“I forgot,” David said. “Christ, it happens. People forget things.”
It took me a few seconds to find them because they were huddled in an alleyway between two stores. David had his hands on Caroline’s shoulders.
“I waited for you till midnight!” Caroline hissed. “I called your phone, like, ten times! You seriously expect me to believe you forgot?” She pushed past him and stumbled into the street, stopping short as soon as she saw me. “Sophia?”
“Hey,” I said. Oh God. Her face was pale and blotchy. She’d clearly been crying.
“Sofa!” David said, turning around.
Before I could say anything back, the door to the konbini slid open and Jamie and Mika toppled into the street. Mika’s mouth was open wide with laughter, and she was clinging to Jamie’s arm. She was wearing her Wonder Woman T-shirt, and her hair was gelled into a small blue fauxhawk. Jamie held a plastic bag and gazed down at her adoringly.
I felt my chest expand and then tighten. Oh crap. I was going to implode.
“Sofa!” David said again. His eyes gleamed as he strode toward me, a streamlined figure all in black. Tight black T-shirt, black pants, black pointy shoes that glinted in the light. His clothes made him impossibly tall. They made his eyes intensely blue. When he got to me, he wrapped an arm around me and kissed the top of my head. Then he squeezed my shoulder and kissed the top of my head again. “Sofa! You’re here!”
Caroline stayed back, combing her hair in front of her face.
Were she and David breaking up?
“Check out the goth twins,” Mika said when she reached us. Jamie wasn’t wearing a hat anymore, but he had the same navy-blue T-shirt on. His cheeks and nose were pink, like maybe they’d been sunburned.
My head filled with static. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know if I should say anything. We’d been in the same vicinity for approximately twelve seconds, and he hadn’t said one word to me.
Mika reached up to ruffle Jamie’s hair. “Dude, how did you hide all this under that hat?! It looked a lot smaller on Skype.”
Jamie ducked away from her, but he was grinning. “Yeah, well. It’s not quite as impressive as that Smurf Mohawk.”
David sighed. “Break it up, you two.” He rolled his eyes conspiratorially at me, and I exhaled loudly in agreement. Despite everything else, I still liked being on his team.
“So,” I said. “Any desire to tell me what’s going on?”
He pulled me into a tight hug that felt lanky and secure. I caught another glimpse of Caroline, standing away from us, outside the light of a streetlamp. She seemed crumpled and heartbroken, but she lifted her hand to wave at me.
David’s voice whispered in my ear, “Not a cat’s chance in hell, little Sofa.”
It was dark out, but not dark-dark. Purplish clouds curled across the sky, glowing from light pollution. Tokyo never blacked out, not even at night. Not even by the T-Cad, where the buildings didn’t touch the sky.
We waded through the muggy air of the cemetery, David leading the way and Mika and Jamie just behind. They were still being jokey and playful with each other.
And they were ignoring me.
Mika was probably still pissed about how I’d treated Jamie his first night back. And Jamie—he was being cool and aloof again, exactly the way he’d been at karaoke. Once, he glanced over his shoulder at me, like he was thinking about saying something.
But I pretended not to notice.
Which was fairly easy because Caroline was walking next to me, emitting a series of sniffling noises.
The harsh truth was that David broke up with everyone. He didn’t always do the actual breaking up, but he always did the thing that caused the breaking up. He got distant, he got flirtatious, he got desperate for the relationship to end. And then it would.
But even though I’d spent the last year daydreaming about this moment—the moment when David realized Caroline was not his type—I felt a little bad for her. I had a compact mirror in my tote that I shoved wordlessly into her hand. She clutched it gratefully and linked her arm tightly with mine.
We trudged out of the cemetery and into the park that wrapped around the back of the T-Cad, away from the gate and the ever-present guard, along the line of the school fence.
“This is it?” Mika said when David stopped us. “This is the plan?”
“This is it,” David said, opening his arms like a circus ringmaster.
We were standing where the fence touched the back of the football field.
David hoisted his long body up and clung to the mesh of the fence like Spider-Man. “We’re taking Sofa inside the T-Cad so she can say a proper good-bye.”
Mika groaned. “Dude. The school is closed. This is so lame.”
“Careful with the ‘dudes,’ nineties girl,” David said cheerfully. “You might wake up and realize you’re in the wrong century. Anyway, it’s not lame. It’s symbolic.”
“It’s illegal,” I interjected. “Or semi-illegal, at least. We’re breaking and entering.”
David gave me a wicked grin. “Don’t worry. This is the blind spot. No security cameras, remember?” He detached one hand from the fence and pointed up.
He was right. Everyone at the T-Cad knew about the blind spot. Everyone had taken advantage of it at least once.
Except me, of course.
“Besides!” David said. “We are students trying to get into school. Someone hand us some friggin’ medals!” He swung over the fence and landed on the ground in an elegant crouch. When he stood up, he fist-pumped the air. “Hell yeah! Ten-point-oh! The judges are unanimous!”
“So lame,” Mika said, but she sounded more on board with the whole thing. She grabbed the konbini bag from Jamie, tied it, and hurled it over the fence. Then she made her own way over. It was like watching two acrobats. It was like watching two people who had definitely done this before.
Caroline pouted, her bottom lip actually sticking out. “I don’t want to climb a fence.”