White Ninja by Tiffiny Hall

eye and told us she’d fallen off a rickshaw.
    â€˜What does Mum do again anyway?’ Elecktra asks, as she does whenever Mum goes away. She can never remember.
    â€˜Your mother is a very successful financial advisor,’ Art says. ‘You know that.’
    â€˜Oh, yeah,’ Elecktra says, sucking maple syrup out of her nails. When she’s done, she sprinkles icing sugar onto a bowl of cereal.
    â€˜We’re not allowed cereal for breakfast. “Cereal killers” — full of sugar, remember?’ I say, repeating what Mum tells us whenever we rebel against her zero-sugar warrior diet. It’s beginning to make more sense to me now.
    â€˜Elecktra offered to make breakfast,’ Art says, waving his spoon at me. ‘A day off won’t hurt.’ He carries his own bowl of cereal and icing sugar to the table. Art had to give up sugar when he met my mother and he’ll take any excuse to have a taste again.
    â€˜Relax, Rox,’ Elecktra says.
    â€˜You relax,’ I shoot back.
    â€˜Both of you relax,’ Art says. ‘Go put a yellow ribbon in your hair,’ he tells me.
    â€˜Why?’ My hand’s shaking as I take celery out of the fridge to prepare the Hulk juice. Even though I don’treally like Hulk juice, the ritual makes me miss Mum less. Now Mum’s gone, what do I do about my ninjaism?
    â€˜Yellow to honour your solar plexus. To calm you down,’ Art says.
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    If Mum’s not going to give me answers, I’ll have to ask the internet. I sit down with my laptop.
    Mum doesn’t talk much about her ninja days or where she was born. Sometimes I’ll see her practising her stances on the clothesline in Ms Winters’s backyard and she always makes the bed using ninja techniques: a knife-hand strike to fold the corners, outside block to hook the corners, then a spear-hand strike to smooth the sheet down, followed by a spinning hook kick to slam the pillows against the headboard. She once told me that it was hard to retire her ninja suit and she still craves it. Sometimes I’ll catch her doing the housework with a T-shirt on her head, the arms tied around the back of her neck and only her eyes visible through the neck hole. I know she has to make a conscious effort to walk slowly in supermarkets, not climb the shelves or leap from aisle to aisle, and to be patient in traffic and not lose her temper. Mum can have lethal road rage.
    As I trawl through the internet, I discover that, once upon a time, the ninja nemesis was the Giant White Tiger. I wonder if Mum ever fought a tiger. These ancienttigers could fly and also had powers of invisibility. The ninjas and the Giant White Tigers finally reconciled, so now the ninja enemy is the samurai. We are mortal enemies, which means we must kill each other no matter what. I click the mouse furiously as images of ninjas in their black uniforms and red samurai with their powerful swords invade the screen.
    The ninja clan fights with stealth and skill, the samurai fight with sword. Samurai have always hated us for fighting in the shadows, but that’s the only way we know how. I learn that we were poor farmers who couldn’t afford metal for swords. Unlike the samurai, who came from the Japanese military class and wore clothes coloured with bright red expensive dyes. The samurai value honour over everything; they’ll cut their own throats before dishonouring their clan. They live according to the Bushido code that means ‘Way of the Warrior’. I search ‘Bushido code’ and realise it’s a code of conduct similar to the European etiquette of a man opening a door for a lady — and still exists in dojos today.
    Ninjas, on the other hand, weren’t upper class. They won’t open doors for you, but blow them up instead! They were from feudal Japan and nicknamed ‘stealers’. Espionage and assassination were their speciality. Their stealth warfare led to