I wrapped my arms around myself as cold rain splashed through the open window.
Mika and David were gone, and it was like I was losing air. I was losing gravity. I was already losing Tokyo, the lights fading around me one at a time.
Until I thought about Jamie—my hand on his, the strange, familiar sound of his voice in my ear—and the lights flickered back to life.
Mom had gone to work hours ago, but she’d left a note stuck to the fridge. Cleaning out office—eat whatever you can find in the kitchen, miss you.
I missed her, too. That was probably pathetic, but it was true—I missed my mom. I stood by the fridge, listening to rain hitting houses with paper-thin walls, to the distant ding of a bicycle bell. Dorothea Brooke came over and butted her head against my calf. I scraped my hands through my hair, fingernails digging at my scalp, and said, “I’m going to clean my goddamned room!”
I grabbed a box of trash bags from the linen closet and started filling them with stuff. A couple of old tests, a bottle of half-dried nail polish, a doodle Mika had drawn of stick-figure Sophia standing next to a unicorn. (At the bottom, it said, happy birthday i got you a fucking UNICORN.) The more I threw away, the more it started to feel—right. Good, actually. Like breathing clean air. Like pedaling a bike until it pedals itself. I hurled stuff in by the armful now. A FUTURE ASTROPHYSICIST T-shirt with a watermelon-ice-cream stain on it, a pack of Pokémon trading cards, a stack of torn Paris museum guides.
I was about six bags in when Alison burst through my door.
“You woke me up,” she said. She was wearing fraying black leggings, a white T-shirt, and a pair of oversize tortoiseshell eyeglasses I think used to belong to my grandmother. Her skin was pale, and for the first time all summer, it occurred to me that she’d lost weight.
“Jesus,” I said. “When did you transform into Edward Scissorhands?”
“You woke me up,” she said again. “It sounds like you’re herding cats in here.”
“That actually makes no sense.”
“God, and your window’s open. Do you not realize it’s freezing out?” She shimmied around my bed and crawled onto my desk.
I almost threw away a crumpled photo of eight-year-old Alison and six-year-old me playing with kitten Dorothea Brooke—but stopped myself just in time.
“Seriously.” Alison yanked the window shut. “What are you doing with all that?”
“Downsizing,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, giving me her best Grown-Up face. “You’ve hoarded that junk for years.”
“Exactly. It’s junk. That’s why I’m throwing it away.”
“You sound like you’re on something,” Alison said. “Don’t throw it all away. You just don’t want to deal with it.”
I stopped what I was doing and lay facedown on a pile of laundry.
“Are you hungover?” she asked.
“Not possible,” I mumbled into the clothes. “I don’t even drink.”
“Good,” she said. “You shouldn’t. You’re seventeen.”
“You drink. You’re nineteen.”
“So? My friends are in their twenties. Your friends are twelve.”
I rolled my eyes, then realized she couldn’t see my face. I sat up, and Alison and the cat were peering at me. Intently. Alison adjusted her glasses.
“Are those even real?” I asked.
“Is that even the point?” she asked. “You’re acting strange. You’re throwing away your lifetime collection of useless crap. Did something happen to you?”
Yes. My best friend is screwing my other best friend, who, by the way, I have an enormous and unfathomable crush on, and they aren’t my best friends anymore, and, if I really think about it, they probably never were.
“Nothing at all,” I said.
“That’s it.” Alison reached for a bottle of sakura perfume and sprayed me with it. D. B. sprinted for the door. “We’re going out.”
I coughed. “We’re not going out. You haven’t left the house all summer.”
“I’ve left the house.”
“To go where?”
“Irrelevant.” She sprayed me again. “Come on. Get up. Wash your face. Make yourself look less depressing.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“No insults!” She sprayed me two more times. “I’m your goddamned sister.”
CHAPTER 14
WEDNESDAY
BEFORE WE WENT OUT, I changed into a red skirt, a white-and-red polka-dot blouse, and a black cardigan with a Totoro button pinned on it. (It wasn’t the one Jamie had got for me, but it made me think of him.) Alison coerced me into sitting on the edge of the bathtub so she could put her favorite red lipstick on me as well.
“It feels like my lips are coated in Play-Doh,” I said.
“Considering you have a fetish for dressing like a clown,” she said, “it’s amazing you’ve never worn this stuff before.”
It was still drizzling when we got outside, so I put up my black umbrella with a print of green and blue birds on it. “Where are we going?” I asked as we walked to the train station. The city smelled fresh in the rain. Like all the stale humidity had been replaced with a pile of wet leaves.
“To be revealed,” she said.
“Do you know how to get there?” I asked. “Do you remember how to buy train tickets?”
“This teenage sarcasm thing is already getting old,” she said. But when we got to the station, it turned out she had forgotten which station we were going to. I looked it up on my phone, calculated the price, and punched the location into the machine for her.
“Tokyo Tower?” I said, fishing out the magnetic strip of paper. “Really?”