Kara had shrugged. “There’ll be plenty of people around. And I want to check on Sakura.”
At his desk, Rob Harper stared at her, tapping a pen against his computer keyboard. “How do you feel? Did you get up again last night?”
His nerves were frayed. When she laughed, she knew she sounded frayed as well. There was no hiding it.
“Not as far as I know. If I did, I didn’t go anywhere.” But Kara knew she hadn’t gotten up again. “And I’m okay,” she went on. “Just really, really tired. If there’s not going to be school, I think I’m going to try to sleep a little after lunch.”
Miho came out of the bathroom then, lost in a hooded sweatshirt much too large for her. Kara’s father glanced at Miho, then back at his daughter. “All right, go ahead. But unless you’re coming back right away, after you go to the dorm, come by the school. I’m headed there shortly to help deal with the parents. There’ll be a lot of activity later today with so many people coming to collect their kids.”
Moments later, the girls were out the front door and walking briskly toward school, a silent but mutual urgency propelling them. Kara had brought her camera, but she uncapped it only once for a quick picture of the school in the distance, shafts of sunlight dappling the pagoda-style roof in splashes of golden light and gray storm shadow.
“Why did you bring that?” Miho asked in English.
Kara glanced at her. They’d spoken very little this morning, each keeping to her own thoughts. Kara’s eyes burned with exhaustion and her head felt stuffed with cotton, the way she’d felt the one and only time she’d ever drunk enough beer to wake up with a hangover. And Miho might not have been suffering from nightmares, but she had to be exhausted this morning as well.
“When I’m upset or freaked out,” Kara explained in English, “there are two things that make me feel better, taking pictures and playing guitar. I’m not some strolling troubadour, and I figured we didn’t have time to hang out and sing Jack Johnson surf tunes. So, the camera.”
Miho nodded slowly as they walked, listening, trying to take it all in. Her English was decent, but not as accomplished as Kara’s Japanese. Miho didn’t have a father who’d been teaching her a foreign language basically since birth.
“What does ‘troubadour’ mean?” she asked.
Kara smiled. She switched to Japanese. “Like a traveling musician.”
Miho shot her a sharp look. “Don’t do that,” she said, resolutely sticking to English, irritable from sleeplessness. “Don’t be so… Don’t be…”
The girl grew frustrated, sighing because she could not find a word in English to express her feelings.
“Shit,” Miho said.
Kara tried to hide her smile, and then laughed instead, raising a hand to hide her face. Miho shot her a fierce, withering look, entirely different from her usual shy, amiable demeanor.
“No, no,” Kara said. “Okay, English. I’m not laughing at you. It was just… you don’t have any problem learning English swear words.”
Miho shrugged. “Profanity is useful and it makes you feel better. It’s an… what is the word?” she said, throwing up her hands in frustration. “My brain is not working right today. Profanity is a very expressive part of any language.”
The girls walked on another half a dozen steps in silence, and then Kara bumped Miho gently. “The word you wanted was ‘condescending.’ It means to treat someone like they’re not as smart as you are, or something like that. And I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be condescending. It’s just easier to talk to you in Japanese.”
Miho bumped her back, a little harder. “But I need to speak better English.”
“Your English is freakin’ amazing. You speak English better than most Americans.”
“Really?”
“Really. No shit.”
Miho smiled. “See? Profanity is useful.”
“Oh, I can teach you all kinds of profanity you probably haven’t heard yet.”
“I would like that.”
The drizzle had picked up a bit, and Kara snapped her camera case shut, keeping it close to her body. As she and Miho walked, they continued to bump each other every few steps.
Pretending they had nothing at all to fear.
As they stepped up onto the curb and then onto the lawn in front of the school, Kara felt words coming up from deep within her, felt her mouth opening to ask a question to which she did not want an answer. She rubbed at her itchy eyes.
“Did you smell the cherry blossoms last night?” Kara asked.
“I was just thinking about that,” Miho said, looking at her oddly. “I looked around this morning, but there are no cherry trees near your house.”
“No. There aren’t.”
Kara expected Miho to pursue the point, to want to talk about what had caused the smell, but instead the other girl fell silent. But Kara couldn’t bear silence right now.
“Did you see it, Miho? Last night, when I was outside?”
Miho glanced at her for a fraction of a second, obviously reluctant to meet her gaze. “I don’t know.”
Kara stopped. “What do you mean you don’t know?”
Miho went on two steps further, then turned. Her gaze kept dropping, shifting from Kara to the ground and then up again.
“When I came out, for a moment I saw something,” she said, then shifted into Japanese, pointing to Kara’s camera. “If someone takes a photograph with a bright flash, sometimes it makes you blink, and there are colored lights that linger when you close your eyes. It was like that. I had only a glimpse of something that seemed only barely there, like I was looking out of the corner of my eye, but instead it was right in front of me. And as soon as your father yelled for you, I blinked and it was gone.”
The two girls stared at each other. Kara had a hard time catching her breath. The damp, gray day enveloped them. Sleep deprivation had made the whole world surreal and dreamlike to her, so that there on the grounds of Monju-no-Chie School, she felt as though she were no longer in the world she had always known.
“I saw it, for just a second. I came out of a nightmare, but I’m not sure I was ever really dreaming,” she said, sticking to Japanese now, needing to be understood. Her voice was barely a whisper. Her father had put ointment on her palms last night but the little cuts still stung. She forced herself not to make fists of her hands. “Last night, as long as I stayed awake, I could still sort of picture it. But then I slept a little, and now all I have is the impression of it in my head, like the whole thing was a dream.”
Miho hugged herself, looking like a tiny little girl in that voluminous sweatshirt. “It wasn’t, though. It isn’t a dream.”
“No. It isn’t.”
“I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
“That’s okay,” Kara said. “We both need a peaceful night’s rest. We need to get away from here.”
“What about Sakura?” Miho asked.
Kara pressed her lips together a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think she’d want to leave.”
Miho blanched, looking like she might be sick, but she didn’t argue the point.
“Let’s go talk to her,” Kara went on.
When they started toward the school again, they walked a little faster. Several unfamiliar cars were in the lot to the left of the main school building. They went around, cutting across the field that separated the school from the dormitory. Other vehicles were parked beside the dorm where several mothers were gathered outside, and two boys were loading suitcases into car trunks.
Kara and Miho ignored everyone. A couple of boys tried to stop Miho to talk to her, but she brushed them off. Some of the doors were open on the corridor; the rooms were empty of students and any personal belongings. It was still early, but some parents had already come and gone, collecting their children. More boarders would depart over the next day or so. By tomorrow night, Kara had a feeling, the dorm would be empty except for a handful of kids, Miho and Sakura included. And then Miho would leave, and Sakura would be alone with her grief and obsession.
