Ink

I could see Shizuoka Station now, rising in the distance.

Thank god, too, because the sun had disappeared from the sky and darkness was setting in.

“You know where you are now?” Jun grinned.

“Thank you,” I said again, and he nodded. Then the smile slipped from his face and he looked all serious. He dipped his head down and his bangs tumbled from behind his ear, swaying in a blond wave in front of his eye. The fading sunlight glinted off his earring.

“I was thinking maybe you’d like to have coffee with me?”

I’m sorry, what? He looked up, his dark eyes somehow cold.

I guess I’d expected him to look a little more nervous asking a question like that, but I couldn’t read how he was feeling.

“Um,” I said. “I really appreciate it, I do, but…it’s getting late and if I’m not home soon…”

“I understand,” Jun said. “You don’t want your aunt to worry. I can walk you the rest of the way if you like.”

I shook my head. “I’m okay from here,” I said.

He nodded.

“Maybe another time?”

“Sure.” He smiled. He turned to walk away, hands shoved in his pockets, then looked over his shoulder at me. “Is that boy still drawing things?”

“Oh,” I said. “No, it’s not that, I—” But it was that. And he knew it.

“I hope he draws for you,” he said, and then he was gone.

When I got home, Diane was just serving up dinner. I pushed it around the plate, forcing myself to eat and make pleasant conversation until I could escape to my room. I stared at the ceiling, trying to picture Koji’s injuries.

“There’s no way,” I said to myself. Tomohiro had been really worked up about the accident. He seemed as shaken as I was about it.

I flipped open my computer and did an internet search of Yuu Tomohiro and Koji together. When that didn’t work, I added in Shizuoka. It came up, finally, a single old article about the incident. Of course, it was also written using hundreds of kanji I was still learning. It might as well have been in hieroglyphic.

I sighed, running the article through a translation site.

Hopefully I’d get the gist of it.

I read the garbled translation. Interview snippets with Koji—“He’s my best friend. He’d never hurt me. It was an accident.”—and comments about dropping the case. The pay-off Tanaka mentioned, I guess. No pictures of Koji, but I didn’t really want to see anyway. And then a description of the wounds—punctures and claw marks, like an animal did it.

And then, in the final paragraph, Koji insisting they broke into a construction site, that the guard dog attacked him.

Police insisting dogs couldn’t inflict those kinds of bladelike slices on his eye.

I reread the paragraph. But claw and bite marks would make similar kinds of wounds, wouldn’t they? So… not a dog, but something else?

Tanaka didn’t know what had happened, but he’d thought it might be an animal, too.

Attacking a friend with a blade? That wasn’t my Tomohiro. I felt it in my heart. He wouldn’t do that, but he would sneak into a construction site and take the fall so they didn’t get into more trouble. And once it came to light about the animal, maybe Koji’s dad would’ve doubted what happened and dropped the case.

Satisfied, I lay down on my bed. And then I realized what I’d said.

My Tomohiro.

Chapter 7

Tomohiro and I barely spoke at kendo, but that suited me just fine. I wanted to keep my distance from Ishikawa, and from the way he glared at me, he felt the same. He and Tomohiro had a few faint bruises on their faces, and I didn’t really want to think about how they’d got them. We went on through club practices like we didn’t know each other at all, and we kept our trips to Toro Iseki secret. Tomohiro feared his dad would learn he was drawing, despite him forbidding it—which I thought was crazy, but I chalked it up to a strict, unhappy workaholic —and I was scared of trespassing charges.

“What if they deport me?” I ranted, but Tomohiro smirked.

“Isn’t that what you want anyway?”

Just like in our kendo matches, where we only felt briefly safe with our shinai thrust between us, keeping each other at arm’s distance was the only way to trust each other. That way, no one would lunge, and either of us could retreat.

We lived in parallel worlds, somehow held together by the axis of each other.

The vibrant greens of spring dulled and the chirps of the wagtails drowned under the whirr of summer cicadas.

Two weeks before the big Aoi Ward tournament, Tomohiro didn’t show up in the courtyard after school. He texted me that night that his uncle had died and he was going with his father to Chiba for the funeral.

I felt his absence more strongly than I’d expected. I felt off balance when he wasn’t there, and while Eto- sensei droned on about world history, I thought about Tomohiro, how he had changed somehow. Maybe he hadn’t changed at all, just opened like a bud on the rough branch of the sakura tree, suddenly blooming and floating on the breeze; free, wheel-ing wherever he might land, dragged only by the current.

His kendo movements were unpredictable like that. No one could keep up with him except Ishikawa, and the two were the hope for the tournament. But no matter how Tomohiro unwrapped his strategies to me, I couldn’t match him in the gym, when all the eyes were watching and we were both shrieking our kiais at each other. The kendo teachers were always pairing us with kendouka we had no chance of beating. For the experience, they said. If we only fought at our own level, we’d never be challenged, never improve. But it was frightening to fight with Tomohiro. When he shouted and brought the shinai toward me, all I could think about was Koji, even though I’d mostly figured out the truth. It still frightened me, what Tomohiro might be capable of.

And yet, against all common sense, I’d fallen for him. I’d told myself for a while it was to figure out what was going on, to get my life back. He understood about my mom. But I wasn’t sure anymore what I wanted. I just knew I wanted to be near him.

Tomohiro was absent from practice for the funeral, but there was hardly time to think as Watanabe-sensei barked out the orders. One hundred push-ups for the junior members, twice as many for seniors. One thousand men strikes and countless laps of footwork around the gym. We would be up against some of the toughest schools in the ward, Nakamura-sensei said, in particular Katakou High. They had one of the best kendo clubs in the ward, and their secret weapon? National kendouka champion Takahashi.

“All our hope this year is placed in Ishikawa and Yuu,”

Watanabe said, “so give them your support.”

So the juniors could “improve” for the tournament, and the seniors could practice beating us to a pulp, the sensei paired us with older kendouka.

“Not today.” I sighed to myself. I didn’t feel like getting my butt handed to me.

“Greene and Ishikawa!” Watanabe belted out, and the pins and needles rushed up my neck.

You’re kidding.

Ishikawa flattened his mop of bleached hair under a tight headband and slipped on his men. My breath condensed on the mesh of the helmet’s screen; the stiflingly hot armor had become almost unbearable.

It had to be a joke. He was a much higher level than me.

Pairing me with Tomohiro was bad, but pairing me with Ishikawa was suicide. He wouldn’t go easy on me