Alison sighs and turns to the side, her profile illuminated by the glow of the streetlights. “No,” she says eventually, still staring out the window. “It really, really doesn’t.”
CHAPTER 20
THURSDAY
I ONLY SLEPT FOR A FEW HOURS. Even though I was exhausted, even though the thing I wanted to do most was sleep. But I couldn’t. I kept waking up every five minutes, convinced it was already nighttime. The air was stale and humid, and my room felt smaller than ever.
I checked my e-mail in case Dad had written to say I should definitely come to Paris. But he hadn’t. I dialed his cell, then remembered it was three in the morning his time and hung up.
I paced the room.
Usually if I stayed out all night, Mika and I would spend the next day in her enormous bed with the curtains shut. We’d eat the chocolate ice-cream bars her mom kept hidden at the back of their freezer and watch episodes of My So-Called Life on her computer.
I slumped back onto my messy bed. Dorothea Brooke purred and groomed my hair. My watch was damp and itchy, so I took it off and tossed it on top of my dresser. Then I went to the kitchen.
Someone was knocking at the front door. Which was weird.
Really weird.
The only people who ever knocked at our front door were the NHK man coming for our unpaid TV subscription or our one English-speaking neighbor, this Canadian guy who brought us Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups whenever he went to North America on business trips. For a wild second, I thought it was Jamie. He wanted to do something else. Tour Japan on the Shinkansen. Fly to Sapporo and back again. Something that could be accomplished in a whirlwind seventy-two hours. I opened the door.
It was Mika.
My hand froze on the doorknob.
“Hey,” she said, lifting her chin in a stiff greeting.
I wanted to slam the door in her face. I wanted to lock it and bolt it and tell her to GO. AWAY.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
I hesitated before opening the door wider. She walked in and stood uncomfortably in the genkan, like she couldn’t decide whether to take her shoes off.
I crossed my arms and tried to seem angry. But I was so tired and confused, and the anger grew numb—a blunt blade. “You cut your hair,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, touching the side of her head self-consciously.
But she hadn’t just cut it; she’d buzzed it. Right down to the quick. It made all her features stand out: piercing eyes, small nose, thin lips. Her eyebrow stud became a cold slash of metal.
“You look like Debra in Empire Records.”
“My parents said Annie Lennox.”
“Were they pissed?”
She smirked. “Yeah. Inevitably. But I don’t know, also mildly amused.”
I nodded. “You can take off your shoes. If you want.”
Inside the living room, everything was sloppy and chaotic, the gray carpets and the frayed couch pillows and the furniture pushed into disarray. Mika played nervously with a hole in the cuff of her dark green shirt.
“You want coffee or something?” I asked.
“No thanks,” she said.
“Okay. I’m going to make coffee. And breakfast. I’m assuming you don’t want breakfast, either.” She followed me to the kitchen, where I hunted through cabinets for something to eat. There wasn’t much. A couple of bags of rice, orange juice, two browning bananas on the windowsill.
“Dude,” Mika said. “Are you okay? Have you been sleeping in a gutter?”
No. I’m just recovering from spending all night in Shibuya with Jamie, and also I might be moving to a different continent than was originally planned, and ALSO the thought of you and David together still makes me feel like the world is tipping out from under me.
“Okay,” I said. “I am, I mean. I am okay.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “You’re being kinda weird right now.”
I opened the fridge and spotted a box of leftover pizza, probably Mom’s dinner from last night. There were two slices of veggie inside, and I wolfed one down in a few bites. “How so?” I asked through a full mouth.
Mika scratched the side of her new head. “I don’t know. I figured you’d call me a traitorous bitch or something. I figured you’d throw me out.”
“Do you want me to?”
“No.”
I ate another slice of pizza. There was a stool shoved in the corner, but Mika didn’t sit on it, and I didn’t offer it to her. I took a coffee mug from the drying rack. I needed to do this before I chickened out completely.
“Did you and David really hook up?”
She seemed to think it over. Which was so ridiculous. It was a yes-or-no question.
“Yeah,” she said finally. “We did.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I’m angry you never told me.”
“It wasn’t a big deal,” she said quickly. “We hooked up a few times, but then we’d talk about how dumb it was. I’m not his girlfriend or anything.”
I put the mug down on the kitchen counter. My hands were trembling a little. “A few times? How many times?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“No. But if you don’t tell me, I’m going to assume it was every day.”
“Christ. Clearly it wasn’t every day.”
“How many times?”
“Five.” She picked up the mug and held it. She was probably worried I would smash it on the floor. Or throw it at her. “Four times last summer. Once this summer.”
“By ‘once this summer,’ you mean Monday, right? The night the three of us were hanging out? The night before David and Caroline broke up?”
She tugged on the silver hoop in her left ear. “It was dumb.”
“Then why’d you do it?” I asked.
“Agh!” She started rubbing the top of her head with both hands, like she was checking all her hair was really gone. “I don’t know! Because he’s not hideous? Because I was bored? Sometimes you feel like hooking up with someone, and it’s better to do it with a friend because that way you can laugh about it later.”
