“What? No.”

“Then you’re not. All Kami have nightmares.” I thought of the painting of Taira no Kiyomori, the demons and shadows encircling him. “Not all Kami’s drawings move, right?

But all Kami have the nightmares.”

“Oh.” Niichan hadn’t said that.

“There’s some other reason you’re moving the ink. I’m not sure why. But don’t worry about it, okay? You’re not a monster, not like me. Ii ka? ”

“O-okay.”

“Good.” He stooped down and packed his shinai, gloves and hakama into his navy sports bag, carrying the rest to the storage room at the back of the gym. “So…want to go for some ramen?”

Not really. Why was it so awkward?

“Sure.”

When I got home, the phone was ringing. I hurried over to pick it up, but when I heard the voice on the other end, my mistake occurred to me.

“How’d you know I’d be here?” I said, scrambling for an excuse. Diane did half a laugh on the phone.

“I’d be more surprised if you weren’t,” she said. “C’mon, what teenager doesn’t want the house to herself for a week?”

“Diane, I promise, I’ll be really careful and take good care of myself.”

“I know,” she said. “If I thought you’d throw a house party, I’d have confiscated your key.”

“Does that mean—?”

“Yes, yes.” She sighed. “You can stay. But if anything happens, you call Yuki’s mom, okay?”

“I will,” I promised.

“So how was Miyajima?”

“Really nice.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I brought some manju home. You know, those cakes with custard in them.”

“Oh, that’s even better. Try and save some until I get home.”

“I will.”

“What did you have for dinner tonight?”

I stared at the unagi bentou, still in the bag. I wondered if it was ruined by now.

“Unagi,” I said. She didn’t say anything for a minute. “Diane?”

“I’m here,” she said. “It’s just, you’re sounding…well, not so much like a gaijin anymore.” Diane laughed, and even though I felt like I should be annoyed, I felt kind of proud. “Just like Nan,” she said. “You could be planted anywhere and bloom.”

“Comes with the genes,” I said. “Well, I mean, for you and me.” Mom had only wanted to bloom in familiar ter-ritory. I don’t think she would have gone for shrimp chips and seaweed.

“I’m in Osaka for a few more days and then I’ll be back, okay? Call me if you need anything.”

“I will.”

“Love you,” Diane said, and before I could answer, she hung up.

“Love you, too,” I said to the dial tone.

I put the unagi in the fridge and went into my room to pull on my pajamas. I sprawled out on my bed, staring at the ceiling.

I thought about how dim Tomohiro’s eyes had been, not lit up the way they were when he was happy or even when he was delighting in being a jerk. Was he really so upset about his wrist?

I rolled onto my side and curled up. It made sense when I thought about it. He’d had to quit calligraphy, the one thing he loved, because of this dark ability. And now the other passion in his life, kendo, was tainted, too. He couldn’t get away from this power, a dark inkblot on his life that controlled him unless he could find a way to control it.

So far, the ink was winning.

Chapter 14

The sound of my keitai beeping woke me the next morning.

I rubbed my eyes until they turned red.

“What time is it?” I mumbled, fingers splayed out as they searched the table beside me for the phone. I flipped the keitai open and looked at the text message from Tomohiro.

Meet me at 1pm, Shizuoka Station. —Yuu I stared at the name he’d written. Yuu felt distant and strange, but maybe he’d just made a mistake. He did seem a little off since the kendo retreat.

I stayed too long in the shower, until my skin turned pink and taut under all the steam. I put on my pretty pink shirt and a cream skirt, and even tried to do my hair up, which didn’t really work that well, but hey, points for effort, right?

I waited outside the bus loop until I saw him stride over, his eyes cold and distant. He had the same look from school, the way he’d look staring at me from across the courtyard.

“Come on,” he said, looping his fingers around my wrist.

“Hey,” I said, following behind him. I pulled my hand out of his grip as I followed him. “What’s up with you today?”

“Sorry,” he said, looking down at the ground. “It’s my wrist. It’s really bugging me.” He pulled up the black wristband he wore to cover it and I gasped. The stitches were still visible, and the gash looked way bigger than I remembered.

“Will it…will it leave a scar?”

He hesitated for a second, then smirked and slipped the soft wristband back over the cut.

“I’ve got quite the collection,” he said, but the joke just made my stomach twist.

He led me through the winding, narrow streets of the Oguro neighborhood, until I’d completely lost track of where we were. He reached again for my arm and pulled incessantly, checking his watch again and again. So much for a nice date.

My pink-and-cream outfit looked completely out of place against the monotonous gray of the streets.

At last he led me toward a tall building. I couldn’t read the kanji, which wasn’t new. When he stopped abruptly, I almost crashed into his back.

“Close your eyes,” he said, turning his head to the side and not meeting my eyes.

“Tomo.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Trust me.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Trust you, Mr. Cheesy?”

He gave me an agitated sigh. “Ii kara!”

“Fine, fine.”

“Okay.” His voice was heavy, but I closed my eyes and let him lead me up the stairs and through some glass door.

The building inside smelled of dried flowers and musty carpet. We went up some more stairs and down a hallway, and I opened my eyes to peek. The hallway was lit with yellow lights glaring from above, an ugly carpet on the floor. Doors flanked both sides of the wall, like an apartment building.

Only, I was wrong.

Tomohiro stopped at one door and fiddled with a key in his pocket. He slid the lock open and led me in. The door clicked behind us, his hands on my shoulders. I stepped forward slowly, panic rising up my shoulders, buzzing in my ears.

I could barely get the words out. “What is this?” My throat felt like it had seized up.

“It’s a love hotel.” And there it was.

“What?” I couldn’t have heard him right.

“It’s popular in Japan,” he said, isolating me as he said it.

