The Waking

4

T he first drop of blood is in the genkan, where the students store their street shoes during the day. Kara notices it only because she steps in it, which is when she realizes she is barefoot. A rush of guilt shivers through her. If anyone comes and sees her walking in the school without slippers on, she will be in trouble. What would be worse, wearing her street shoes into the school or no shoes at all?

She slips on the blood, smears it on the floor. Frowning, she lifts her foot and stares at the bottoms of her toes, painted red.

Behind her, back at the entry doors, something moves and Kara flinches. She doesn’t want to be here, but going out that way seems a terrible idea, so she walks deeper into the school. The lights are off, and yet she can see. On the stairs is an arrangement of candles and flowers, as though someone has set them up to create an atmosphere of romance, but all she can think is that it’s a shrine.

To what, or whom, she doesn’t know.

Something shifts at the far end of the hall to her left, in the shadows. For a long moment she watches, trying to make out what it is, and then, just as she turns her attention once more to the candles-which are in a new arrangement now, a new pattern spread all across the stairs-something darts across her peripheral vision, dark and low to the ground.

Kara stumbles up several steps, knocking over a candle. Eyes wide, she stares down at the melted wax as it pools on the step. Flame licks the wood and begins to spread. She reaches down to snuff it with her fingers, but when she touches the step, the wax and flame are gone. Instead, she touches something sticky and warm and red. Blood.

Soft laughter comes from behind her and Kara turns. A small parade of girls shuffle through the genkan. It must be them laughing-the sound comes from that direction-but still it seems unlikely, for they have no faces. No eyes. No mouths.

Trapped, for a moment Kara doesn’t dare move up or down the stairs. Then a breeze flutters the candlelight and she glances around to find that the blood is gone and only a single, large candle burns at the top of the steps, as though to light her way.

With the rustle of laughter below, she starts up, away from those no-face girls. Her own breathing is strangely loud, echoing off the walls as though to smother her, and she can’t stand being in the stairwell anymore.

At the top of the steps, she finds herself in the hallway of the house where she’d grown up, back in Medford, half the world away. This feels right, natural, and her fear abates. Down the hall, the door to her parents’ bedroom is open and a butterfly of hope flutters in her chest.

Kara runs for that open door, not wanting to admit to herself what-or who-she believes she’ll find in her parents’ bedroom. The hall feels longer than it should, and at the end is a window she doesn’t remember, with candles of various sizes and colors arranged on the sill, flames dancing.

She reaches the bedroom, grabs the frame, and turns to look inside.

It isn’t her parents’ bedroom at all. It’s her homeroom, back at her old school. Lying across the desk is the body of a Japanese girl, her sailor fuku plastered against her body, hair matted with blood. But she has no face.

Kara screams and no sound comes out. A sudden terrible certainty fills her and she reaches up, fingers searching, to find that her own features are smooth and dry. No mouth. No nose. She no longer has eyes, yet still, somehow, she sees.

On a desk in the far corner, by the windows, sits a cat with eyes that flicker like candle flames. It watches her, arches its back, and then leaps to the floor. The cat begins to pad toward her, or so she thinks, until it stops at the teacher’s desk and begins to lap at the blood that pools on the floor there.

Still silently screaming, Kara staggers backward, breath coming in gasps. Everything around her shifts, changing. Now the inner wall of the classroom is comprised of sliding doors, like in Monju-no-Chie School. She bumps into one, shoves it aside, and stumbles into the corridor. It isn’t her home anymore. She’s back at her new school, outside Class 2-C, and all she can think of is getting out.

Kara runs. She passes one classroom, but through the sliding doors she can see the shore of Miyazu Bay, water lapping over the legs of the desks, though this is the second floor. Quaking, she passes another classroom, and its walls and windows and desks are spattered with blood. No-face girls are collapsed on the floor and over desks like abandoned marionettes. A dead boy hangs from the ceiling.

