It’s never quiet in Dad’s apartment, not even when no one is talking. The Birds is playing on the TV, and there are church bells going off across the street and motorcycles vrooming below. Pigeons flutter by the window like Christmas doves.
When Dad comes back, he’s holding a calendar full of pictures of Japan. He flips through them, and I see cherry blossoms and shrines covered in snow and koi-fish kites, their colorful tails wriggling in the wind. Dad hands me the calendar. “The next time you two come to France, it will be May sixteenth. This watch tells you how many days and hours and minutes and seconds are left until May sixteenth. See? Not just a watch!”
“So it’s a time machine,” I say.
Alison makes a “gah” noise and rolls her eyes—Mom calls that her signature move.
Dad laughs. “Yes. It is. You just have to wait until it beeps and all the numbers are zeroes.”
“What happens then?” I ask.
Dad rubs his chin. “You can start another one. For next Christmas maybe. For anything you want.”
His phone starts to ring, so he jumps up again to answer it.
Alison leans toward me and hisses, “You better not let Mom see you wearing that. It is so not gender neutral, and she will totally kill you.”
“Shut up,” I say, cradling the watch against my chest. “I love it, and I’m going to wear it every day until forever.”
CHAPTER 6
MONDAY
WHEN MY PHONE ALARM WENT OFF, I lay in bed for a minute and waited for memories of last night to suck me into a vortex of embarrassment and self-pity.
But I felt okay.
Maybe because Mika’s apartment was so bright and sunlit in the morning, so unlike the ethereal cavern it had been a few hours earlier. The kitchen was flooded with daylight, and I could see construction going on in the building across the street, orange cranes moving around like robots from Neon Genesis Evangelion. I texted my mom to let her know I was up, toasted two thick slices of shokupan, and ate them at the table by the window.
Mika’s parents didn’t care if I ate their food. They liked it, I think. They liked having me over for dinner, anyway, because they were always telling Mika to invite me. Mika’s dad made amazing food: hot soba noodles with an egg cracked on top, hand-rolled sushi stuffed with salmon, tiny strawberry-and-cream cakes for dessert. After dinner, Mika and I would watch TV, and her mom would bring out tortilla chips and homemade guacamole with lots of chopped-up tomatoes and chili peppers in it.
“They really like you,” Mika would say drily. “You’re the daughter they never had.”
I couldn’t say it to Mika, but I really liked her parents, too. I liked how smart they were. Mika’s mom wrote a column about being an American expat for the Japan Times. Her dad was the vice president of a big Asian airline and was constantly jetting off to places like Thailand and China and India. Every time he saw me, he’d lend me a brand-new science book or ask me how my physics class was going. He kind of reminded me of my dad, actually.
It was early, and Mika had slept through both my alarm and hers. According to the schedule tacked to the corkboard above her desk, she was supposed to go on a four-mile run that morning.
“Eff no,” Mika said when I tried to wake her up. “Do you want me to vomit and then die?”
She didn’t look great. Spiky hair flattened against her head, and a weird white crust crystallized at the corners of her mouth. Seeing Mika like that was enough to keep me sober for life.
“Can I borrow some clothes?” I asked. “My stuff smells like an ashtray full of beer.”
“Dude, yeah. Take whatever.”
I grabbed a dress from the bottom of her closet, a grungy plaid one that could have been stolen from the set of My So-Called Life.
There was no time to wash my hair, so I put it in a high ponytail and crammed all my old clothes into my tote. It occurred to me that this might be the last time I ever did this—get ready at Mika’s, borrow her stuff. Her apartment felt like a real home, and I was jealous that she got to stay here, in one place. And I was really jealous that Jamie could just come downstairs whenever he felt like it and hang out in her room.…
I grabbed the Suica card from the bottom of my tote. I had to leave before eight to get to the T-Cad by nine for the last day of my summer job. It sounded quiet outside Mika’s front door, but I looked through the peephole before I opened it. And I sprinted all the way to the train station. Just in case.
