Ink

“You wasted your wish.”

“Obviously you haven’t tried my sister’s onigiri, ” Tanaka said. He threaded the yarn through the end of the paper and looked for a spot.

“You waited too long,” said Yuki. “The tree’s full.”

“Here,” I said. “Put it beside mine.”

I stooped down and found mine quickly enough, the English writing standing out amid the blocky kanji.

“Here it is,” I said, reaching my hand out for the twirling paper. But there was a new scribble on it, not in my hand-writing. I pulled the tag forward, squinting to read the faint reply to my wish.

Mine, too.

Tears brimmed in my eyes and I tried to blink them back.

I dropped my paper before the other two could read it and did my best to smile with Yuki as Tanaka tied his wish next to mine.

Chapter 10

I grabbed my ticket and hopped on the Roman bus down to Toro Iseki. I’d stayed behind to clean the classroom and had to make up time. It was way too humid to bike anyway. I wiped my face with my handkerchief.

Since Monday, Tomohiro had been grinning at me. His tall figure had loomed in the doorway of our classroom at lunch. He’d waited patiently as the class went from chatting, to noticing, to mumbling and whispering, and finally to tapping me on the shoulder. I’d walked over to the door slowly, the eyes of my classmates burning into my back. Tomohiro seemed to enjoy my embarrassment, which didn’t surprise me.

“Are you coming on Wednesday?” he said when I reached the doorway. I could hear the whispers mounting, so I slipped into the hallway and out of sight. Okay, except for the row of windows along our classroom that was suddenly crowded with faces.

“Tomo, we always go on Wednesdays,” I said in a hushed voice.

“I know,” he said. “I just want to make sure you’re going.”

“Of course.”

“It’s the last time before summer break,” he said.

“I know.”

“I promise I won’t draw a turtle.”

“Good,” I said, looking over my shoulder at my classmates.

Their heads dipped below the windows.

He lifted my fingers in his, and the sudden touch made me turn. He flipped my hands over in his, looking for the bite mark where the turtle had snapped me.

“I’m okay now,” I said, staring at the top of his head as he scanned my hands gently.

“Good,” he said and lifted my fingers to his mouth. His smooth lips brushed over them softly, and the students at the windows whooped like idiots. Then he let go and turned down the hallway, his leather bag slung over his shoulder.

It wasn’t just the last time we’d go to Toro Iseki before summer vacation. They’d finished the renovations, and the site was opening to the public at the beginning of August.

Tomohiro would have to find a new safe haven to practice his art. So far, we’d come up with Mount Fuji and Antarctica.

I ducked under the chain-link fence and into the mini forest. The breeze pushed the humidity against my body in waves.

Then I heard the chimes.

There were at least forty of them hanging in the tree above me, little Japanese wind chimes tinkling in the hot gasp of wind, their papers floating and rippling as they twisted back and forth. Most furin chimes in Japan were bright summer colors, but these were black-and-white with jagged edges, so I knew Tomohiro had drawn them into existence. Some of the chimes sounded mournful, likely the drawings that had gone wrong, but the sound of them all jingling together was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard.

He was sitting in the grass, his notebook balanced on his lap. I watched him for a moment before he realized I’d arrived. He looked up at the sky, the clouds drifting lazily above. He’d loosened the tie around his neck and rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. The top buttons of his shirt were unbuttoned, exposing the defined edges of his collarbone.

He seemed lost in the sound of the chimes, and I hesitated, listening to them, too.

Then the pollen of the flowers caught in my nose and I sneezed. He whirled around, his eyes wide until he realized it was me.

“Okaeri,” he said, and as much as I’d felt awkward when Diane said it to me, when Tomohiro said it I got goose bumps.

“I’m a bit late,” I apologized.

“I’ll say,” he said with a laugh. “Come see what I’m drawing for you today.”

I walked forward and sat beside him in the grass. He opened his notebook, and a half-finished sketch draped across the page. I stared with wide eyes.

“You’re serious.”

He just grinned and pulled the cap from his pen. I rested my hand on his arm.

“Don’t you think people will notice that?”

“In Toro Iseki?” he said. I just stared at him. “Katie, this is our last chance to try this. We won’t have another opportu-nity like this for who knows how long. I want to try.”

“You’re totally crazy,” I said. “It could trample us.”

But he placed the nib of his pen on the paper and started filling in the sketch. He drew in the eye, a dark pool of ink on the page. He filled out the ear and the mane, the muzzle and the long, strong flanks that whizzed across the page as he drew them. The sketch tossed its head and turned to bite a fly off its withers.

There was a gentle thud in the grass, and another, and then the horse stepped out from behind a Yayoi hut. There was a ghostly, vacant look in its eyes, and its mane was as jagged as Tomohiro’s hurried pen strokes.

Tomohiro drew faster and faster, his own eyes growing vacant and strange like the horse’s. He was scribbling in details, fetlocks above the hooves and muscles trailing down the horse’s legs.

“I think that’s enough,” I said.

“Huh?” He broke away like I’d snapped him out of a dream. I pointed to the horse sniffling at the grass with his scribbled black muzzle.

He whispered, “I did it.”

He rose to his feet, placing the notebook gently on the grass.

“Stay here,” he warned. I knelt, ready to tear the drawing to shreds if I had to. The horse lifted its head high as Tomohiro approached, and then it swallowed back a distressed whinny. Tomohiro whispered as he stepped closer. The horse pawed the ground, then lowered its head.

I watched him reach his gentle hands to the horse’s muzzle, and I waited for it to take a big chunk out of him. My fingers bent the corner of the drawing as I waited for the jaw to open.

But the horse merely nuzzled his hands, drank in the spiced smell of him and turned back to the grass. Tomohiro turned to face me, his face brighter than when he won a kendo match.

“Come on!” he shouted. I ripped the page out of the notebook and folded it into my pocket. Just in case.

He lifted me onto the horse’s back, then climbed a railing in front of the Yayoi hut and leaped on behind me. Swirls of ink spilled into the grass from the horse’s hooves and twisted into the air from his mane. The horse’s skin felt like crinkled paper, but he was warm and alive beneath that thin hide.

His hair flopped in slow motion, pulled by the wisps of ink that radiated from it. I pressed a tentative hand