Shun left his sketchbook on his desk when he went to buy bread at lunch on the Tuesday after Yuigahama. It was lying open. I wasn’t trying to look at it. I was reaching past it for my drink.
It was a girl in red and white, standing on the sea.
She was drawn in black ink with the red put in afterward in felt tip, and she was standing on a wave with her arms up, holding back a wall of water that went right up off the top of the page. Her hair was streaming out behind her. Her face was turned away, so you couldn’t see it. On the beach behind her, tiny, there were people running, and one of them was a woman in a blue top with an arrow pointing at her and a word written beside the arrow in small capitals.
AUNTIE.
I turned the page.
It was her again, the girl, standing on a crab made of bicycles, with a long stick in her hand. On the next page she was flying over the Katase river mouth. On the next she was sitting on a roof with her knees up, looking at the moon, which hadn’t happened, but could have. On the next she was huge, as tall as Enoshima, holding the island in her hands like a bowl.
Some of them were good. Shun was good at drawing. Some of them were terrible, with her arms on wrong, or her face too big, or a halo like a dinner plate. Some had her tall and grown-up, like a woman on a poster, and those were crossed out. Everyone who’d been near her said the same thing about her: she was small. Most of them had the stick wrong. It was a spear, or a broom, or a wand with a star on the end. And in every one of them he’d done her face. He’d done it from the clips, again and again, trying to get it. In a few of them he had.
I counted them without meaning to.
There were forty.
I’d never looked at that face for longer than a clip lasted.
On the last page he’d only done the outline. Just a shape, a girl in wide sleeves, standing with her wrist raised the way the stone woman in the cave stood, and underneath it in pencil, very small: thank you for my aunt.
“Hey,” said Shun, behind me.
I closed the book. He was standing in the aisle with a bag of melon bread, looking at me without much expression.
“Sorry. It was open.”
“It’s fine.” He sat down and pulled the sketchbook toward him and opened it again, to the wave. He looked at it. “She saved my aunt. I know everybody says she’s cool or whatever. Everybody’s got the keychain. But she actually saved my aunt. My aunt was under the light. She told me what it was like. She said it was like being under a bowl that somebody very careful was holding.” He turned a page. “I just want to get her face right. Everybody draws her like a doll. She doesn’t look like a doll.”
I said something. I don’t remember what.
Then I got up and went down the corridor to the boys’ bathroom and locked myself in a stall and sat on the closed lid with my hands over my face.
I stayed there until the bell went for afternoon lessons. When I came back Shun was drawing again and didn’t look up.
* * *
On Thursday my voice went in our Japanese lesson.
Our teacher, the quiet one in the gray cardigan, had us reading a story aloud around the class, a paragraph each. It was an old story about a man who goes fishing and comes back to find a hundred years have passed. When it got to me I stood up and started reading, and halfway through the second sentence my voice cracked.
It didn’t crack down, the way boys’ voices are supposed to. It cracked up, high and clear, on the word sea, like somebody else had said it.
Somebody laughed. Then three people did.
“Asakura sounds like a girl,” said Kondo from the back row. He’s a big boy on the baseball team who says most things twice. “Asakura sounds like a girl.”
I stood there with the book in my hands and my face burning. I couldn’t think of anything. I waited for my voice to come back so I could finish the paragraph.
“Kondo-kun.”
Saki didn’t turn around. She was sitting very straight at the front, the way she always does, with her own book open in front of her.
“Your voice broke in the middle of the national anthem at the sports festival last year. In front of the whole school. You sounded like a goose.”
The whole class laughed, at Kondo this time. He went red and said something nobody heard.
“Continue, Asakura,” said our teacher mildly.
I finished the paragraph. My voice held.
When I sat down I looked at the back of Saki’s head, at her neat short hair, and she didn’t turn around, and never mentioned it to me afterward.
* * *
Kohaku had a different way of training, by the end of May.
She’d stopped telling me what to do. She sat on the parapet of the roof at dawn and watched, and every so often she said a girl’s name.
“Shino,” she said, when I turned back over the sea without being told, at the right place, and landed on the roof with enough left to stand.
“Oharu,” when I held a full water tank over my head for two minutes and put it down before my arms started shaking instead of after.
“Hana,” when a crow landed on the satellite dish and I took one look at it and didn’t bother.
On the last day of May, a Monday, I came back from a long flight out over the bay and landed on the roof as the sun was coming up over the hills, and Kohaku was sitting on the water tank looking at me.
“You’ll do,” she said.
I stood there in my hakama, glowing faintly, with my hair wet from the spray.
