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.
As Kara glanced around the gym while Principal Yamato talked, she saw other students who looked ragged around the edges. Ume and Maiko hurried into the back of the room, almost late, but Kara spotted other members of their clique. As a group, the soccer girls did not smile. Most had dark circles under their eyes. A couple of the boys looked equally tired.
Hachiro leaned out of his line and caught her eye, offering a smile. Kara could muster only a halfhearted grin in return, but she felt a strange sense of relief to see that he looked happy and alert. Whatever sickness had begun to affect so many of the students-it had to be a sickness, didn’t it?- Hachiro seemed not to have caught the bug.
Maybe they’re just not sleeping, Kara thought.
She frowned. Could it be that simple? All of them, just not sleeping?
All of them having nightmares.
Troubled by this thought, she studied them again, more carefully this time. Several of the soccer girls caught her staring and made unpleasant faces, but no one said anything or made rude gestures. They didn’t want to get in trouble.
When they were dismissed, and Mr. Matsui was leading them to the classroom, Miho caught up with her.
“Are you all right? What was going on in there?”
“I’m okay,” Kara said, brow still furrowed in thought. “Just more bad dreams. And I’m starting to think they’re…”
She couldn’t think of the word in Japanese.
Miho supplied it. “Contagious?”
Kara shot her a look as they walked up the stairs. “Exactly. How did you know that’s what I was going to say?”
Adjusting her glasses, Miho shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m fine. The only reason I haven’t been sleeping that well is because of the bad dreams Sakura’s been having. But I’ve heard other people talking about it in the dorm.”
“That’s weird.”
“You’ve been having them, too?” Miho asked.
Kara nodded. “I wonder what they’re all dreaming about?”
But then they were walking into class, and Mr. Matsui cast an admonishing glance at them and they had to drop the conversation. Kara took her seat. Ren said good morning to her again and she waved. When he wished Miho a good morning as well, she blushed so hard her whole face went a shade of deep pink. As much as she talked about only liking American boys, Kara thought the bronze-haired Ren was a definite exception.
Ume’s friend Maiko sat in the front left corner of the room, beside the windows. Mr. Matsui called on her for toban, the morning attendance and announcements. The girl pursed her lips, as though she might be thinking about telling him off, but she obviously thought better of it. She stood and took the notebook from him and went to the front of the class.