Entitled

Chapter 1

The Plane Ride Home

The girl in the middle seat of the international flight had only turned seventeen four months ago. She was returning home from a study abroad in Tokyo, Japan and was feeling increasingly uncomfortable along with a host of other emotions from happiness to sorrow to extreme exhaustion. The one that was forcing itself to the forefront of her mind was the uncomfortable feeling. She was in the middle seat, stuck between two grown men, neither of whom appeared to speak good English, both of which were drinking heavily.

Only eight more hours, she thought sardonically. It had been a long seven months. There was almost too much to process and the thought of coming back to her life in America, her rural high school and semi-retired lawyer parents. It made her feel more alone than anything else. She'd missed her parents sure; but things had been happening while she was on her adventure in Nippon. Her sister had been struggling, for a long time now, but things sounded worse and something about her mother's tone on the last few and brief phone calls they'd had seemed.. off. Something was happening, or maybe about to happen. And the worry and anxiety was starting to set in.

She moved slightly in her seat, refusing to make eye contact with either man beside her, intently listening to music and pretending to read Harry Potter (which had come out years prior but was the only English language books in her Japanese high school library, and once she'd started she'd become hooked like the millions of others before her.)

Another side-glance from the larger of the two men. Obese, really, she thought. Hard to describe him as anything else and she'd really not seen very many overweight people while in Tokyo. Her hometown and state in America was a different. So many things were different, the way people acted, treated each other, treated themselves.

She was afraid to come home she realized. Things had been scary at first in a new country where she barely spoke the language. Intimidating, rather than scary. A lot of firsts, and being blonde haired and blue-eyed hadn't helped the feeling of being an outsider. She'd never been stared at that much at home. Every day, every where she had gone, she stood out. Even in her school uniform or maybe especially in that uniform she received looks, although most of them seemed to be just polite curiousness.

There was the one time. She'd been walking home to her incredible host family (the most loving and accepting people whose kids she started tearing up about again on the plane, because she knew she may never see them again) from the train. It was about a ten minute walk, the last leg of her daily commute through the park, but after her flower-arranging after school club (Ikebana) she was getting home a little later than normal and the sun had already set.

A group of teenagers, clearly by the uniforms from a different high school, passed by her. And they did a double take. Just like the movies or maybe even more comical than that. But the word that came out from one boys mouth, it hurt a little, maybe scared her the way they then turned and followed for a bit. "Gaijin" ..Foreigner .. not with a nice connotation. She just smiled and kept walking though, what else could she have done after all?

And they'd finally stopped, turned and left her alone. Harmless, Probably. Like the gentleman on her left who'd just passed out, or the one on her right slowly drinking his beverage, no longer trying to make eye contact. Harmless. Probably.