of soft pink lipstick rolled into the gutter, and Jude's house keys landed near her foot. Before slamming the door and peeling away from the curb, Alice lifted the bottle of brandy and threw it as hard as she could towards Jude. It hit the sidewalk and shattered on impact, its shards and contents splattering against Jude’s bare legs.

The red taillights were gone in an instant, and Jude was left kneeling on the sidewalk, trying to gather her belongings in the weak pool of light from above. She looked around at the darkened houses on the street; they’d parked in a quiet neighborhood in an area known for its orange groves and dusty backroads. The only thing to do would be to knock on the door to someone’s house and beg to borrow the phone so that she could call her father. When Jude finally gathered the courage to knock on a door, the woman inside immediately smelled the alcohol on Jude’s skin and saw her tear-stained cheeks and the blood on her legs from the shards of glass on the sidewalk and panicked. She called the police, who took Jude home and dropped her right at her doorstep, where her father stood wrapped in a bathrobe under the porch light, looking disappointed and grim.

From that day forward, until she met Vance, Jude never again told anyone her truth.

CHAPTER8

Jo

Frankie and Johad started their evening walks together shortly after meeting and becoming friends. Frankie would come over in the after-dinner twilight, meet Jo at the end of her driveway, and then they’d stroll down the streets of their neighborhood together, smoking cigarettes and talking about whatever needed to be discussed and worked out at the moment.

“She wasdrunk?” Jo asks incredulously as they walk, accepting a cigarette from Frankie and then waiting as Frankie holds up the lighter for both of them.

Once they’re walking again, Frankie nods. “Yep. Three sheets to the wind. She forgot to get the girls after class—oh, they’re such cute little ballerinas,” she says as an aside, “such good girls. But she never showed up, so I called her and she said she lost track of time making dinner.”

“Huh.” Jo inhales and exhales a stream of smoke, putting her free hand into the pocket of her lightweight sweater. It’s not cold, by anyone’s measure, but it is evening in January, so the temperature has dipped enough that bare arms don’t feel entirely comfortable. “I’ve lost track of time before making dinner. It happens.”

“Sure,” Frankie says. “But when I knocked on the door, she looked like she’d just climbed out of bed after a roll in the hay.”

Jo gives a surprised laugh. “Frankie!”

“Well, she did.” Frankie has an amused look on her face as she watches Jo bend over at the waist and continue to laugh. “She had crazy hair, and her eyes were at half-mast. She even confused her own daughters.”

Jo stops laughing. “You mean she confused them with her behavior?”