No, not her best friend Jamie. Just Jamie. Sitting right there, his cheeks slightly pink from the sun. “I like your mom,” he said. “I like how she trusts you. You guys are so comfortable with each other.”
“Of course she trusts me.” I picked up a stuffed puppy dog and tossed it onto the bed. “That’s why she lets me go out all night. That’s why she doesn’t care if my laundry smells like cigarettes and booze.”
He took his sunglasses off his head and ruffled the top of his hair. “She trusts you because you’re not the one smoking the cigarettes or drinking the booze.”
“She trusts me because I’m smart. Smart is all the currency in my family.”
“Not in mine,” he said bluntly. “We Fosters are big on appearances.”
“Just the Fosters? What about the Collinses?”
“My dad’s family has been absorbed into the orbit of the Famous Wyatt Foster. They’re all big on the manners thing. Use ma’am and sir when talking to adults. No fighting in front of strangers or, worse, in front of the Famous Wyatt Foster. Go to the gym. Smile a lot.” He smiled as an example.
“You definitely win in the manners category,” I said. “You were horrifying down there.”
He drew back, affronted. “Horrifying? How was I horrifying?”
“I’m just glad you didn’t call my mom ma’am,” I said. “If you’d called my mom ma’am, this would all be over.”
He scrunched up his eyes in adorable confusion. His sunglasses were sitting between us, so I put them on the nightstand. When I lowered my arm, he reached over and brushed his fingers against the back of my hand. Goose bumps traveled up my arm. And then I actually couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed his hand and rubbed my thumb over his knuckles, again and again and again.
He closed his eyes.
“How many girls have you kissed?” I whispered.
“What?” He opened his eyes.
“How many girls have you kissed?” I asked again.
“You want to know that?”
“Of course I want to know that. Jesus. Who wouldn’t?”
He chewed his bottom lip. “I feel like the number is misleading.”
“Oh God,” I groaned. “What does that even mean?”
“It means I’ve kissed people for stupid reasons.” He sat closer to me. “I went to boarding school. If you didn’t have a car, you might not leave campus for months. There was a lot of let’s-pass-the-time kissing going on.”
“Let it be known that you are currently confirming all my worst fears,” I said.
“Damn.” He dipped his head forward. “I was trying to make it better.”
“How many girlfriends have you had?”
He seemed to think about this for a while. I imagined him tallying up the numbers. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen…
“Three,” he said.
“Three?”
He nodded. “My last girlfriend was the one I was talking about, the one Hannah hated. Her name was Sam. We dated for a year and a half.”
“That’s exactly one-half of your teenage life.”
He pulled my hand into his lap with both of his, then turned it over and started tracing figure eights on my palm. Every part of me shivered.
“We broke up last January,” he said. “But we were really done six months before that. When she went to the University of Florida. Long distance. We were doomed.”
Long distance.
“The girlfriend before that,” he said, “was one of my first friends at that school. We dated because everyone else in our tiny friend group was dating. She dumped me after two weeks.”
“And the one before that?”
His fingers stopped moving. “Mika.”
“Mika?”
“Not seriously or anything.” He pulled me a little bit closer so he was holding me lightly by the wrist and forearm. “When I started at the T-Cad, I was in kindergarten and Mika was in first grade. She saw that other kids wouldn’t play with me, so she told them all that she was my girlfriend. We used to walk around the playground holding hands.”
I thought about me and Jamie—walking around Tokyo, holding hands. I shimmied back a little. “Was that it?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “We did kiss. Once. When I was in sixth grade.”
“What?” I jerked my arm away. “The year before I moved here?”
A crease flickered briefly between his eyebrows. “It was on the train one night. Afterward, Mika made me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone, and she said it would never happen again. I was disappointed, but I got over it.”
I crossed my arms. “But she’s still your best friend. You still talk to her all the time.”
