Heat coursed through my cheeks, and my ears burned with embarrassment.
When I didn’t reply, Tomohiro stopped drawing. Still not looking up, he moved his hand to a spot on the ground beside him and patted it. “Sit.”
I smirked. “What am I, a dog?”
He looked over and grinned, the breeze twisting his spiky hair in and out of his deep brown eyes. I almost melted on the spot.
“Wan, wan,”
he barked, the Japanese version of a dog’s noise. I nearly jumped back at the sound of it, and his eyes gleamed with twisted delight. “I’m the animal around here, right?” he said with a smirk. “Don’t sit if you don’t want. I don’t care.” He turned back to the page.
I took a deep breath and stepped forward, walking slowly toward his back, curved over his drawing.
My eyes flicked nervously to the drawing, a sketch of a wagtail bird. The drawing was beautiful, but I was relieved to see it didn’t move around.
Tomohiro shook his head.
“You just don’t get the message, do you?” he said, his pen curving around the back of the wagtail. High in the trees I saw a wagtail in a cherry tree, singing while other birds darted through the branches.
“You told me to stay away from you,” I said.
“And so you followed me to Toro Iseki.” He looked up at me, but I gazed back suspiciously.
“I just think—”
“You think I’m up to something.”
I nodded. He tilted his notebook toward me.
“I’m up to this,” he said, tapping the page.
I said nothing, but the heat rose to my cheeks.
“You think Myu had the right idea, don’t you?” he said.
“You want to slap me, too?”
I stared at him. Why so much attitude? The way he’d saved that girl in the park, the moment we’d had after, even the softness of his face when he’d waited for the Roman bus—it didn’t match up with this I-don’t-give-a-shit act he was pulling now, the one he always put on at school.
“Well?” He stared at me expectantly, and I forced my mouth to move.
“I’m not going to hit you, but I think it was pretty shitty of you to cheat on her.” He smirked and glanced into the trees, lifting his pen to shade the wagtail’s beak. “Why did you lie to her?”
“Lie to her?”
“Yeah. Myu didn’t mean nothing to you. I saw it in your eyes, how you really felt.”
He paused in his drawing.
“That,” he said, “is not your business.”
A moment passed before either of us said anything. The tip of his pen made a loud scratchy noise as it scribbled back and forth across the paper.
“Okay, so how about something that is my business? Tell me why your drawings move, and how you made my pen explode.”
“Animation, and a faulty pen.”
“Like crap it was,” I said.
“Watch if you don’t believe me,” he said, and I stared at his page. Completely normal. “You must be seeing things.
You should probably get that checked out.”
“Shut up,” I said, but the comment worried me. I’d done an internet search of the symptoms of hallucinating, and apparently, grieving the loss of a loved one was a big one.
“So Watanabe-sensei and Nakamura-sensei say you’ve joined kendo,” Tomohiro said after a minute.
“Yeah,” I said. He grinned and leaned forward to brush the
ume
petals off his paper. His bangs slipped over his eyes and he tossed his head to the side.
“You’re doing a thorough job of stalking me,” he said.
“I’m not stalking you!” I snapped. “I couldn’t care less what you’re doing with your time.”
“Which is why you followed me here.”
“Like I said, I thought you were up to something.”
“The arts.”
I lowered my voice, embarrassed. “I see that.”
He stopped drawing abruptly, and the wagtails peeped high-pitched warnings to each other. He scratched thick black strokes through his drawing, scribbling it out of existence. I watched with surprise.
“It wasn’t that bad,” I said. He didn’t answer, but flipped to a fresh page. I could hear his breath, tired and labored like when he’d fought in the park. After a moment, he swallowed and his hand started moving across the paper, sketching what looked like a plum tree.
“Why did you quit calligraphy?” I asked, watching his hand pause a moment as he studied the foliage of the nearby
ume.
“My dad,” he said. “He thinks art is nonsense. He wants me to study medicine or go into banking like him.”
“But you’re really good at it,” I said. “I mean really good.”
Tomohiro sketched in a few more ink leaves. “Maybe if your dad saw your work—”
“He’s seen it,” Tomohiro snapped darkly. The ink blotted from his pen and trickled down the tree. “Shit!” he added, scratching violently through the drawing.
