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.
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.
7
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.