“I know where you live, Murakami,” Kara warned.
But Sakura only rolled her eyes. As they had gotten to know each other better, they teased each other more and more frequently. Kara enjoyed the sparring-she’d never had a sister, but if she had, she would have been happy with two like Sakura and Miho. The two girls were opposites, but at their core they shared the best traits: loyalty, honesty, and unselfishness.
Of course, if Kara had said as much to Sakura, the girl would have feigned shock. She liked to present herself to the world as a rebel, from her hair-which was cut short in back, but in diagonal slashes in front, framing her face-to the many patches and buttons she wore inside the jacket of her sailor fuku uniform, turned inside out whenever she could get away with it. Sakura was proud of her status as different in a society that valued conformity so highly.
“Kara,” Ren whispered.
She had just bent to her work again, and now her brush twitched the tiniest bit, ruining the line of the kanji character she had begun.
“Sorry,” he said, glancing to make sure Miss Kaneda was not paying attention. “Sakura showed me the last few pages of the manga you guys are doing. It’s pretty dark stuff.”
A ripple of unease went through Kara. Months had passed, but she still didn’t like to talk about what had happened in April. Not that Ren had asked about that-he just wanted to know about the graphic novel she and Sakura had been working on-but Kara couldn’t discuss one without being haunted by the memory of the other. The manga faithfully adapted a Noh theater play about the demon Kyuketsuki. Very few people knew that during the first term, she and Sakura, Miho, and another student, Hachiro, had encountered the real Kyuketsuki, an ancient, almost-forgotten demon spirit summoned by the violent murder of Akane, and the rage and grief of Sakura.
“The subject matter is pretty dark,” Kara whispered, with a sidelong glance at Sakura. “I’m glad to be done with it.”
“You mean you don’t like it?” Ren said. “It’s really good. Sakura’s art gets better with every page, and your script is excellent. So creepy and tragic.”
Kara shrugged. “It’s the way the play was written. I can’t take credit for it.”
They had managed to stop the spirit from stepping fully into the modern world, but before it had vanished, it cursed them. In the time since, the girls had not encountered anything remotely supernatural. No hauntings, no violence, no demons. Sakura and Miho had even begun to believe that Kyuketsuki had grown so ancient that its curse no longer wielded its original power. But Kara did not feel so sure. She still had nightmares sometimes, though they were ordinary enough, not the unnatural dreams the Kyuketsuki had once created.
“Don’t be so modest,” Sakura said. “You did an excellent job. Even Aritomo-sensei said so, and you know how worried she was that we would disrespect the source material.”
Kara wished the conversation would end. She and Sakura shared a sad and knowing look, but Ren seemed not to notice.
“So what are you going to do next?” he asked.
“Next?” Kara echoed.
“For your second manga. Sakura’s getting so much better, you have to do another one,” Ren said.
Kara looked at Sakura. “I hadn’t really-”
Miss Kaneda cleared her throat. All three of them stiffened and looked up at the teacher, whose disapproving glance was enough to make Kara feel terribly guilty.
“I’m sorry, sensei,” she said.
Miss Kaneda gave a small bow of her head. Kara returned the gesture, and lifted her brush, focusing again on her calligraphy. But as she got back to work, she couldn’t seem to slide back into the peaceful, meditative state she’d been in before.
Next? They had just finished the manga about Kyuketsuki. She didn’t want to think about what came next.
To Kara, the best part of summer had always been the long, golden twilight of early evening, when the day had come to an end but night had not yet arrived. On that Friday night, as the heat of the day began at last to break, she sat on a fence across the road from the tiny house she shared with her father, playing her guitar and softly singing along. It was a song about tragic romance, and though Kara had never had the kind of relationship the song depicted, she could imagine heartbreak all too well. Perhaps for that very reason, there were times when the idea of falling in love terrified her.
Or maybe you’re just sending a message, she thought.
A tiny smile played at the corners of her lips, but then guilt drove it away. Her father and Miss Aritomo were inside the house, and surely could not hear her singing. Even if they could, they wouldn’t have been able to make out the words. Still, she faltered, losing interest in the song, and moved on to another.
Kara had plenty of homework and she wanted to try to get as much of it as possible done tonight, because she had plans for tomorrow. But hitting the books could wait a while, especially since Miss Aritomo was inside cooking dinner with her father. The two teachers had been getting closer over the past couple of months. Though her dad kept insisting they were just friends, it was obvious to Kara-and to anyone else paying attention-that they liked each other a great deal. What was going on was more than friendship. Dating, at least. Maybe other things that she refused to think about.
At first Kara had encouraged it. Miss Aritomo taught art at Monju-no-Chie school and was the faculty advisor to the Noh theater club. While Kara and Sakura had been working on their manga, she had been a huge help.
Pretty and petite, with gorgeous eyes, Miss Aritomo had seemed to take to Rob Harper immediately. Kara had wanted her father to be happy, to smile more, and she had seen him noticing Miss Aritomo. She’d smiled and teased her dad to let him know it was all okay with her, had told him that her mother would never have wanted him to be alone.
Those sentiments had felt true at the time. But now that her father and Miss Aritomo were getting closer- maybe a lot closer-Kara was having a difficult time with it, and she refused to let her father see that it bothered her. He didn’t deserve that.
So she sat on the fence across from the house and looked out over Miyazu Bay below and played her guitar. It didn’t hurt that the view was considered one of the two or three most beautiful in all of Japan. A spit of land thrust out from the shore, a three-mile sandbar that had been there long enough for eight thousand pine trees to grow along its length. Ama-no-Hashidate-this finger of land-was a major tourist attraction, and Kara always smiled to see people coming to view it in the traditional way. From various vantage points, they would turn their backs to Ama-no-Hashidate and bend over, looking at it upside down through their open legs. It looked ridiculous, but she had tried it, and from that angle, the spit did indeed look like a bridge in the heavens, which was a rough English translation of its name.
Her fingers lost their way on the strings, moving almost of their own accord, jumping from song to song before finally falling still.
With a sigh, Kara stood up, holding her guitar close, and stepped over the low fence. Off to her left, in the distance, she could see Monju-no-Chie school and the welcome arch at the edge of its grounds. As she started across the street, her father opened the door of their squat little house and blinked in surprise when he spotted her.
“Perfect timing,” he said with a smile.
“My stomach is psychically attuned to the precise moment of dinner’s readiness,” she said in English.
Her father arched an eyebrow as he stepped aside to let her in. “Hey. I thought we were supposed to stick to Japanese.”
Kara laughed. “You think I can say ‘psychically attuned’ in Japanese? You aren’t that good a teacher.”
He gaped in false astonishment and then glared with equally invented anger. “My dear,” he said in Japanese, “I am an exceptional teacher.”
“And modest, too.”
As they walked into the dining area, Miss Aritomo was pouring ice water into glasses from a pitcher. She smiled.
“You have a very pretty singing voice,” she said.
Kara bowed her head in thanks. “I didn’t realize I was singing so loud.”
“Not very loud,” Miss Aritomo replied. “But the window in the kitchen is open, and we could hear you while
