Alison guffawed. “Yeah. Be my guest.” She picked up a pebble from the ground and started rolling it between her palms. “You know what, though? I knew she would dump me. I didn’t know when, exactly, but it was inevitable. Letting people get close to you, it sucks. That’s why I’ve been MIA all year. Because it hurts a hell of a lot less than trying to stay in touch.”
“I understand,” I said carefully. “I feel that way all the time.”
The corner of my sister’s mouth lifted slightly. “Nice try, baby sister, but you’re not like that. You give people a shot.” She nudged my side. It was almost like it was when we’d only had each other. She was the shoulder I’d slept on during countless international flights. She was the person I’d hid with during Dad’s wedding reception, eating cheese smuggled in napkins and griping about how everyone kept calling us les petites Américaines.
“Here’s the truth,” she said abruptly. “It wasn’t dumb that you wanted to go to Paris.”
“Don’t mess with me,” I said. “I still feel like my head might explode.”
“This isn’t a joke. I can’t stand what he said to you, and I still think he’s a self-centered bastard, but I get why you’d want to be there. I get why you’d want that life.”
I stretched out my feet, sliding them down a dip in the cement. After everything else that had happened last night, the stuff with Dad seemed better somehow. Manageable. “Maybe it’s supposed to be this way,” I said. “I don’t want to leave Mom yet. I’m not sure I can lose her, too.”
“I don’t hate him,” she said. “But I hate how this feels. I hate that we’re not good enough for him.” She still sounded angry, but less angry. Like she was conceding something. She glanced up at the building. “And I mean, it’s not like our lives would have been perfect if he’d stuck around.”
“You were right about that, too,” I said, following her gaze. “It was kind of a crappy apartment.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad we agree. Because if everything gets shot straight to hell, you’re the one person that I… You’re my person. You know?”
She was wearing sunglasses so I couldn’t see her eyes. But I could see her.
Alison was almost seven when Dad left. He used to pick her up and hold her upside down by the ankles. He used to call her Christopher Robin. After he left, Alison crawled into my bed every night for two years.
“God, Alison,” I said, “you’re my person, too. You always have been.”
She snorted. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I knew she was rolling them. “Obviously.”
CHAPTER 32
SATURDAY
MOM WAS IN OUR ROOM when we got back.
It took approximately twenty seconds before I broke down and told her the whole disreputable tale of my alcohol abuse. I hated doing it. Disillusioning her. Making her realize that I was just like all the other Bad Teenagers out there. Not that she hadn’t figured it out already.
“You look like you have food poisoning and the plague,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “Is this my fault? Is this about Paris?”
That made me cry. No, I told her, this wasn’t about Paris. But also, I didn’t want to go. Even if Dad had told me to move there, it wouldn’t be home. Not the way I’d always imagined it would be. And I couldn’t leave her behind—I just couldn’t.
She was upset. Mostly because I was hungover. Mostly because she thought moving me away from my friends at the start of my senior year was a cruel and unusual punishment. She said she couldn’t even ground me, because the move itself was basically an extreme form of grounding. I sat on the bed and cried and said she could ground me until I was forty because I deserved to be locked away from humanity. She hugged me, and Alison sat next to us and leaned her head against Mom’s back. We were messy and emotional, and it was wonderful. It was home.
“This week has been crazy,” Mom said, tucking my hair behind my ears.
“Yeah.” I sniffled. “No shit.”
On the last night of the last day of my last week in Tokyo, Mom took me and Alison out for sushi. We went to a restaurant with a crowded countertop and ate thick scallops and glossy fish eggs on rice and bowls of warm miso soup chock-full of tofu and seaweed.
Back at the hotel, Alison and I watched the annual Tokyo Bay fireworks on TV. There were hanabi happening all over Japan that week. Across the country, spectators dressed in yukata stood huddled together, watching the sky. “Can’t see them from the goddamned window,” Alison said. “Too many goddamned buildings.”
