Ink

Tomohiro smirked. “I was drawing pictures in my sketchbook inside the Louvre.”

Of course he was.

“You really love art, don’t you?”

“I can’t explain it,” he said, curving around the tail of the horse with his pen. “It’s not really a love of art. I have to draw. It’s…a compulsion.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Sou da na…” he mused.

“Yuu?”

“Hmm?” He drew gentle strokes to build the horse a wild mane, and it looked so lifelike I could almost smell the dank locks, feel them tangled between my fingers.

“Your friend from Kendo Club, the one with the…” I wasn’t sure of the term in Japanese, so I switched to English.

“You know, with the bleached hair…”

“Bleached?” he repeated in English. I wasn’t sure how to translate.

“Lighter than blond hair,” I said. “Almost white.”

Tomohiro scoffed. “Sato?” he said. “Ishikawa Satoshi?”

So he had a name.

“Does he draw, too?”

Tomohiro laughed, and the sound rang in my ears.

“Zenzen,” he said. “He can barely draw a straight line.”

“I was curious,” I said, biting my lip and taking a breath,

“because I thought it looked like he had a tattoo.”

Tomohiro dropped his pen. It rolled across the page and fell with a gentle thud into the long, dewy grass. A moment later he wrapped his fingers around the black cover of his notebook and closed it. The drawing of the horse flashed out of sight, but I swore he’d drawn the head curving down, not over the shoulder like it was now.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything,” I said. “It just looked like he had a tattoo.”

He breathed slowly, hunched over his notebook.

“Yes,” he said. “He has a tattoo.”

The truth screamed out inside my head. It’s all true. Why else would he act like this?

“Ishikawa…is he—”

“Does it really concern you?” he said in a sharp voice. I felt the shame burning up my neck, but it only made me angry.

I hadn’t said anything wrong.

“He’s your best friend,” I said. “It kind of concerns me if he’s into dangerous stuff.”

“I told you to stay away, didn’t I?” he snapped.

“Would you cool it already?” I said, but the expression was lost in the translation and he looked puzzled. His eyes clouded over, and his head hung lower and lower until he rested his chin on his notebook. Then I saw the dark ooze dripping out from between the pages.

“Yuu!” I said. “Are you bleeding?”

Tomohiro shot up, stared at his hand and then the dripping liquid. His hand was fine, but he grabbed the pen, opened up the notebook a sliver and scribbled over the horse drawing.

“The ink blots sometimes,” he said. “It’s from the pen.”

I stared with wide eyes at the bloodlike liquid, how it shimmered as it pooled on the grass. “What the hell kind of ink are you using?”

“Look,” Tomohiro said. His tone was even now, and he looked up at me. I was suddenly aware that I was sitting too close to him, but I couldn’t back up without looking like I was recoiling. “Sato is mixed up in some things that are no good. He gets me into a lot of fights, but I’m not into that stuff, okay?”

The unasked question hung in the silence of Toro Iseki. I could barely form the words, but Tomohiro’s eyes told me I didn’t need to.

“Yuu,” I said, my throat thick and dry.

“Yes,” he said, but he didn’t raise his voice like a question.

He knew what I was going to say, and he was ready to answer.

“Is Ishikawa in the Yakuza?”

Tomohiro stared straight at me, and I could already see the answer.

“Yuu, you have to stop hanging out with him.”

“We’ve been best friends since elementary school,” he said.

“He was the only one who was my friend after…”

“After what?” I whispered.

“After I—switched schools.” Koji. After Koji. What the hell happened, Yuu? “I can’t abandon him. Anyway, I can take care of myself. And he’s not that involved. He hasn’t taken a sake oath or anything. He just does…odd tasks.”

Fear coursed through me slowly, nerves prickling with the information I didn’t want to know.

“When you were warning me to stay away…I had no idea.”

Tomohiro snorted and his eyes fell to the cover of his notebook.

“You have no idea,” he said.

A surge of panic cut through the pins and needles prickling down my spine.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “You won’t have to worry about it.”

“You’re scaring me,” I said. He looked up and smiled warmly, like that would melt the fear in my heart.

“Daijoubu,” he said. It’s okay. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Just like—” He stopped.

“Like what?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’ll watch out for you.”

“I don’t need your protection,” I said. “I just don’t want ties to the Yakuza.”

“Greene, I’m not in the Yakuza. I’ve made my intentions clear to them. You don’t have to worry. Sato doesn’t bring it up and I don’t ask.”

Tomohiro opened up his book bag and pulled out two cans of sweet milk tea. He pressed the cold drink into my hands and we said nothing, listening to the wagtails sing, their tails bobbing up and down like they were sketching, too. Tomohiro opened up his notebook to a fresh page and started drawing.

Ishikawa was his only friend after the fight with Koji.

After he cut himself on the calligraphy project. I felt like I was standing too close to a painting, like I couldn’t see the whole picture or put the fragments together. None of it made sense on its own. I couldn’t piece him together.

“Yuu?”

“Hmm?”

“I’ve got to know. About the drawings. And don’t tell me they’re animated. My own doodles came at me with pointy teeth.”

“I didn’t do that,” he said.

“So you’re saying I’m doing it?”

“I’m not. I’m saying I didn’t do that.”

“Which means you did some of it, just not that.”

Silence.

Bingo.

“I’m going to figure it out,” I said.

“I’m sure you are.”

“Yuu—I’m serious.” I reached for his arm so he would look at me, but stopped. The cold way he’d told me to