I rolled my eyes. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”
“My mother’s dead,” he said.
I stared at him, my hands shaking. I’d been standing until then, but my legs buckled under me and I sank down to my knees beside him. I opened and closed my mouth, but no sound. I’d never expected we were connected in this way.
“Mine, too,” I managed.
He looked up from the page, his eyes searching my face, and I felt like he was seeing me for the first time, really me, how broken I was.
“Sorry,” he said.
“What…what happened to yours?” I asked. His eyes were intense, and I felt exposed suddenly, like I’d told him too much. And maybe I had, but for a minute I’d felt like maybe he could understand me.
“It was an accident,” he said. “I was ten.” Not recent, then, like mine. Not like mine at all. His voice was all softness and velvet. “Yours?”
My eyes started to blur with tears. Having this in common knocked all the fight out of me. I could barely get out the words. “Heart attack, eight months ago. One minute she was fine and then…”
“No warning, then,” Tomohiro said. “Like mine.” Oh.
I guess it was like his after all. Except his voice was steady as he spoke. Time healing all wounds and all that, like everyone kept telling me. He was where I’d be in seven years.
Without the attitude, hopefully. He was where I’d be if I let myself forget my old life.
I watched him draw for a little while in silence, and even though he was just doodling with a pen, each drawing was so beautiful. But he was critical of his work. He’d start and stop drawings like he had a short attention span. He’d scribble things out, sometimes striking them out so hard the pen tore through the paper and blotted onto the next page of the notebook.
“They tell you you’ll forget how it used to be,” he said suddenly, and the sound of his voice startled me. “You’ll get used to it, that it’s better to move on. They don’t realize you can’t. You’re not the same person anymore.”
My eyes f looded again and I stared at his blurry form through them. This wasn’t what I’d expected him to say. I mean, when he had half the school staring up my skirt, I was pretty sure he didn’t even have a soul.
“Don’t let them tell you you’ll be fine,” he said, looking at me urgently. His brown eyes caught the sunlight and I could see how deep they were before his bangs fell into them again.
He tucked the bangs to the sides with his slender fingers; I couldn’t help wondering what his fingertips felt like. “Be angry, Katie Greene. Don’t forget how it was. Because there’ll always be a hole in your heart. You don’t have to fill it.”
Satisfied with his pep talk, he gave me a small grin and then turned back to his drawing. The wind caught the cherry and plum petals and they spun in drifts before my eyes.
And I felt that I wasn’t alone, that Tomohiro and I were suddenly linked. No one had told me I
wouldn’t
feel better.
No one had let me be empty and changed. I knew which side of him was real now, and it wasn’t the part everyone else saw.
When he moved his hand across the drawing, the cuff of his white school shirt caught on the edge of the paper and rolled up his arm. He left his palm up as he studied the Toro houses, and that’s when I saw the scars that slashed across his wrist, the ones I’d seen in Sunpu Park. The biggest one spanned from one side to the other, interlaced with the rest.
They were smaller and not as deep, but they looked ragged, fresher and not anywhere as neatly healed.
Concern welled up in me.
Oh—he’s a cutter.
Now that I looked, I could see the pattern of dark scars that trailed up his arm beneath the thin fabric of his shirt. But when he saw my expression, he looked down at his wrist and grinned, like he thought my assumption was funny.
“It’s from the sword,” he said.
“The what?”
“
Sword.
The kanji. In elementary Calligraphy Club? I’m sure Ichirou told you about it.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s a pretty bad scar.”
“It was a deep cut. I had to go to the hospital for it.” He switched to English and tried to explain, and I got the message that he’d needed stitches and lost a lot of blood. All I could think of was how he’d put his friend Koji in the hospital, too. At the moment, he didn’t seem capable of it.
“Sorry,” I said, but he smiled grimly.
“Art is a dangerous hobby,” he said, and somehow I couldn’t tell if he was joking.
“So how come you draw here?” I asked.
“It’s safer here.”
“You mean your dad doesn’t know?”
