I touched my wrist, but it felt bare and strange. I’d forgotten to put my watch back on. “Yeah? I mean, I should go, right? It’s Paris.”
“I can imagine you there,” he said. “Drinking wine, wearing scarves, going to museums. You could pull that off.” He grinned and his sunglasses fell down onto his nose. He pushed them back up again.
“Mom would be alone, but not alone-alone,” I said. “Alison would only be one state away. I don’t know. It still feels pretty strange. When I was a kid, all I wanted was to move to Paris, and now it might really happen.”
I breathed the heavy air, which tasted earthy and bitter. Maybe, in a few weeks time, I’d be in Paris, dunking pains au chocolat in bowls of hot chocolate and hunting for dresses at my favorite flea markets. Maybe I’d be somewhere I actually wanted to be.
I tried to focus on that instead of the way I was unraveling from the inside, my molecules breaking apart and rearranging every time I glanced at Jamie.
“So,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching up. “The question is, are you sure you still want it?”
We arrived at the torii that marked the entrance to the central area of the shrine. Before we went in, we had to wash our hands and mouths at a fountain, a temizuya. I ladled water into my left hand, then my right, then my left again and rinsed out my mouth.
“My mom comes here for New Year’s,” I said. “She always e-mails us pictures of the thousands of people waiting in line to get in.”
“You don’t go with her?”
I felt a tiny twinge of guilt in my stomach that I quickly suppressed. “Alison and I go to my dad’s for New Year’s. In Paris. She spends it by herself.”
He nodded. People around us were washing their hands at the temizuya. I’d been to shrines with my mom and for school trips before, but I still worried I would embarrass myself. “I feel so noticeable here,” I whispered. “Do you think we seem like loud, obnoxious gaijin?”
“First of all,” he said, “you’re currently whispering. And second of all, this is one of the most famous shrines in Japan. We’re not the only foreigners here, I promise.”
We walked through the torii—bowing as we went—and then we were in the middle of a broad square paved with striated gray stone. The square’s edges were marked with low wooden buildings with slanted green roofs. We were facing a building that was slightly taller than the rest, its roof curled up at the corners. The shrine. Or the outer hall of it, according to Jamie. Groups of people stood in the archways, clapping, bowing, and throwing coins for good luck. More people hovered in the center of the square, taking pictures and consulting guidebooks. Jamie was right. We definitely weren’t the only foreigners there.
“What should we do?” I asked.
“We should walk,” Jamie said. “It’s our thing.”
At the various stalls around the square, you could buy charms, woven amulets that hung from thick, colored string and promised health or safety or success. Jamie tried to read the painted kanji signs that described what each charm was supposed to do. I liked the way he blushed and laughed at himself when he messed up. I liked the way he laughed at himself, period. I thought about David, who strutted and crowed and dragged the spotlight with him wherever he went. Jamie was the kind of person you could talk to all night without getting bored, who was funny in a quiet, observant way. And now that I’d noticed it, I couldn’t un-notice it. I couldn’t imagine paying attention to anyone else if he was in the room.
We came up to a tree with three walls propped around it sitting in the far-right corner of the square. The tree’s branches spilled over the walls, and the walls themselves were covered in hooks with small wooden tablets hanging from them. Hundreds of wooden tablets, all inscribed with handwritten messages.
We stopped there.
“They’re called ema,” Jamie said, reading a nearby sign.
My eyes scanned the tablets. Some had neat vertical rows of kanji on them; others had pictures of flowers or anime characters drawn on.
“What do they say?” I was half tempted to touch one. There were so many of them, layered on top of one another. Some tablets were hung precariously over the others, their woven threads barely catching the hooks. I wondered if they would drop to the ground, like acorns.
“They’re wishes,” he said. “Do you want to write one?”
“What would I say?” I asked.
“How about ‘I wish I could stay in Tokyo forever’?”
“Ha. Is that what you’d wish for?”
He took a breath. “If you did.”
I turned away, my cheeks burning. I wanted it to be true—it was terrifying how much I wanted it to be true.
“I’d wish you weren’t moving,” he said, the words tumbling out. “If I could wish for anything.”
“Jamie.” I couldn’t face him. My ears were ringing.
“I’d wish I were going to Paris next year,” he said. “I’d wish I’d never gone to boarding school. I’d wish—”
“Jamie,” I said. “Stop.”
“Okay.” I felt him take a step back from me. I could hear the letdown in his voice. “I’m sorry.”
I turned around, and before he could take it back—before the moment could turn to glass and shatter into pieces—I kissed him.
CHAPTER 23
THURSDAY
IT WAS BARELY A KISS. My lips on the corner of his mouth, my hand on his neck. There was a warm pulse against my palm. When his throat moved, I felt it in my skin.