Seven Days of You

by Cecilia Vinesse

  “Huh?”

  “Jesus!” He bent over. “What did you do to your knees?”

  I gazed down. Watery red streaks were running down my calves. “It was the fence. It’s fine now.”

  “Yeah, it’s really not,” Jamie said. “We should get you some Band-Aids.”

  “Is there something you want?” I asked. He shook his head, and I realized he couldn’t hear me over the rain. “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”

  “Nothing.” He held on to his neck with one hand. “Just to help.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” My feet were drowning in my shoes, and my clothes were suctioned to my skin, but I could barely feel it. I could barely feel any of it.

  “Here.” He shoved something at me. It was a candy bar, one of the Meiji milk-chocolate ones with the strawberry center. “This was in the pile of stuff Mika and I bought. I grabbed it for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sorry it’s kind of wet.”

  It was wet. The cardboard wrapper was so soggy, I thought it might disintegrate.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go to the train station. You realize you’re going in the wrong direction, right?”

  “I know where I’m going.”

  “Sophia?” He put both hands on my shoulders, and I blinked, surprised. It was strange that Mika and David were gone but that Jamie was here. Standing close enough that I could see his freckles and the green in his eyes. Their gold and brown flecks reminded me of calligraphy strokes. “Please try to think clearly,” he said. “You’re freaking me out a little.”

  “You don’t get it.” I squeezed the chocolate bar in both hands. “I knew this was going to happen. I knew I was going to lose them. But not”—my voice went hoarse—“not like this.”

  His face filled with pity. “It’s okay,” he said. “We all build someone up in our heads. We all fall for someone who hurts us.”

  “Is that what you did? Did you build Mika up in your head? Did Mika hurt you?”

  “What?” He let go of my shoulders and took a step back. “Do you think I have a crush on Mika?”

  “Please,” I said. “Everyone knows you do.”

  “And by ‘everyone,’ you mean?”

  “Me,” I said. “David. And also Caroline.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “You know what?” I waved the chocolate bar menacingly at his face. “I don’t care. I don’t want a detailed report on your feelings for Mika. They are what they are, and that’s fine. But are you really telling me you don’t have a problem with the fact that David and Mika have been sleeping together? Sleeping together?”

  His tone was firm. “I’m telling you I don’t have a crush on Mika.”

  “Well, why NOT? What’s wrong with Mika?” Now I was yelling.

  “Nothing.” He pushed his hands all the way through his now soaking-wet hair. “Why are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  He crossed his arms. “Bullshit.”

  “I’m not mad at you! You’re harmless. You—you bring me candy.”

  “Which you should eat, by the way,” he said. “It might make you feel better.”

  “Stop being nice!” I snapped. “You’re making it difficult for me to express my rage.”

  “Seriously. I don’t mind. Express away.”

  He sounded so earnest, it jolted me out of my anger. I wiped the mess of rain and tears from my face. “No,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  He started pacing. “Yeah, I did. I’m a total jackass. And I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry I chased you out here. Tonight and—and that other time. I’m sorry I was such a dick about you and David. I’m sorry I made you not want to talk to me for the last three years.”

  “It’s fine, Jamie. Seriously.”

  He stopped pacing and stood in front of me again. His eyes were pleading, and his cheeks were flushed. I wondered if his neck felt warm. I wondered why I was wondering that. “It’s really not,” he said. “I was pissed off because I thought you had a crush on David and that I was just some little dweeb you put up with because you had to. And then I sent that text, and it was all downhill from there because I went to boarding school, and then I got kicked out.”

  “How?” I asked. “How could you get kicked out? It just doesn’t seem possible.”

  He sighed. “I got kicked out because I failed a couple of my classes. I failed most of my classes. And I did that because I’ve been fucking miserable for the last three years. Here’s my summary of the last three years: They were the worst. And I’m sorry, all right? I really am sorry.”

