“Hey!” He puts his foot down and stops in front of us. “You know what we should do this year? We should get Sofa a boyfriend.”
“What?” I start blushing like crazy. “Why?”
“You need one,” David says. “It’s the law.”
I try to think of something flirty to say back, but all this boyfriend talk has thrown me off my game. “Um, no, I don’t date. It’s too mushy, too needy, too”—I paw the air in front of me—“touchy.”
“Oh no.” Mika pushes down her sunglasses and peers at me over the top of them. “Not touchy.”
I toss a piece of melon bread into her lap. “You know what I mean.”
David sits on the step below mine. I resist the urge to fidget with my hair. Mika talked me into dyeing it platinum blond the other night, but I’m starting to regret it. I feel so obvious. So “look-at-me!”
Also, I’m pretty sure I smell like bleach.
“You have to at least make out with someone,” David says. “Before the year is over.” He puts out his hand like he wants me to shake it. I regard it warily.
“This can’t honestly matter to you.”
“Of course it matters! You’re my friend, and you’re cute, and you deserve to be made out with.”
“You really are revolting, David,” Mika says. “You know that?”
David takes my hand in his and moves it lazily up and down. My heart sputters pathetically. He wouldn’t touch my hand like this if he was just joking around. He wouldn’t hold on for these few extra seconds—his grip somehow loose and firm at the same time—if he didn’t mean anything by it.
“And if I have to do it myself,” he whispers, “then so be it.”
CHAPTER 13
WEDNESDAY
I WOKE UP ON TOP OF MY COVERS, still wearing all black. It was raining again. Not End of Days rain like the night before, but rain nonetheless. I held my watch above my head and stared at the seconds blinking uselessly away. It was one in the afternoon, but what the hell did that matter? A day isn’t even what we think it is—the earth rotates on its axis every 23.93 hours, not every 24. My entire concept of this week was false.
Carefully, I climbed onto my desk, my scraped knees still throbbing, and pushed open the window. Drops of water smacked against the windowsill. I heard a train sluicing toward the station and a few indignant crows rustling their wings in the alley below. The skin of my arms prickled. It wasn’t just raining—it was cold.
This is an alternate universe. I have discovered a wormhole.
When I was a kid, my dad would go on these long theoretical rants about wormholes, trying to explain them to me. I wished I could call him, even though it was practically the middle of the night his time. I wished I could ask him some basic physics question and listen as he launched into another lecture about time and the universe—explaining how time wasn’t actually this all-powerful force but a variable. Something that could be changed.
I guess that’s why I’d made this stupid countdown. Because I wanted to hold on to the time I had left here. Because I wanted to separate good-bye from all the moments—the better moments—that came before it. It was my own little scientific experiment, to try to contain that one second when everything I cared about would suddenly vanish.
But that was bullshit. I couldn’t control losing Mika and David. I couldn’t control how it ripped and altered the fabric of my universe. How it was like… like losing a leg. Like falling off the monkey bars. Like falling, period. They were my best friends.
They were.
And now I felt the way I used to feel before I met them. Empty and small.
Alone.
But on the other hand—the other seriously weird, confusing hand—there was Jamie. Jamie, who’d been gone for good. Jamie, who was freckles and moving limbs and a voice like warmed-up honey. When I thought about that, something inside my chest unclenched. The massive Mika-and-David-shaped hole in my life shrank as I thought about him riding the train with me to my station, talking to me the whole time. About boarding school, about his flight back to Tokyo, even about the movie.
“I wasn’t supposed to be cast in it,” he said. “That’s fun fact number one. The book takes place in North Carolina, and they filmed some of it near my grandparents’ place. Fun fact number two is that the director actually wanted my grandfather to have a cameo, but the Famous Wyatt Foster would have nothing to do with it. So they gave me a role instead.”
It was way past midnight when we got to my station, which meant he couldn’t get another train to his place. He had to take a cab home.
“I’ll give you money,” I said when we were standing near the station exit.
He shook his head. His hair had started to dry and turn back into curls. He shoved his hands in his pockets so I couldn’t hand him the damp thousand-yen bills I was holding. “Can’t let you do that, I’m afraid. Anyway, my parents gave me ‘emergencies only’ money.”
“Your parents,” I groaned. “It’s already so late. They’re going to kill you.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m alive and I didn’t get kicked out of the T-Cad, so tonight is all victory as far as they’re concerned. Besides, Mika and I have this deal where she won’t make me go home alone. She’ll wait for me in the lobby and walk me up, and my parents won’t be able to freak out because they love her.”
The thought of Mika waiting for Jamie, helping him, made my stomach pitch. “Please don’t tell her you were with me,” I said.
He glanced down, sheepish. “I think she’s probably guessed.”
“In that case, don’t tell her I yelled at you.”
“Are you kidding?” He gave me a half smile. “That was my favorite part.”
“Jamie,” I said. “Please.”
He paused, then held out a hand for me to shake. “I won’t tell her a thing.”
In a fit of madness, I’d almost told him to stay at my house. He could have slept on a futon on the floor, and the world wouldn’t have seemed so empty and vast and terrifying.