Was that how his hands had looked when he attacked Koji?

I backed up quickly, the warmth of Tomohiro’s words to me turning cold and slick like sweat. I was seeing things again.

It couldn’t be true. I’d told him I believed him that it was an accident. He’d seemed so genuine, filled with regret, but it wasn’t the kind of event I could ignore. How dangerous was Tomohiro? It was starting to give me a headache.

I turned and walked away, but it was a bad neighborhood, and the roads were too crowded to bike.

“Hello,” said a creepy voice in English, and it was like a warning shot going off into the air. I was too terrified to look.

A tough-looking guy, grubby and smelling of thick smoke, started walking alongside me. He was in bad need of a haircut, and bright tattoos circled his beefy arms. “Hello, pretty girl. You American?”

I walked faster, but he kept pace with me. For a minute I considered going back to Tomohiro. Which was safer, going forward or going back? I didn’t know.

“You lost?” the guy said in English.

Like I would ever tell him in a million years. “I’m fine,”

I said, my voice shaky.

And suddenly someone wrapped his arm around me and pulled me into his warmth, away from the guy. My body went rigid, ready to kick away whoever this new threat was. And then I saw a flash of blond tucked behind his ear.

“She’s not lost,” Jun said. And then to me, “Sorry I made you wait. Shall we go?”

I nodded numbly, pushing the bike forward, letting my body lean into Jun as he pulled me closer.

The angular guy grunted and fell back, and for a few minutes it was the sound of my heartbeat in my ears, the warmth of Jun and the slightly sweet smell of his hair gel.

“You okay?” he said quietly, and my eyes filled with grateful tears. “What are you doing down here anyway?”

“I could ask you the same,” I said, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. In a fluid movement, Jun whisked my bike to the other side so he could push it and I could freely dab at my eyes.

“There’s a great pasta place near here,” he said. “I used to live in Ishida and I crave the manicotti sometimes. Lucky for you.”

“Thank you,” I said. We seemed far enough away, but Jun didn’t drop his arm from my shoulder. He had a black wristband around his wrist, and then his muscular arm disappeared into the sleeve of his school blazer. When he saw me staring, he smiled, pulling his arm away.

“Glad I could help. Shizuoka’s a pretty safe city, but it’s still better to stick to main routes, okay?” I just nodded. Between following Tomohiro and being on the phone with Tanaka and Yuki, I hadn’t paid any attention to the maze I’d stumbled through.

“We keep running into each other.” He smiled. “Are you an exchange student? Or have you moved here?”

“Moved here,” I said. “I’m living with my aunt. She’s an English teacher.”

“Ah.” He smiled again. “Maybe you can teach me sometime. My English isn’t that great. But your Japanese is really good. I’m envious.” He talked easily, like we were old friends.

I could see Shizuoka Station now, rising in the distance.

Thank god, too, because the sun had disappeared from the sky and darkness was setting in.

“You know where you are now?” Jun grinned.

“Thank you,” I said again, and he nodded. Then the smile slipped from his face and he looked all serious. He dipped his head down and his bangs tumbled from behind his ear, swaying in a blond wave in front of his eye. The fading sunlight glinted off his earring.

“I was thinking maybe you’d like to have coffee with me?”

I’m sorry, what? He looked up, his dark eyes somehow cold.

I guess I’d expected him to look a little more nervous asking a question like that, but I couldn’t read how he was feeling.

“Um,” I said. “I really appreciate it, I do, but…it’s getting late and if I’m not home soon…”

“I understand,” Jun said. “You don’t want your aunt to worry. I can walk you the rest of the way if you like.”

I shook my head. “I’m okay from here,” I said.

He nodded.

“Maybe another time?”

“Sure.” He smiled. He turned to walk away, hands shoved in his pockets, then looked over his shoulder at me. “Is that boy still drawing things?”

“Oh,” I said. “No, it’s not that, I—” But it was that. And he knew it.

“I hope he draws for you,” he said, and then he was gone.

When I got home, Diane was just serving up dinner. I pushed it around the plate, forcing myself to eat and make pleasant conversation until I could escape to my room. I stared at the ceiling, trying to picture Koji’s injuries.

“There’s no way,” I said to myself. Tomohiro had been really worked up about the accident. He seemed as shaken as I was about it.

I flipped open my computer and did an internet search of Yuu Tomohiro and Koji together. When that didn’t work, I added in Shizuoka. It came up, finally, a single old article about the incident. Of course, it was also written using hundreds of kanji I was still learning. It might as well have been in hieroglyphic.

I sighed, running the article through a translation site.

Hopefully I’d get the gist of it.

I read the garbled translation. Interview snippets with Koji—“He’s my best friend. He’d never hurt me. It was an accident.”—and comments about dropping the case. The pay-off Tanaka mentioned, I guess. No pictures of Koji, but I didn’t really want to see anyway. And then a description of the wounds—punctures and claw marks, like an animal did it.

And then, in the final paragraph, Koji insisting they broke into a construction site, that the guard dog attacked him.

Police insisting dogs couldn’t inflict those kinds of bladelike slices on his eye.

I reread the paragraph. But claw and bite marks would make similar kinds of wounds, wouldn’t they? So…not a dog, but something else?

Tanaka didn’t know what had happened, but he’d thought it might be an animal, too.

Attacking a friend with a blade? That wasn’t my Tomohiro. I felt it in my heart. He wouldn’t do that, but he would sneak into a construction site and take the fall so they didn’t get into more trouble. And once it came to light about the animal, maybe Koji’s dad would’ve doubted what happened and dropped the case.

Satisfied, I lay down on my bed. And then I realized what I’d said.

My Tomohiro.

Chapter 7

Tomohiro and I barely spoke at kendo, but that suited me just fine. I wanted to keep my distance from Ishikawa, and from the way he glared at me, he felt the same. He and Tomohiro had a few faint bruises on their faces, and I didn’t really want to think about how they’d got them. We went on through club practices like we didn’t know each other at all, and we kept our trips to Toro Iseki secret. Tomohiro feared his dad would learn he was drawing, despite him forbidding it—which I thought was crazy, but I chalked it up to a strict, unhappy workaholic—and I was scared of trespassing charges.

“What if they deport me?” I ranted, but Tomohiro smirked.

“Isn’t that what you want anyway?”

Just like in our kendo matches, where we only felt briefly safe with our shinai thrust between us, keeping each other at arm’s distance was the only way to trust each other. That way, no one would lunge, and either of us could retreat.

We lived in parallel worlds, somehow held together by the axis of each other.

The vibrant greens of spring dulled and the chirps of the wagtails drowned under the whirr of summer cicadas.

Two weeks before the big Aoi Ward tournament, Tomohiro didn’t show up in the courtyard after school. He texted me that night that his uncle had died and he was going with his father to Chiba for the funeral.

I felt his absence more strongly than I’d expected. I felt off balance when he wasn’t there, and while Eto-sensei droned on about world history, I thought about Tomohiro, how he had changed somehow. Maybe he hadn’t changed at all, just opened like a bud on the rough branch of the sakura tree, suddenly blooming and floating on the breeze; free, wheel-ing wherever he might land, dragged only by the current.

His kendo movements were unpredictable like that. No one could keep up with him except Ishikawa, and the two were the hope for the tournament. But no matter how Tomohiro unwrapped his strategies to me, I couldn’t match him in the gym, when all the eyes were watching and we were both shrieking our kiais at each other. The kendo teachers were always pairing us with kendouka we had no chance of beating. For the experience, they said. If we only fought at our own level, we’d never be challenged, never improve. But it was frightening to fight with Tomohiro. When he shouted and brought the shinai toward me, all I could think about was Koji, even though I’d mostly figured out the truth. It still frightened me, what Tomohiro might be capable of.

And yet, against all common sense, I’d fallen for him. I’d told myself for a while it was to figure out what was going on, to get my life back. He understood about my mom. But I wasn’t sure anymore what I wanted. I just knew I wanted to be near him.