  I could feel tears tracking down my cheeks again, the warmth of them dissipating in the cool rain. “But you were right. I did flirt with David. I was pathetic.”

  “Yeah, you definitely weren’t.” He nudged my hand with his. “Please. At least eat this. It’s gonna melt.”

  I ripped back the cardboard and foil on the candy bar and broke off a piece. It did taste good. Like fake strawberry. Like the past four years in Japan.

  “Is it true?” I asked. “What David said?”

  He paused. “About me being adopted?”

  I nodded.

  He glanced down and scuffed the ground with his toe. “Yeah. That’s true.”

  “How did David know?”

  Jamie shrugged. “Mika must have told him.”

  “She never told me.”

  He shrugged again. I broke off another piece of chocolate and shoved it into his open hand. For a moment, the rest of the night felt vague, smudgy and uncertain compared with the vividness of my fingers on his wrist, of the rain falling between us, steady as a pulse.

  “Jamie,” I said, my hand still on top of his. “I think we should catch our train.”

  “Junior fucking year.” Mika scrunches a plastic wrapper in her hands. “Well, this is gonna be a whirlpool of misery.”

  We’re hanging out on the steps of the T-Cad station, eating breakfast and killing the last ten minutes of summer vacation.

  David brought his new road bike, and he’s riding it up and down the street.

  “Bullshit!” he yells. “Two more years and we’re out of here, kids.”

  “One more year for me,” I say. I’m ripping my melon bread into pieces, dividing the parts with crystallized sugar on top from the ones without.

  “Ugh,” Mika scowls. “First Jamie, now you. You’re all going to leave me alone with that asshole.”

  “You shut your dirty mouth,” David says and turns the bike.

  “We have to take the SATs this year,” she says. “And my parents are making me take five goddamned AP classes.”

  “You should have my parents,” David says. “They don’t give a crap.”

  Mika flips him off.

  “Hey!” He puts his foot down and stops in front of us. “You know what we should do this year? We should get Sofa a boyfriend.”

  “What?” I start blushing like crazy. “Why?”

  “You need one,” David says. “It’s the law.”

  I try to think of something flirty to say back, but all this boyfriend talk has thrown me off my game. “Um, no, I don’t date. It’s too mushy, too needy, too”—I paw the air in front of me—“touchy.”

  “Oh no.” Mika pushes down her sunglasses and peers at me over the top of them. “Not touchy.”

  I toss a piece of melon bread into her lap. “You know what I mean.”

  David sits on the step below mine. I resist the urge to fidget with my hair. Mika talked me into dyeing it platinum blond the other night, but I’m starting to regret it. I feel so obvious. So “look-at-me!”

  Also, I’m pretty sure I smell like bleach.

  “You have to at least make out with someone,” David says. “Before the year is over.” He puts out his hand like he wants me to shake it. I regard it warily.

  “This can’t honestly matter to you.”

  “Of course it matters! You’re my friend, and you’re cute, and you deserve to b
e made out with.”

  “You really are revolting, David,” Mika says. “You know that?”

  David takes my hand in his and moves it lazily up and down. My heart sputters pathetically. He wouldn’t touch my hand like this if he was just joking around. He wouldn’t hold on for these few extra seconds—his grip somehow loose and firm at the same time—if he didn’t mean anything by it.

  “And if I have to do it myself,” he whispers, “then so be it.”

  CHAPTER 13

  WEDNESDAY

  I WOKE UP ON TOP OF MY COVERS, still wearing all black. It was raining again. Not End of Days rain like the night before, but rain nonetheless. I held my watch above my head and stared at the seconds blinking uselessly away. It was one in the afternoon, but what the hell did that matter? A day isn’t even what we think it is—the earth rotates on its axis every 23.93 hours, not every 24. My entire concept of this week was false.

  Carefully, I climbed onto my desk, my scraped knees still throbbing, and pushed open the window. Drops of water smacked against the windowsill. I heard a train sluicing toward the station and a few indignant crows rustling their wings in the alley below. The skin of my arms prickled. It wasn’t just raining—it was cold.

