Ink (17 page)

The medic finished her inspection—clean bill of health and no bleeding, surprise, surprise. The audience burst into applause. The referees deliberated for a tense moment and finally lifted their flags.

Red.

Watanabe gave Ishikawa hell for being lazy about taking care of his
shinai,
but behind the speech, his eyes were shining. Ishikawa was the winner and advanced to the prefecture finals. And so did Tomohiro, who scraped by thanks to his other matches.

Takahashi unbound his headband, and his jet-black hair flopped down around his face. His angled bangs almost covered one eye and trailed down to his ear, pierced with a shiny silver ring. He tucked two thick blond highlights behind his ears.

Oh my god.

It’s Jun.

My face turned as red as the flags. I looked away in case Tomohiro got the wrong idea, but he was already walking over to congratulate Ishikawa.

All I could think about was the ink. Was this my life now, to be punctuated with drips of ink wherever I went? And had the ink spilled the truth to Ishikawa?

And Jun. Takahashi Jun shaking hands with Tomohiro and Ishikawa, the three of them chatting there, not realizing they were standing on the edge of a dangerous cliff. Maybe Tomohiro knew; maybe he’d gone to smooth things over.

He’s here, the boy who draws things.
Sketches that look alive, I’d told him.
You look flustered again.

I felt like I’d fallen into a cold river. I’d told Jun about Tomo hiro’s drawings. He’d put it together and we’d be found out.

I watched them laugh as they chatted.

I was overreacting, I knew it. Why would Jun invent something impossible?

No one would believe what I knew. Even I barely believed it.

So why was I shaking?

Chapter 9

A muffled chime rose from my book bag. I’d forgotten to put my
keitai
in manner mode, and Yuki raised her eyebrows at me.

“Good thing it’s lunch,” she said as I ruffled through the bag. “They have a way of never coming back after Suzuki-sensei confiscates them.”

“Sorry,” I said absentmindedly. I pulled the phone out and flipped it open to the text.

Talked to Ishikawa. He won’t bother you again. Join me today. I’ll wait for you there. —Yuu

“From Tomo-kun?” Tanaka chimed in. I snapped the
keitai
closed and slipped it back into my bag.

“Not your business,” I said, and he grinned.

“You know, Katie,” said Yuki quietly. Her eyes were round and sad, and I knew what she would say. I’d thought about it myself after the kendo match. “Please don’t get involved with someone like him. What he did to his friend… And you saw what he did to Myu. Even Yuu’s friends are bad news.”

“He was always a good guy,” said Tanaka thoughtfully.

“He got into a lot of trouble, but when it came down to the wire, he always did the right thing.”

“Right,” I said. “And you were right about Koji, Tanaka.

It was an accident.”

“Hai?”
Tanaka’s jaw hung open, and I realized what I’d said. It wasn’t like I could tell him what had really happened—

now what?

“Um. They broke into a construction site, and there was a guard dog.” More lies, but closer to the truth than Tomohiro stabbing him.

“I knew it!” he shouted.

I took a deep breath and turned to Yuki. “And he didn’t cheat on Myu, you know. The pregnant girl? She’s a family friend, and he’s only trying to help her.” There was a pause while Tanaka and Yuki absorbed this.

“Well, even if that’s true,” Yuki said doubtfully, “you saw the way he broke up with her. It wasn’t pretty.” It was true; he’d been heartless to her, cold and ugly. I’d spent so much time remembering the way the drawing looked at me and not enough thinking about the dark look in Tomohiro’s eyes as he broke up with Myu, the way he’d slouched against the door frame while she wept. I knew he’d been lying, but even then—that was cruel.

Maybe they were right. I had to admit it had been on my mind since the tournament—okay, so since I’d learned he was a Kami. Did I really need the nightmares he came with? But every time I decided to step away, my heart twisted.

“It’s not like we’re a serious couple or anything,” I said.

“He hasn’t even confessed.” But I knew how ridiculous I sounded. If his phone hadn’t gone off that time, what would he have said? What would I have said?

“Not serious at all. He’s just sending you texts for a date,”

Tanaka said. I picked up his packet of
furikake
seasoning and smacked him with it.

“Sonna wake nai jan!”
I whined with a Japanese accent.

It’s not like that.
But from the look of them, I’d already lost the argument. I took my black chopsticks and lifted the leftover croquettes from my
bentou
into my mouth. The taste of peanut-butter sandwiches had drifted away with my old life.

I wondered who I was then, when I couldn’t speak or read or eat, totally immobilized by the change in my world. Vines were entangling the hole in my heart, buds sprouting on the outskirts. There was still a void, a pocket of emptiness. But around it, my heart was blooming.

Tomohiro sat in his usual place beside the Yayoi house, his notebook resting on his pulled-up knees. That was the only thing that was the same. Clouds of shimmering dust encircled him, wisps of inky swirls that glinted in the sunlight. They curled in slow motion, spreading around him like waves of fireflies.

I gasped. He heard me and looked up, a grin plastered on his face, and I began to understand how much effort it had been to keep all this from me. This was why he’d always stopped so abruptly in the middle of a sketch, why he’d scraped those desperate lines across the paper. It was to keep me safe from the truth, when all the time this was supposed to be
his
safe haven.

“Katie,” he said, his hands still. The clouds faded and swirled into nothingness as his pen stopped.