Then I took a shower. I put on pajama bottoms and a Regina Spektor concert T-shirt and crawled into my hotel bed. The curtains were open enough to show me a wedge of glittering night. The city was painfully beautiful, a firework that never faded. I rolled onto my side and pushed the wet hair away from my neck.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from David since last night, but I didn’t really care. Not because I thought he was evil or anything. It was more that I had nothing to say to him. He wasn’t the person I’d always hoped he’d be, and, in all fairness, neither was I.
I hadn’t heard from Jamie, either—but that, I did care about. Even though thinking about him made pain wind its way through my body. We’d both been angry and we’d both said horrible things, but I was the one who’d pushed away first. I’d lit the match that destroyed this week.
Still, a part of me wished I could see him. I wished I could tell him I was sorry and that it really sucked, but we weren’t supposed to last beyond tomorrow, anyway. We’d always been facing good-bye.
What other choice did we have? A long-distance relationship? That implied dating, and Jamie and I definitely weren’t dating. I wasn’t exactly an expert on romance, but I didn’t think kissing someone, refusing to respond to their messages, and then kissing someone else in front of them constituted a “relationship.”
Or we could be friends. Exchange e-mails and texts until the day we grew apart, until he started dating someone else. I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want to experience the unavoidable breakdown of our connection, so I was going to be happy with this week. This week that I’d spent holding on to Tokyo as tightly as I could. This week that had been made up of counting seconds and waiting for everything around me to finally disappear.
But. Maybe it didn’t have to end that way. Because maybe Mika was right—maybe I did love Jamie. Even if he didn’t love me. Even if he never had. I must have loved him, because being with him was like waking up at the end of a long plane flight. Like looking at the star-shaped twinkly lights spun across my ceiling. I thought about stars and how their light lasts long after the star itself has faded. I thought about how home is still home even when it’s thousands of miles away.
That was this week. That was Jamie.
I heard Alison shut her laptop. “Are you going to sleep?” she whispered.
“Sort of,” I whispered back.
“And it’s not yet the melodramatic hour of two in the morning. How grown-up of you.”
“You’re one to talk.”
She made an amused sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Did you set an alarm?”
My watch was lying on the nightstand. “Mom called the front desk,” I said. “We’ve got a seven a.m. wake-up call.”
“Great.” Alison sighed. “Bon voyage to us.”
She turned off the lamp at the side of her bed, and the darkness in the room made the city glow brighter. A flash of lightning, frozen.
It’s my birthday. And the morning of my last day of middle school, the last day of my first year at the Tokyo International Academy… .
And Jamie is waiting near the gate, scanning the crowd for me. I push past a group of kids signing yearbooks. “Happy last day of school,” I say.
“Happy birthday, Sophia!” he says, bouncing on his heels.
“Blah,” I say. And even though it makes me nervous, I glance at the entrance to the high school. Older kids swish through the door. Boys with their arms around girls, everyo
ne looking exactly like adults.
“I can’t believe we’ll be there next year,” I whisper.
“I won’t,” Jamie says, his features pinched and anxious. “Hey, this is my last day. We have to say good-bye in approximately a few hours.” He reaches into the front of his backpack, pulls something out, and shoves it into my hand.
I hold up the Totoro pin. “What! This is the MOST awesome.”
“It was cool hanging out with you this year,” he says, like it’s all one word. “I’ll, um, miss you.”
I roll my eyes. “Jamie, it’s no big deal. We’ll still be friends. We’ll talk every day.”
“Really? Because I have no idea if my parents are going to let me visit, and you’ll be busy, and this could really be good-bye. You know, for permanent.”
I close my hand around the pin. “Only if you let it be.”
CHAPTER 33
SUNDAY
THE FIRE ALARM WAS GOING OFF.
I sat up, gulping for air, unsure where the nearest fire exit was, unsure where I was. Tokyo? New Jersey? Paris? I didn’t remember going to the airport or saying good-bye to anyone. But what I did remember seemed flimsy and dreamlike. The T-Cad at night, a slurred neon boulevard, Jamie’s reflection overlaying the whole city.
