Thomas Randall - The Waking

By the time they finished lunch it was after two-thirty, and Kara knew she wouldn’t be hungry at dinnertime. Still, her fish had been excellent and the plums delicious. And since she’d never be able to finish her dinner, it made total sense to her that they should get some candy at the little shop just down the street.

They rode the bus back into the heart of Miyazu City, eating their sweets and talking about nothing. A boy who looked old enough to be at university admired Sakura, apparently taken by the dramatic cut of her hair or the collection of patches and pins on her jacket, though Kara thought it just as likely he merely appreciated the shortness of her skirt. Many Japanese girls would have looked away, either with a shy smile or in an attempt to ignore him. The culture avoided bold eye contact whenever possible, but Sakura had her own style, and it involved challenging convention whenever possible. She gave the boy a withering stare that eventually forced him to turn away.

Kara and Miho shared a smile over that.

“You look tired,” Miho said quietly, in English, adjusting the bow in her hair. “Are you feeling all right?”

The change of tone and subject was abrupt. Kara blinked and looked at her, but Miho’s gaze was elsewhere.

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she confessed, also in English.

“ Soudesuka,” Miho replied with a nod. “Sakura hasn’t either.”

The word meant something like I hear you and understand. Kara enjoyed how versatile the Japanese language was. After a couple of months in Japan, shifting between the languages had grown difficult. If she was thinking in Japanese, it wasn’t easy to switch to English.

“What haven’t I been doing?” Sakura asked, moving across the bus to sit beside Miho.

Seeing them next to each other-the mousy, proper girl with her cute glasses and the wild child-usually made Kara smile at the contrast. But on the subject of sleep, she couldn’t muster a smile.

Kara switched to Japanese, hoping they would stick with it. “Sleeping well. Why not?”

With a shrug, Sakura unwrapped a small candy and looked away from them. “I haven’t slept well since Akane died.”

“This is different,” Miho said. Sakura ignored her, but Miho leaned toward Kara and whispered, “Bad dreams.”

The words made Kara flinch, thinking of her own nightmares of cats and no-face girls and all that blood. A chill snaked up the back of her neck and she would have asked Sakura to elaborate, but then the bus slid to a halt and the doors opened.

“Let’s go,” Sakura said, leading the way.

The streets of Miyazu City looked nothing like an American or even European city. There were markets and shops everywhere, monks in white, police officers stopping bicyclists to see their riding permits, and tourists buying souvenirs of Ama-no-Hashidate. Some of them were embarrassingly American, one man even wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a cowboy hat, as though he had dressed up expressly for the purpose of becoming a caricature. Kara cringed at the sight of him, but nobody else seemed to notice, as though this man in his sandals and sunglasses was what they expected of Americans.

Don’t be nasty, she thought. He might be perfectly nice.

Still, the shirt had to go.

They visited Miho’s favorite dress shop, where a saleswoman seemed to adopt them as her personal mission, though none of them bought anything. Sakura dragged them into a bookshop, where she introduced Kara to her favorite manga and they both spent too much money, and then into a music store, where Miho insisted Kara pick out some American music for her. Since she hated J-pop-the bubblegum pop music a lot of Japanese kids liked-Kara was happy to oblige, grabbing the latest Alicia Keys and an ancient Nine Inch Nails, just for variety.

Outside a little store where Sakura had bought them each a spangly hair band and herself a pair of bright orange socks, they stopped for a break near a fountain. Kara thanked her for the gift, and Sakura seemed pleased.

“A keepsake of our day,” she said.

Then her smile went away. She couldn’t manage happiness very long. If Kara judged just by her appearance, she’d have thought it was part of the persona Sakura had crafted for herself, but she felt sure it had much more to do with Akane and the way their parents seemed to have just left Sakura here and forgotten about her. Maybe the girl felt like she shouldn’t be happy.

The thought made Kara’s heart hurt.

Sakura surprised both Kara and Miho by suggesting they visit Temple Chigenji, which had been built by someone named Takahiro for his mother, who’d been a Buddhist saint.

“I didn’t think you’d like history,” Kara said.

“Just because I don’t have respect for authority doesn’t mean I don’t have respect for the past,” Sakura explained.

Standing in front of the temple, Kara felt exhausted. It had been a very long day.

“My mother would have loved it here,” she said. “She never liked the idea of leaving home, living someplace so far away. But she would have loved it here. Sometimes beautiful places made her cry. I think Ama-no-Hashidate would have had her in tears. It feels like the top of the world… like you could sail north and find-”

Kara faltered. She’d been about to say find heaven, but she couldn’t finish the thought. If that was where her mother had gone, Kara wished she would come back.

Miho touched her arm. “I haven’t heard you mention your mother before.”

“We know your father,” Sakura added. “He gives too much homework.”

Kara smiled, a twinge of sadness still in her heart. “He’ll lighten up. He likes to put a scare into his students at the beginning of the year to make us take him seriously.”

Both girls were still watching her but did not speak, as though waiting for her to go on.

At length, Kara glanced away. “My mother died in a car accident, almost two years ago. It’s just the two of us, my father and me. She left us to take care of each other.”

“But she loved you,” Miho said.

Kara looked up to find a sad smile on the girl’s face. She nodded.

Sakura did not smile. Her expression was hard, and her eyes difficult to read. But she met Kara’s gaze.

“That’s a treasure,” Sakura said. “And you’ll have it as long as you live.”

Kara startled her with a quick embrace. By the time Sakura started to return it, Kara was already stepping away. The three girls looked at one another for a moment, and then the subject changed and they were talking about nothing and everything again, heading back along the street. Heading for home.

And they were friends.

Jiro had his window open, and the night breeze brought the powerful scent of cherry blossoms into his room. So strong was the aroma that he blinked in distraction and pulled his attention away from the television set. He spent too much time in front of the TV, his parents were always telling him. But the stupid game shows helped numb him.

Ever since September, when Akane had died, numb had been his goal. They’d been close friends-maybe even best friends-and he’d known that she didn’t love him any other way. But his feelings for her had been so strong that it felt like love to him, or the way he thought love should feel. He still wasn’t sure he knew what love really felt like, but no one else had ever made him so happy inside, so nervous, and so lighthearted, as though he could rise off the ground and fly.

Ume certainly never made him feel that way, and she was supposed to be his girlfriend. But then, he knew Ume had never been in love with him. She used the word, but Jiro didn’t think she knew it was supposed to mean something more.

The light from the television flickered blue off the walls of his bedroom, the only illumination in the room except for what streamed in through the open window. He shivered. It was probably too early in the year to have the windows open so wide, but the chilly spring air felt good. All winter he had let himself shiver with the cold; it fit perfectly with how alone he felt. His best friend had been taken from him, and her sister, Sakura, wouldn’t even talk to him. Every time she looked at him, he could see the blame there. But Jiro hadn’t killed Akane. He would have given anything to have her back.