“Yeah, but honestly? Mika and I have never been great with the serious stuff. I mean, we joke around, and we grew up together, so I guess she knows a lot about me. But hey, listen.” He reached out and held me carefully by the elbows. “She’s not my best friend, okay?” We were leaning into each other, like there were magnets in our shoulders. “Since we’re on the topic of past romantic lives,” he whispered, “I have to ask you a question.”
“What is it?” I whispered back.
“Shit. Okay. I have to ask if you really liked David? Before, when we used to… hang out a lot?”
I paused. “Yes. I mean, I did. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I led you on.”
He ducked closer still; our foreheads were nearly touching. “Listen to me, Sophia. You didn’t lead me on. We were friends. You treated me like a friend. It was my problem that I wanted it to be different.”
“I really liked you, Jamie,” I said. “But, I don’t know, I liked David, too. He was so… self-assured, and funny, and charming—”
“Thanks,” Jamie said. “I got it.”
“No.” I rolled my eyes. “I mean, he was imposing. I thought, if someone like him paid attention to me, I must be special. Turns out he was just addicted to the confidence boost.”
“He liked you,” Jamie insisted. “But you’re too much awesome for his brain to handle.”
“Uh.” I snorted. “Am not.”
“You are,” he said. “Sophia. I like you. The last three years haven’t felt as real to me as the last three days. I like talking to you. I like listening to you talk. I don’t want it to end.”
I shifted forward. Our knees connected.
“That’s because I’m good at talking,” I said. “You may think my only strong suit is science, but I have a bunch of other skills. I can talk, I can listen and look serious at the same time, I can nod knowingly.”
Jamie lifted my left hand and pressed it between both of his. He brought my exposed wrist to his lips and kissed it, once, where my skin was nearly sheer and charged with nerves.
I really hoped it wasn’t sweaty or smelly or something. I really hoped he didn’t hate it. I really hoped he didn’t think it was embarrassing when I gasped.
I sat up on my knees and ran both of my hands around Jamie’s neck, tilted his face up to mine. His lips parted easily, and his eyes closed. When he opened them again, I said, “I don’t want it to end, either.”
His mouth found mine, his arms wrapped around my back. Kissing. I was kissing someone! And it—it made my mouth feel instantly numb. It was like plunging into ice-cold water. My body was all, I have no map for this! Help!
I took a quick, shallow breath and our lips disconnected. I sat back on my feet, trying to fill my lungs with oxygen. Jamie leaned forward, one hand sweeping away the hair that had gotten stuck to my lips. “Is everything okay?”
All those shadows and the curves of his face. All that concern in his magic green eyes. Okay. I am okay. My hands held on to his face. And then…
And then we were kissing again.
I opened my mouth wider and his tongue pushed gently against mine and I tasted tea leaves and mint. His hands slipped under my knees and he was pulling me into his lap. My stomach touched his. My mouth opened a little more and his teeth clicked against mine, which Mika had told me was ba
d, but it didn’t feel so bad. It didn’t feel like a disaster.
He shifted back so he was resting against the bookshelf. I sat back and ran my hands down his shoulders and up his arms. His eyes were closed, and his eyelashes beat furiously against his cheeks, sending out all kinds of Morse code. It made me want to kiss him more.
So I did.
I wanted to coil all the way around him. I wanted to take all his air and give it back to him and take it again. His arms adjusted around my waist, and he twisted his mouth away. He touched his nose to my cheek, then my jaw. “You’re pretty good at this, too,” he whispered.
I kissed his ear and rested my nose there, in the dappled sunlight of his hair. I whispered, “MIT will be glad to hear it.”
He laughed with his mouth against my throat, and the nerves in my body disconnected, one by one by one.
CHAPTER 24
THURSDAY
JAMIE WAS RIGHT. He was good at packing.
“This is the advantage of being repeatedly shipped between nations,” he said. “I am a Jedi master of packing.”
“If that was true,” I said, “I’d be one, too. But I totally suck.”