  This is an alternate universe. I have discovered a wormhole.

  When I was a kid, my dad would go on these long theoretical rants about wormholes, trying to explain them to me. I wished I could call him, even though it was practically the middle of the night his time. I wished I could ask him some basic physics question and listen as he launched into another lecture about time and the universe—explaining how time wasn’t actually this all-powerful force but a variable. Something that could be changed.

  I guess that’s why I’d made this stupid countdown. Because I wanted to hold on to the time I had left here. Because I wanted to separate good-bye from all the moments—the better moments—that came before it. It was my own little scientific experiment, to try to contain that one second when everything I cared about would suddenly vanish.

  But that was bullshit. I couldn’t control losing Mika and David. I couldn’t control how it ripped and altered the fabric of my universe. How it was like… like losing a leg. Like falling off the monkey bars. Like falling, period. They were my best friends.

  They were.

  And now I felt the way I used to feel before I met them. Empty and small.

  Alone.

  But on the other hand—the other seriously weird, confusing hand—there was Jamie. Jamie, who’d been gone for good. Jamie, who was freckles and moving limbs and a voice like warmed-up honey. When I thought about that, something inside my chest unclenched. The massive Mika-and-David-shaped hole in my life shrank as I thought about him riding the train with me to my station, talking to me the whole time. About boarding school, about his flight back to Tokyo, even about the movie.

  “I wasn’t supposed to be cast in it,” he said. “That’s fun fact number one. The book takes place in North Carolina, and they filmed some of it near my grandparents’ place. Fun fact number two is that the director actually wanted my grandfather to have a cameo, but the Famous Wyatt Foster would have nothing to do with it. So they gave me a role instead.”

  It was way past midnight when we got to my station, which meant he couldn’t get another train to his place. He had to take a cab home.

  “I’ll give you money,” I said when we were standing near the station exit.

  He shook his head. His hair had started to dry and turn back into curls. He shoved his hands in his pockets so I couldn’t hand him the damp thousand-yen bills I was holding. “Can’t let you do that, I’m afraid. Anyway, my parents gave me ‘emergencies only’ money.”

  “Your parents,” I groaned. “It’s already so late. They’re going to kill you.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m alive and I didn’t get kicked out of the T-Cad, so tonight is all victory as far as they’re concerned. Besides, Mika and I have this deal where she won’t make me go home alone. She’ll wait for me in the lobby and walk me up, and my parents won’t be able to freak out because they love her.”

  The thought of Mika waiting for Jamie, helping him, made my stomach pitch. “Please don’t tell her you were with me,” I said.

  He glanced down, sheepish. “I think she’s probably guessed.”

  “In that case, don’t tell her I yelled at you.”

  “Are you kidding?” He gave me a half smile. “That was my favorite part.”

  “Jamie,” I said. “Please.”

  He paused, then held out a hand for me to shake. “I won’t tell her a thing.”

  In a fit of madness, I’d almost told him to stay at my house. He could have slept on a futon on the floor, and the world wouldn’t have seemed so empty and vast and terrifying.

  I wrapped my arms around myself as cold rain splashed through the open window.

  Mika and David were gone, and it was like I was losing air. I was losing gravity. I was already losing Tokyo, the lights fading around me one at a time.

  Until I thought about Jamie—my hand on his, the strange, familiar sound of his voice in my ear—and the lights flickered back to life.

  Mom had gone to work hours ago, but she’d left a note stuck to the fridge. Cleaning out office—eat whatever you can find in the kitchen, miss you.

  I missed her, too. That was probably pathetic, but it was true—I missed my mom. I stood by the fridge, listening to rain hitting houses with paper-thin walls, to the distant ding of a bicycle bell. Dorothea Brooke came over and butted her head against my calf. I scraped my hands through my hair, fingernails digging at my scalp, and said, “I’m going to clean my goddamned room!”

