“I didn’t take them,” I said. “She gave them to me earlier. She always gives me her stuff.”
“I lose everything,” Mika said. She drew out the word everything. She had reached her Exaggerated Drunk phase.
We got on the elevator, and Mika decided to sit down. Jamie and I pulled her up when we reached the eleventh floor. Jamie lived on the twelfth.
“Okay,” I said to Jamie. “Good night.”
“Noooo,” Mika moaned, opening her eyes in horror. “Jamie can’t go. He has to come with us. He has to.”
“I’ll help you take her in,” Jamie said. He sounded so tentative and considerate, it was seriously grating my nerves.
I glared at Mika, but she just widened her eyes at me. Like a confused owl.
Even though I knew Mika’s parents weren’t home, I still had the urge to be as quiet as possible when we pushed open the door to 11A. The glow from the surrounding buildings poured in through the windows, illuminating the meticulously clean genkan. Mika bumped into a bulky umbrella stand with polished wooden handles sticking out of it. I cringed. Those umbrellas were probably expensive.
Jamie and I took off our shoes and picked out two pairs of slippers from a stack by the door. Mika kept her shoes on.
Beyond the genkan, her apartment opened up into a spacious living room with sleek black leather couches and a glass coffee table. There were glass-topped pedestals arranged by the windows displaying antique vases and a Buddha statue. We hauled sleepy Mika through the living room, past a framed white scroll covered in long, vertical lines of painted black kanji.
The last time I’d come over for dinner, Mika’s dad had explained to me that it was Japanese calligraphy. Mika sat next to him slurping her shiitake mushroom pasta as loudly as possible while I nodded vigorously with my hands squeezed together in my lap, hoping my brightly colored hair didn’t offend her parents as much as I knew Mika’s did.
We took Mika into her room and lowered her onto the bed. She crawled under her covers, kicking her scruffy black clogs to the floor.
“Are you going to put pajamas on?” I asked.
“Why?” Mika asked into her pillow. “I have to wear new clothes tomorrow. Why change now if I have to change again later? Pointless.”
So she’d moved on to Philosophical Drunk.
Mika’s room was less chaotic than mine. The desk was neat with a huge flat-screen computer on it. A pastel pink-and-yellow plaid comforter lay over the bed with matching throw pillows clustered at the headboard. There was a vase of flowers on her dresser that Mika’s mom arranged in her weekly ikebana class at the American Club, and the whole room smelled of lavender and lemon.
Of course, there were little Mika touches as well. A chunky serial-killer novel on her nightstand, a pair of running shorts draped over her desk chair, and all the ’90s stuff: a Daria doll on her dresser, a poster of The Craft hanging on her wall, and DVDs of all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer stacked by the foot of her bed.
I dug through Mika’s pajama drawer until I found the red ones with an M monogrammed on the pocket, the ones Mika had always refused to wear. I glanced at the doorway. Jamie was still standing there. The confident veneer he’d had all night was definitely wearing off. He was chewing his lip.
“I think you can go now,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to call your mom and tell her you’re staying over?” he asked.
“I texted her.” I folded my arms. “Did you call yours?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been at boarding school for three years. They don’t care what I do.”
“Whatever.” I shoved past him and went into the kitchen to fill three glasses with tap water.
“Here.” I gave one to Jamie. “You’ve been drinking.”
“Only a beer,” he said. He took the water, though, and leaned against the refrigerator. He was smiling but with only half his mouth. I thought about the way he used to smile at me. With his teeth showing. With his whole face.
“Hey,” he said. “You want a mint?” He reached into his pocket and took out a slim, credit-card-sized box of tiny Japanese mints. “This is going to sound dumb, but I really missed these. Mika bought me some as a welcome-back present. Take one.” He held out the box and rattled it a little, but I didn’t move a muscle. He fidgeted with the tab on the box’s side.
In the light coming through the window, I noticed the slight bump on Jamie’s nose. He’d broken it when he was a kid, falling face-first off a slide, and it had never set properly. The memory of him telling me this made me physically recoil. I was being assaulted by things I’d spent a long time trying to forget.
“I really can’t get over this,” he said.
“What?”
“Tokyo. Karaoke. All of this.” His eyes met mine, and I winced again, knocking my elbow against the counter behind me. “You know, I kept wanting come back and visit, but my parents always flew to North Carolina for Christmas and summer. Being here doesn’t feel real yet.”
I shrugged. “It is real.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess you’re right.” His hat had shifted, and I could see more of his hair now, the messy, unraveled curls. I stared down at my feet—my toenails were painted a bright purple.
“So,” he said after a moment. “David, huh?”
Every defense mechanism inside me switched on. Hearing Jamie say David’s name made me feel like we were still standing in that deserted cemetery, rain spitting down on us, that text message glowing in my hand. “What about David?” I asked.
“Nothing in particular,” he said, sounding lighter. Confident Jamie was back. “He’s the same, I guess. Good ol’ passive-aggressive David.”
“You don’t talk to David anymore. You have no idea what he’s—”
He interrupted me. “Caroline seems cool, though.”
“Caroline?”
“Yeah. I mean, she seems like his type.”
“And what type is that?” I asked through nearly gritted teeth.
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. She’s—outgoing. She’s pretty.”