“What?”
“You’ll do. You’re ready. As ready as anyone gets.” She stretched, one leg at a time, and settled again. “I used to count, you know. With all of them. I counted the days, from the day each of them put it on. One day. Two days. I couldn’t stop myself.”
Then she said the numbers.
She didn’t say whose they were. She said them flat, one after another, looking at the hills.
I didn’t ask what she’d been counting toward. I didn’t need to.
“I’ve stopped,” said Kohaku. “This morning.” She looked at the sun on the hills. “You passed forty-four days this morning. That’s longer than any of them lasted.”
She jumped down off the tank and walked off across the roof to the stairwell door with her tail up, and didn’t look back to see what my face was doing.
* * *
That night I took Nishikawa’s card out of my wallet.
It was a little more bent now than when he’d given it to me. Plain white, with the prefectural police crest in one corner, his name, and a phone number, and on the back, in blue ballpoint, a second number he’d written by hand.
I sat on my bed with it in my fingers.
“Tell someone,” said Kohaku from the windowsill.
She didn’t say it like an order. She said it like a girl’s name, the way she’d been saying them all week.
“He’s a policeman.”
“He’s a man who held on to a woman’s wrist while a crab dragged him down a flight of steps,” said Kohaku. “He’s a man who stood on a sea wall all morning looking at an island you made.”
“If I tell him, he tells someone. Then they all know.”
“Then they all know,” Kohaku agreed. “Or nobody does, and one night you go out, and something happens, and nobody knows where to look.”
I looked at the card for a long time.
Then I put it back in my wallet, behind my train pass, where it had been. Kohaku watched me do it and let it be, and after a while she turned around and looked out of the window.
* * *
There’s an elementary school next to our building.
It’s so close that from our balcony you can see right down into the playground, and on weekday mornings you get woken by the sound of six hundred children doing exercises to a piano recording. In early June they have their sports day.
That Saturday Mom had swapped onto the afternoon shift, and Mio was off, and the three of us ended up on the balcony with tea, watching it, the way we do every year. The playground was ringed with tents and parents on picnic blankets, with colored flags strung across it on lines. The children ran races in red caps and white caps. The teacher with the microphone kept saying “Everyone, please do your best” in a voice that suggested she’d said it a lot.
A lot of the children were dressed as Miko-chan.
Nobody had told them to. It wasn’t a costume day. But all over the playground there were small children in red and white, in their mothers’ red skirts pinned up, in white shirts with the sleeves made wide with tape, with yellow paper halos on headbands. During the relay one of them, a girl of about six with a cardboard halo, fell over at the corner and lay on the ground, and the whole playground went quiet.
Then she got up and kept running with her halo bent, and everyone cheered as if she’d won.
“They all want to be her,” said Mom.
“She’s a better role model than most,” said Mio. “And she’s about their size, from the clips. Look at that one. She’s got the stick.”
A small boy at the edge of the playground was walking around with a broom handle held out in front of him, very seriously, stabbing it at things.
“That’s horrible,” said Mom, and laughed, which she doesn’t do much.
I watched the girl with the bent halo cross the finish line.
They all wanted to be her. They all wanted to be the girl in red and white, flying and lifting people and shining so bright you could see her from the next town. Six-year-olds in their mothers’ skirts.
And I was her.
I’d been her this morning, at five, on the roof. I’d be her again tomorrow. Now I sat on the balcony in my old hoodie with my hair over my ears, drinking tea between my mother and my sister. Nobody in the world knew, and the feeling in my chest was so complicated that I couldn’t have told you what it was.
Pride, maybe. Something like being caught.
Kohaku was on the balcony rail, watching the children.
“The first lot did this too,” she said, low enough that only I could hear. “At Koshigoe. After the Lady. The children played at being her for years. They used to fight over who got to hold the staff.”
That evening, while Mom was making dinner, there was a man on the news in a dark suit, a politician from the ruling party, being interviewed outside the Diet building with a crowd of microphones in his face.
“Nobody doubts that this girl has saved lives,” he was saying. “But we have to ask who she is. Where she comes from. Who she answers to. A person with that kind of power, operating on her own, with no oversight, no accountability. I’m not saying she’s dangerous. I’m saying we don’t know.”
“She saved hundreds of people at Yuigahama,” said Mio, from the table. “Who cares who she answers to?”
“Some people care,” said Mom.
She picked up the remote and changed the channel to a program about a man restoring old boats, and turned the sound down low, and went back to the rice.
* * *
On Sunday Mio wanted to take my photo.