It took me a second, but then I noticed the partially open curtains. The sun was starting to rise, and the sky was purple and blue with orange stripes across it like plane tracks.
Right! Of course. The hotel. And—the fire alarm was going off?
“Tell me what that sound is!” Alison shouted. “I will burn it to the ground!”
“It’s…”
My watch.
“It’s my watch,” I said.
“Are you deranged?” she snarled. “You set your watch for five o’clock in the morning?!”
No. My watch was still on the nightstand, where I’d seen it before I went to sleep. It was beeping like crazy, and the screen was flashing:
I picked it up and jammed the button on the side. The beeping stopped. “Everything is okay,” I announced. “The sound is not happening anymore.”
“Oh my God!” Alison was sitting up as well now. She jutted her bottom jaw at me. “What the hell? Our flight doesn’t leave till almost noon. I do not want to be experiencing consciousness right now!”
“Sorry,” I said, pressing a few more buttons, hunting for an explanation. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. I set it for when we get on the plane.”
“You and your metaphysical countdowns! Always with the goddamned metaphysical countdowns!”
“They’re not metaphysical.” I tapped the watch’s screen. “They’re just countdowns.”
The only possible explanation was that I’d miscalculated the time. But that had never happened to me before. Like, actually never. I knew how to schedule a countdown. I could have been a professional timekeeper, if I so desired. The watch was still in my hands. I ran my fingers over the embroidered flowers. They were raised and nubby, especially where the pink thread was starting to unravel. I half expected it to tell me what was going on. I half expected it to beep again.
I half wanted it to.
Alison lay back down and jerked the comforter all the way over her head. Dorothea Brooke rested her cheek on my forearm and seemed as awake as I felt.
I tried to think this through. The last time I’d checked the countdown was in Shibuya, in the ramen shop with Jamie. I’d taken it off the next morning and hadn’t even touched it again until that night, when Jamie and I were packing. After we’d finished, Jamie had handed me my watch. He’d told me not to forget it. And before that, I’d left the room to take the tea mugs downstairs. Which meant he could have picked up my watch and…
Oh.
Oh my God.
I grabbed the clothes I’d laid out the night before. Green sweatpants, yellow tank top, underwear, socks. I rushed to the bathroom to assess the remaining clutter. There were toiletries strewn around the sink, and my clothes from yesterday balled up on the floor. I brushed my teeth and shoved hair ties and face wash into my sushi-printed makeup bag. As I was doing all this, I repeated to myself: Don’t get your hopes up, don’t get your hopes up, don’t get your hopes up.
I gathered up the final scraps of my existence and zipped them into my suitcase. My laptop, my passport, and the last of my money were crammed into my backpack.
“Explain yourself,” Alison said. She was sitting up again, and she seemed pretty unimpressed with everything I was doing.
“I can’t explain,” I said, slinging my backpack onto my shoulders. “Not now. Tell Mom I’ll meet you at Tokyo Station, on the platform for the Narita Express at nine.”
“Nuh-uh,” Alison said. “There is no way on earth I’m letting you leave.”
My flip-flops were by the closet. I felt an irrepressible surge of optimism. The early countdown wasn’t an accident. It had happened for a reason. I slid my flip-flops on and hoisted my suitcase onto its back wheels. It was heavy, but I could handle it.
I could handle this.
“Please,” I begged my sister. “After this, I swear I will never do anything fun or crazy ever again. Nothing. I’ll just go to school and study and, even if I get a driver’s license and a car, I will use those powers for good, not for evil. Like, I’ll grocery shop for Mom or visit our grandparents every afternoon. I’m going to be the most boring, well-behaved teenager in the whole world, starting at nine this morning, if you just let me go now.”
She was going to knock me out, I could tell. Or call Mom. She was going to lock me in the bathroom and tell me I could leave this room over her dead body.