The T-Cad was what everyone called the Tokyo International Academy.
It’s an hour outside Tokyo’s city center, in a suburban neighborhood full of little houses and little shops and a train station with only one platform. But the defining feature of the T-Cad neighborhood is definitely the cemetery. To get from the station to the school, I made my way through a cemetery so large and complicated there were maps posted at the entrances.
I could feel heat creeping into the morning air, but I walked slowly because it was the last time I’d be here, wandering down concrete paths that wound between dark green lawns, past graves made of rough gray stones arranged to resemble small houses or temples. There were more flowers lying in front of the graves than usual, I guess because of Obon, the Buddhist festival of the dead. The flowers made the air smell like sweet floral tea. Walking there alone, I could almost trick myself into believing the rest of Tokyo didn’t exist.
“Sophia!”
Well, except for the fact that Caroline was racing up behind me, shouting.
“Hey! Sophia!” She ground her bike to a halt and put both feet down to steady herself. “I knew it was you! Your hair is, like, very recognizable.”
“Hi,” I said.
Caroline lived nearby and worked as a lifeguard at the T-Cad swimming pool, which was open for students during the summer. I sometimes ran into her on the way to work.
“Wow!” she said. “You look exhausted.”
“Do I?”
“Oh my God, yeah!”
Caroline didn’t look exhausted. Which was completely illogical. “What time did you even get up?” I asked.
She pursed her lips, thinking. “Like five-ish? I guess? I went home first so I could shower and get my bike.”
“Jesus,” I said. “How are you awake?”
“Konbini coffee!” Caroline pushed her sunglasses into her hair and smiled a terrifying cheerleader smile.
“Uh-huh.” I started walking and she walked with me, wheeling her perfectly functioning bike beside her. I kicked a stone along the path and silently fumed. I did not want to spend my morning with Caroline Cooper. She was so—blond. And swishy. And she totally wasn’t David’s type, no matter what Jamie said. David made jokes about hating school, but he was smart. I’d seen him sitting at train stations, hunched over paperback copies of Kurt Vonnegut stories and On the Road. He needed someone who appreciated that side of him. Someone who got his jokes.
“What do you tell your parents when you stay over there?” I asked.
“Oh!” Caroline glanced at me self-consciously. “I tell them I’m staying with you.”
“Seriously?” I asked. Christ! Who did this girl she think she was? Had she forgotten that we were not—by any stretch of the imagination—friends? She’d moved to Tokyo a year ago, and we hadn’t so much as been to each other’s houses.
“They think you’re totally great,” she said, as if that was what I’d be worried about.
“Well, I’ll be gone next week,” I said tightly. “So I guess you can’t use that excuse anymore.”
“I know.” Caroline sighed. “Totally sucks.”
Yes—for me. Because I am the one who is MOVING CONTINENTS.
We turned right at an intersection of the cemetery’s paths, and Caroline grabbed my arm. “Oh my God!” she squealed, startling a black bird out of a nearby tree. “You’ll never guess what David told me last night.” She didn’t even pause for breath. “About the movie?”
“What movie?” I adjusted my bag on my shoulder, pulling lo
ose of her grasp.
“A Century Divided! He told me Jamie was in A Century Divided!”
I fidgeted with my watch, unstrapping and restrapping the Velcro band. “Oh?”
Caroline leaned down to me. “Did you know about this?”
I shrugged.
“Oh my God! What is with you and David? You both act like it’s no big deal. Your minds should be blown! We know someone who was in A Century Divided! A Century freaking Divided! It’s only on all the lists of Best Movies Ever.”
I shrugged again. Caroline was turning me into a highly proficient shrugger. “He was only in it for, like, a minute.”
“But it’s the most emotional minute of the whole movie! I’ve seen it at least ten times, and that minute always makes me cry. Always.”
I yanked open a gate, and we walked out of the cemetery. Across the street, I could see the T-Cad’s massive building peeking out from behind a metal fence, and a blue uniformed guard sitting in his windowed booth.
