I wanted to be alone all of a sudden, to figure it out. But Shiori was already at my side, a new smile on her lips, her eyes puffy from dried tears. I’d worry about it later.
“Let’s go,” I said, and she nodded.
We wove through the pathways of Sunpu Park in the crisp February sunlight.
“Don’t let me eat too much this time,” Shiori laughed. “I’m getting fat.” She patted her stomach.
I grinned, but inside I felt drained, frozen. I couldn’t keep this up anymore. One wrong move and everything would shatter.
“Shiori,” I said, stopping on the path.
“You okay?” she said, but I didn’t answer. I stared down the grassy hill to the moat around the park. The murky water rippled under the cold breeze. Not quite spring, but not quite winter. Caught in between, like me. How had I lost control of my own life?
I slumped down on the bench, running a hand through my hair. She sat down delicately beside me.
“Shiori, you can’t—you can’t let them keep bullying you like this. I’m not always going to be around to help you.”
She smiled, hooking her elbows over the back of the bench as she crossed her legs. “You always say that,” she said. “And yet you always come.”
“But what if I couldn’t?” I said. “What if something happened to me?”
She frowned. “What’s wrong, Tomo-kun?”
“Nothing,” I lied. It scared me to know the nightmares might be real, visions of the past or something. It scared me because it meant maybe they were true.
How much time did I have before it consumed me? Is that what had happened to Taira?
Shiori’s small hand curled into mine, and I looked up, surprised. Her skin felt cold and soft, fragile. Something precious. “Tomo-kun,” she said. “I’ll try to be tougher, okay? I won’t let them get to me. I don’t want to be a trouble to you anymore.”
“You’re not,” I said. “You could never be. I just hate to see them hurt you, Shiori. I don’t want that for you.”
She smiled and nodded, her hand pulling away from me. Emptiness where her fingers once were. I was alone again, somehow.
She looked out over the moat, strands of her hair pulled loose from her ponytail and clinging to her neck.
As a rule, I never sketched people. It was too dangerous, the ink taking off in ways I couldn’t control. But looking at her sitting there, with her sad eyes and her slender fingers curled around the nape of her neck, I couldn’t fight the urge to capture it. I wanted to hold on to this moment like nothing else. It was quiet, peaceful. Normal. Everything I wanted.
And as dangerous as the ink was, if there was anything in me at all that wasn’t monstrous, it would protect Shiori. Maybe I could trust myself to protect her—I always had.
“Shiori,” I said.
“
“I want to sketch you.”
She tilted her head. “What? But you never draw people.”
“Just this once.”
“Why?”
I looked at her, wanting to tell her but not sure how to express it. Her eyes fell away from me and back to the moat. “
I opened my sketchbook and clicked the end of my pen. I sketched the lines furiously, reaching with a gentle hand to tilt her chin for the portrait, to smooth the hair beside her ear.
I watched for inkblots, for the lines to drip the way they had in class. I watched for the warning signs that I should stop, but they didn’t come. Even the shadows were frightened to break the fragile moment.
It was nice, pretending to be normal. Later, when I’d tucked the sketch away, we walked to the department store on Miyuki Road and ate udon together, seeing who could shove the most noodles in their mouth without laughing. I choked on the spicy broth and gulped down my water as the waiters eyed me with suspicion.
But the darkness always waited, always lurked in the corners. It couldn’t stay like this forever. And when the time came, the claws would reach for me again, and I would be engulfed in darkness.
“Katie!” Diane shrieked, waving wildly at me. She was easy to spot on the other side of the crowds. It’s not that she was really overweight or anything, but she had, as Mom put it, a “healthy appetite.” With her build, height and pale skin among the bustling Japanese crowd, she was like a sad version of
But once we’d hugged and I trailed her to the lower level of Narita airport, everything changed. She wasn’t awkward. She wasn’t the piece that didn’t fit, the difference that needed circling. She spoke fluently to everyone, placing a ticket in my hand for the Narita Express train—the NEX—and standing with the crowd, watching the kanji fly by on the digital board to tell us which platform and which car to line up for.
I was the one who didn’t fit, not her. I stared at her, awed.
She smiled. “You’ll pick it up quickly, too,” she said as we took our seats on the train.
I tilted my head back against the fuzzy headrest.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “I studied for four months and I could barely nod my way through customs.”
“Just give it four or five months here, and you’ll speak like a pro,” Diane said. “It’s completely different when you’re immersed in the language.”
“Okay,” I said, halfway between not believing and not caring. I was too exhausted from the jet lag to worry about it much. The train tunneled out of the darkness and to the outside, the February trees bare and the grass brown as mud.
“Just forget English,” Diane said, folding her hands in front of her. “Don’t even think of it as an option. Don’t translate things in your head—just go with what sounds right. If you translate, you’re not really thinking in Japanese, right?”
“I guess.”
Diane smiled. “Never mind. Rest a bit. We still have to take the bullet train after this.”
I peered out the window at the tracks, nestled between two steep hillsides so that I could see nothing of Japan but the slopes of winter forest. The train swayed from side to side gently, and a stream of steady Japanese echoed in the train car, announcements telling us something or other about the train and the destinations. The tracks clacked underneath us in a steady rhythm—
I stared at the low buildings. They looked strange, somehow, deep reds and browns, with black-tiled roofs and gray brick walls.
“This isn’t exactly how I pictured Tokyo,” I said.
“Oh? What did you expect?” Diane peered out the window to look with me.
The hills blotted out the buildings again.
“I guess—skyscrapers? Pagodas? Millions of people?” But the glimpses of road that sped past were empty.
“Well, we’re not really in Tokyo for one thing. It’ll be an hour before we get there.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling ridiculous. Wasn’t Narita Airport in Tokyo? Just how big was a sprawling city of 13 million people? I couldn’t picture it.
I closed my eyes, the jet lag hitting me as the train rocked me from side to side. When I opened them
