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got all day.” He slowly leans back in his bed and groans.
    The black kid, whose name we finally find out to be Cornelius, asks Yoshi, “Why’d you come here, anyhow?”
    “You mean America?”
    “Yeah, I mean America.”
    “I came here to learn English and about American thinking. Everybody in Japan must learn English. People who speak English andunderstand Western culture get good jobs. I was real bad at English, but then something bad happened to me to make me study harder.”
    “What happened?” asks David.
    “When I was in sixth grade, I living in Singapore. I sitting by a pool with my younger brother one day when a Westerner spoke to us. Unfortunately, I can’t understand that much English then, so I just smile at him, though I had no idea what he saying. He kept talking, and I could sense he was getting more and more pissed off at me. I kept smiling at him, hoping it would calm him down. But no, it didn’t. He blew up and suddenly grab my legs. He swung me around like it was hammer-throw event in the Olympics, you know? I ended up in the pool. I wish I learned English better then so I could respond and he wouldn’t throw me in the pool. I still wonder what he was talking about.”
    “That’s crazy,” Cornelius says. “If somebody tried to do that to me and my brother, he be dead.”
    “Ah, he was just playing,” I say. “If he was really mad, he wouldn’t have thrown you in the pool.”
    “Yeah, us Americans like to punch when we’re angry,” David says with a laugh.
    “Ohh! This anime was very popular in Japan five years ago!” Yoshi says. He points at the television on a dresser. There’s some cartoon about robots that turned into werewolves and vampires. I’ve never seen it before but it looks ‘crazy,’ as Cornelius likes to put it. “It was first a manga—a very famous comic book in Japan. It’s a video game, too.”
    “I thought I saw it somewhere,” says Cornelius. “I played that at my cousin’s. He got that game for Christmas. We played that all day.”
    “Oh yes, very fun. In Japan little high school girls love it!”
    “High school girls? Damn!”
    We spend the last hour before school officially ends lying around on the floor listening to hippy-sounding country rock and roll by a group called the Flying Burrito Brothers.
    “Are you serious?” I ask when he tells us the name of the band.
    “Yeah, and the slide guitarist, his name was Sneaky Pete. He invented Gumby,” David says.
    “Who the hell’s Gumby?” ask Yoshi and Cornelius.
    David looks at the two and says, “Forget it. Just listen.” I’m not much into hippy-sounding rock, but it doesn’t sound half bad. It’s sure easy to listen to. I even nod off a couple times, it’s so damn relaxing.
    “Any of you ever hear of some monster babies?” I ask.
    “Monster babies?” asks Yoshi.
    “Yeah, some people say there’re these freakish babies somewhere in Sugweepo. I heard they were out heading south, past the swamps somewhere.”
    “I heard about them babies. My little brother said something about that one time,” says Cornelius. “He said some kids been talking about like it’s real.”
    “They are real. I saw them,” I say. “We saw them. Me and David.”
    “You’re lyin’,” says Cornelius.
    “No man. We went to their house and saw them. They had these big jug heads.”
    “Bigger than David? Ha-ha!” says Cornelius.
    “I’m serious. And their eyeballs were like…one big as a silver dollar and the other as small as a penny. Everything was out of whack. One arm or a leg was just a little stump with some fingernails on it and then another almost normal. The only thing one hundred percent normal were their mouths.”
    “Their mouths?” asks Yoshi.
    “Yeah. They had these normal mouths.”
    “I wish I could of seen it,” adds Cornelius.
    “No you don’t. They were nasty.”
    “Maybe they’re not real,” suggests Yoshi.
    “When I first saw them I wasn’t so sure myself. But the