On the last night of the last day of my last week in Tokyo, Mom took me and Alison out for sushi. We went to a restaurant with a crowded countertop and ate thick scallops and glossy fish eggs on rice and bowls of warm miso soup chock-full of tofu and seaweed.
Back at the hotel, Alison and I watched the annual Tokyo Bay fireworks on TV. There were hanabi happening all over Japan that week. Across the country, spectators dressed in yukata stood huddled together, watching the sky. “Can’t see them from the goddamned window,” Alison said. “Too many goddamned buildings.”
Then I took a shower. I put on pajama bottoms and a Regina Spektor concert T-shirt and crawled into my hotel bed. The curtains were open enough to show me a wedge of glittering night. The city was painfully beautiful, a firework that never faded. I rolled onto my side and pushed the wet hair away from my neck.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from David since last night, but I didn’t really care. Not because I thought he was evil or anything. It was more that I had nothing to say to him. He wasn’t the person I’d always hoped he’d be, and, in all fairness, neither was I.
I hadn’t heard from Jamie, either—but that, I did care about. Even though thinking about him made pain wind its way through my body. We’d both been angry and we’d both said horrible things, but I was the one who’d pushed away first. I’d lit the match that destroyed this week.
Still, a part of me wished I could see him. I wished I could tell him I was sorry and that it really sucked, but we weren’t supposed to last beyond tomorrow, anyway. We’d always been facing good-bye.
What other choice did we have? A long-distance relationship? That implied dating, and Jamie and I definitely weren’t dating. I wasn’t exactly an expert on romance, but I didn’t think kissing someone, refusing to respond to their messages, and then kissing someone else in front of them constituted a “relationship.”
Or we could be friends. Exchange e-mails and texts until the day we grew apart, until he started dating someone else. I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want to experience the unavoidable breakdown of our connection, so I was going to be happy with this week. This week that I’d spent holding on to Tokyo as tightly as I could. This week that had been made up of counting seconds and waiting for everything around me to finally disappear.
But. Maybe it didn’t have to end that way. Because maybe Mika was right—maybe I did love Jamie. Even if he didn’t love me. Even if he never had. I must have loved him, because being with him was like waking up at the end of a long plane flight. Like looking at the star-shaped twinkly lights spun across my ceiling. I thought about stars and how their light lasts long after the star itself has faded. I thought about how home is still home even when it’s thousands of miles away.
That was this week. That was Jamie.
I heard Alison shut her laptop. “Are you going to sleep?” she whispered.
“Sort of,” I whispered back.
“And it’s not yet the melodramatic hour of two in the morning. How grown-up of you.”
“You’re one to talk.”
She made an amused sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Did you set an alarm?”
My watch was lying on the nightstand. “Mom called the front desk,” I said. “We’ve got a seven a.m. wake-up call.”
“Great.” Alison sighed. “Bon voyage to us.”
She turned off the lamp at the side of her bed, and the darkness in the room made the city glow brighter. A flash of lightning, frozen.
It’s my birthday. And the morning of my last day of middle school, the last day of my first year at the Tokyo International Academy… .
And Jamie is waiting near the gate, scanning the crowd for me. I push past a group of kids signing yearbooks. “Happy last day of school,” I say.
“Happy birthday, Sophia!” he says, bouncing on his heels.
“Blah,” I say. And even though it makes me nervous, I glance at the entrance to the high school. Older kids swish through the door. Boys with their arms around girls, everyone looking exactly like adults.
“I can’t believe we’ll be there next year,” I whisper.
“I won’t,” Jamie says, his features pinched and anxious. “Hey, this is my last day. We have to say good-bye in approximately a few hours.” He reaches into the front of his backpack, pulls something out, and shoves it into my hand.
I hold up the Totoro pin. “What! This is the MOST awesome.”
“It was cool hanging out with you this year,” he says, like it’s all one word. “I’ll, um, miss you.”
I roll my eyes. “Jamie, it’s no big deal. We’ll still be friends. We’ll talk every day.”
“Really? Because I have no idea if my parents are going to let me visit, and you’ll be busy, and this could really be good-bye. You know, for permanent.”
I close my hand around the pin. “Only if you let it be.”
CHAPTER 33
SUNDAY
THE FIRE ALARM WAS GOING OFF.
I sat up, gulping for air, unsure where the nearest fire exit was, unsure where I was. Tokyo? New Jersey? Paris? I didn’t remember going to the airport or saying good-bye to anyone. But what I did remember seemed flimsy and dreamlike. The T-Cad at night, a slurred neon boulevard, Jamie’s reflection overlaying the whole city.
It took me a second, but then I noticed the partially open curtains. The sun was starting to rise, and the sky was purple and blue with orange stripes across it like plane tracks.
Right! Of course. The hotel. And—the fire alarm was going off?
“Tell me what that sound is!” Alison shouted. “I will burn it to the ground!”
“It’s…”
My watch.
“It’s my watch,” I said.
“Are you deranged?” she snarled. “You set your watch for five o’clock in the morning?!”
No. My watch was still on the nightstand, where I’d seen it before I went to sleep. It was beeping like crazy, and the screen was flashing: