Feeling lonely and far from home, she’d replied to a bunch of e-mails that had been sitting in her in-box from her friends back in Boston, and then surfed the net for a while, reading about new movies and new music. She downloaded some tunes and browsed the Facebook and MySpace blogs of some of her friends.
She’d lulled herself into such a state of online oblivion that when the little Instant Messenger window popped up on the left side of the screen, she blinked stupidly at it a second before registering who the message was from.
Hi. You’re up late, Sakura had written, in Japanese.
Kara had been typing and reading in English, and her skill with written Japanese was not in the same league as her talent with speaking the language. She did her best.
So are you.
Can’t sleep.
Neither can I. Are you okay?
Not really. But I will be.
Kara paused before she replied, pushing up the sleeves of the sweater she’d put on to warm her against the chilly spring night. She didn’t want to intrude if Sakura didn’t want to talk about it. But there was no way the girl would have IMed her this late without expecting her to ask.
What happened with the police?
It sucked. And Miho said you were upset. Do you think I’m a freak now?
Kara stared at the screen, fingers paused over the keyboard, cheeks flushed with guilt.
No. I’ve just been worried about you.
J Thank you. The past two days have been hard enough without having friends turn on me. Ume, that bitch, told the police they should talk to me about Jiro’s death. Some of her friends said the same thing.
Why would they believe that? Kara wrote.
I don’t know if they did. But it’s their job to check it out, right?
So what now? Kara asked. Are your parents going to come?
Are you kidding? The police called them, and all they wanted to know was if I was being charged with a crime. I guess that’s what it would take to get them to pay me a visit.
Kara felt sick with anger at the callousness of Sakura’s parents. Their older daughter had been murdered, and they’d abandoned their youngest child to grieve on her own. She wondered if Sakura had always dressed and acted like such a rebel, or if it had all come about after Akane’s death. The wild child thing was really a facade—no matter what attitude she presented to the world, it wasn’t like she was some party girl, drinking and doing drugs—and Kara would have bet that Sakura had put that persona on like a mask after her sister’s death.
As she was typing a reply, another message came in from Sakura.
I’ve got to get some sleep. Thanks for not thinking I’m some serial killer.
Kara deleted what she’d been writing and started over, signing off with a simple, Good night.
No bad dreams, Sakura wrote.
Kara stared at the words. Bad dreams. On Saturday, the day they’d gone to the park and shopping, Miho had mentioned something about Sakura having nightmares, and Sakura had seemed on edge about it. Kara had been having terrible dreams herself, things that troubled her deeply. Now she wondered exactly what Sakura had been dreaming about.
What do you mean—she started to write.
But then Sakura logged off for the night, leaving Kara to stare at the screen and wonder.
Tired as she was, suddenly the idea of sleep unsettled her. A line from Shakespeare whispered across her mind.
For in that sleep, what dreams may come?
Tuesday passed by in such ordinary fashion, mostly a blur of teachers’ voices, studying, and the whispers and glances of other students, that Kara could almost forget how scary and weird things had been getting. She hadn’t slept well the night before, but if she’d had any nightmares, she didn’t remember them.
During o-soji, she got to sweep the stairs with Hachiro and two other students. At first it was awkward just being around him. He and Jiro had been close, and she didn’t know what to say to comfort him. Kara had liked Hachiro from the moment they’d met. He was a big, friendly guy, smarter than he wanted people to see. Though she wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, there was something really charming about him.
She still had until Monday to decide what club she would join but had pretty much decided to go with calligraphy, so she gave herself the rest of the afternoon off, went home early, and made dinner for herself and her father.
That night, she went to bed thinking that maybe the dark cloud that had been hanging above Monju-no-Chie School had passed.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, long before dawn, Kara woke up screaming, tears and sweat on her face.
Her father stumbled in, half-asleep. She sent him back to bed, insisting that she was fine, that it was only a bad dream. And perhaps it was. But even as pieces of the dream slipped from her mind, gone forever, the echo of it remained. She lay in bed with her back to the windows and her legs drawn up beneath her, and only managed to drift off again when she saw the sky begin to lighten outside.
7
On Wednesday morning, the world seemed to hold its breath.
No rain fell, no spring showers or storm clouds. On the contrary, the sun rose on a pristine day, the sort that almost demanded rambling along the shore of Miyazu Bay in quiet contemplation. Blue seemed insufficient an adjective to describe the sky. Instead of the bright, vibrant color that crowned perfect spring days, that morning the sky had a dusting of white over blue; not clouds, but the sort of crisp air that spoke more of mid-winter sunrise.
Kara kissed her father good-bye and went out the door, backpack slung over one shoulder, a small blue bow in her long blond hair. She started to whistle but faltered. Whistling, singing, anything that didn’t involve walking to school was beyond her today. Her eyes burned from lack of sleep.
