“It’s been a long time, huh?” he said.
Tomohiro nodded, his bangs bobbing curtly. “You got taller, Ichirou.”
“Well, I had to fend for myself after you left.” Tanaka grinned before turning to us. “Tomo-kun used to get into fights over everything.”
Tomohiro smirked. “That hasn’t changed,” he said, staring directly at me.
So he was picking a fight with me. But over what? He was the one doing creepy stuff, not me. He ran a hand through his hair and looked over at Bleached Hair, who rolled his eyes.
Yuki spoke up. “Sorry about you and Myu.”
Tomo’s eyes snapped back to mine. I bet he was wondering how much I’d told. Was he worried I’d spilled about the drawing, too?
“Maa,”
he said with a dramatic sigh, pressing his slender fingertips to his forehead. “Some people don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.”
Fire spread through me. “I didn’t say anything,” I blurted.
“My sister told me,” Tanaka said quickly. “Keiko’s in Myu’s homeroom.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Tomohiro said, rubbing the back of his neck. “You don’t have to cover for her. The whole school knows anyway.”
But it did matter. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being right when he wasn’t.
“He’s not covering,” I said. “I have better things to do than gossip about you.”
“So you have a new girlfriend now?” Yuki piped up again.
She was determined to drag the gossip out at any cost.
Tomohiro tilted his head. “Why? Are you confessing?”
That’s what they called it here when you admitted you liked someone. Yuki turned bright pink.
“It’s—it’s not like that,” she said, waving her hand back and forth.
“Oh, her, then?” he said, motioning at me.
My heart almost stopped. “Excuse me?”
“It’s a joke,” Bleached Hair said. “Calm yourself.”
“Um,” Tanaka said, looking from Tomohiro to me and back with wide eyes. “Um, so are—are you going to join the
Shoudo
Club this year?”
A dark look crossed Tomohiro’s eyes. “I don’t do calligraphy anymore,” he said quietly.
“Tan-kun told us you were really talented,” Yuki bubbled, but Tomohiro took a step toward her, glaring at her from behind his bangs.
“I don’t paint anymore,” he said, and I wondered why he had to get so uptight about it. “It doesn’t interest me.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Tanaka said, laughing politely to smooth things out. “With me in the club, they need all the help they can get.” Tomohiro let out a small laugh, which only egged Tanaka on. “God help us if they put my drawings on display!”
“You did always draw the lines too thickly.” Tomohiro grinned. The storm in his eyes looked as if it had passed. I could see a faint image in my mind of what he must have been like in elementary school, when he and Tanaka had been friends.
“Sou ne…”
Tanaka trailed off, staring into the distance, deep in thought. He tapped his fingers against his chin. “How do I fix it?”
Tomohiro gripped his fingers together, as if he were holding a paintbrush. “If you hold it like this,” he said, “with the right support here, and move like this…” His arm moved gently through the air, making light brushstrokes, and even I, who had no background in calligraphy—heck, even my school notes were illegible—could tell there was something more going on here.
“Try to load less paint on the tip of the brush,” Tomohiro said. “And move like this.”
Tanaka smiled and crossed his arms as he watched. “You’re really good, you know? A natural.”
Tomohiro’s arm stopped suddenly like a dance cut short.
It hung there in the air, rigidly, until he dropped it down to the side and shoved his hand into his blazer pocket.
“I told you,” he said sharply, “it doesn’t interest me anymore.”
Tanaka’s face fell while Bleached Hair leaned back into the tree, grinning.
What the hell?
I thought. Tanaka and Tomohiro used to be friends, and now he treated him like this?
“You don’t have to be a jerk about it,” I snapped. “Tanaka’s just trying to be nice to you.”
“Katie,” Yuki whispered, urgently squeezing my arm.
Tomohiro sneered. “You’re always sticking your nose in, aren’t you?”
“So are you. You’re everywhere I turn. What, are you a stalker, too, or something?”
“If I was, I wouldn’t stalk you.”
“Oh, I’m not your type, huh? You don’t like
gaijin?
”
“I don’t like annoying girls who think they know everything.”
“Unless they have a skirt to look up, right?”
