God, why couldn’t I stop fixating on this? I wished Jamie had never come back to Tokyo or followed me into Mika’s kitchen or stood in front of me in this waiting room looking lost and uncertain. Like someone familiar. Like someone who used to be my friend.
At 10:49, Ms. Suzuki’s door finally opened. I hunched over my computer and squinted at it. (The only thing on there was my screen saver. A picture of a cat.) “Hey,” Jamie said.
He was standing over me, looking worse than he had an hour and twenty-four minutes ago. His skin was pale, and he’d pushed some of his hair off his forehead so that it stuck straight up. “Ms. Suzuki said there was a water cooler out here?” He said it like it was a question.
I jerked my head back. Since my headphones weren’t attached to my computer, the cord just fell to the floor. The door to Ms. Suzuki’s office was open, and I could hear her asking Jamie’s mom about North Carolina beaches.
“Yeah, it’s right…” I started to point over my shoulder. “I’ll just show you.”
The water cooler was on the other side of the SAT bookshelf. The bookshelf itself almost blocked our view of Ms. Suzuki’s office. Jamie stood behind me as I filled a plastic cup with water. When I turned around, I was standing so close to him I could see a faint bleach mark on the chest of his T-shirt.
“Did you get in trouble this morning?” I whispered. “For staying out so late?”
“Yeah, I guess you could say that.” He glanced over his shoulder. “But it wasn’t a big deal. It was just because I left the house without telling my parents where I was going. And without having a cell phone.”
“Jamie,” I said. “You’re an idiot.”
He shrugged. “I know. But hey, sorry about my mom.”
“You’re sorry about your mom?”
He exhaled slowly. He seemed irritated, but I wasn’t sure if it was with me or with himself. “I’m just sorry. That was a general apology for—all kinds of things.”
My cheeks warmed up. I couldn’t have a serious conversation with him about last night. Not when I could hear his mom’s voice—her strong southern accent—wafting into the room. Not when I was in my place of business. “Forget it, Jamie,” I whispered.
He pressed his lips together and furrowed his brow. I could see the few freckles on his neck, right above the collar of his T-shirt. Jamie had fair skin spotted all over with freckles and moles, the type of skin the sun could probably burn right off. It was always turning red, where his backpack rubbed his neck, where he scratched the back of his hand. Whenever he blushed.
The first time I’d noticed this was back in eighth grade, when I was eating lunch with him and Mika and David. Mika had just laughed at one of his jokes, and his face went red up to his hairline. I thought it was really annoying. Everything about Jamie annoyed me back then. He was squeaky and small and desperate. Desperately desperate. He told too many jokes; he tried too hard to make other people like him. I found it all so infuriating that for the first few months I hung out with them, I could barely handle his presence.
Until, one day, he talked to me.
“You’ve got such a cool name,” he said. “It’s like Sophie Hatter, in Howl’s Moving Castle.”
“My name is Sophia,” I huffed. “And what’s Howl’s Moving Castle?”
“Sophia. Of course.” He blushed. “And it’s a Ghibli movie.”
“I don’t watch those.”
“Why not?”
“Uh, they’re cartoons. That’s why not.”
The next day, he brought his copy of Howl’s Moving Castle to my locker after school. I mumbled a thanks and shoved it in my backpack, and I might not have watched it at all if I hadn’t finished my homework early that night. (I finished my homework early a lot.) I watched it twice, until Alison said I was hogging the TV, and then I watched it two more times on my laptop, curled up on my bed till three in the morning.
“It was so weird,” I said to Jamie at lunch the next day.
“Weird in a bad way?” he asked.
“No,” I said, thinking it over. “Weird in a… crazy way. I liked it when Howl turned into a bird and when Sophie got so angry she turned young again.”
“I know, right? Sophie is awesome. She’s such a badass.”
Jamie brought me all his Ghibli DVDs, one after the other. Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke and My Neighbor Totoro. I’d thought they were kids’ movies, but they weren’t. They were the closest thing to magic I’d ever experienced. More beautiful than real life. More beautiful than anything.
We’d talk about them at lunch, sitting in the courtyard next to Mika and David, who got bored and started ignoring us.
“I think I might have seen Totoro when I was a kid,” I said. “But yes, I loved it. I loved the cat bus.”
“We should find a cat bus,” Jamie said, pointing at me. “My whole life, I have wanted to find a cat bus.”
I rolled my eyes. “Obviously we should do that. I mean, God, it’s a freaking cat bus.”
He laughed and his ears turned pink, the color of strawberries in cream.
He has skin like a mood ring, I’d think. Or a modern-art painting.
Looking at Jamie’s neck, I remembered the way he used to make me feel. It was stupid, but there it was, a familiar dull ache in my chest and stomach. I remembered waking up in the morning, already excited to talk to him. I remembered the wrench of disappointment whenever he stayed home from school. I remembered running late to lunch and seeing him scanning the crowd, trying to find me.
It was such a disorienting feeling, I almost had to sit down. I almost forgot how much I currently hated him.
He took the water from me. “Thanks,” he said, relaxing the set of his shoulders a little.
I pulled at the heavy sleeves of my dress and gripped them in my palms. “You’re welcome.”
He started to walk away but then came back and leaned down to my ear, his breath warm and minty against my cheek, making the tidal wave of memories grow stronger and stronger as he quickly whispered, “I got kicked out, that’s why I’m back, don’t tell Mika.”
CHAPTER 8
MONDAY
“WHAT UP?” MIKA SAID when she answered the phone.