Thomas Randall - The Waking

Her father considered for a moment, and then nodded. “I’ll come and get you. What room are they in?”

Kara told him, and then the three of them walked down to the first floor together. She hugged him good-bye and went down to the genkan to put her street shoes on.

Outside, all but a single police car had departed. In her mind’s eye, she pictured what the parking lot side of the school would look like. At the back corner, there would be police tape. On the pavement would be smears of blood, the school waiting for permission to wash it away.

She went the other way, around the side where Sakura always went to smoke, where they’d run into trouble the day before. The spot where Hana had died might not be as awful as she imagined it, but then again, it might be worse. Best to just avoid it completely.

Even as she walked across the field between the school and the dorm, Kara didn’t turn to look. But there were plenty of students who were. At least twenty kids-boys and girls both-were outside the dorm, sitting on the stairs or just standing around, some of them pretending to play catch. They all seemed to be moving in slow motion, mesmerized by death.

It startled Kara to see Miho sitting on the steps by herself, staring across at the school, the sun glinting off her glasses. Of Maiko and Ume and Hana’s other friends, there was no sign.

“Where’s Sakura?” Kara asked as she sat down next to Miho.

“Upstairs, watching TV.”

“I guess she thinks she knows why Hana did it?”

Miho looked at Kara. “Because she was haunted. Yes. I’m really worried about her. She doesn’t seem sad, or even surprised.”

Kara wanted to tell Miho about the conversation she’d overheard between her father and Miss Aritomo, but with so many people around, now wasn’t the time. Instead, she asked a question, keeping her voice low.

“I still don’t understand,” Kara whispered. “What aren’t you telling me, Miho? I know what Sakura said about Ume, but what’s the connection between Jiro and Akane?”

Miho studied Kara’s face, then glanced around at the other students who surrounded them and shook her head.

“It’s not my story to tell.”

T he warm, white sand gave way under Kara’s bare feet, sifting between her toes. Her shoes dangled from the fingers of her left hand. In spite of the sun and the blue sky of that Saturday morning, the air had a chill that made her glad she’d worn a turtleneck this morning, but her jacket was unzipped. On the bay side of Ama-no-Hashidate, the thick black pines provided shelter from the wind that swept in off the Sea of Japan.

Loosely translated, Ama-no-Hashidate meant “bridge in the heavens,” but Kara liked specifics and preferred the more literal translation, “standing celestial bridge.” From the mountain overlooking the bay-accessible by cable car-the view was even more magnificent. The two miles of serpentine sandbar, with its pine trees only edged with white sand, were set off against the blue water.

According to local lore, for more than a thousand years, people had been visiting Ama-no-Hashidate and experiencing it in a way that Kara thought was just weird. You were supposed to turn your back to the view, then bend over and look at Ama-no-Hashidate through your legs. From that perspective, the dark spit of land against the blue water looked like a bridge across the sky.

Supposedly.

“I tried it once,” she said.

Hachiro had been walking beside her, hands stuffed in his pockets. She felt like some kind of Hollywood pop tart with a bodyguard. Hachiro towered over her. Yet for all his size, Hachiro had a gentleness that set her very much at ease.

On Friday, they’d had no school. A terrible stillness had settled on Monju-no-Chie School and on the entire area, as though everyone connected with the school held their breath and didn’t think it was safe to exhale yet. Maybe they were right, but Kara had to exhale.

This morning, she’d planned to come down to Ama-no-Hashidate and play her guitar by the Turning Bridge. Instead, she had left her guitar at home and walked over to the dorm, hunted down Hachiro, and asked him to come with her. He’d agreed instantly, and as they’d walked to the Kaitenbashi- the Turning Bridge-and across to Ama-no-Hashidate, he’d lightened her spirits, talking incessantly, making her smile the way he always did.

Until his words ran dry.

Jiro had been his good friend, so it made sense that there would be a limit to how long Hachiro could pretend he wasn’t grieving. Kara thought that her quietness probably also made him nervous. For her to ask him to accompany her this morning had been a very un-Japanese thing to do. She liked the way it made her feel, and if Hachiro was off balance, not knowing quite how to handle it, she didn’t mind very much. His utter lack of smoothness and cockiness charmed her, and given the way her expectations about life in Japan had turned out, she wasn’t in the mood to worry about fitting in.

“Tried what?” Hachiro asked.

“Hmm?” She glanced at him, saw him studying her curiously. “Oh, the whole ‘viewing heaven’s bridge’ thing. I didn’t care that I looked silly, since everyone else was doing the same thing. But I didn’t see it. To me, it just looks like an upside-down view of the sandbar, and it made me dizzy as hell.”

Hachiro laughed. “You’re not much of a romantic.”

Kara cocked an eyebrow. “You’d be surprised.”

He gave her a befuddled look and glanced at the pine trees as though he’d never seen anything so fascinating. Shoes in hand, Kara started walking again, and Hachiro fell into step beside her. Her free hand brushed his and for a moment, as though by instinct, his fingers curled with hers, then set them free.

“It’s hard to believe this is just a sandbar,” she said nervously.

“Just a sandbar?” Hachiro said. “It cuts off the bay from the sea! There are thousands of pine trees out here! It’s hardly just a sandbar. Ama-no-Hashidate might be the most beautiful place on earth!”

Kara smiled. “It sounds like you’re enough of a romantic for both of us.”

The words disarmed him. Hachiro had no idea what to make of her, and Kara liked that just fine. She found herself wishing she had brought her guitar after all.

“I suppose this is a bad time to ask if you’ve decided you don’t like Japan,” he said.

Kara shrugged and kept walking. “I don’t know. I can separate Japan from what’s happening at school, as crazy and upsetting as it all is. When I was eleven years old, a younger kid who rode the bus with me just didn’t show up at the bus stop one morning. The principal got everybody together and explained that he’d been born with a heart defect, and that he was dead. It seemed almost ridiculous. How could this kid be dead? He was in the fourth grade. But we went through it as a community. It’s different here. It’s like, students on one side and grown-ups on the other, trying to pretend this isn’t all as ugly as it seems.

“I’ll say this: of all the different things I fantasized about living in Japan, this is something I never imagined. I know I can’t judge how much I like this country while this is all happening. So right now, the jury is still out.”

Hachiro nodded thoughtfully. “What about before, when you first got here?”

Kara thought about that. She and her father had come to Japan to start over, to leave behind all the painful reminders of her mother’s death and build a life that she would have wanted for them. But now death had thrown a terrible shroud over their new home. She wasn’t ready to have that conversation with Hachiro, was she?

No. Stick to school, she told herself.

“I love the people, and it’s beautiful here. I don’t even mind being ‘bonsai.’ But there are so many kids at school who barely acknowledge my presence, who won’t talk to me or really look at me, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t bother me. Most of the time, I can ignore it. And I’ve made friends, so it’s not that I’m a total outsider. But I hate being judged just for being gaijin. If they’d talk to me and then decide to hate me, that’d be different. At least they’d be hating me for me.”