“That’s space talk,” I said. “Hooking up is not eating pizza. Or watching every episode of Buffy in a row. Having sex is not a casual activity.”
She snorted. “Oh, right. Because you’re an expert?”
I gripped the pizza box against me like it was a shield. “I really liked him. You knew that.”
She rolled her eyes. “He uses people. Everything he touches turns to stone.”
“Well.” I shrugged. “I’m not the one who slept with him.”
Mika stopped rubbing the bristles on the top of her head. She really did look awesome with short hair. Sharp and androgynous. She reminded me of the girls I sometimes saw in Paris, standing on sidewalks in leather jackets and oversized wool scarves, smoking cigarettes and glowering a lot.
The thought of Paris made me feel even more out of control. I was still mad at Mika, but I also wanted to talk to her. I needed my best friend.
“He likes you,” I said, putting down the pizza box. “I think he wants to be your boyfriend.”
“That’s his fucking problem,” Mika said. “I’m here because I’m worried about you. I don’t want you to hate me forever. Not over an idiot like David.”
“You lied to me. You lied and you were my best…” I spun around and started pawing through a cabinet, searching for coffee grounds. Mika came behind me and pulled at the fabric of my tank top.
When I turned around, she looked shyer and smaller than she had a few minutes ago. “I hope you’ll still come to our birthday–going-away thing tomorrow night,” she said tentatively. “That’s what I came here to say.”
For a few seconds, I just let myself breathe in and out again. All I wanted was to forgive Mika. All I wanted was to sit on the kitchen floor and drink coffee and tell her about last night and Jamie and Paris. I wanted to trust her again.
But then I thought about her and David, saying they were going o
ut but going to her apartment instead, flicking off her bedroom light, pressing their mouths together. My stomach heaved.
“I’m not sure I can forgive you,” I said.
Mika blinked. “So you’re really going to let David do this to us? You’re really going to let him get between us?”
“It’s not just David,” I said. “I can’t forgive you for—for other things, too. For the way you treat me like I’m a little kid sometimes. For telling me to stay away from David and making fun of me because I don’t drink or have sex or whatever. That’s why you slept with him, right? Because you guys are the experienced ones, and I’m just the dumb, innocent little Sofa?”
Mika’s expression went carefully neutral. “You’re not actually mad about that.”
I held back a scream. I grabbed the empty pizza box and jammed it into the full garbage can.
“Come on,” she said. “You know that dating David would have been a catastrophe. On a government-intervention level. He doesn’t deserve you. He deserves someone who—will divorce him. And take all his money.”
“I don’t care if it would have been a mistake! It was my mistake to figure out!”
“Jesus!” she said and then softened her voice. “Just—please. I never wanted you to hate me. I never wanted everything to explode like this.”
I scoffed. “Oh, it’s way past exploded. Way past.”
“Please,” she said again, something that could have been anguish filling her eyes. “I’m not abdicating my position as best friend yet. We can still talk about this. We can come back from this. Right?”
I crossed my arms and didn’t say a single word. Neither of us moved a muscle for a minute. The cicadas outside were so loud, it felt like the noise was filling up the room, crowding up my head, drowning me even more.
“Fine,” Mika said. “You know what? That’s fine. Have it your way. I’ll see you later, or maybe I won’t. Or whatever.” She left the kitchen.
I heard the door to the genkan open and then close. Followed by the front door.
Opening. Closing.
CHAPTER 21
THURSDAY
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: I drooled on some guy’s shoulder on the train :-/
Good morning! (Sort of.)
So I have no idea if this is your e-mail address anymore. Or if you still use e-mail. I probably should have sent you a message by carrier pigeon. That would be more my style.
I hope this isn’t stupid. I would have tried to call you, but we don’t have a house phone and Hannah won’t lend me her cell. She says I’m “up to something.” Of course I’m up to something. I wouldn’t ask for her phone if I weren’t.
What I’m trying to say (attempting to articulate) is that I’m going to Meiji Shrine. I just Googled it, and it’s open till sunset. So I’ll be there around fourish, and I guess I’ll loiter around the entrance, and if you’re there, then cool. If you’re not, also cool. You should sleep. I should sleep.
No. I’m lying. WAKE UP, SOPHIA!! I WILL BE LOITERING!
CHAPTER 22
THURSDAY
TO GET TO MEIJI SHRINE, I took a train to Harajuku and walked along an avenue of kitsch boutiques that became a row of cubed apartment buildings that became Yoyogi-koen.
Inside the koen, everything melted to green. Trees replaced buildings. The sound of traffic grew more and more muffled until it was drowned out by thousands of cicadas singing. The entrance to the shrine was a tall wooden torii, a Japanese gate shaped like an enormous, elegant pi sign. That’s where Jamie was. At Meiji Shrine, loitering outside. Wearing a Studio Ghibli T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses with square red frames. His hands were stuffed in his pockets, and he was watching the milling crowds.
Every time I saw him, it was different. This time, it was waking up. My fight with Mika, the conversation with my mom, those things didn’t exist anymore. The night Jamie and I had spent in Shibuya burned back to life. It was real. It was the only thing in the whole world that was real.