“Something like that. Anyway, look around the clearing. People lived here almost two thousand years ago. There are birds, trees, silence. Ever try to be alone in a city like Shizuoka?” He ran his hand through his copper hair and shook it from side to side, flower petals tumbling onto his notebook. I thought of Jun reaching for the flower petal in my hair.
So beautiful.
I quickly pushed the memory aside with shame. I felt like I’d betrayed Tomohiro by thinking of it, which was dumb, but I felt it anyway.
“You know you’re trespassing here,” I said. Tomohiro broke into a broad grin.
“A place like this doesn’t belong to anyone,” he said. “They can’t keep me out like they can’t keep the birds in.”
It was surreal among the ruins, and I could see why he risked coming in here. Besides, with his entitled attitude, the orange sign on the gate was probably a challenge, a dare, more than anything else.
He stopped sketching and a bead of sweat rolled down his face. He drew an ugly rigid line through his beautiful sketch of a Yayoi hut and slammed the cover of the notebook closed.
“Why’d you wreck it?” I asked as he shoved the notebook deep into his book bag. When I thought about it, he’d crossed out every single drawing.
He shrugged it off, but his eyes were dark. “They’re not good enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Go? Together? I struggled to push down the panic that rose to my throat and reminded myself what a jerk he could be. And he was a taken jerk, on top of it. Cheater. Pregnant girlfriend. Koji in the hospital. It was a mantra I repeated in my mind, but somehow it wasn’t working.
He strode ahead into the trees and I followed, reaching for my bike as he lifted his. When we were both through the chain-link fence, he let go and it clanged into place.
We leaped on our bikes, coasting across the street and up through the thickening maze of Shizuoka.
He led the way, but competitiveness overtook me and I pedaled past him, coasting in front and weaving around the traffic. He didn’t challenge me but sat back and relaxed, following my lead and riding in my wake.
Maybe there was something to his friendship with Tanaka.
He wasn’t acting the same as before, different than the Tomohiro that Myu had slapped.
Not different than the one who’d tenderly embraced his crying girlfriend in the park, though. The memory flashed through my mind like a good slap to the head.
We stopped at Shizuoka Station.
“I go north from here, to Otamachi,” he said.
“I live west,” I said. “Near Suruga.”
He nodded. “You hungry?”
I just stared at him. My hunger was definitely clawing at the sides of my stomach, but I wasn’t about to admit it.
It was like he knew what I was thinking. He smiled, then burst into another of his grins, looking down and shaking his head as he laughed.
“You should see your face,” he said between laughs. “Like I’d just asked you to jump off the top of Sunpu Castle!”
I flushed red.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s a good café in the station.”
I grasped for words, reasons, that I could not go.
“Won’t your girlfriend be upset?” I said.
He tilted his head to the side. “Girlfriend?”
“The pregnant one? Or do you have more than one?”
He stared at me blankly and then burst out laughing.
“So that made it into the rumor?” he managed to say.
He looked pretty pleased with himself. My face would have turned redder if I’d had any humiliation left in me.
When he saw how pissed I was, he stopped laughing. “Oh, right. You heard Myu say it. I don’t have a girlfriend. Especially a pregnant one.”
“But I saw you. In the park,” I said and regretted the words the minute they came out. His eyes went wide.
“You really have been spying,
ne?
” he said. “Shiori’s not my girlfriend. She’s more like a sister, and I promised her mom I’d look out for her. Students are giving her a rough time because she’s keeping the baby.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Now, come on. I’m hungry.”
I protested, but he just walked his bike toward the station, waving his arm in the air like he wasn’t going to hear it.
I stood there for a moment, squeezing the handlebars of my bike. I could just take off for home and ignore him. But when he turned around to see if I was following, I hurried forward, like I didn’t control my own legs anymore.
I ordered a melon soda and he got a platter of
tonkatsu
curry.
“You sure you don’t want something to eat?” he said, breaking his wooden chopsticks apart. I held up my hand.
“I’m fine,” I said. He narrowed his eyes at me.
“I know what it is,” he said. “You’re scared I’m going to try and pay for you.”
The heat prickled up my neck. “It’s not that at all,” I stuttered.
“No problem,” he said, “because I’m not going to.”