Ink (11 page)

Watanabe-sensei looked way too pleased that I’d actually shown up, and sent some of the senior girls to help me put on the armor.

When we slipped out of the change room, the class was already forming into lines, so I hurried into place. Nakamura-sensei shouted out something and all the students knelt, placing their bamboo
shinai
swords on their left sides.

Crap.
I didn’t have one.

A shadow draped over my head, blotting out the gym lights that beamed down on us from the ceiling. I looked up, straight into the face of Yuu Tomohiro, and the sudden closeness of him shuddered through me like a shock. He was in my space again, his face way too close to mine. He knelt and the bright lights beamed over his shoulders. He placed a
shinai
at my side, lining the hilt up carefully with my knees.

“Thanks,” I whispered, while Watanabe-sensei shouted and all the other students bowed, hands down on the floor.

Tomohiro nodded and strode slowly to a break in the line where I saw Bleached Hair waiting for him. He eyed me suspiciously, looking from me to Tomohiro, and then he stared with outright hatred. I looked away, my pulse buzzing in my ears.

We did twenty-five push-ups to warm up, and as I stared at my little square of varnished gym floor, I couldn’t stop thinking about Bleached Hair’s glare. He’d stared at me like I’d destroyed something, invaded where I shouldn’t have. And maybe that was the truth, because I didn’t belong in the world of someone like Yuu Tomohiro, and he didn’t belong in mine.

After the exercises, the students fell into a drill, and Watanabe-sensei helped me hold my
shinai
properly while he taught me the basic stances.

There was a lot of yelling involved in kendo. Sometimes the
kiai
shrieks broke through my concentration and I looked up to watch two students advancing on each other in more and more complex drills. They slipped the
men
helmets into place, the metal bars caging their faces in shadow, and swung at each other, the crack of the
shinai
rattling through my thoughts.

I practiced with the junior
kendouka,
learning to control the
shinai
with my right hand but power my hits from the left. It took more concentration than I had expected, and after fifteen minutes my shoulder throbbed. It was a relief when Watanabe-sensei ordered us to take a break and observe the senior students, and we knelt in a line,
shinai
placed neatly by our sides, to watch.

Tomohiro rose to his feet, and Bleached Hair was called on to spar with him. Tomohiro swung his
men
in his hand as he approached the lines of
kendouka.
He hoisted the mask over his face, jostling it until it fell snug on his shoulders. The straps flared out and bounced as he walked into place, bowing to Bleached Hair, who slipped behind his own mask. They looked like two mysterious samurai now as they crouched down, their
hakama
skirts draped across the floor.

As they lifted, they drew their
shinai,
and a
kiai
erupted from Tomohiro, a terrifying sound in the silence of the gym.

The wildness of it drove fear into my heart, as if I didn’t really know him at all—and maybe I didn’t. The kindness of bringing the
shinai
to my side and lining it up carefully was lost with the ferocious shriek as he moved forward and cracked his
shinai
against Bleached Hair’s, as he swung again and again.

Maybe Yuki and Tanaka were right. Maybe Tomohiro was more dangerous than I realized.

Bleached Hair growled back, and the sound of them fighting was like wild animals. No lie. They struck over and over, keeping each other at sword’s length. Bleached Hair slammed his foot down as he swung at Tomohiro’s
dou
—a hit, a point.

Some of the older students murmured to each other, studying their form. All I could do was watch, the shouts echoing in my ears. Tomohiro whacked Bleached Hair on the right side of the
men
near his neck, their
shinai
looking as if they would splinter as they cracked together.

As they fought, I noticed a splash of color on Bleached Hair’s arm. At first it moved like a blur, but from his
kote
glove to the sleeve of the
keigoki,
I was certain I’d seen the broad outlines of a tattoo.

I watched the rest of the match with my mind occupied.

Tattoos weren’t as big a deal in New York—rebellious, maybe, and sometimes beautiful. But in Japan, tattoos were linked to gangsters and the Yakuza. I stared at Bleached Hair in a new way.
Impossible,
I thought.
He’s only in high school like us.
But the more I tried to convince myself, the more the suspicions loomed over me. Was this what Yuki and Tanaka had meant when they said Tomohiro was mixed up in things?

