Ink

Satisfied with his pep talk, he gave me a small grin and then turned back to his drawing. The wind caught the cherry and plum petals and they spun in drifts before my eyes.

And I felt that I wasn’t alone, that Tomohiro and I were suddenly linked. No one had told me I wouldn’t feel better. No one had let me be empty and changed. I knew which side of him was real now, and it wasn’t the part everyone else saw.

When he moved his hand across the drawing, the cuff of his white school shirt caught on the edge of the paper and rolled up his arm. He left his palm up as he studied the Toro houses, and that’s when I saw the scars that slashed across his wrist, the ones I’d seen in Sunpu Park. The biggest one spanned from one side to the other, interlaced with the rest. They were smaller and not as deep, but they looked ragged, fresher and not anywhere as neatly healed.

Concern welled up in me. Oh—he’s a cutter. Now that I looked, I could see the pattern of dark scars that trailed up his arm beneath the thin fabric of his shirt. But when he saw my expression, he looked down at his wrist and grinned, like he thought my assumption was funny.

“It’s from the sword,” he said.

“The what?”

“Sword. The kanji. In elementary Calligraphy Club? I’m sure Ichirou told you about it.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s a pretty bad scar.”

“It was a deep cut. I had to go to the hospital for it.” He switched to English and tried to explain, and I got the message that he’d needed stitches and lost a lot of blood. All I could think of was how he’d put his friend Koji in the hospital, too. At the moment, he didn’t seem capable of it.

“Sorry,” I said, but he smiled grimly.

“Art is a dangerous hobby,” he said, and somehow I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

“So how come you draw here?” I asked.

“It’s safer here.”

“You mean your dad doesn’t know?”

“Something like that. Anyway, look around the clearing. People lived here almost two thousand years ago. There are birds, trees, silence. Ever try to be alone in a city like Shizuoka?” He ran his hand through his copper hair and shook it from side to side, flower petals tumbling onto his notebook. I thought of Jun reaching for the flower petal in my hair. So beautiful. I quickly pushed the memory aside with shame. I felt like I’d betrayed Tomohiro by thinking of it, which was dumb, but I felt it anyway.

“You know you’re trespassing here,” I said. Tomohiro broke into a broad grin.

“A place like this doesn’t belong to anyone,” he said. “They can’t keep me out like they can’t keep the birds in.”

It was surreal among the ruins, and I could see why he risked coming in here. Besides, with his entitled attitude, the orange sign on the gate was probably a challenge, a dare, more than anything else.

He stopped sketching and a bead of sweat rolled down his face. He drew an ugly rigid line through his beautiful sketch of a Yayoi hut and slammed the cover of the notebook closed.

“Why’d you wreck it?” I asked as he shoved the notebook deep into his book bag. When I thought about it, he’d crossed out every single drawing.

He shrugged it off, but his eyes were dark. “They’re not good enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Go? Together? I struggled to push down the panic that rose to my throat and reminded myself what a jerk he could be. And he was a taken jerk, on top of it. Cheater. Pregnant girlfriend. Koji in the hospital. It was a mantra I repeated in my mind, but somehow it wasn’t working.

He strode ahead into the trees and I followed, reaching for my bike as he lifted his. When we were both through the chain-link fence, he let go and it clanged into place.

We leaped on our bikes, coasting across the street and up through the thickening maze of Shizuoka.

He led the way, but competitiveness overtook me and I pedaled past him, coasting in front and weaving around the traffic. He didn’t challenge me but sat back and relaxed, following my lead and riding in my wake.

Maybe there was something to his friendship with Tanaka. He wasn’t acting the same as before, different than the Tomohiro that Myu had slapped.

Not different than the one who’d tenderly embraced his crying girlfriend in the park, though. The memory flashed through my mind like a good slap to the head.

We stopped at Shizuoka Station.

“I go north from here, to Otamachi,” he said.

“I live west,” I said. “Near Suruga.”

He nodded. “You hungry?”

I just stared at him. My hunger was definitely clawing at the sides of my stomach, but I wasn’t about to admit it.

It was like he knew what I was thinking. He smiled, then burst into another of his grins, looking down and shaking his head as he laughed.

“You should see your face,” he said between laughs. “Like I’d just asked you to jump off the top of Sunpu Castle!”

I flushed red.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s a good café in the station.”

I grasped for words, reasons, that I could not go.

“Won’t your girlfriend be upset?” I said.

He tilted his head to the side. “Girlfriend?”

“The pregnant one? Or do you have more than one?”

He stared at me blankly and then burst out laughing.

“So that made it into the rumor?” he managed to say. He looked pretty pleased with himself. My face would have turned redder if I’d had any humiliation left in me.

When he saw how pissed I was, he stopped laughing. “Oh, right. You heard Myu say it. I don’t have a girlfriend. Especially a pregnant one.”

“But I saw you. In the park,” I said and regretted the words the minute they came out. His eyes went wide.

“You really have been spying, ne?” he said. “Shiori’s not my girlfriend. She’s more like a sister, and I promised her mom I’d look out for her. Students are giving her a rough time because she’s keeping the baby.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Now, come on. I’m hungry.”

I protested, but he just walked his bike toward the station, waving his arm in the air like he wasn’t going to hear it.

I stood there for a moment, squeezing the handlebars of my bike. I could just take off for home and ignore him. But when he turned around to see if I was following, I hurried forward, like I didn’t control my own legs anymore.

I ordered a melon soda and he got a platter of tonkatsu curry.