A wind had come through in the night and seemed to have blown away the bad aura that had hung over Miyazu City for the past week or so. Despite her exhaustion, Kara felt a little better, as though the air was fresher and just breathing it in could cleanse her, and maybe keep the nightmares away. What a relief that would be.
Meanwhile, she had to make it through today. She would focus on the weekend, on having some time away from school. On Saturday afternoon, she’d already promised herself she would go down to the Turning Bridge and play guitar and sing, just shaking off the dust that had been settling on her spirit of late. She had hardly played guitar at all since school started.
And maybe there would be other plans as well. The one good dream she could recall from the previous night had involved Hachiro. At first she had dreamt they were walking together in the rain in a city that seemed sometimes to be Boston and others to be Miyazu. Then, somehow, they were swimming in a lake, or maybe the bay, laughing and splashing each other. He seemed even bigger in her sleeping imagination, like some kind of Goliath, and he had touched her face. She’d laughed, getting all shy, and looked down at herself in the water.
Only then did the dream-Kara realize they were swimming naked.
Sheer embarrassment had woken her, and then she’d seen the clock and realized somehow she had turned off the alarm. Twenty minutes later than she’d planned, she had stumbled out of bed to the shower.
Under the hot spray of water, she grinned at herself. How strange to still be embarrassed about something that had only happened in a dream. But then the dream of Hachiro began to slip away, and she started to recall the nightmares that had come earlier in the night. Slivers of those dark dreams flitted like ghosts at the back of her mind, tainting what remained of her one happy dream.
But it had gotten her thinking of Hachiro and how a walk along the bay with him might make her smile. She focused on those more pleasant thoughts as she walked to school, shoes clicking on pavement.
Nearby she heard the creak of a rusty bicycle chain and the rumble of a car engine. Someone tooted their horn not far away. None of it had anything to do with her; they were the sounds of any city. Kara kept to the side of the road, going over homework in
her mind, making sure she was on top of things for her classes.
Three boys in Monju-no-Chie School uniforms rode by on their bikes, racing.
“Good morning, Kara!” one of them called, in English.
Surprised, she studied their backs as they pedaled toward school. The boy glanced over his shoulder and she recognized him as Ren, the spiky-haired kid in her homeroom.
Kara raised a hand to wave, but he’d already turned back around, bending to make up for the moment of distraction, still trying to win the race against his friends. Up ahead, other students congregated in front of the school.
Ren’s greeting had lifted her spirits. Her eyes felt heavy, and she knew she was moving slower than usual this morning. But tonight she would sleep, she promised herself. Early to bed and too tired to dream.
At home, her mother had kept a Native American dream catcher hanging from the lock on her bedroom window. Kara wondered what had happened to that dream catcher. More than likely it had ended up in a box in storage, but she wished she had it now.
Curt, angry voices snapped her from her reverie.
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“I didn’t say that. But I think drawing attention is a mistake—”
“You think? No, you don’t think. Little mouse, you’re not worthy to share the air I breathe, and you want to tell me how to behave?”
Kara couldn’t help staring. She kept walking but slowed down as she passed the two girls on the corner, not far from the freestanding arch that marked the entrance to the school’s grounds.
A furious Ume had her hands balled into fists at her sides as she menaced Maiko, one of the soccer girls in her clique. As nasty as Ume was, one thing she had said was true: the girl was a mouse in comparison.
The argument accelerated until Kara couldn’t understand more than a few words of their rapid-fire Japanese. They were simply speaking too fast for her to translate. Then Ume glanced up and saw her watching, and it stopped abruptly.
“You! Ugly gaijin witch, what are you looking at?”
Kara flinched, not in fear but in astonishment. Ume had been a total bitch from day one, but she had been calm and collected, vicious in that quietly devastating way popular girls had perfected all over the world. This behavior went way beyond that. Her father referred to loss of temper on this scale as “going apeshit,” and Ume had definitely reached that point.
Eyes front, ignoring the two girls now, she picked up her pace and hurried toward school. As she walked away, she heard one last snippet of the argument.
“We both just need to sleep,” Maiko said.
Ume practically snarled her reply. “I don’t want to sleep,” she said. Her voice cracked on the last word, brittle and almost hysterical.
The words echoed in Kara’s mind as she lined up outside of school and then went inside. In the genkan, she put her street shoes into her cubby and slipped on her uwabaki, lost in thought.
Shuffling to the morning meeting, she started looking around at the other students. Sakura had been looking exhausted and frayed the past couple of days, but under the circumstances that was no surprise. And Kara herself looked like hell in the mirror this morning. Good thing that—dreams about Hachiro notwithstanding—she wasn’t really searching for a boyfriend.
But Ume and Maiko had both looked frazzled this morning as well. Ume’s hair had been perfect last week. The girl had the poise and skin and bone structure of a porcelain doll. But Kara remembered thinking recently that Ume looked tired, and today the girl looked like she was unraveling. Her clothes needed ironing and her shoulder-length hair had been put up in twin clips, as though she couldn’t be bothered to do anything else with it. Maiko didn’t look much better.