“It’s a place where we can be alone.” He turned around then, a sly smile on his face.

The room was huge, with a big soaker tub on the other side with marble steps leading up to it. And behind him, a neatly made bed. The whole thing looked like a very fancy hotel room, and I felt the lump in my throat growing.

He kissed me then, but it wasn’t at all like the kisses in his living room. His arms wrapped around me, but they weren’t gentle.

My world no longer felt like it was slipping out of balance.

It had tilted right over and I was falling, tumbling into space, into the flames below.

Yeah, he was gorgeous, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about him a lot since that night at his house. But it was too fast, way too fast. There was no way I was ready for this.

His kisses trailed to my shoulder, and the panic burned through me. My ears hummed like I’d been surrounded by screaming tweens at an Arashi concert.

“Tomo,” I said. “I don’t— I think— I’m not really ready for this.” I tried to lift his hands off me, but they snaked away and landed on my arms, my back, my hips. I stepped away from his lips as he leaned in, but his hands pressed me into the wall and he kissed me so hard I swore my lips would bruise.

I grabbed his shoulders with my hands and shoved him away. “I said quit it!”

The look on his face was horrible, an ugly sneer that made me look ungrateful. It made me feel like garbage, like he thought I was utter garbage.

“Typical Western girl,” he snapped, and time stopped. Hot tears sprang to my eyes and my stomach churned. He leaned in to kiss me again, but I turned away. I darted for the door and stumbled into the hallway.

“Katie!” I heard him call after me, but I ran faster, throt-tled down the stairs as my heart pounded in my chest. The tears wouldn’t stop, tracing down my cheeks and blurring my vision as I ran. I didn’t know where to go, but when I stared down the first-floor hallway, I saw that one end led to an array of doors and the other a glass door to the street.

I burst onto the sidewalk, clacking down the stairs in the shoes I’d so carefully chosen to go with my outfit. It seemed ridiculous now; all the warning signs, and yet I’d never admitted to myself what kind of guy he really was.

I raced down the street, choking back sobs. I stumbled as a shape rose in front of me, a person I hadn’t seen through my blurry vision. I tried to stop before we crashed, but my shoe twisted underneath me and I collapsed. He caught me before I hit the cement.

I looked up with horror.

Ishikawa.

“Greene?” he said, looking puzzled. His forehead creased as he looked at me with concern. “Are you okay?”

“Leave me alone,” I said, struggling out of his arms. I ran forward, but I could feel his eyes burning into my back as I sprinted away.

Oguro was a messy labyrinth of streets. I hurried onward, getting more and more lost, feeling like a dragon coiling in on its own tail, until my legs gave out. I fell to my knees, my lungs burning, and I cried there, cried and cried until the sobs ran dry.

I spent the night watching variety shows on TV, eating melon ice with a miniature wooden spoon they gave me at the conbini store. My head was spinning, even though I’d already downed two headache tablets with a slug of bitter oolong tea.

All the signs had been there. Didn’t I know better than to go for that kind of guy, thinking I had seen a different side of him and just excusing the way he acted the rest of the time?

I watched the variety-show panel as they jumped on little trampolines and shot hoops, and then talked about the history of onigiri rice balls.

I flinched when the phone rang. I didn’t want to answer it in case it was Tomohiro, although he hadn’t tried my keitai yet, so I figured he was pretty pissed.

Well, good. I was way more pissed.

The phone kept ringing. If it was Diane and I didn’t answer, then she’d worry and I’d never be allowed to be by myself again. Although that wasn’t really the worst punish-ment; apparently I wasn’t capable of making good judgments anymore.

The phone rang again. Maybe it was Yuki or Tanaka. They could pull me out of this spiral of misery. I swallowed hard, lifted the receiver and put it to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Um, hello?” It was a girl’s voice, gentle but unfamiliar. I wondered if it was a wrong number.

“Yes?”

“Is this, um, Katie Greene?”

“Unfortunately, it is.”

A confused hesitation. “What?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Yes, it’s me.”

“Oh.” Pause. She sounded so nervous. Why the heck was she calling me? “I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Yamada Shiori.”

My head buzzed with a migraine, but the name hit some sort of recognition. How did I know that name?

“I go to a girls’ school near Sunpu Park. I’m a friend of Yuu Tomohiro…?”

It struck me like a hit between the eyes, like a shinai cracking down on my head.

Shiori. The pregnant “girlfriend.”

“Oh, hi,” I said weakly. She gave an embarrassed laugh on the phone, like she was relieved I knew who she was.

“I wanted to ask you about Tomo-kun,” she said, and I felt like I would throw up. That was the last thing I wanted to talk about. I bet she really was his girlfriend after all. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

I dug the wooden spoon into the melon ice while I held the phone with my shoulder. “Yeah?”

“Well, have you noticed anything strange lately?”

The world that had been spinning stopped suddenly. I fell back into the couch and cupped the receiver with both hands.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he’s been coming to visit me and help me with my…

situation. Our mothers were best friends before, um, before the accident. But he hasn’t been coming around lately, and he’s been sort of…cold, somehow. Tough.”

I couldn’t speak.

“The thing is, Yuu has some friends who are no good. I’m a little scared that he’s in trouble. You know, with his last girlfriend, when she was in trouble with them, he actually—

I know it sounds cruel but—he asked if he could sketch me so she would think he was cheating. He said he had to do something severe to protect her.”

Her words blurred in my ears. Yuu’s last girlfriend. Saeda Myu. The name cracked into my head.

Point. Two wins the match.

It hit me then, in a horrible way. The argument between Myu and Tomohiro in the genkan at school, the way he’d been a total ass to her. The betrayal in her eyes, that she’d thought he was different, and his confession to me later in Toro Iseki.