Thomas Randall - The Waking

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.

O n 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.