“Hi,” I said when I reached him.
“Hi.” He pushed his sunglasses onto his head. There were pink grooves under his eyes. “You’re here.”
He was smiling. And it was such a warm smile, such a relieved smile, that it made me want to kiss him. To kiss the shy nervousness right out of him. To kiss him under his eyes, in the cool, delicate place that should have been hidden by his sunglasses.
“You seem tired,” he said.
“The opposite,” I said, tugging on the sleeve of his shirt like it was a kite string. “I’m the opposite of tired.”
Oh. CRAP.
We’d passed through the torii and were snaking our way down a long, curving path toward the central building of the shrine. And I had no idea what to do. Was I supposed to hold his hand again? Was I supposed to touch him? He wasn’t touching me, which did not compute at all.
I knew he liked me. Or, at least, I thought he did. He’d said all that stuff about belonging with me, but maybe he’d meant, like, belonging in our friendship. The way I’d belonged with Mika.
That wasn’t how I felt, though. I felt about him the way I used to—only times ten thousand. To the nth degree. We weren’t touching, but the energy between us fizzed and popped. And I was such an idiot for ever thinking he was cute. Puppies were cute; the tiny cakes they sold at Kinokuniya were cute. Jamie was—electric.
When I looked at him—all lawless hair and anxious hands—I felt a lightning storm in my skin. When I looked at him, I wanted to kiss him. It was an automatic response. Like smelling a cookie and wanting a cookie. I tried to remind myself of all the things that were awkward and goofy and not-in-any-way-attractive about him. He’s a nerd. He’s read The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter at least twenty times each. He makes jokes about history and literature.
Every single one of those things just made me want to kiss him more.
But maybe kissing Jamie was a terrible idea. For one thing, it would make leaving Tokyo completely impossible. (Like, physically impossible. I would just hug Jamie around the waist and refuse to let go.) For another, it would take my soul and leave nothing but a warm, liquid center.
Kissing Jamie…
It would be Harry finding his wand. Frodo taking the ring. It would turn this week into something I couldn’t even fathom.
“Why’d you want to come here?” I asked, my voice a lot louder than I’d meant it to be. The path was cool and quiet, with cicadas cooing and trees eclipsing our shadows. This was a place to be peaceful.
And I was blabbering like a nervous weirdo.
“Because it’s historical,” he said, “and also it’s not my apartment.”
“I thought maybe you’d want to go to a cat café,” I said.
“A cat café?” He laughed. Loud, infectious laughter.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a café. Full of cats. We could—hang out with some cats.”
He was finding all this very funny. But I wasn’t joking. I was talking about cats because I needed to talk about something. Cats, dogs, parakeets, the unpredictability of the weather. I needed to distract my twisted brain from noticing that we were surrounded by trees. Dark and shadowy places…
Christ. I was so inappropriate. Who imagines making out with someone at a shrine?
“Did you get home okay?” Jamie asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I guess. Mom was waiting for me when I got there.”
“Yeah?” He sounded surprised. “Was she pissed off?”
“I don’t think so. She was just worried because Alison and I had a fight yesterday.”
“You had a fight with your sister?” He seemed concerned, which was so unfair. A genuine display of emotion was the last thing I needed from him. Don’t look at his lips… or his neck… or both! You idiot! You idiot! Don’t do both!
We walked over a wooden bridge.
“My sister and I fight all the time,” I
said. “We’re like pairs figure skaters. But instead of skating together, we fight. At an Olympic level.”
“Uh-huh.” He gave me a sidelong smirk. “My sister and I don’t really fight. But that’s because we’re the delinquents of the family. We have to band together.”
“Right. So I guess your parents weren’t thrilled when you came home this morning?”
His grin faded a little. “You could say that. But they’re both gone all day, and Hannah said she’d cover for me if they came back early, so…” He lifted his hands, palms tipped up. “Here I am.”
There he was.
And I could not stop STARING at him. I wondered if he’d noticed. I wondered if he was picking up on my swoony vibes. No way was I the first person to crush so hard on him. Maybe he’d even had a girlfriend. That thought made my stomach start to eat itself. Mika had never mentioned a girlfriend, but she’d never really mentioned him in general. Not around me, anyway. She’d once joked to David that he usually went for “older women.”
Older women.
I tried to imagine that. Older women with driver’s licenses and dark lipstick. Older women who gave him cigarettes and rolled around on his bunk bed with him.
I was eight months older than Jamie, so technically I was an “older woman,” too. But my hair was twisted into two braids, and I’d never had a boyfriend, and the thought of kissing someone made me want to breathe into a paper bag.
So. I probably didn’t count.
“Anyway,” he said, “what happened with your mom?”
“Huh?” I blinked. Like I was trying to clear my vision of him. (Because that was possible.)
“You said she was worried?”
“She was,” I said. “She talked to my dad this morning. Apparently I can move to Paris if I want to.”
“Like for college or something?”
“Like, next week.”
“Shit.” He rubbed the back of his head. “That’s—short notice.”
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