  I grabbed a box of trash bags from the linen closet and started filling them with stuff. A couple of old tests, a bottle of half-dried nail polish, a doodle Mika had drawn of stick-figure Sophia standing next to a unicorn. (At the bottom, it said, happy birthday i got you a fucking UNICORN.) The more I threw away, the more it started to feel—right. Good, actually. Like breathing clean air. Like pedaling a bike until it pedals itself. I hurled stuff in by the armful now. A FUTURE ASTROPHYSICIST T-shirt with a watermelon-ice-cream stain on it, a pack of Pokémon trading cards, a stack of torn Paris museum guides.

  I was about six bags in when Alison burst through my door.

  “You woke me up,” she said. She was wearing fraying black leggings, a white T-shirt, and a pair of oversize tortoiseshell eyeglasses I think used to belong to my grandmother. Her skin was pale, and for the first time all summer, it occurred to me that she’d lost weight.

  “Jesus,” I said. “When did you transform into Edward Scissorhands?”

  “You woke me up,” she said again. “It sounds like you’re herding cats in here.”

  “That actually makes no sense.”

  “God, and your window’s open. Do you not realize it’s freezing out?” She shimmied around my bed and crawled onto my desk.

  I almost threw away a crumpled photo of eight-year-old Alison and six-year-old me playing with kitten Dorothea Brooke—but stopped myself just in time.

  “Seriously.” Alison yanked the window shut. “What are you doing with all that?”

  “Downsizing,” I said.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said, giving me her best Grown-Up face. “You’ve hoarded that junk for years.”

  “Exactly. It’s junk. That’s why I’m throwing it away.”

  “You sound like you’re on something,” Alison said. “Don’t throw it all away. You just don’t want to deal with it.”

  I stopped what I was doing and lay facedown on a pile of laundry.

  “Are you hungover?” she asked.

  “Not possible,” I mumbled into the clothes. “I don’t even drink.”

  “Good,” she said. “You shouldn’t. You’re seventeen.”

  “You drink. You’re nineteen.”

  “So? My friends are in their twenties. Your friends are twelve.”

  I rolled my
eyes, then realized she couldn’t see my face. I sat up, and Alison and the cat were peering at me. Intently. Alison adjusted her glasses.

  “Are those even real?” I asked.

  “Is that even the point?” she asked. “You’re acting strange. You’re throwing away your lifetime collection of useless crap. Did something happen to you?”

  Yes. My best friend is screwing my other best friend, who, by the way, I have an enormous and unfathomable crush on, and they aren’t my best friends anymore, and, if I really think about it, they probably never were.

  “Nothing at all,” I said.

  “That’s it.” Alison reached for a bottle of sakura perfume and sprayed me with it. D. B. sprinted for the door. “We’re going out.”

  I coughed. “We’re not going out. You haven’t left the house all summer.”

  “I’ve left the house.”

  “To go where?”

  “Irrelevant.” She sprayed me again. “Come on. Get up. Wash your face. Make yourself look less depressing.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  “No insults!” She sprayed me two more times. “I’m your goddamned sister.”

  CHAPTER 14

  WEDNESDAY

  BEFORE WE WENT OUT, I changed into a red skirt, a white-and-red polka-dot blouse, and a black cardigan with a Totoro button pinned on it. (It wasn’t the one Jamie had got for me, but it made me think of him.) Alison coerced me into sitting on the edge of the bathtub so she could put her favorite red lipstick on me as well.

  “It feels like my lips are coated in Play-Doh,” I said.

  “Considering you have a fetish for dressing like a clown,” she said, “it’s amazing you’ve never worn this stuff before.”

  It was still drizzling when we got outside, so I put up my black umbrella with a print of green and blue birds on it. “Where are we going?” I asked as we walked to the train station. The city smelled fresh in the rain. Like all the stale humidity had been replaced with a pile of wet leaves.