by Amanda Sun
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 ex
pression, 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.”
“What?”
He raised an eyebrow and shone a cocky grin at me.
“I’m pretty broke at the moment. So order yourself something and I won’t protest, promise.”
“Fine,” I mumbled. I called the waitress over and ordered a bowl of gyudon. Tomohiro picked at his meal until mine came, and by then his curry was cold. But even though I insisted he go ahead and eat, he just prodded it.
When my bowl of teriyaki beef and rice arrived, Tomohiro just about leaped out of his seat.
“Itadakimasu!” he shouted, clasping his hands together and wolfing down the pork cutlet.
He took a gulp of his water to wash it down. “I’m starving,” he said, but the sound of the childish words he chose made me snort. “Peko peko” coming from the mouth of someone like Tomohiro.
“So are you convinced now that I’m not up to anything?”
he asked, his chopsticks suspended in the air between bites.
“Not even close,” I said. “But why did you do that to me, the day after I saw you with Myu?” I said. He raised his eyebrows and looked sincerely puzzled.
“Do what?”
“Oh, please, like you don’t remember. You waited for me at the gate, and then you walked past me all dangerous-like.”
And too close, I added to myself. The smell of his vanilla hair gel, the heat of his shoulder grazing mine. And then, you know, he proceeded to look up my skirt, but did we really need to remember that part?
I wondered if it was the wrong thing to say. It must have been, because Tomohiro’s grin faded, replaced by a look of concern. His eyes focused on some distant object that wasn’t there. I wanted to choke back the words, but it was too late.
The silence pressed against me, the tension pushing against the back of my neck and down my spine.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” I said weakly, but it didn’t help. Tomohiro picked at his curry.
“I wanted you to stay away from me,” he said, but the voice didn’t sound like his. It was too cold and distant, like his vo
ice at school.
“Why?”
“Ichirou told you, right? I’m always getting into fights. So you’d only have trouble if you made friends with me.” Was that really the reason? I couldn’t believe anything he said in that tone anymore.
I scoffed. “Why should you care whether I get into trouble?”
“Why do you have to see everything as a challenge?”
Tomo hiro snapped. “Fine, okay? Maybe I shouldn’t have stared you down at the gate, but you’re the one who spied on me all the way to Toro.”
“You gave me reason to.”
“I never intended to be so interesting to you.” He slammed his chopsticks down and I felt too sick to eat any more of my rice. “I told you to stay away, didn’t I?”
“Ha,” I snorted. “Like you’re not going around making my writing utensils combust. Like you didn’t cheat on Myu like the lowest scum of the earth!” He grinned darkly, like he enjoyed all the fuss about him.
“You still believe that, after I explained?” he said, and that’s when the shame washed over me, when I realized the mistake.
“You were lying,” I said. “There never was another girl, was there? And you lied when you told Myu she didn’t matter. Why would you want to break up with her if there was no one else and you still cared about her? And how am I supposed to know when you’re telling the truth about anything?”
The waitress came by and Tomohiro put down his money while I counted out my yen.
“Whatever,” he said. “Take it how you want, but what I did was a warning to stay away.” He rose to his feet and lifted his book bag off the chair. He stared into the distance for a minute and I could barely look at him, utterly humiliated that I’d agreed to go for dinner with him like this.
He took a deep breath and sighed. “But that was before,”
he said.
“Before?”
He shook his head. “You didn’t take the warning, so I guess it’s void.” He tilted his head back and grinned, and his bangs slid out of his eyes and to the tips of his ears. “Follow me to Toro again. It’s nice to have company when I draw.”
And just as suddenly he was gone from the café, the bell on the door ringing and me feeling off balance like my head was spinning.
