Chapter 1
Hiro Nakamura was in love.
Full-on, balls-out, head-over-heels in love.
Charlie was perfect. Smart, funny, gorgeous—God, was she gorgeous, with that red hair and those small soft hands and that smile . . .
He had waited his entire life to have a girl smile at him like that. And it had finally happened, lightning had finally struck. Six thousand miles from home, at a tiny greasy spoon smack in the middle of Texas, he’d finally met the girl of his dreams.
Charlie. Mmmmm.
Hiro peacocked in front of the men’s room mirror, bringing sexy back. He felt like slaying a dragon or saving a village or pounding his chest with mighty fists—something masculine and rugged and virile, to announce to the world that Hiro Nakamura was in love with Charlie . . . um . . .
Charlie Something-or-other.
Huh. He didn’t know her last name.
Hiro’s shoulders slumped for a second, then he shook it off.
Well, so what? Who cared what her last name was? If he played his cards right, she might just end up as Charlie Nakamura!
He gave his reflection a goofy smile.
Okay, maybe he was going overboard. Maybe love was too strong a word for what he felt, given that he’d known her for less than an hour, and they spoke different languages, and she was probably only talking to him at all because he’d happened to sit down in her section in the diner.
All right, then, he’d admit it: maybe he wasn’t actually in love with Charlie.
But he was definitely smitten. No one could argue with that.
2
No wonder everyone in America is so fat!”
Hiro surreptitiously glanced around the diner, checking out the other customers to see if Ando was talking about anyone in particular.
A group of chattering women in tennis whites took up three tables in the back; a sketchy-looking trucker with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, shielding his face, nursed a solitary cup of coffee at a table by the door; a pair of businessmen were anchored down the counter; and two men in police department uniforms lingered over the newspaper a couple of tables away.
The younger of the two, whose bushy sideburns threatened to take over his face, scowled down at the crossword puzzle, erasing an answer so vigorously that he tore a hole in the paper. But the older—and fatter— cop looked up, meeting Hiro’s gaze with a friendly nod.
Hiro smiled back, trying not to look alarmed at the way the sheriff’s chair creaked ominously anytime he shifted his considerable bulk. Then he returned his attention to Ando, who was scowling down at the laminated menu in consternation.
“All there is to eat is waffles and french fries,” Ando complained.
Hiro leaned back in the comfortable padded booth and grinned. “You like french fries.”
“I’ve gained four kilos from french fries!”
Hiro opened his mouth to respond, then thought better of it. Half a dozen replies sprang to mind, each one more hilarious than the last, but he knew that his friend wouldn’t find any of them funny, at least not until he’d had some coffee.
So Hiro simply shrugged and picked up his own menu, happy just to be out of the car.
Hiro and Ando had been on the road since dawn, steadily ticking off the miles on the endless monotonous ribbon of I-20 East from El Paso. Ando was lucky enough to be doing the driving, but for Hiro, it was the most boring morning of his life.
There had been nothing interesting to look at, scenery-wise—just scrubby brown earth, divided by barbed-wire fences that seemed utterly pointless to him—what were they trying to fence in? There was nothing there!
At one point they’d passed a squashed armadillo by the side of the road, and after that Hiro hadn’t been able to look out the window at all. Yet there was nothing else to do—he’d read all the manga he’d brought along a million times already. His 9th Wonders! was in tatters, he’d memorized every word of Tengu Ninfuuden Shinobu, and he’d flipped through Robogirl so often that the pages were all coming loose.
He’d tried to buy the latest issues when they’d stopped for gas the day before in Las Cruces, but the woman running the little newsstand had no idea what he was talking about, even with Ando translating for him. She kept trying to press a copy of something called Fish & Stream on him, which as far as Hiro was concerned was worse than having no reading material at all. She was so insistent that he’d finally shelled out the $3.95 and taken it, just to get her off his back, but the second he was out of her eyesight he tossed it into a trash bin.
And even though Ando had turned out to be a far better traveling companion than Hiro had expected—really, a better friend than he ever would have dreamed—he was grouchy in the mornings and never wanted to talk until the caffeine from his coffee had fully kicked in.