As Kara glanced around the gym while Principal Yamato talked, she saw other students who looked ragged around the edges. Ume and Maiko hurried into the back of the room, almost late, but Kara spotted other members of their clique. As a group, the soccer girls did not smile. Most had dark circles under their eyes. A couple of the boys looked equally tired.
Hachiro leaned out of his line and caught her eye, offering a smile. Kara could muster only a halfhearted grin in return, but she felt a strange sense of relief to see that he looked happy and alert. Whatever sickness had begun to affect so many of the students—it had to be a sickness, didn’t it?— Hachiro seemed not to have caught the bug.
Maybe they’re just not sleeping, Kara thought.
She frowned. Could it be that simple? All of them, just not sleeping?
All of them having nightmares.
Troubled by this thought, she studied them again, more carefully this time. Several of the soccer girls caught her staring and made unpleasant faces, but no one said anything or made rude gestures. They didn’t want to get in trouble.
When they were dismissed, and Mr. Matsui was leading them to the classroom, Miho caught up with her.
“Are you all right? What was going on in there?”
“I’m okay,” Kara said, brow still furrowed in thought. “Just more bad dreams. And I’m starting to think they’re . . .”
She couldn’t think of the word in Japanese.
Miho supplied it. “Contagious?”
Kara shot her a look as they walked up the stairs. “Exactly. How did you know that’s what I was going to say?”
Adjusting her glasses, Miho shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m fine. The only reason I haven’t been sleeping that well is because of the bad dreams Sakura’s been having. But I’ve heard other people talking about it in the dorm.”
“That’s weird.”
“You’ve been having them, too?” Miho asked.
Kara nodded. “I wonder what they’re all dreaming about?”
But then they were walking into class, and Mr. Matsui cast an admonishing glance at them and they had to drop the conversation. Kara took her seat. Ren said good morning to her again and she waved. When he wished Miho a good morning as well, she blushed so hard her whole face went a shade of deep pink. As much as she talked about only liking American boys, Kara thought the bronze-haired Ren was a definite exception.
Ume’s friend Maiko sat in the front left corner of the room, beside the windows. Mr. Matsui called on her for toban, the morning attendance and announcements. The girl pursed her lips, as though she might be thinking about telling him off, but she obviously thought better of it. She stood and took the notebook from him and went to the front of the class.
Barely lifting her eyes from the book, Maiko took attendance.
When she got to Kara’s name, she paused and looked up. Again, she seemed about to speak, but then shook her head and returned to her task. Kara had no idea what the girl had on her mind, but something was troubling Maiko deeply.
For the rest of the day, Kara tried her best to focus. By early afternoon, she had to accept that her best would not be good enough. Even the breaks between classes, when she could get up and chat with Miho and get a breath of fresh air by an open window, didn’t seem to help. Half of what she’d heard today had gone in one ear and out the other. Her notes were a mess. Between the distracting thoughts that kept popping up in her mind and the way her whole body seemed to just hang wrongly on her bones, exhaustion dragging her down, she felt that if she had to spend one more minute sitting on the hard wooden chair, she would scream.
When her father came in to teach his class, Kara wanted to run up and hug him. But he was Harper-sensei in the classroom, not her dad. Still, he smiled at her, and a few times he gave her looks of parental concern, obviously noticing that something was wrong. That alone was enough to restore her spirits a little. Besides, just because she was American didn’t mean she would automatically pass American Studies.
As the clock ticked away the afternoon—the end of the school day still seemed far away—she glanced out the window. An old cypress tree grew near the school, thriving and alive. The wintry cast to the sky had receded and now only pure blue remained.
Her father was discussing t
he three branches of American government, and she forced herself to pay attention. But as she pulled her gaze away from the window, she saw that Maiko had her head down. Exhausted as she was, Kara’s first reaction was envy. The thought made no sense. The moment her father saw that the girl had fallen asleep on her desk, she would be in big-time trouble. He had explained to Kara that the code of conduct at the school was very strict. At home, he might have let something like that slide, but he would have no choice but to punish her in some way. Harper-sensei would give her an extra assignment rather than make her sit on her knees in the hallway as some teachers would do.
At her desk, Maiko began to shiver, as though she was cold. Still asleep, head on her arms, she gave a tiny gasp, then a low murmur. Kara narrowed her eyes, staring at the girl. Then Maiko began to whimper in her sleep, and she understood.
Maiko was having a nightmare, right there in class.
Kara trembled, skin prickling with goose flesh. Just the thought of her own nightmares made her pulse quicken.
Most of the class was looking at Maiko now. Kara’s father had ignored her as long as he could, but now, at last, he started walking toward the sleeping girl’s desk. All Kara could think about was that whimpering—what was Maiko dreaming about to cause her to make that sound?
Her father tried to shake the girl awake. Kara couldn’t watch. She looked away, glancing toward the door to the hall.
A cat stood poised just beyond the open door.
The Waking Page 9