“That was another reason I went home early,” Caroline said. “I had to tell my parents about it. And my sisters. They totally freaked! Do you think it would be weird if I asked Jamie for an autograph? Oh! Do you think he went to the Oscars? The next time I see him, I’m going to make him tell me everything.”
“Good luck with that.” I checked my watch even though I knew exactly what time it was.
Caroline and I showed our ID cards and went through the main gate. The T-Cad always made me think of a secret government organization. It was a compound of buildings, like a military base, secured by a metal fence topped with sharp-eyed security cameras and a guard booth manned twenty-four hours a day.
Caroline had to park her bike, so I was spared further dissection of Jamie’s former acting career as I walked through the parking lot. The T-Cad is made up of three schools—elementary, middle, and high—all built around a central courtyard. As I approached the entrance to the high school, I saw the school’s motto emblazoned over the door: TRAINING GLOBAL CITIZENS TO ENCOUNTER THE WORLD!
“It’s vaguely threatening, isn’t it?” Jamie had said to me once. “It’s like, ‘You will be trained, and then you will encounter the world, and you will DESTROY IT!’”
I shook off the memory and opened a door into a waiting room full of blue couches and coffee tables scattered with college brochures. At the back of the room, another door led to a hallway of school counselors’ offices. I worked in the waiting room, at a computer next to a shelf of SAT-prep books, updating the school website for a few hours a week—changing over semester calendars, uploading pictures of sports games and class trips to Mount Fuji.
It was easy, and the counselors were all really nice to me. Probably because I wasn’t one of the T-Cad rich kids. (We were easy to tell apart. The rich kids had important parents and good haircuts and expensive backpacks. The rest of us wore fake Converse and bought most of our clothes at discount stores.)
I logged in to my computer and got to work on a job-evaluation form.
But I couldn’t concentrate. My thoughts dragged me back to Mika’s kitchen last night, to the light splashed across Jamie’s face as he’d talked about David. Pain bloomed in my chest, the vortex of embarrassment finally sucking me in. It was like I was fourteen again and staring at that awful text for the first time. And even though I’d told him to fuck off, confusion gnawed at me just the way it had back then. (Why did he say that? Didn’t we used to be friends?) The hurt was fresh and brutal. A scar slashed open.
After he’d gone to boarding school, I’d spent a cloud of painful days obsessively checking my e-mail, hoping he’d write to explain everything. To tell me it had all been a big, comical misunderstanding. But he never wrote. And I tried to tell myself it was for the best. That I didn’t actually care about what he’d have to say.
That I’d never care.
Caroline texted to say her day was already boring, and I texted back a smiley-face emoji. I started an e-mail to Dad but quit because I wasn’t sure when he’d get it. (He was on vacation in the south of France with Sylvie and the babies. Whenever he was away, though, I missed hearing about life in Paris—about sitting at my favorite patisserie prepping for his high school physics class or going to Hitchcock movie marathons at the theater near his house.) A new kid came into the waiting room for a school tour and sat on one of the couches, talking on his smartphone in a language I couldn’t understand. Possibly something Scandinavian? Although he must have spoken English as well. T-Cadders were a mixed bunch, but we all had to speak English in class.
The new kid turned to the side, and his profile almost reminded me of Jamie’s…
God. I’d only been working for fifteen minutes, but I already needed air. I went to buy a can of iced coffee from one of the many vending machines in the courtyard. The heat was a blanket weighed down with the croaking of cicadas. I clicked on my countdown and stared at it, imagining each second was something I could grab and flick away. Something I had control over.
When I came back inside, Jamie was in the waiting room, leaning heavily against one of the walls.
I backed into the hallway.
“Sophia?” he said, pushing himself off the wall to walk toward me.
This couldn’t be happening. I looked around for some kind of explanation. I even looked at the Scandinavian kid, but he was just playing on his phone.
“What are you doing here?” Jamie asked, his posture rigid. He was looking at me like he wanted me to disappear.
