“It doesn’t work that way.” I sniffle. “Home has to be, like, a place.”
Alison sighs and turns to the side, her profile illuminated by the glow of the streetlights. “No,” she says eventually, still staring out the window. “It really, really doesn’t.”
CHAPTER 20
THURSDAY
I ONLY SLEPT FOR A FEW HOURS. Even though I was exhausted, even though the thing I wanted to do most was sleep. But I couldn’t. I kept waking up every five minutes, convinced it was already nighttime. The air was stale and humid, and my room felt smaller than ever.
I checked my e-mail in case Dad had written to say I should definitely come to Paris. But he hadn’t. I dialed his cell, then remembered it was three in the morning his time and hung up.
I paced the room.
Usually if I stayed out all night, Mika and I would spend the next day in her enormous bed with the curtains shut. We’d eat the chocolate ice-cream bars her mom kept hidden at the back of their freezer and watch episodes of My So-Called Life on her computer.
I slumped back onto my messy bed. Dorothea Brooke purred and groomed my hair. My watch was damp and itchy, so I took it off and tossed it on top of my dresser. Then I went to the kitchen.
Someone was knocking at the front door. Which was weird.
Really weird.
The only people who ever knocked at our front door were the NHK man coming for our unpaid TV subscription or our one English-speaking neighbor, this Canadian guy who brought us Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups whenever he went to North America on business trips. For a wild second, I thought it was Jamie. He wanted to do something else. Tour Japan on the Shinkansen. Fly to Sapporo and back again. Something that could be accomplished in a whirlwind seventy-two hours. I opened the door.
It was Mika.
My hand froze on the doorknob.
“Hey,” she said, lifting her chin in a stiff greeting.
I wanted to slam the door in her face. I wanted to lock it and bolt it and tell her to GO. AWAY.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
I hesitated before opening the door wider. She walked in and stood uncomfortably in the genkan, like she couldn’t decide whether to take her shoes off.
I crossed my arms and tried to seem angry. But I was so tired and confused, and the anger grew numb—a blunt blade. “You cut your hair,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, touching the side of her head self-consciously.
But she hadn’t just cut it; she’d buzzed it. Right down to the quick. It made all her features stand out: piercing eyes, small nose, thin lips. Her eyebrow stud became a cold slash of metal.
“You look like Debra in Empire Records.”
“My parents said Annie Lennox.”
“Were they pissed?”
She smirked. “Yeah. Inevitably. But I don’t know, also mildly amused.”
I nodded. “You can take off your shoes. If you want.”
Inside the living room, everything was sloppy and chaotic, the gray carpets and the frayed couch pillows and the furniture pushed into disarray. Mika played nervously with a hole in the cuff of her dark green shirt.
“You want coffee or something?” I asked.
“No thanks,” she said.
“Okay. I’m going to make coffee. And breakfast. I’m assuming you don’t want breakfast, either.” She followed me to the kitchen, where I hunted through cabinets for something to eat. There wasn’t much. A couple of bags of rice, orange juice, two browning bananas on the windowsill.
“Dude,” Mika said. “Are you okay? Have you been sleeping in a gutter?”
No. I’m just recovering from spending all night in Shibuya with Jamie, and also I might be moving to a different continent than was originally planned, and ALSO the thought of you and David together still makes me feel like the world is tipping out from under me.
“Okay,” I said. “I am, I mean. I am okay.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “You’re being kinda weird right now.”
I opened the fridge and spotted a box of leftover pizza, probably Mom’s dinner from last night. There were two slices of veggie inside, and I wolfed one down in a few bites. “How so?” I asked through a full mouth.
Mika scratched the side of her new head. “I don’t know. I figured you’d call me a traitorous bitch or something. I figured you’d throw me out.”
“Do you want me to?”
“No.”
I ate another slice of pizza. There was a stool shoved in the corner, but Mika didn’t sit on it, and I didn’t offer it to her. I took a coffee mug from the drying rack. I needed to do this before I chickened out completely.
“Did you and David really hook up?”
She seemed to think it over. Which was so ridiculous. It was a yes-or-no question.
“Yeah,” she said finally. “We did.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I’m angry you never told me.”
“It wasn’t a big deal,” she said quickly. “We hooked up a few times, but then we’d talk about how dumb it was. I’m not his girlfriend or anything.”
I put the mug down on the kitchen counter. My hands were trembling a little. “A few times? How many times?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“No. But if you don’t tell me, I’m going to assume it was every day.”
“Christ. Clearly it wasn’t every day.”
“How many times?”
“Five.” She picked up the mug and held it. She was probably worried I would smash it on the floor. Or throw it at her. “Four times last summer. Once this summer.”
“By ‘once this summer,’ you mean Monday, right? The night the three of us were hanging out? The night before David and Caroline broke up?”
She tugged on the silver hoop in her left ear. “It was dumb.”
“Then why’d you do it?” I asked.