Tomohiro grinned, and my nerves flipped over. It was that same secret-alliance look. I almost expected him to wink like Jun had at the train station. I took a deep breath.
“So if you hate art so much, how come you had a sketchbook full?”
The grin vanished.
“And how come they move?”
“Move?” Bleached Hair said.
“That’s right,” I fumed. “I know you’re doing something.”
I looked at Tomohiro, and did he ever look pissed!
Good. I’ll finally get some answers.
“Oh, are you working on another of those animations, Tomo?” Tanaka said.
Tomohiro smiled.
No.
“He used to do these really neat ones on the edges of his notebooks.”
No! Don’t give him an escape hatch!
“Right, Ichirou. Animation.”
“On one page?” I sneered.
“On lots of pages,” he said. “That’s why I had so many drawings. It’s a project for my cram school. I didn’t want to draw, but I have to if I want full credit.”
Yuki nodded knowingly.
The answers were slipping through my fingers like sand.
“But I saw you in the hallway,” I said, “when my pen— I know you’re trying to freak me out with all your ink stuff.”
Tomohiro stepped toward me, his eyes studying mine. He was a little taller than me, and his bangs feathered around his eyes like the hairs of a painter’s fan brush. My stomach twisted and I focused hard on hating him.
“Why would I want to freak you out?” he said in a smooth voice.
“I don’t know,” I said. I could hear my pulse in my ears.
Tomohiro smiled, his eyes gleaming from behind his bangs.
So he could look normal after all, I thought. Okay, more than normal.
Damn it! Focus!
“Greene-san,” he said in accented English, giving me just about the politest suffix he could, “I assure you, I don’t have the time or the intention to scare you. I’m third year, yes? I have two cram schools to go to and I have university entrance exams to take. If you don’t want to see me, then don’t look for me at the school gate every morning.”
English. He was speaking English. Not only that, but calling me by my last name like I wasn’t some outsider, as if I belonged. I felt off balance, like he’d rolled a single marble to my side of a plank and the sudden change of weight might cause me to topple over. He’d turned this into a game, and he was winning.
Bleached Hair grinned. “I didn’t know you spoke English so well, Yuuto.”
“You understood me that day, in the
genkan,
” I whispered.
I felt nauseous and wished he would stop looking at me and turn away. “You told me you didn’t speak English.”
He smirked, but his face was pale. “And you told me you didn’t speak Japanese,” he said. “So we’re even.”
“I don’t—” Wait, was he complimenting my Japanese?
“Look, we’re already late for kendo practice.” He turned to his friend and snapped,
“Ikuzo.”
Let’s go,
trying to sound like a tough guy. He took off toward the
genkan,
followed by Bleached Hair.
There was more to it all—I knew it. How could he hate something that had made him come alive? I saw the way his arm arced through the air, the graceful way he moved, the look in his eyes and the softness of his voice as he sketched the kanji with his fingers. And he hadn’t denied the ink moving. He hadn’t said no.
My head flooded with questions, too many to handle. I wanted him to leave me alone—didn’t I? I never wanted to see him again—right? I just wanted things the way they were before. My whole world was shaken up. I didn’t want to see things that weren’t there. I didn’t want to lose whatever it was I had left without Mom. And every step he took away from me was a step away from normal. I needed answers and I needed them now.
I panicked and grabbed his left wrist with my hand. He turned, his eyes wide with surprise.
His skin felt warm beneath the shirt cuff, and time felt like it stopped.
“Katie,” Yuki whispered. Tanaka’s mouth was half open, half shut. I guess you didn’t just grab someone in Japan. I was making a spectacle of myself again—but it was too late.
I clung to the softness of his skin, unsure what to do next or what I had been thinking.
“Oi,”
Bleached Hair said, annoyed. The whole courtyard was staring at me. Again. Tomohiro looked at me, face flush-ing pink, his eyes wide and gleaming. He even looked a little frightened. I opened my fingers and let his wrist slip away.
“I—”
“Stay away from me,” Tomohiro said, but his voice wavered, and his cheeks blazed red as he turned and took off. I looked down at my hands.
Stay away from me.
Isn’t that my line?
And then I saw the pads of my fingers, covered in dark ink.
I screamed and wiped them on my jeans. But when I lifted them to look, the ink was gone. There was nothing on my jeans, either.