The match finished and Nakamura-sensei dismissed us.

Tomohiro and Bleached Hair swung their masks off, sweat dripping down their faces. Bleached Hair jabbed Tomohiro in the arm and they laughed, walking past like they didn’t even see me. I stared at them as they disappeared into the change room. Did Tomohiro really keep such dangerous company?

Is that why he’d wanted me to stay away?

And if they were both in the Yakuza, then I’d already delved too deep into that dangerous world.

But it was just a tattoo. It didn’t have to mean that. And why would Bleached Hair be so careless to get one where it would be seen?

Did Tomohiro have one, too?

The senior girls helped me unbuckle my armor. The rain outside was so heavy it pounded against the roof of the gym, echoing with the sour sound of aluminum.

When I came out of the change room, Tomohiro and Bleached Hair had already left, and there was nothing for me to do but head home.

I walked slowly to the
genkan,
dreading the drenching ride home. I’d brought Diane’s bike again today, in some feeble hope that Tomohiro might head for Toro Iseki again.

When I slid open the door to the torrent of rain, Tomohiro’s bike wasn’t in the racks with the abandoned ones, slick with rain.

I couldn’t leave the bike at school; Diane needed it for Monday. Taking a breath and lifting my book bag over my head, I stepped out into the coolness of the spring rain, soaking in the thick raindrops that pelted from the gray sky.

I reached the bike, but it took me a moment to realize it was mine.

Someone had hooked a clear plastic umbrella to the handlebars.

The rain slicked down the sides as I lowered my book bag.

I stood there a long time, staring at the umbrella in the rain.

On Wednesday I went to school with the umbrella under my arm. The rain lasted all weekend and knocked what was left of the cherry petals out of the trees into soggy piles all over the city. The beauty of
hanami
now lay as a shriveled ugliness on the ground. The trees still towered above in bright late-spring greens, and the heavy rains sprouted lots of new flower stalks from the dank earth. I sneezed the whole way to school.

It smelled of spring—or would’ve, if my nose wasn’t plugged from allergies—even if there were no petals to catch in my hair, no shower of blossoms on my walk to and from Suntaba.

When I saw Tomohiro’s bike in the racks, I hooked the umbrella over the handlebars. Then I hurried into the
genkan,
slid on my school slippers and raced down the hallway to homeroom.

At the end of the day, he was waiting for me at the bike racks, straddling his seat with his foot on the pedal. He checked his watch as I approached and narrowed his eyes.

“You’re late,” he said.

We never talked about the umbrella.

Tomohiro headed out first, twisting north out of the Suntaba gate to throw everyone off. “I don’t need any more stalkers,” he said. “One’s enough.” I rolled my eyes, until he added,

“At least she’s a cute one.” He grinned and set off.

Oh, jeez.
I was definitely in trouble.

We met up near Shizuoka Station and twisted past the underground walkways. We took turns leading the way through the crowds, but Tomohiro was much more at ease with the task. He cut razor-sharp lines through the traffic, so following him was terrifying and thrilling at the same time.

We laid our bikes down in the curtain of forest and sat down by a Yayoi-period hut. Tomohiro had said the houses were almost two thousand years old, and I stared at them, terrified to touch them in case they crumbled to dust or something. The rain had let up the day before, but the grass was still a little soggy. Tomohiro didn’t seem to care. He leaned back into the hut and let the tall grasses soak into the back of his school blazer.

I spread my blazer on the ground and sat down in the middle of it. That should help keep me at least a little dry from the dewy grass. I took out the book I’d brought with me and some strawberry-cream sandwiches I’d saved from lunch, my favorite of the ones Diane made. I hesitated, then passed one to him.

He eyed it suspiciously.

“What?”

“Is it poisoned?”

“Hey, you’re the creepy one, not me,” I said.

He grinned and took a bite, crumbs dropping onto his sketch of a horse.

“You’re good at the anatomy,” I said.

“The proportions are all off,” he said. “I’ve never seen a real horse.”

I stopped eating.

“Never?”

