“Why do you ask?”
Sakura let out a derisive laugh. “I told her American boys are stupid. That they wouldn’t be intelligent enough to keep up with her, but would expect her to act like she is even dumber than they are.”
Miho glared at her.
Kara grinned. “You mean Japanese boys aren’t the same way?”
“Exactly the same,” Miho said.
“Not all of them,” Sakura added quietly.
“Oooh, Sakura likes a boy!” Kara said.
Whatever vulnerability Sakura had just revealed vanished in an instant. Her cynical, tough-girl mask reappeared, and she winked at Kara.
“I like them all. Except American boys.”
Miho glared at her. “You’re evil.”
But she couldn’t keep the angry face in place for more than a few seconds, and then they were laughing. Kara’s heart felt lighter than it had in days. She had never acquired a huge number of friends at home; she just didn’t have that kind of personality. But she missed Dawn and Toni and Aaron, the kids she’d hung out with in her high school in Massachusetts. She’d kept in touch by e-mail, but she’d been gone three months and already it felt like they’d forgotten about her. Out of sight, out of mind.
Which meant she had to live in the now, with the people around her.
“Say ‘cheese,’ ” she said, raising the camera.
Sakura and Miho grinned. “Chee-zu!” they both said.
Kara laughed. “It’s ‘cheese!’ I’m not the one pronouncing it wrong.”
“You’re in Japan,” Sakura told her. “We say ‘chee-zu.’ ”
“Because we say ‘cheese,’ ” Kara replied.
“Which is silly, anyway,” Miho put in. “Why cheese?”
Kara laughed. “Fine. Explain ‘chee-zu,’ then.”
Miho and Sakura glanced at each other, genuinely baffled, and Kara snapped their picture like that. She viewed the shot on the little screen on the camera and giggled, showing it to the girls.
“Who’s evil?” Sakura said.
Miho crossed her arms. “Kara is evil,” she said in English.
Kara nodded in appreciation. “Hey, that was pretty good.”
“We need practice,” Sakura said, also in English. “You should speak English with us.”
“I need practice, too,” Kara replied.
“We…,” Miho began, but switched to Japanese. “We should take turns.”
Which sounded more than fair. For the rest of the afternoon, they moved back and forth between English and Japanese, correcting one another as politely as possible. They were hungry and ate lunch in a small restaurant near the park. The girls were much more comfortable with gossip outside of school, and Kara learned the secrets-real or imagined-of some of the most popular students, not to mention some teachers. Some of the teachers she’d barely met, and some of the other students she’d never heard of, but Kara listened intently and laughed in all the right places.
Miho and Sakura weren’t content to talk just about their own world, though. They wanted to know about her life in America, and Miho, of course, about every boy she’d ever kissed, or wanted to kiss. They had questions about fashion, shopping, and the house she’d lived in, and Kara happily filled them in. An older woman who worked in the restaurant joined in on the conversation at one point, wanting to hear Kara speak English.
“You should learn to speak Japanese-English,” the woman said, “if you want us to understand when you speak your own language.” When she saw the confusion on Kara’s face, she went on. “The accent. If you speak English with a Japanese accent, it will be easier to understand you.”
Kara bowed her head in gratitude for the advice. As the woman walked away, Sakura rolled her eyes.
“Don’t listen to her,” Miho said. “You need to speak
American-English if we’re going to learn correctly.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Kara replied. “It’s hard enough to speak Japanese without trying to learn to speak English with a Japanese accent.”
By the time they finished lunch it was after two-thirty, and Kara knew she wouldn’t be hungry at dinnertime. Still, her fish had been excellent and the plums delicious. And since she’d never be able to finish her dinner, it made total sense to her that they should get some candy at the little shop just down the street.
They rode the bus back into the heart of Miyazu City, eating their sweets and talking about nothing. A boy who looked old enough to be at university admired Sakura, apparently taken by the dramatic cut of her hair or the collection of patches and pins on her jacket, though Kara thought it just as likely he merely appreciated the shortness of her skirt. Many Japanese girls would have looked away, either with a shy smile or in an attempt to ignore him. The culture avoided bold eye contact whenever possible, but Sakura had her own style, and it involved challenging convention whenever possible. She gave the boy a withering stare that eventually forced him to turn away.
Kara and Miho shared a smile over that.
“You look tired,” Miho said quietly, in English, adjusting the bow in her hair. “Are you feeling all right?”
The change of tone and subject was abrupt. Kara blinked and looked at her, but Miho’s gaze was elsewhere.
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she confessed, also in English.
“ Soudesuka,” Miho replied with a nod. “Sakura hasn’t either.”
The word meant something like I hear you and understand. Kara enjoyed how versatile the Japanese language was. After a couple of months in Japan, shifting between the languages had grown difficult. If she was thinking in Japanese, it wasn’t easy to switch to English.
“What haven’t I been doing?” Sakura asked, moving across the bus to sit beside Miho.
Seeing them next to each other-the mousy, proper girl with her cute glasses and the wild child-usually made Kara smile at the contrast. But on the subject of sleep, she couldn’t muster a smile.
Kara switched to Japanese, hoping they would stick with it. “Sleeping well. Why not?”
With a shrug, Sakura unwrapped a small candy and looked away from them. “I haven’t slept well since Akane died.”
“This is different,” Miho said. Sakura ignored her, but Miho leaned toward Kara and whispered, “Bad dreams.”
The words made Kara flinch, thinking of her own nightmares of cats and no-face girls and all that blood. A chill snaked up the back of her neck and she would have asked Sakura to elaborate, but then the bus slid to a halt and the doors opened.
“Let’s go,” Sakura said, leading the way.
The streets of Miyazu City looked nothing like an American or even European city. There were markets and shops everywhere, monks in white, police officers stopping bicyclists to see their riding permits, and tourists buying souvenirs of Ama-no-Hashidate. Some of them were embarrassingly American, one man even wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a cowboy hat, as though he had dressed up expressly for the purpose of becoming a caricature. Kara cringed at the sight of him, but nobody else seemed to notice, as though this man in his sandals and sunglasses was what they expected of Americans.
Don’t be nasty, she thought. He might be perfectly nice.
Still, the shirt had to go.
They visited Miho’s favorite dress shop, where a saleswoman seemed to adopt them as her personal mission, though none of them bought anything. Sakura dragged them into a bookshop, where she introduced Kara to her favorite manga and they both spent too much money, and then into a music store, where Miho insisted Kara pick out some American music for her. Since she hated J-pop-the bubblegum pop music a lot of Japanese kids liked-Kara was happy to oblige, grabbing the latest Alicia Keys and an ancient Nine Inch Nails, just for variety.
Outside a little store where Sakura had bought them each a spangly hair band and herself a pair of bright orange socks, they stopped for a break near a fountain. Kara thanked her for the gift, and Sakura seemed pleased.
“A keepsake of our day,” she said.
