Ink

He slammed the page facedown on top of the pile of drawings he’d collected. He stood too close, so that he hovered over me.

“Did you draw that?” I whispered in English. He didn’t answer, staring hard at me. His cheek burned red and puffy where Myu had hit him.

I stared back. “Did you draw it?”

He smirked. “Kankenai darou!”

I looked at him blankly, and he sneered.

“Don’t you speak Japanese?” he said. I felt my cheeks flush with shame. He looked like he’d settled some sort of battle in his mind, and he turned, walking slowly away.

“She moved,” I blurted out.

He stumbled, just a little, but kept walking.

But I saw him stumble. And I saw the drawing look at me.

Didn’t I? My stomach churned. That was impossible, wasn’t it?

He went up the stairs, clutching the papers to his chest.

“She moved!” I said again, hesitant.

“I don’t speak English,” he said and slammed the door. It slid into the wall so hard it bounced back a little. I saw his shadow against the frosted glass of the door as he walked away.

Something oozed through the bottom of the sliding door, sluggish like dark blood. Did Myu hit him that hard?

The liquid dripped down the stairs, and after a moment of panic, I realized it was ink, not blood. From the drawings she’d thrown, maybe, or a cartridge of ink he’d kept inside the notebook.

I stood for a minute watching it drip, thinking of the burning eyes of the girl staring at me, the same flame in Yuu’s eyes.

Had Myu seen it, too? Would anyone believe me? I wasn’t even sure what the heck I’d seen.

It couldn’t be real. I was too tired, overwhelmed in a country where I struggled to even communicate. That was the only answer.

I hurried toward the front door and out into the fresh spring air. Yuki and her friends had already vanished. I checked my watch—must be for a club practice. Fine. I was too jittery to talk about what I’d seen anyway. I ran across the courtyard, sans slippers this time, through the gate of Suntaba School and toward the weaving pathways of Sunpu Park.

When my mother died, it didn’t occur to me I would end up on the other side of the world. I figured they would put me in foster care or ship me up to my grandparents in Deep River, Canada. I prayed they would send me up there from New York, to that small town on the river I had spent almost every summer of my childhood. But it turned out that Mom’s will hadn’t been updated since Gramps’s bout of cancer five years ago, when she’d felt it was too much of a burden to send me there. And Gramps still wasn’t doing well now that the cancer had come back, so for now I would live with Mom’s sister, Diane, instead, in Shizuoka.

So much sickness surrounded me. I could barely deal with losing my mom, and then everything familiar slipped away.

No life in Deep River with Nan and Gramps. No life in America or Canada at all. I’d stayed with a friend of Mom’s for a while, but it was only temporary, my life stuck in a place where I couldn’t move forward or back. I was being shipped away from everything I knew, the leftover baggage of fading lives. Mom never liked leaving American soil, and here I was, only seven months without her, already going places she wouldn’t have followed.

And seeing things, hallucinating that drawings were moving. God, I’d be sent to a therapist for sure.

I told Yuki about the fight the next day during lunch, although I left out the part about the moving drawing. I still wasn’t sure what I’d seen, and I wasn’t about to scare off the only friend I had. But I couldn’t get it out of my mind, those sketched eyes glaring into mine. I wouldn’t imagine that, right?

But the more I thought about it, the more dreamlike it felt.

Yuki turned in her seat to eat her bentou on my desk. I wasn’t used to the food yet, so Diane had packed my bentou box from side to side with squished peanut-butter sandwiches.

Yuki gripped her pink chopsticks with delicate fingers and scooped another bite of eggplant into her mouth.

“You’re kidding,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand as she said it. “I still can’t believe you went in there.”

She’d pinned her hair back neatly and her fingernails were nicely painted, reminding me of Myu’s delicate pink-and-silver nails. I wondered if they’d chipped when she hit him.

“You didn’t even wait for me to come out,” I said.

“Sorry!” she said, pressing her fingers together in apology.

“I had to get to cram school. Believe me, I was dying inside not knowing what happened.”

“I’m sure.” Yuki did like her share of drama.

She lifted her keitai phone in the air. “Here, send me your number. Then I can call you next time I abandon you in the middle of the biggest breakup of all time.”

I turned a little pink. “Um. I don’t have one?”

She stared at me a minute before shoving the cell phone back into her bag, then pointed at me. “Get one. Maa, I never realized Yuu Tomohiro was so mean.”

“Are you kidding? You told me he was cold!”

“I know, but I didn’t know he was cheat-on-your-girlfriend-and-get-someone-pregnant cold. That’s a different level.” I rolled my eyes, but secretly I tried to break down the number of words she’d just used. I loved that she had faith in my Japanese, but it was a little misplaced. We switched back and forth between languages as we talked.

Across the room, Yuki’s friend Tanaka burst through the doorway, grabbing his chair and dragging it loudly to our desks.

“Yo!” he said, which sounded less lame in Japanese than English. He tossed his head to the side with a friendly grin.

“Tan-kun.” Yuki smiled, using the typical suffix for a guy friend. I looked down into the mess of peanut butter lining the walls of my bentou. Tanaka Ichirou was always too loud, and he always sat too close. I needed space to think about what I’d seen yesterday.

“Did you hear about Myu?” he said, and our eyes widened.

“How do you know?” said Yuki.

“My sister’s in her homeroom,” he said. “Myu and Tomo-kun split up. She’s crying over her lunch right now, and Tomo didn’t even show up for class.” Tanaka leaned in closer and whispered in a rough tone, “I heard he got another girl pregnant.”

I felt sick. I dropped my peanut-butter sandwich into my bentou and closed the lid.

That curve of stomach under the sketched blouse…

“He did!” Yuki squealed. It was all just drama to them.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the way her head turned, the way she looked right at me.

“It’s just a rumor,” said Tanaka.

“It’s not,” Yuki said. “Katie spied on the breakup!”

“Yuki!”

“Oh, come on, everyone will know soon anyway.” She sipped her bottle of iced tea.

Tanaka frowned. “Weird, though. Tomo-kun might be the tough loner type, but he’s not cruel.”

I thought about the way he’d snatched the paper out of my hands. The sneer on his face, and the curve of his lips as he spat out his words. Don’t you speak Japanese? He seemed like the cruel type to me. Except that moment…that moment where he’d almost dropped everything and kissed Myu. His hand reaching for her chin, the softness in his eyes for just a second before it changed.

“How would you know?” I burst out. Tanaka looked up at me with surprised eyes. “Well, you called him by his first name, right?” I added. “Not even as a senior senpai, so you must know him