“There aren’t many horses in Shizuoka, Greene.”

“Well, haven’t you traveled around Japan or outside the country?”

“My father took us on a business trip once to Paris, in the days when he was happier.”

“Paris?”

“Mais bien sûr, mademoiselle.”
The French rolled off his tongue, and every nerve in my body tingled. This was a bad idea, spending more time with him. I should be at home, trying to forget him, falling for Tanaka, or maybe Jun. Tomo hiro didn’t notice that I was silently falling apart beside him; he was lost in the memory. “I disappeared and he and my mom panicked. They looked everywhere for me, even called the police. I was about six, I think.”

“So where were you?” It was hard to conjure up an image of a six-year-old Tomohiro, lost and crying somewhere for his mommy.

Tomohiro smirked. “I was drawing pictures in my sketchbook inside the Louvre.”

Of course he was.

“You really love art, don’t you?”

“I can’t explain it,” he said, curving around the tail of the horse with his pen. “It’s not really a love of art. I have to draw. It’s…a compulsion.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Sou da na…”
he mused.

“Yuu?”

“Hmm?” He drew gentle strokes to build the horse a wild mane, and it looked so lifelike I could almost smell the dank locks, feel them tangled between my fingers.

“Your friend from Kendo Club, the one with the…” I wasn’t sure of the term in Japanese, so I switched to English.

“You know, with the bleached hair…”

“Bleached?” he repeated in English. I wasn’t sure how to translate.

“Lighter than blond hair,” I said. “Almost white.”

Tomohiro scoffed. “Sato?” he said. “Ishikawa Satoshi?”

So he had a name.

“Does he draw, too?”

Tomohiro laughed, and the sound rang in my ears.

“Zenzen,”
he said. “He can barely draw a straight line.”

“I was curious,” I said, biting my lip and taking a breath,

“because I thought it looked like he had a tattoo.”

Tomohiro dropped his pen. It rolled across the page and fell with a gentle thud into the long, dewy grass. A moment later he wrapped his fingers around the black cover of his notebook and closed it. The drawing of the horse flashed out of sight, but I swore he’d drawn the head curving down, not over the shoulder like it was now.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything,” I said. “It just looked like he had a tattoo.”

He breathed slowly, hunched over his notebook.

“Yes,” he said. “He has a tattoo.”

The truth screamed out inside my head.
It’s
all true. Why
else would he act like this?

“Ishikawa…is he—”

“Does it really concern you?” he said in a sharp voice. I felt the shame burning up my neck, but it only made me angry.

I hadn’t said anything wrong.

“He’s your best friend,” I said. “It kind of concerns me if he’s into dangerous stuff.”

“I told you to stay away, didn’t I?” he snapped.

“Would you cool it already?” I said, but the expression was lost in the translation and he looked puzzled. His eyes clouded over, and his head hung lower and lower until he rested his chin on his notebook. Then I saw the dark ooze dripping out from between the pages.

“Yuu!” I said. “Are you bleeding?”

Tomohiro shot up, stared at his hand and then the dripping liquid. His hand was fine, but he grabbed the pen, opened up the notebook a sliver and scribbled over the horse drawing.

“The ink blots sometimes,” he said. “It’s from the pen.”

I stared with wide eyes at the bloodlike liquid, how it shimmered as it pooled on the grass. “What the hell kind of ink are you using?”

“Look,” Tomohiro said. His tone was even now, and he looked up at me. I was suddenly aware that I was sitting too close to him, but I couldn’t back up without looking like I was recoiling. “Sato is mixed up in some things that are no good. He gets me into a lot of fights, but I’m not into that stuff, okay?”

The unasked question hung in the silence of Toro Iseki. I could barely form the words, but Tomohiro’s eyes told me I didn’t need to.

“Yuu,” I said, my throat thick and dry.

“Yes,” he said, but he didn’t raise his voice like a question.

He knew what I was going to say, and he was ready to answer.

“Is Ishikawa in the Yakuza?”

Tomohiro stared straight at me, and I could already see the answer.

“Yuu, you have to stop hanging out with him.”

“We’ve been best friends since elementary school,” he said.