She had an assignment for her skin-care class, close-up photographs of a face with no makeup, before and after a treatment, and the model she’d booked had canceled. She came into the kitchen with her camera, the good one she’d saved up for, and a ring light under her arm.
“You,” she said. “Sit there. Ten minutes.”
“No.”
“I’m not putting anything on you. It’s just cleanser and a mask. I need the before.” She was already setting up the ring light on the table. “Your skin’s better than half my class. It’ll make me look amazing.” Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
“I said no.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want my picture taken.”
“You don’t want your picture taken.” She put the camera down. “You’ve never wanted your picture taken. You hid behind Mom in every school photo since you were six. You brush your teeth looking at the faucet. I know. I’ve seen you.” She folded her arms. “What’s going on with you? Seriously. Your hair, your skin, the sweatband, the hood. You won’t let me cut it. You won’t let me photograph it. You go out at five in the morning and come back starving.”
“I go running.”
“You’ve never run anywhere in your life.”
“Just leave it, Mio.”
It came out louder than I meant.
She looked at me for a moment. Then she picked up the ring light and the camera and went back to her room without another word, and shut the door, not hard.
I sat at the kitchen table. Kohaku sat on the counter and looked at me, and I looked at the mannequin head, which looked at nothing.
After an hour I knocked on her door. She said “What,” without opening it.
“Sorry,” I said through it.
There was a pause. Then the door opened. She was sitting on her bed with her laptop, and she looked at me standing in the doorway.
“We don’t really talk,” she said. “I know that. But you’d tell me. Right? If something was wrong. If you were in trouble.”
“Yeah.”
She looked at me a moment longer, the way she looks at a client’s hair before she decides what to do with it. Then she nodded, and went back to her laptop, and I went back to my room.
The lie sat in my chest like a stone for the rest of the day.
* * *
That week I dreamed of the shore again.
The Lady was standing at the edge of the white stones, where the far-off sea was, looking out at it. I went and stood beside her. We stood there without saying anything.
“I wanted to ask you something,” I said.
“Ask.”
“The bracelet.” I held up my wrist. “Things are changing. Since I put it on. My hair. My skin. My voice.” It cracked as I said it, upward, the way it had been doing all week, and I hated it. “Is it doing that? Is it doing something to me?”
The Lady turned and looked at me. She looked at me with her burned hands folded in front of her. She didn’t look at the bracelet.
She looked at me.
“It doesn’t make anything,” she said. “It never has. It sees.”
I had no answer to that.
Sees what? I thought, and didn’t let myself answer.
So I asked her if she’d ever been to Kyoto. She hadn’t. She’d heard of it. She asked whether it was still full of priests, and I said it was mostly full of tourists, and she was quiet, and then asked what a tourist was. I explained. It took some time. I didn’t ask her anything else.
I woke at four, before Mom’s alarm, and lay there with Kohaku’s small weight across my feet, asking myself what it saw.
I didn’t answer that either.
* * *
I needed a pen on the Thursday.
I’d lost mine in the bottom of my bag somewhere, and I had a test, so I stopped at the kiosk on the platform at Ofuna on my way to school. It’s a tiny booth at the end of the platform, crammed with newspapers and gum and canned coffee, run by an old woman in a cardigan who has been there as long as I can remember. I’ve bought things from her a hundred times. She calls everyone dear.
It was raining. I had my hood up.
I put a black ballpoint on the counter, and a hundred yen.
“Thank you, ojou-chan,” she said, and gave me my change.
I stood there with the coin in my hand.
Ojou-chan. Young lady. Little miss. The thing you call a girl when you don’t know her name.
The last time anyone had called me that, I was six, and I’d cried, and Dad hadn’t spoken to me all the way home.
She’d already turned away to serve a man buying a newspaper. She didn’t look at me again. It hadn’t been anything to her, a girl in a hood buying a pen on a wet Thursday. I could have said something. I could have pushed my hood back and said I’m a boy, the way I’d said it to Kohaku in the cave. She’d have apologized and laughed, and that would have been the end of it.
I kept quiet.
I put the coin in my pocket and picked up the pen and got on the train.
I stood by the door all the way to Kamakura with my hood up and the pen in my hand, looking out at the rain on the window. I didn’t take the hood down. At Kamakura I walked to school the long way, around by the shrine, under the dripping trees, and I was early, and I didn’t know why my feet felt so light.
I didn’t think about why.
I put it in the drawer with the ten seconds over the hills, and closed it, and went to my test, and wrote my name at the top of the paper with the new pen.