“You”—he pointed at me with a pack of Pingu stationery—“are just denying your potential.”
It took three hours to pack my room. It should have been weird between us after the marathon make-out session, but it wasn’t. I was too floaty to be anxious. Too effervescent, like I’d been filled to the top with something carbonated.
Kissing Jamie had made time stop. Or, at the very least, slow down. Every second was too alive to worry about the next. I couldn’t even think about getting on a plane in two days, because there were hundreds upon thousands of seconds between this moment and that one. Seconds I could potentially spend with Jamie. Kissing.
We’d only been making out for ten minutes or so when we heard the back door open again. My house was small enough that I could feel if someone else was inside it. The floor in my bedroom actually shook when Mom and Alison walked into the kitchen.
I jumped up, flipped on the light, and threw open the door. By the time I turned around, Jamie had started packing. We made boxes, we labeled boxes, we filled boxes. Jamie was a Grade A folder of clothes. And he wrapped all my science books in old T-shirts and carried them with both hands before putting them gingerly into a box. Which made me want to nudge my way between him and the box, to nudge my nose against his neck and kiss a line along the back of his ear. (My imagination was being way more active than I had realized it could be.)
Soon my room was nothing but boxes. They sat around my bed and under my desk and in front of the closet. We packed a suitcase for me to take on the plane, since the rest of my stuff was being shipped to the States.
I stood next to my bed and tried to wrap my head around all the change. The walls were stripped of posters and pictures, the rainbow rug was gone, and the twinkle lights were coiled in a box instead of hanging from the ceiling. I went downstairs to get a glass of water and put our tea mugs away while Jamie finished taping the very last box. When I came back, it was done.
“It looks so small,” I said.
Jamie flipped my stuffed puppy into the air and caught it. “It looked small before.”
I knocked my arm against his, and he bopped the top of my head with the puppy. It was hard not to kiss the side of his neck, but I could hear Alison moving around in her room next door, listening to cello music.
“Hey.” Jamie put the puppy on top of my suitcase. “Don’t forget this.” He picked up the watch from the otherwise empty dresser and handed it to me.
“Right. Thanks.” It felt almost hot in my hand. Staring at its faded purple-and-white face sobered me up for a second—the inevitable was coming. The only reason Jamie was here was to help me pack my room. So I could get on a plane and leave.
I dropped it on the suitcase. “You’re going to miss the last train,” I said. “I’ll walk you to the station.”
Mom was sitting at the desk in her room, typing on her laptop. I knocked and said I was taking Jamie to the station. “Okay, good.” She pushed her glasses onto her head and gave us a weary smile. “Still miles to go for me. Thanks for all your help, Jamie.” Jamie nodded and tugged his leather wristband. I stared intently at some loose plaster on the wall.
Going downstairs felt like walking into a crime scene, everything neat and square and cordoned off. And then we were outside, and Jamie was reaching for my hand again. The night opened up around us: a breeze rustling the laundry on someone’s balcony, cicadas croaking in the trees that curled around buildings. I could smell yakisoba and the vague perfume of persimmon trees, all of it floating up to a dark smear of hazy sky.
Since it was just before midnight, every store we passed was shuttered, but a few vending machines lit our way down the hill. Someone biked past us with a small dog sitting on a cushion in the basket. But then they were gone, and we were alone.
Jamie lifted our joined hands and pointed them at the sky. “Check it out,” he said. “There are exactly four stars up there.”
I looked up. “Those are probably airplanes.”
“So cynical,” he said. “Those count.”
He stopped walking, so I did, too. “Stupid question,” he said, sounding nervous all of a sudden. He was swinging my hand back and forth. “Did you miss me? When I was in the States?”
I frowned. “That doesn’t sound like a stupid question. That sounds like a trick question.”
He laced his other hand with mine, like we were going to start dancing up and down the empty street. Like we were in one of those cheesy movies from the 1950s with big, long dance sequences at night under the stars. I could see Jamie in one of those movies. All that goofy charm and that wide, expressive face.
