Ink

“You just don’t get the message, do you?” he said, his pen curving around the back of the wagtail. High in the trees I saw a wagtail in a cherry tree, singing while other birds darted through the branches.

“You told me to stay away from you,” I said.

“And so you followed me to Toro Iseki.” He looked up at me, but I gazed back suspiciously.

“I just think—”

“You think I’m up to something.”

I nodded. He tilted his notebook toward me.

“I’m up to this,” he said, tapping the page.

I said nothing, but the heat rose to my cheeks.

“You think Myu had the right idea, don’t you?” he said. “You want to slap me, too?”

I stared at him. Why so much attitude? The way he’d saved that girl in the park, the moment we’d had after, even the softness of his face when he’d waited for the Roman bus—it didn’t match up with this I-don’t-give-a-shit act he was pulling now, the one he always put on at school.

“Well?” He stared at me expectantly, and I forced my mouth to move.

“I’m not going to hit you, but I think it was pretty shitty of you to cheat on her.” He smirked and glanced into the trees, lifting his pen to shade the wagtail’s beak. “Why did you lie to her?”

“Lie to her?”

“Yeah. Myu didn’t mean nothing to you. I saw it in your eyes, how you really felt.”

He paused in his drawing.

“That,” he said, “is not your business.”

A moment passed before either of us said anything. The tip of his pen made a loud scratchy noise as it scribbled back and forth across the paper.

“Okay, so how about something that is my business? Tell me why your drawings move, and how you made my pen explode.”

“Animation, and a faulty pen.”

“Like crap it was,” I said.

“Watch if you don’t believe me,” he said, and I stared at his page. Completely normal. “You must be seeing things. You should probably get that checked out.”

“Shut up,” I said, but the comment worried me. I’d done an internet search of the symptoms of hallucinating, and apparently, grieving the loss of a loved one was a big one.

“So Watanabe-sensei and Nakamura-sensei say you’ve joined kendo,” Tomohiro said after a minute.

“Yeah,” I said. He grinned and leaned forward to brush the ume petals off his paper. His bangs slipped over his eyes and he tossed his head to the side.

“You’re doing a thorough job of stalking me,” he said.

“I’m not stalking you!” I snapped. “I couldn’t care less what you’re doing with your time.”

“Which is why you followed me here.”

“Like I said, I thought you were up to something.”

“The arts.”

I lowered my voice, embarrassed. “I see that.”

He stopped drawing abruptly, and the wagtails peeped high-pitched warnings to each other. He scratched thick black strokes through his drawing, scribbling it out of existence. I watched with surprise.

“It wasn’t that bad,” I said. He didn’t answer, but flipped to a fresh page. I could hear his breath, tired and labored like when he’d fought in the park. After a moment, he swallowed and his hand started moving across the paper, sketching what looked like a plum tree.

“Why did you quit calligraphy?” I asked, watching his hand pause a moment as he studied the foliage of the nearby ume.

“My dad,” he said. “He thinks art is nonsense. He wants me to study medicine or go into banking like him.”

“But you’re really good at it,” I said. “I mean really good.” Tomohiro sketched in a few more ink leaves. “Maybe if your dad saw your work—”

“He’s seen it,” Tomohiro snapped darkly. The ink blotted from his pen and trickled down the tree. “Shit!” he added, scratching violently through the drawing.

I rolled my eyes. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“My mother’s dead,” he said.

I stared at him, my hands shaking. I’d been standing until then, but my legs buckled under me and I sank down to my knees beside him. I opened and closed my mouth, but no sound. I’d never expected we were connected in this way.

“Mine, too,” I managed.

He looked up from the page, his eyes searching my face, and I felt like he was seeing me for the first time, really me, how broken I was.

“Sorry,” he said.

“What…what happened to yours?” I asked. His eyes were intense, and I felt exposed suddenly, like I’d told him too much. And maybe I had, but for a minute I’d felt like maybe he could understand me.

“It was an accident,” he said. “I was ten.” Not recent, then, like mine. Not like mine at all. His voice was all softness and velvet. “Yours?”

My eyes started to blur with tears. Having this in common knocked all the fight out of me. I could barely get out the words. “Heart attack, eight months ago. One minute she was fine and then…”

“No warning, then,” Tomohiro said. “Like mine.” Oh. I guess it was like his after all. Except his voice was steady as he spoke. Time healing all wounds and all that, like everyone kept telling me. He was where I’d be in seven years. Without the attitude, hopefully. He was where I’d be if I let myself forget my old life.

I watched him draw for a little while in silence, and even though he was just doodling with a pen, each drawing was so beautiful. But he was critical of his work. He’d start and stop drawings like he had a short attention span. He’d scribble things out, sometimes striking them out so hard the pen tore through the paper and blotted onto the next page of the notebook.

“They tell you you’ll forget how it used to be,” he said suddenly, and the sound of his voice startled me. “You’ll get used to it, that it’s better to move on. They don’t realize you can’t. You’re not the same person anymore.”

My eyes flooded again and I stared at his blurry form through them. This wasn’t what I’d expected him to say. I mean, when he had half the school staring up my skirt, I was pretty sure he didn’t even have a soul.

“Don’t let them tell you you’ll be fine,” he said, looking at me urgently. His brown eyes caught the sunlight and I could see how deep they were before his bangs fell into them again. He tucked the bangs to the sides with his slender fingers; I couldn’t help wondering what his fingertips felt like. “Be angry, Katie Greene. Don’t forget how it was. Because there’ll always be a hole in your heart. You don’t have to fill it.”