“Does it always do that?” I asked, walking forward slowly and clutching the handles of my bag.

He laughed. “No. Don’t you think the Calligraphy Club would’ve noticed?”

“That’s where I come in, right? Where you lose control like the kendo match?”

“That,” he said, “was not my fault.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“
Oi.
I’m serious.”

“Okay,” I said. “So if it wasn’t you, then who was it?”

There was silence. My jaw dropped.

“Me?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“No, no, you’re the Kami.” I panicked.

“But you’re the one making the ink do weird things. Well…

extra weird.”

“Look, I’ve had enough, okay?” I said, feeling sick to my stomach. “I don’t want ink following me around. I don’t want Yakuza following me around. You need to get this thing under control or I need to switch schools.” It was one thing to watch him draw things here, but the idea of the ink permeating my own life, never knowing when it was going to show up…

He smiled.

“Luckily I have a plan,” he said. “The wagtail that attacked the others—I couldn’t stop it. I’ve been thinking about the way Takahashi Jun was in control in the kendo match. You know, like he wouldn’t let me see what attack was coming next, not a shift of body weight or a glance or anything, and yet he had his moves planned out, everything calculated. If I could learn to keep my thoughts so focused and hidden, maybe I could take control of what I draw. Here, look what I brought.”

He lifted a velvet drawstring pouch out of his book bag and slipped its contents into the palm of his hand. His eyes shone as he held them out.

“A bottle of ink,” I said. “And a paintbrush. For calligraphy?”

“It’s too dangerous for me to paint,” he said. “But maybe over time I can use them again.”

He rested them gently on the grass and shook his head, tossing his bangs out of his eyes. A useless gesture, because the minute he leaned forward to the notebook, they slid back again.

“This isn’t much of a plan,” I said. “Focusing your thoughts?

Super Zen, but I need the ink to leave
me
alone.”

“The ink isn’t always bad,” he said. “I mean, it’s dangerous, but sometimes it’s beautiful. At first, I never wanted you to know. I thought I could never tell you. But now I can show you.”

He moved his pen in a broad stroke, and then another. And as he drew the lines more quickly, the firefly specks of ink appeared again, shimmering like oil as they rippled in the air.

He drew a butterfly, but its movements blurred on the page. The closer I looked at it, the more my head ached.

“It’s because we think it’s impossible,” he said. “So our brain tells us it isn’t moving. Like an optical illusion or something. It used to give me migraines all the time.” And the more I watched it, the queasier I got. I had to turn away.

Tomohiro smiled, but his eyes never moved from the paper.

And suddenly, as he moved his pen to sketch the wings of another butterfly, the first spiraled upward from the page.

It was colorless, with jagged sketched outlines. A stream of ink trailed behind it like a firework, shimmering in shades of black and dark plum. I watched as the butterfly lifted on the breeze, the membranes of its wings thin and transparent.

I glanced down at the page, and it was there, too, like the flying one was only a copy.

Three smaller butterf lies rose amid a shower of black sparks, beating their wings as they fluttered through the air.

And the whole time Tomohiro grinned and sketched more and more, until a cloud of them hovered in the sky above us.

I watched with my hand to my mouth. Almost fifty of them, swirling around each other as their trails crossed and intertwined in slow, gleaming pinwheels. Such terrifying beauty.

And then Tomohiro scratched through the drawings and they dropped one by one, like black cherry petals crumpling to the ground. It was so horrible that tears welled up in my eyes.

“Don’t kill them,” I whispered. Tomohiro’s eyes widened and he stared at me for a moment.

“I didn’t kill them,” he said. “They’re not alive. They’re just drawings.”

“But it’s horrible to see them fall like that.”

“Katie,” he said gently, and I felt his warm palm curl around my shoulder. His smooth voice was calm, and he gazed into my eyes through the wisps of his bangs. I felt like the butterflies had tumbled into my rib cage. “It’s dangerous not to call them back. If they left Toro and someone else saw them…” He sighed. “I can’t let anyone know. It would be the end of me.”

“Then stop drawing, Yuu,” I said. “Don’t bring them to life.”

“They aren’t alive.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know. When I look at them, I can feel them somehow, like they’re fluttering around in my head. So I know they’re a thought of mine, not real. They’re part of me.”

It was too awful. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I stood to leave. Tomohiro stumbled to his feet, the notebook slapping closed as it fell off his lap.

“Katie,” he said, and I hesitated. “I never asked for this…

ability, you know. It’s not something I can walk away from.”

I looked into his eyes, which seemed deeper and darker than before. “I even have nightmares,” he said. “It sounds dumb, but I can’t get away from this. I wake up and there’s ink dripping on my floor. And I’ve lost so much because I’m a Kami.

I can’t lose any more. I can’t lose—”

He didn’t have to say it.

We stood there for a minute and I really, truly pitied him.

He couldn’t walk away from it. It was true. And right now he didn’t look at all like the jerk Myu had slapped.

He blinked and shook his head. “It was wrong of me to say that,” he said. “You have a choice. You can walk away from this, but please just promise you won’t tell anyone.”

Something about the two sides of Tomo clicked in my head. It was like the sketch in his notebook and the butterfly that lifted; there was some sort of difference there, something between his pleading eyes and his arrogant slouching.

My eyes snapped to his. “This is why you broke up with Myu.”