Tomohiro was absent from practice for the funeral, but there was hardly time to think as Watanabe-sensei barked out the orders. One hundred push-ups for the junior members, twice as many for seniors. One thousand men strikes and countless laps of footwork around the gym. We would be up against some of the toughest schools in the ward, Nakamura-sensei said, in particular Katakou High. They had one of the best kendo clubs in the ward, and their secret weapon? National kendouka champion Takahashi.

“All our hope this year is placed in Ishikawa and Yuu,”

Watanabe said, “so give them your support.”

So the juniors could “improve” for the tournament, and the seniors could practice beating us to a pulp, the sensei paired us with older kendouka.

“Not today.” I sighed to myself. I didn’t feel like getting my butt handed to me.

“Greene and Ishikawa!” Watanabe belted out, and the pins and needles rushed up my neck.

You’re kidding.

Ishikawa flattened his mop of bleached hair under a tight headband and slipped on his men. My breath condensed on the mesh of the helmet’s screen; the stiflingly hot armor had become almost unbearable.

It had to be a joke. He was a much higher level than me.

Pairing me with Tomohiro was bad, but pairing me with Ishikawa was suicide. He wouldn’t go easy on me the way Tomohiro did.

“Sensei?” I said to Watanabe, but he nodded at me.

“We want you to compete in the tournament,” he said. “It would look great for our club to have more girls and more gaijin competing. So you need as many challenges as we can give you before you go out there. Take it lightly, Ishikawa, okay? Let her get warmed up first.” Ishikawa gave a faint nod, but his eyes were piercing. He wasn’t going to go easy on me. I knew that.

Ishikawa and I crouched to the floor, shinai at our sides.

We pulled them from their imaginary sheaths and pointed the tied bamboo slats at each other.

Ishikawa shrieked as he ran at me, and two thoughts snapped into my head: how different his movements and kiai were from Tomohiro’s, and how his yell rattled even Tomohiro. He often said Ishikawa would be the better fighter if he didn’t let the rage block his thinking, but the upcoming tournament had made him ferocious, so that panic grasped my mind as his shinai came at me. I tried to block, but within a minute his shinai slammed down on my wrist for a migi-kote point.

It was like I forgot all my training, like I was regressing.

Watanabe barked combinations at me, but my mind was so murky I could barely hear him. I was drowning in my own fear, off balance. Through the metal screen, Ishikawa’s dark eyes glared at me, a shock of white hair clinging to his forehead.

When the match finished, Ishikawa had managed four good hits, and I’d only had one pathetic swing to his dou.

And missed.

Class wrapped up, and Ishikawa pulled off his men and walked toward me, towering over me the way Tomohiro had done before.

“You think you’re so important to Yuuto,” he sneered, his voice low and hushed. His hot breath was in my ear, and the sounds of students unfastening armor and pushing open the change room doors all blurred into the background. “But he’ll lose interest in you, like he did in Myu. He always does.”

“We’re just friends,” I said quietly, but Ishikawa snorted.

“Yuuto always liked girls who were weak,” he said. “His interest in you will end, and then he’ll cast you aside.”

“Shut up,” I said. My whole body shook and my ears buzzed from the blood rushing through them. “What do you care anyway?”

“Because he’s my best friend,” Ishikawa said, combing a hand through his bleached hair. “And you’re distracting him.”

“From what?”

“His destiny,” he said. “Anyway,” he added, cupping his arm around his helmet, “he already has a girlfriend, so you’re wasting your time.”

My fingers squeezed so hard against my palms that I could feel my nails digging in. “Not that I care, but some best friend you are. He doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

Ishikawa looked blank for a moment and started to laugh.

It was a wicked laugh, cold and scornful, and as much I wanted to tell him to go to hell, the sound of it made my whole body shudder.

Ishikawa leaned in right beside my ear. He smelled of kendo leather and sweat.

“What did Yuuto tell you?” he said quietly. “Did he tell you his pregnant girlfriend was only a cousin? A sister? A family friend?” He smirked and turned away, his gray hakama swaying as he walked.