Ink

Tomohiro for help, when he had one hundred times the burden to carry that I did and more to lose from dropping it.

He’d carried this frightening knowledge with him since elementary school, and I couldn’t even carry it through an evening.

I sighed and slipped my keitai into my purse, pushed the bathroom door open and headed down the hall to our karaoke room.

I crashed into Ishikawa in the hallway.

“Sorry!” I said out of instinct, before I saw his white-blond hair and his stark-white apron.

He smirked. “Yuuto know you’re on a date with Tanaka?”

“Get a life,” I said and tried to push past him. But then I saw the switchblade in his hand. He snicked it shut and shoved it into his pocket. “What the hell?” I said.

“You didn’t see anything,” he said, but I saw how his hand was shaking, just a little bit. He kept checking over his shoulder.

“Ishikawa—”

“Just get back in your karaoke room, okay?” He pushed my shoulder in the direction of the door.

“Watch it!” I said, startled.

He breathed out slowly through his teeth, the sigh sounding like sssssss. Then he said quietly, “I’m waiting for someone. So could you just get inside?” The edge of his tattoo was startling against the white of his uniform.

“You’re going to attack someone?” I whispered.

Ishikawa stared at me, annoyed. “No, stupid. It’s just, you know, in case.”

“Yuu doesn’t know, does he?” I said. “How far in you’re getting.”

He didn’t answer me. After a moment he glanced down the empty hall again, his fingers curling into a loose fist.

“Ishikawa.”

His eyes snapped to mine, and in them I saw the fear he was trying to hide. “Look, it’s too late to worry about that now. It would be a lot easier if he’d admit what he was and help me.”

I paled. “What do you mean?”

“Never mind,” he said, but I already knew what he meant.

Tomohiro was right—Ishikawa was suspicious he was a Kami.

“Just get in there.”

“Fine,” I said, but my heart was pounding. I opened the door of our room to the sound of Tanaka’s tone- deaf singing. I tried to shake off the icy reality that froze my thoughts solid. I couldn’t let on to Ishikawa that I knew—ever. And yet I couldn’t think about anything else, the wagtail falling in my thoughts over and over, filling me with cold dread.

“Maybe we should go,” I told Tanaka.

“One more song,” begged Yuki.

“Listen, Ishikawa is…” But no one was listening to me over the loud music. I opened the door a crack and peered down the hallway. Ishikawa had vanished.

The song finished up and after I pleaded with them, we finally packed up to go. I saw Ishikawa walking down the far end of the hallway, a tray of drinks balanced on his arm.

I guess whatever meeting it was had gone well and without puncture wounds.

But what about the meetings that didn’t?

On our way home, we passed a shrine in Mabuchi. The gate was locked, but floodlights illuminated the orange-and-green arch on the other side.

“Oh!” Tanaka said. “We should pray for the midterms coming up.”

“It’s closed,” Yuki said, motioning at the gate.

“You going to let a gate stand in the way of good marks?

Come on!” He started toward the stone wall.

“Count me out.” Yuki giggled, holding her hand over her mouth.

“Katie, you coming?”

“I’m fine.”

“You can pray for your kendo tournament.”

“I’ll stay here with Yuki,” I said. I didn’t mention that I would feel like a hypocrite breaking into a shrine to pray.

“Fine,” Tanaka said. His friend lifted him over the wall and we stood on our toes to watch him over the top of the gate. He bobbed down the gravel path toward the shrine, where a rope thicker than his fist hung down from a giant rusty bell. Tanaka dug in his pockets for change, and the coins rattled as they spilled into the big wooden tithe box.

He grabbed hold of the fat, braided rope and swung it violently from side to side, until the bell jingled and clanged.

He clapped his hands twice and bowed his head, but then a light flicked on from an adjacent building and he raced for the gate, laughing and gasping as his friends pulled him back over. We took off, thundering down the streets to outrun the robed, groggy priest.

“You rang it too loudly!” Yuki shrieked between terrified giggles.

“That’s so the kami will hear me!” Tanaka shouted back, and I wondered if anyone would want to get their attention if they knew the truth, what they were capable of. What had really happened to Koji.

What could happen to me.

I wasn’t sure I could ever go back to Toro Iseki again, knowing Tomohiro’s drawings really were alive and possibly wanted me dead, or at least maimed by pointy teeth.

On top of that, as dumb as it seemed in comparison, I was afraid of seeing him after he’d held me. Even if I’d felt the shift from rivalry to friendship, opening like sakura buds on the trees, it didn’t make it any easier to face the blossom it had become. We felt the same before and the same after, but something had changed, so that when I thought about him my arms prickled with goose bumps.

I watched the senior kendo drills in the last practice before the ward tournament, Tomohiro and Ishikawa moving in unison through the practice katas. I wondered how they could claim to be best friends when there was so much darkness between them; I wondered if Tomohiro would be pissed at Ishikawa for the you’re-weak speech he’d given me.

He’d better be.

Saturday finally arrived, and despite my pestering not to, Diane came to watch the tournament. She probably thought it was what mothers did, but she looked too genuine to just be filling a role. Anyway, she made a better aunt than a mother.

Maybe the pieces were starting to fit after all.

I knelt in seiza with the other juniors, waiting for our turn to present katas. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t the most elegant kendouka out there, but I was proud that I’d come from unknowing to knowing, and I performed every move carefully.

I stepped with calculation, striking my shinai with loud cracks of bamboo. I stared down my opponent from behind the bars of my men and felt alive. I saw Diane’s jaw drop in the stands, but it only made me scream harder.

In the corner of my eye, I saw the senior match unfolding across the host gym; the way the student moved, I knew it was Tomohiro. A red scarf dangled from the back of his men, but the referees moved their red-and-white flags so quickly that before I could see whether he’d made a hit, my eyes flickered back to my own opponent.

Seeing Tomohiro brought everything back, and my heart raced under the hard shell of the dou laced around my chest.

The secret, so dangerous I could never share it with anyone, had left me with nightmares about the Yakuza kidnapping my mom—until I woke drenched in sweat and remembered she was already gone.

I couldn’t stand it anymore—feeling helpless, useless, trapped in the bars of my