Thomas Randall - The Waking

They set off together, walking around the front of the school. Most of the juku students and those who didn’t live on campus would have left immediately after their club meetings. Half a dozen guys and girls gathered a short way down the front walk, standing under umbrellas, probably talking about whatever meeting they’d just come from.

Kara glanced down toward the bay but didn’t see anyone near the water. With the storm, she couldn’t even make out the location of the shrine that had been created for Akane.

“Let’s try inside,” Miho said.

But none of the students they encountered had seen Sakura. Kara spotted Mr. Matsui and asked him, but he also shook his head.

They walked to the room in the eastern wing, at the farthest, rear corner of the first floor, where the calligraphy club had its meetings. Two girls remained in the room, though no teacher was present. They worked quietly on a large piece of parchment, practicing the sweep of the brush over paper, one girl seeming to guide the other.

“Reiko?” Miho asked.

Both girls looked up. The older one reacted, lowering her gaze a moment before focusing on them again.

“You’re looking for Sakura?” Reiko asked.

Miho nodded.

“Do you know where she is?” Kara asked.

The girl shook her head. “Not exactly. In one of the classrooms, I think. But I don’t think you should interrupt them.”

“Them?”

Reiko’s eyes widened a bit. “Oh. I’m sorry, I thought you knew. It’s really creepy. The police are here. They took her out of our meeting to talk to her about Jiro.”

Kara knew her mouth was hanging open and how foolish it must have looked, but she couldn’t get it to close. Her heart began to pound and she felt her face flush. She and Miho turned to each other, but it was obvious that neither of them had any idea what to say.

The police were here. What did that mean? Had somebody listened to the accusations Ume had made the day before? Did they have a reason to? Kara hated the questions, but she hated not having the answers even more.

“Poor Sakura,” Miho said, at last.

“Yeah,” Kara agreed. But in the back of her mind, she was also thinking, Poor Jiro.

That night, Kara sat at the small desk in her bedroom, staring at her computer screen. The rain had stopped but the clouds had never gone away, and now-long after dark-the air still felt chilly and damp. She wore a hooded woolen sweater, the sleeves pulled down over her hands, leaving only her fingers uncovered.

Her doubts had returned full force. She hated the emotional seesaw she’d been on the past few days; that just wasn’t the kind of girl she wanted to be, some emo drama queen. But she didn’t know how else she was expected to react to the ugliness moving to Japan had brought into her life.

Had she made the wrong friends? It seemed so. At first she’d felt such sympathy for Sakura, but now all of this death and brutality had come too close.

A lot of the guys she knew at home listened to Led Zeppelin, though the band had broken up when their parents were little kids. Still, they wore the T-shirts and scribbled lyrics on their notebooks. She knew plenty of the songs herself, and most of her guy friends were torn between whether “Stairway to Heaven” was the best or worst rock song ever written. Kara was on the fence, but the lyrics came to her now.

There’s still time to change the road you’re on.

Could she switch gears now-switch friends, even? Would others accept her?

That’s not the question, Kara, she thought. The question is, do you want to?

She didn’t.

Weird as all of this stuff with Sakura was, the girl had been the first person under the age of thirty to be nice to her in Japan. Kara liked her, and she liked Miho as well. Maybe they hadn’t known each other long, but no way was Sakura capable of killing someone, even by accident. Kara felt guilty for even considering such a thing. She couldn’t turn her back on a friend just because things were getting weird and nasty.

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.