He didn’t want to listen to Hiro talk, either, and had even snapped at him to stop humming, “because it’s interfering with my driving.”
Hiro wasn’t sure how his practically inaudible humming could affect Ando’s ability to steer the car—in a perfectly straight line, no less— but whatever. He wasn’t going to fight about it. So he agreeably folded his lips inside, then stared silently up at the cloudless, unremittingly blue sky. It had been that way for hours and hours, until finally, on the outskirts of a small town, they’d spotted the faded red sign of the Burnt Toast Diner.
Ando flicked on the turn signal and pulled into the parking lot.
Hallelujah.
Hiro bolted out of the car before it had even come to a full stop.
“Breakfast!” he crowed, and hurried to the diner’s front door, stopping to hold it open for Ando.
Hiro loved diners. He loved the food, loved the retro chrome-and- vinyl décor, loved the little individual jukeboxes sitting on each table. He always flipped through the playlist, even though he had yet to recognize a single song. What he loved best, though, were the menus, which frequently had pictures of the food printed next to their descriptions, so you knew exactly what you were going to get.
It was just like Tokyo, where every noodle joint in Shinjuku had plastic models of each dish displayed in the window. It made ordering a lot easier, and it was one of the few things he’d encountered so far on this trip that made Hiro feel at home.
It was especially helpful in a place like this, where the dishes were given colorful, incomprehensible names and descriptions. Hiro wavered back and forth between the Oil Rigger breakfast sandwich—scrambled eggs, cheese, and Canadian bacon, pressed between two waffles, dipped in batter, and deep-fried to golden gooey perfection—and the Strike It Rich special, with pork-and-apple sausage patties piled on a fresh homemade biscuit and smothered in country gravy.
He was so absorbed in the menu—did he feel more like the fried square thing or the white creamy thing?—that he didn’t even notice the waitress bustling up to their table until she spoke.
“Anything looking good, guys?”
Hiro glanced up and froze, thunderstruck.
Standing in front of him was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.
Eyes like a baby koala’s, strawberry-blond hair that swooped fetchingly down her shoulders, a body you could toast marshmallows over. She looked—holy moly, she looked just like Robogirl, the main character in Hiro’s all-time number one favorite manga, brought to life.
And Hiro worshipped Robogirl. Since he was twelve years old he’d devoured every issue about the sexy female robot with weapons for hands and sadness in her heart. And now here she was, standing right in front of him.
But instead of having lethally sharp stilettos or spiked clubs at the end of her arms, this girl had two coffeepots clutched in her hands, one of which had an orange spout. She held them up invitingly.
“Yes, please!” Ando begged, righting the upside-down cups that were preset on saucers on the table, and quickly pushing his in her direction.
The waitress poured, then turned her smile onto Hiro. “Would you like some coffee?”
Hiro just stared at her, a foolish grin planted on his face. Even if he knew the English words he needed to answer her, he didn’t think he could speak.
She lifted a shoulder in a little half shrug and reached across the table to pour him a cup anyway. As she bent toward him, Hiro saw that she had a name tag pinned to the left pocket of her pink blouse.
charlie.
He studied the name, deciphering the unfamiliar combination of letters, attempting—why didn’t I pay more attention in English class— to sound it out, when—ouch!—Ando kicked him under the table.
Hiro scowled at him, indignant. “What did you do that for?”
Ando answered in a low voice, in Japanese. “Stop leering at her!”
What? “I wasn’t,” Hiro protested, but then a second glance at Charlie made him realize that, yeah, he kinda had been.
Oops. But he stole another glance anyway, noticing the necklace Charlie was wearing, a filigreed heart-shaped silver locket nestled in the hollow of her pale, slender throat.
“Tell her I like her necklace.”
“I will not.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a completely transparent excuse for having been ogling her.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Hey, I don’t blame you. But I’m not going to help you hit on some poor defenseless girl—”
“Ando!”
Charlie, who was looking back and forth b...