But she didn’t do any of those things.
She got up, grabbed her shoulder bag, and pulled out a wad of thousand-yen bills. “The last of my yen,” she said, stuffing it into my hand. “Take a taxi if you’re running late.”
I closed my fist over the money. She was the best person in the universe, and I was about to tell her so when she held a hand up to stop me. “Seriously. Go now. Because I’m still half-asleep, and when I wake up, I’m going to begin the long process of regretting this for the rest of my life.”
I opened the hotel door.
Everyone in Shibuya had an umbrella.
Everyone except me, of course.
I propped my suitcase upright, swung my backpack around, and took out the T-Cad sweatshirt I’d packed in case it got cold on the flight.
It was six thirty on a Sunday morning, but there were still people in the plaza around the station. Clubbers staggering home arm in arm, women in matching pink tracksuits power walking in circles. Some young Australian tourists hovered near one of the station entrances. They were wearing ripped jeans and bandannas tied around their heads. One of them leaned back to take pictures of the tops of buildings.
Across the plaza was Hachiko. Loyal Hachiko with his nose held high, still waiting for someone. I’d wheeled my suitcase past him once, but I decided to do it again. Even before I reached him, I knew, for a fact, no one would be there. Hachiko was a place people went to meet, and no one had anyone to meet at six thirty on a Sunday morning. Regardless, I walked toward him, and I thought, Don’t get your hopes up, don’t get your hopes up, don’t get your hopes up. But with every step, I got my hopes up a little bit more, defying my logical brain.
No one was there.
Except me, of course. Because I was an idiot. An idiot who came here for a set of carefully deduced reasons.
They were:
If Jamie had reset my watch, it was because he wanted to see me before I left. If he reset my watch, it was because he wanted me to wake up early and go somewhere to meet him. And the only place I could think of was Shibuya. It was where I’d first seen him one whole week ago. Where I’d spent all night with him, every second unspooling and holding us in its amber. Before that awful night in Roppongi, I was supposed to meet Jamie in Shibuya, at Hachiko.
And so that’s where I went now. Me and my suitcase and my big, pathetic ho
pes.
I laid my suitcase on the ground and sat on top of it, pulling my hood over my head. There were raindrops on the backs of my hands and my bare feet. I wiggled my toes. The adrenaline high from racing to Shibuya was starting to wear off. And I was left with the knowledge that this was over. That soon I would be on a plane, moving away from this week and this place and this life.
But strangely, I wasn’t panicking. It was like I’d passed the event horizon and I was being absorbed into a black hole, but I was done fighting it. I looked up. The buildings reached toward the sky like outstretched fingers, and the sound of traffic swelled and crashed over me.
When my thoughts settled, I was surprised to find they settled on this poem Alison used to have scrawled on her bedroom door. It was called “Parting,” by Emily Dickinson, and it was all about loss. About how, when certain things are gone, it can feel almost like death. Something sudden, violent, and final.
The end.
Once the dust of that ending clears, though, there’s possibility. I saw that now. Countdowns can be reset. In the wake of the end, beginnings can be made. I had no idea what my beginning would look like, but I thought it might be out there. Waiting for me.
But first, I needed to say good-bye to Tokyo. Hachiko sat stoically in the rain, so I reached up to pat his side before dragging my suitcase toward the crossing. It was comforting to be part of the morning crowd. People surrounded me, all of them facing forward, going somewhere. The sky was gray, but somehow that made the city even more brilliant. All these colors pulsing on the billboards and TV screens above me.
The light at the crossing turned green, and hordes of bobbing umbrellas started moving across the street at the same time, like they were part of a choreographed dance.
But I didn’t follow them.
I closed my eyes and listened to the rumble of footsteps and the echo of voices from giant screens and the whir of trains, coming and going. The rain continued to wash down on me, and it reminded me that this was real and I was real, and for one whole second, that was the only thing in the world that mattered.
Seven Days of You Page 21