“Actually,” he said, “don’t answer that. I’m gonna stop talking before I embarrass myself some more.”
I turned away. There was a cat sitting in an alleyway between two stores, its flashlight eyes blinking at us. “I don’t know what to say. I thought we’d fucked things up so much when you left. I thought you were living proof that I was a loser with no ability to make genuine connections with other human beings.”
“Wow.” Both of his eyebrows quirked up. “That’s quite a compliment.”
I rolled my eyes and shoved him a little. For the past three years, I’d tried so hard not to think about him. When I sat in the courtyard at lunch, when I watched my favorite movies, when I checked my e-mail and knew I’d never see his name there again. “You were my first real best friend,” I said, realizing with each word that it was true. “Of course I missed you. Every single day.”
He didn’t say anything or even smile. He just kissed me, with all those airplanes twinkling above.
CHAPTER 25
FRIDAY
I DIDN’T GET UP WHEN MOM knocked on my door, but I did when Alison came in and tore the sheet off me.
“Get your shit together,” she said. “The movers are here.”
“I’m up,” I mumbled, burying my face in my pillow. “My shit is together.”
Alison snorted. “Yeah, you seem real alert. Change your clothes.”
I grabbed the first things I found in my suitcase. A green-and-black striped T-shirt, a pair of skinny jeans, a plastic belt covered in pictures of comic book covers, and my toiletry bag. There were people downstairs. I heard furniture scraping across the floor and boxes bumping into doorframes.
Seeing the house picked clean was even worse in the morning, sunlight and dust filling up every empty corner. None of this belonged to us anymore—it belonged to a stranger.
“Don’t think about it,” I whispered. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth with a miniature toothbrush and a tube of travel toothpaste. As I pulled my shirt over my head, I smelled mint on my shoulder. Memories of last night sparked in my nerve endings—Jamie’s mouth and the careful loops he’d drawn up and down my arms.
The iron fist gripping my stomach loosened as I remin
ded myself that whatever else happened today, I was going to see Jamie. He didn’t have a cell, so I couldn’t call him. But last night, before he’d gotten on his train, we’d agreed to meet at Hachiko at four. That thought was like putting on a coat of armor. It was like putting on headphones to drown out the racket downstairs.
I practically skipped out of the bathroom and back into the chaos of boxes.
The movers were there all morning, Alison and me swooping around them, and Mom directing them in Japanese. It was noon, and then one, and then, somehow, it was after two.
The last few boxes huddled in small groups by the genkan. The rest of the house had transformed into nothing but blank walls and spongy carpet. Mom shouted at me from the top of the stairs that we’d be leaving for the hotel in an hour.
And after that, I’d go to Hachiko.
My stomach growled. I escaped into the kitchen to see if we had any food left and almost collided with Alison, who sat near the back door pulling on shoes. “Mom gave me money. She said we should get lunch at Mister Donut before we leave.”
I twisted my belt so it sat in the right place. “You’re talking to me again?”
I could hear Mom in the hallway now, explaining something to one of the movers. Alison stood up. “Captain’s orders.”
Jamie had left his red sunglasses in my room, so I wore them on the way to the station. My sister eyed me suspiciously.
“You’re smiling a lot,” she said. “Did you knock your head on something?”
“The other day you thought something was wrong because I was sad,” I pointed out. “Now you think something’s wrong because I’m happy.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Your face is warped with a new and unique emotion every time I see you.”
Mister Donut was a donut shop in Yoyogi-Uehara Station. I waited in line with Alison, overwhelmed by how familiar everything was. The glass cases of donuts and the cheerful yellow decor and the rumble of the trains overhead. I used to hang out here with Mika and David on boring Sunday afternoons. We’d sit at a table in the back, and they’d laugh and tease each other for hours, maybe flirt with each other, now that I really thought about it… .
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