Well, of course he wanted me to disappear. Last night had proven beyond all reasonable doubt that the two of us should never be in the same room together, ever again.
“I could ask you the exact same question,” I said.
He shoved his hands into his pockets, then pulled them out and flexed his fingers. I noticed how tired he looked. There were deep grooves under his eyes, and he was wearing a scruffy T-shirt, faded jeans, and black-framed glasses instead of contacts. Plus, the pretentious hat was gone.
Thank God. Or maybe not thank God, because he looked so much smaller and so much less confident without it. It made me want to ask him if everything was okay. It made me want to reach out to him. But as soon as I felt that, my stomach twisted in rebellion. I wanted to sit down. I wanted to close my eyes and make him disappear, too.
“Do you have to see a counselor?” he asked. Still annoyed.
“Of course not,” I said. Also annoyed. “I work here.”
The annoyance on his face turned to confusion. “You do?”
A skinny, tan woman started walking down the hall toward us, cork wedge sandals smacking angrily against the ground. Jamie turned away from me just as she stepped between us.
“Good,” she said. “You found the office.”
“Yup,” he said, all low and mumbly. He didn’t sound like Jamie anymore.
“Well,” she said, “have you talked to anyone? Have you done anything?”
“Mom…”
She pinched the bridge of her nose between her forefinger and thumb. Her nails were painted beige; they almost matched the color of her leather bag. “Answer the question. I want to be here for as little time as possible.”
“I talked to Sophia.” Jamie pointed at me. “She works here.”
Great. Now his mom was staring at me. I’d seen her around, of course, even after Jamie moved. Sometimes she came to Mika’s apartment to talk to Mika’s mom. Or, when Mika dragged me to the American Club, I’d notice her coming out of conference rooms with a group of women gathered around her like skinny, well-dressed bodyguards.
“Well,” she said, “who are you?”
“Uh. I work here.”
His mom sighed. “And?”
“And—I update the website every week.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jamie smile. A little.
His mom took her cell phone out of her bag and tapped the screen. “This is ridiculous. Someone was supposed to meet us outside at nine fifteen.”
The can of ice
d coffee was starting to sweat in my hand. I shifted it to the other. “You’re probably looking for Mr. Frederic. He’s the admissions counselor, in room four.”
“No.” She dropped the phone in her bag. “We’re here to see Ms. Suzuki.”
Ms. Suzuki? I felt my eyes widen.
The only reason anyone saw the head counselor was if they were in the kind of trouble I could only dream of. Couldn’t even dream of! I’m the type of person who recoils at the subconscious imagining of trouble. But how could Jamie be in trouble? He wasn’t even a student yet.
“Mom,” Jamie said quietly.
“Oh, stop it,” she said. “You’re not allowed to be precious about this. Especially not after showing up at one in the morning without telling us where you were. I swear to God, Jamie, you…”
“Ms. Suzuki’s in room two,” I blurted.
“What?” She blinked at me. “Oh. Good. Thank you.” She walked right through the waiting room, breaking all sorts of waiting-room protocol, and leaving Jamie and me to face each other.
What’s going on? I mouthed at him.
He cringed and glanced over his shoulder. Later, he mouthed back.
God. Why did I ask that?
Ms. Suzuki opened her door. “Oh, Mrs. Foster? Did you find the office all right?”
“Jamie,” his mom called. “Come on.”
His back stiffened, and the look in his eyes changed, becoming closed off and insular. And then he was turning away from me. Again.
CHAPTER 7
MONDAY
IT HAD BEEN AN HOUR.
An hour and twenty-three minutes.
Enough time to down my iced coffee. Enough time to listen to Mr. Frederic talk to the Scandinavian kid who, in typical T-Cad fashion, was the son of a Norwegian diplomat.
I kept my headphones on but not plugged in. I couldn’t hear what Ms. Suzuki was saying, but I did a crack job of obsessing over it. I obsessed over why Jamie had come back to Tokyo in the first place. Mika said it was because his parents thought he’d be happier here.
Seven Days of You Page 5