Now she just strummed, idly, watching the people who waited for the Turning Bridge to swing back into place so that they could cross over onto Ama-no-Hashidate. But playing the guitar was like singing for her. When Kara thought she was only humming tuneless notes, a song would come out of her mouth as though the radio in her head had been playing all along and she had just turned up the volume. Likewise, her hands surprised her by discovering that they were not simply strumming, playing the opening notes of The Frames’ “When Your Mind’s Made Up.”
Quietly, under her breath, she sang along.
When she first spotted the thin girl in the blue skirt and long gray coat, with her white socks and black shoes and the white bow clipped in her hair, just above her right ear, she did not even look at her face. In those clothes the girl, all alone, seemed to have wandered away from some kind of church tour group. Only when the girl kept walking, away from the Turning Bridge and up the path toward the stone wall, did Kara look curiously at her face.
Her eyebrows went up, and then she smiled.
“Sakura?”
With a shrug, Sakura paused and presented herself like some actress on the red carpet who’d just been asked what fashion designer had made her outfit. Sakura actually spun around once.
“Total transformation,” she said in Japanese. But she continued in English. “My mother thinks clothes can change a girl. She thinks we are what we wear. Good girl clothes means good girl Sakura.”
Kara strummed quietly, studying her friend. “How’s that going?” she asked in English.
Sakura sat down beside her, reached inside her long coat and withdrew a packet of cigarettes. She tapped one out and flicked open a lighter Kara hadn’t even seen her produce, putting flame to the cigarette’s tip.
“I’m still Sakura,” she said. “If the school uniform did not change me, why should this? First my mother wanted me to be more like Akane, and now she wants me to be more like her. I told her it was hard enough trying to be like me without trying to learn to be someone else. She didn’t understand. Thought I was trying to make a joke.”
Kara put her fingers over the guitar strings, stilling the music. She gave Sakura a sad smile and switched back to Japanese.
“I’m going to guess she didn’t think it was funny.”
Sakura pointed the cigarette at her. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”
Kara laughed. “You’re not as paranoid as people say you are.”
Eyes mock-wide, Sakura looked around. “People? What people?”
They grinned at each other and then fell into an easy companionship. Kara played and Sakura smoked. It occurred to Kara that they must look very odd together, the proper Japanese girl in her pristine clothes and the blond gaijin girl in blue jeans and a Boston College sweatshirt. People would look at them and wonder. Kara liked that.
They had spoken on the phone and via instant message regularly throughout the days since Mr. Matsui’s murder, but they had not seen each other even once in that time. Furious with her and terrified for her, Kara’s father had not let her leave the house for the first three days unless he was with her, and by the time she had been free to go anywhere on her own-during the day, of course-Miho and Hachiro had both been taken home by their parents.
Sakura had never gone home, but the principal had restricted her to the dormitory and Miss Aritomo had stayed with her whenever she wasn’t at the police station answering questions. That arrangement had lasted for two days, and then her parents had finally arrived. They had been out of the country, out of contact, but had become miraculously findable when, instead of merely being in danger, their daughter had been arrested for assault.
So many times, Kara had wanted to say, “At least they came.” But the words never made it as far as her lips, mainly because she knew they would be hollow and bordering on deceit. Though who she was trying to deceive, herself or Sakura, she was not quite sure. Sakura’s parents had come to be with her, that much was true. But neither their daughter nor anyone else involved-even Kara’s father-thought for a moment that they had come for any reason other than to save face. They defended their daughter because if she was indeed guilty of a crime, that would be an embarrassment to them.
It had apparently never occurred to them that their neglect of their surviving girl did more to dishonor them than anything Sakura might have done, or would ever do.
“Are you officially innocent, then?” Kara asked.
“As innocent as I’ll ever be,” Sakura said. “Thanks to you and Miho and Hachiro, they don’t have any reason not to believe my version.”
Kara cringed inside. She had hated to lie, but no one would have believed the truth, and so they’d all had to manufacture a version of that long, terrible night to account for its events without any hint of the supernatural. Given her troubled history and school record, neither the police nor the school board had any difficulty believing that Sakura had snuck out a first-floor window that night.
Sakura had wanted to visit her sister’s shrine, as she had nearly every night, to say a prayer for her. There, she discovered that the memorial put together by so many students had been destroyed, nearly every scrap of paper and every photo torn up. Furious and anguished, she had searched the site for a picture of herself and her sister that she had left at the shrine. She did not realize that Ume had followed her, out the window and down to the bay, until she heard the other girl laughing.
Sakura claimed Ume had admitted destroying the shrine and gloated about it. To give the story the ring of truth, Sakura confessed to the police that she had attacked Ume, that she had been the one to throw the first punch, but that she had no doubt that Ume had come there to harm her. They fought on the shore and then in the water. Ume had tried to drown her and had confessed in the ferocious heat of that moment that she had murdered Akane.
And then they had heard screaming from the direction of the school.
Sakura told the police she had left Ume there by the water and gone running back up to the school and then around to the field, where she had found Miho, Hachiro, and Kara frantically screaming for help and using their cell phones to call the police after having discovered the torn, bloody corpse of Mr. Matsui.
Kara had snuck out of her house and gone to meet Hachiro, desperate to say good-bye to him before he left for home the next day. They had feelings for each other, and she had been unable to sleep, thinking that she might never see him again. Discovering Sakura missing from her bed, Miho had gone in search of her and run into Hachiro, and she agreed to try to distract Mr. Matsui so that he could sneak out and say good-bye to Kara.
In the foyer of the dormitory, Hachiro and Miho had been surprised to find the door open and Mr. Matsui gone.
At the same moment, as she walked across the field, Kara had found the bloody remains of Mr. Matsui. She had screamed and then heard a roar. A black bear had charged her from the trees. She had run toward the dorm but not been fast enough, and it got its claws into her.
Hachiro had grabbed an aluminum baseball bat that he and his friends had left near the door the day before and rushed out. He had struck the bear several times, and it had raked his chest with its claws before finally retreating. He told the police he believed he had injured it badly, that it had been staggering.
Then Miho had seen Mr. Matsui’s body and begun to scream, even as Kara called the police.
As far as Kara was concerned, the whole thing sounded like the biggest pile of bullshit she had ever heard. Mainly because that was exactly what it was. But they had certain things working in their favor.