I realize now. Not every boy is right for every girl, and for boys too, not every girl is the right one. That’s just the way it is. At least for some girls and some boys.
I’m pretty much one of those girls who gets horny and gives in to the urge, but I suspect Yoji’s not like that. I was going to need some sort of strategy to get him in bed. Some sort of trick. A tactical advantage.
But at that moment I was just really disappointed. I stood there at the door, watching until he was out of sight. Then I went inside. Oh cruel, cruel world…and all that crap.
But what’s so cruel about it? I’ll tell you what. It was cruel that I hadn’t been able to have sex with Yoji, and crueler still that I hadn’t even been able to kiss him. But cruelest of all was the fact that I was the sort of girl who was always always thinking about fucking and kissing and nothing but fucking and kissing and everything that went with them. It was cruel to be me.
It was different for Yoji. That much was obvious.
Yoji was thinking about Sano. He was thinking about those kids who might stumble into that little park and catch the Yoshibas fucking. And he was thinking about the Yoshibas. Even the fact that he had forced them to stop showed that he was concerned about them. He didn’t want them to get in trouble for what they were doing, didn’t want other people to see them like that. That’s what he was thinking about.
And you had to admire him for that. He’s a noble soul.
And I’m an idiot. An idiot who never thinks about all the things she should be thinking about.
But then again, what kinds of things have I got to think about? And what good would it do for me to think about them anyway? I don’t understand much of anything.
But it would be even worse to give up and not think about anything at all. Just like you’re expected to do the right thing even if there’s a chance you’re being hypocritical when you’re doing it, so too you should try to think the right stuff even if you didn’t really believe any of it. That’s just the way things are, Aiko.
So I lay down on the sofa in the living room, fully intending to put my brain to work thinking about where Sano might be—but before I’d thought about it for more than five minutes, I was sound asleep.
Like I said, I’m pretty much an idiot.
7
So Kerstin was there in my dream, and I was there with her. We were two different people, but she looked exactly like me. We were out in this big grassy field next to the Tama River, looking for a soccer ball. It was starting to get dark and we still couldn’t find it, and we began to notice that everybody else had gone home. We got more and more nervous. “Where’s the ball? Where’s the ball?” Like that. I felt like I was going to cry, but then I could see Kerstin off in the distance, just her silhouette, holding up her hand like she wanted to let me know she’d found it. But somehow I knew she hadn’t. What she had found in the bushes was the bodies of the three little kids, all chopped up in pieces, and she was trying to lure me over so she could scare the hell out of me.
She waved again and again to get me to come, but I wouldn’t budge. I was trying to figure out how far it was to the road from the spot where I was standing. If I sprinted, could I make it there and stop a car to get help before Kerstin caught me?
But when I looked back at the dark mass of the bushes, Kerstin had vanished. I looked around at the field, but there was no sign of her anywhere.
No, not vanished. She had hidden somewhere, and I was sure she was sneaking up on me. Probably with some part of one of the kids clutched in her hand.
I woke to find my brother perched on my back, bare legs sticking out of his shorts, reading the sports pages. My heart was pounding from the dream. “Get off,” I muttered, my face pressed into the sofa, but he stiffened his legs and tried to keep me from shaking him off. The rest of his body is pretty scrawny, but thanks to years of soccer his legs are thick and muscly. It suddenly occurred to me that those heavy limbs pressing down on my back must have caused my nightmare. But was that really possible? Did dreams really work like that? Could I really have gotten the idea for the soccer ball in my dream from his legs, even while I was sound asleep? Not likely. That would take ESP or something.
Whatever.
Maybe he’d been talking while I was asleep; maybe I’d heard his voice and made the connection to soccer and then gone looking for the ball.
Whatever.
“What are you doing sleeping?” he said. “What’s for dinner?”
“How should I know?” I said.
“Where’s Mom?”
“She said she’d be working late tonight.”
“Then why didn’t you make dinner?”
“Because I was asleep,” I told him.
“Which is why I asked what you were doing sleeping.”
“I was tired. So I slept.”
“What kind of an excuse is that?”
“No excuse. Just human nature. People sleep when they’re tired. When they’re not tired, they don’t sleep.”
“That’s not what I meant…Awhh, forget it. Stop chattering and get cooking.”
“I don’t feel like it,” I said. “You do it.”
He didn’t look happy about it, but he got off my back and shuffled out to the kitchen. I’ve got him pretty well trained. Fortunately.
“What’re you going to make?” I called after
