“Right. Of course. And ruggedly handsome and able to leap buildings in a single bound.”
“I remember the way we used to talk about those movies. You made everything seem so—”
Beautiful. Jamie made the world seem more beautiful than it had ever seemed before. And bigger. Like it was a dark sea I wanted to swim in. Like it was a place I wanted to explore.
I needed to say it to him. Even if it connected us in a way I couldn’t take back. Even if it meant I would inevitably get hurt. “You make everything beautiful. And—you made me feel less like life was going to swallow me whole. And you made me feel the opposite of small and stupid and alone. For the first time maybe ever.”
As he was looking at me, his eyes flicked back and forth. Like he was reading a book. Like he was memorizing a passage. “I don’t feel like tonight is real,” he said. “Do you think we’re both sleeping?”
“Ha,” I said. “Maybe sleepwalking.”
“Sophia?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t wake up.”
CHAPTER 18
THURSDAY
“SUMIMASEN!” THE GIRL TOTTERED a few steps away from me and bowed.
I shook my head. “Sumimasen.” At the very least, I could say sorry in Japanese.
We were standing on a street corner fed by the traffic from various nightclubs. The sidewalks were hectic, and I was tired, and the heat was getting more intense by the second. Maybe from all the walking and walking and walking. The girl smiled at me. She was wearing bright red platform heels and a black dress. “America jin desuka?”
“Um, hai.”
“Nai!” Jamie said, grinning. “Tokyo ni sundeiru.”
The girl’s expression became elated. “Eh—! Nihongo sugoi desune.”
Jamie blushed so hard, I was amazed all the blood vessels in his face didn’t burst. The girl asked him a few more questions, and I stood to the side, following most of what they were saying but too self-conscious to join in with my own basic, T-Cad level-two Japanese. The sounds of Tokyo transformed into a gentle murmur, and the night grew warmer and hazier and—was my head against Jamie’s shoulder? I pushed myself away.
“Tired?” he asked. The girl was gone. There were patches of sweat around the neck of his red Anpanman T-shirt.
“You speak Japanese good, Jamie. So good. Can we stop walking now?”
“I’m not sure how to break it to you, but we’re not currently walking.”
But we had been walking. For so long. A little while back, we’d tried to go to a bar. Jamie ordered a beer, but neither of us drank any. It was too loud to think. Or talk—I wanted to talk. So we walked instead. Outside, in the imperfect dark, we could talk as much as we wanted to. There was all this space above, all this room for our voices to go.
“Jamie.” I blinked through the glue in my eyes. “I need to sit down.”
“We need coffee.” He raked his hands through the sides of his hair. The sweat made it into a disheveled mess. I sort of wanted to run my fingers through it. Sleeplessness was giving me all kinds of irrational desires.
“There’s no coffee here,” I said. “You’re hallucinating.”
He looped his hand around my wrist and gave me a small tug. Then he started to run. We started to run. All the lights blotting and blurring, the roads unraveling in a familiar way. There were fewer people out now, everyone weighed down and listless, like we were in a distorted version of the bustling city Tokyo usually was.
We didn’t have to run for long till the street deposited us on the edge of Shibuya Crossing. My eyes opened wider. It was like racing through the solar system and stumbling on the sun. All the signs and the screens and the people and the cars. Light and sound crawling up, up, up.
“Wow,” I breathed.
Jamie squeezed my wrist. “Look behind you.”
I already knew what was there, of course. The building had huge paneled windows that faced the crossing. Advertisements flashed across its glass exterior, and a sign in all caps ran along the facade of the second floor.
STARBUCKS COFFEE.
“Coffee,” I said.
Inside, everything was exactly what I needed. The air-conditioning, the whirring espresso machine, people in green aprons smiling. There was light folky music playing over the speakers and, as soon as we walked in, all the baristas chorused, “Irasshaimase.”
“It smells like life,” I said, feeling a little teary. “This is where life comes from.”
Jamie dug into his pockets for change. “I have a plan. I’m going to get two enormous green tea lattes with all the whipped cream and sprinkly things they’ve got, and you’re going to go upstairs and steal the couch.”
“The couch?”
“It’s the only couch,” he said. “It’s in front of a window. You’re going to steal it and we’re going to stay there till the trains start. This is our destiny.”
“The couch,” I repeated.
Jamie joined the surprisingly long line. Somehow, my dead legs carried me up the stairs to the second floor. An array of insomniacs crowded around the small tables and counters that ran along the floor-to-ceiling windows. The entire room hovered over Shibuya Crossing like balcony seating. As Jamie had predicted, there was a maroon couch situated in the center of all the windows, wedged between two counters.
I shuffled over. The couch was occupied by the sleeping body of a guy wearing skinny jeans and a leather jacket. There was no way I was going to be able to steal it. How does one steal a couch, exactly? I waved down at him. “Um. Hello?”
He didn’t respond. Presumably because he was asleep.
“Okay.” I nodded, and my head felt like it was bobbing in water. I was swimming. “Okay. Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
I lay on the ground in front of him, in the small sliver of space between the couch and the window. I put my bag under my head for a pillow, and then I fell asleep. Right there, right in the window, where everyone in the whole wide world could see me.
“Sophia?”