“Katie.” Yuki, looking worried, grabbed my arm and steered me away from the scene I was making. “Let’s go, okay?”
I followed, my mind racing.
I hated myself for the heat that flushed through me when I thought of the warmth of his wrist against my fingers. I tried to crumple up the feeling and toss it away like I had with Tanaka, but when I thought I’d crushed it, it dripped back into my thoughts like black, sluggish ink.
I walked silently through Sunpu Park, Yuki with a sym-pathetic arm around me.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not like everyone saw. I mean…um.”
“You okay?” Tanaka said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t like how he was talking to you. He said he’s your friend, and then he goes all crazy when you ask him about calligraphy. I just feel like he’s hiding something. Sometimes he looks so pissed, and other times he looks worried or like I’m in on some kind of secret. I don’t get it—I want to know what’s going on.”
“Katie,” Yuki said, squeezing my arm. “That’s just how Yuu is. I’ve been talking to the second years, and he’s just touchy like that.”
“Right,” said Tanaka. “He likes his space. My sister told me he’s always disappearing somewhere—a loner or something, right? I know he’s cold, but don’t take it personally.”
Disappearing somewhere?
So he
is
up
to something.
Yuki flipped her phone open to check the time. “Listen, I have to go. They’ll kick me out of cram school if I’m late again. Later, okay?”
We waved as she took off ahead of us.
“Tanaka,” I said quietly as we walked.
“Hmm?” he said, tilting his head to the side.
“Why did Yuu quit Calligraphy Club?”
“
Eh?
Oh,” Tanaka said, looking a little embarrassed. Maybe I’d hit a sore spot. “He was getting into a lot of fights, and sensei warned him he’d have to quit the club if it continued.”
“So he got kicked out.”
Tanaka shook his head. “He was doing all right for a while.
We had a big show coming up, our winter exhibit. Tomo-kun was working so hard on his painting. He chose the kanji for sword, and it was supposed to be our feature piece. Anyway, he practiced so many times and then went to paint the one for the display.”
“And?”
“Somehow he cut himself on it. Some sharp nail in the back of the frame or something. It was a deep cut, and he bled across the canvas. After all his hard work, his painting was ruined.”
I struggled to imagine it, Yuu Tomohiro throwing himself into creating a work of art. It didn’t mesh with his tough image, that was for sure.
“So, what, he just quit?”
“When I came into the arts room the next day, his canvas was ripped in two in the garbage. I still remember the sound of the ink dripping into the trash can.”
I stopped walking. “Ink dripping…”
Tanaka nodded. “He must have used a lot of pigment. It was really thick. I remember how weird it looked, kind of an oily sheen with dust or something. He never came back to Calligraphy Club. And shortly after he switched schools.”
“Switched schools? Isn’t that a little drastic?”
Tanaka laughed. “Different reason,” he said.
Ink dripping in ways it shouldn’t, with sparkling clouds of dust. So Tanaka had seen weird stuff, too. “Kanji only have so many strokes. If he’s so talented, why didn’t he start over?”
“I thought so, too. But after that, the fights started getting worse. When I asked what was going on, he said his dad made him quit. Of course, he wouldn’t want to admit it if he just gave up. Probably the ruined painting was the last straw for him.”
“Why would his dad make him quit?” I said, incredulous.
Tanaka grinned and his whole face lit up. He looked hand-some, but not in a way, I noticed, that distracted me.
“Well, I didn’t really hang out with Tomo-kun outside of school,” he said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if his father was pushing him to study harder and spend less time on the arts, even the traditional ones. My mom is always pushing my sister and me to study harder.”
“Hmm.” I wondered what sort of home Tomohiro went to at night, where he slipped off his shoes, whether he had curry waiting for him, too. “So why did he switch schools?”
“You like him.”
My heart stopped. “What?”
“Trust me, I can tell. But you should probably keep your distance. Tomo switched schools because he was almost ex-pelled. There was a really bad fight with his best friend, Koji.”
“The white-haired guy?”
“No, no, I don’t know him. I haven’t seen Koji since…well, since it happened. It was bad. There was a lot of pressure to expel Tomo. So he withdrew and went to a different school.”