She can’t breathe and turns to run, but now there are cats at the top of the stairs. Too many of them. They move from the shadows, out of classrooms, and down the hall behind her, and then she is surrounded. Their feet leave bloodied red paw prints on the floor as they close the circle around her.

Again, she screams…

And wakes.

Kara drew in a gasp of air, as though she’d stopped breathing while asleep. Her heart hammered in her chest and she sat up, clutching fistfuls of her sheets as she stared around her bedroom. In the corners, shadows lingered. The light that filtered through the shutters over her windows cast only gloom into the room. Early morning, then, barely dawn. Too early to be awake, but she didn’t dare lie down for fear she might fall back to sleep and back into that dream.

“God,” she whispered, and swung her legs out of bed. “Not again.”

Three days since school began, and she’d had the same nightmare for three nights in a row, disturbing her sleep. She ought to have been glad it was morning, but she still felt so tired that it might be worth risking more bad dreams if she could sleep a little longer. Or maybe not. The nightmare was awful.

She ran her hands over her face and got up, sliding back the shutters to have a look outside. Despite the gloomy light, there were very few clouds in the sky. When the sun stopped peeking at morning and came fully over the horizon, it would be a crystal clear day, warm and blue.

Kara stayed by the window, waiting for dawn to break and for the cobwebs of her dream to burn away. Already, only fragments of it remained, but it left her with the sensation that she’d been lost in the dream all night. Details changed, but certain elements had been consistent all three nights-the blood and the candles and the cats. The presence of her parents’ bedroom and the feeling of expectation, like she might see her mother again, had been new this time, and it lingered with her. It felt like she’d lost something, though of course even if she had seen her mother, it would only have been a dream.

With a deep breath, she wrapped her arms around herself and watched the sun climb over the horizon. The morning light spread, and she began to feel better.

Then she remembered that it was Saturday, and a smile touched her lips, as though sunrise had spread within her. Yes, she had a few hours of school this morning, but the afternoon would be free. Miho and Sakura were taking her shopping in Miyazu City. After hearing about Akane’s murder and the creepy thing with the cat earlier in the week-added to the stress of trying to adjust to her new life-no wonder she’d been so troubled. The dream had been haunting her all week, but her friends from home were fond of saying there was nothing a little retail therapy couldn’t cure. Shopping was just what the doctor ordered. They’d walk all afternoon, get completely exhausted, and if she was lucky, there would be no dreams tonight.

No dreams tonight. She made it her mantra.

Or perhaps it was more like a prayer.

Pink lanterns were strung from the trees in Takinoue Park, where spring had just begun to blossom. Kara took a bunch of pictures, framing some of them diagonally because she liked her photos off-kilter. At home she would take pictures of her friends because they’d bug her until she relented, but Sakura and Miho seemed to understand that the camera meant something to her beyond just snapping tourist shots, and so they posed only when she asked them to get into the picture.

After school they’d taken the Tankai bus to Sanno-bashi, where only a few minutes’ walk brought them to the park. Kara loved the Turning Bridge and Ama-no-Hashidate and had already photographed them endlessly, not to mention beautiful shots across Miyazu Bay, framing some of the islands in her shots, especially the misty rise of Mount Oidake on Kami Island. One day, she hoped to explore those places with friends. But today wasn’t for sightseeing. It was a day just to be with the girls.

“Can I ask you something?” Miho said, adjusting her round glasses.

Kara lowered her camera. “Sure.”

“We always hear about how much more time we spend in school than American students. Is that really true?”

“Well,” Kara said, “back home, we don’t have school on Saturdays, that’s for sure. And the school days here are definitely longer. But in Japan, there are longer breaks between classes, and more art and physical education classes. We’re probably not actually in class with a teacher that much more than in America, if you add it all up.”

Miho nodded as though this satisfied some suspicion she’d already had. Kara had to know.

“Why do you ask?”

Sakura let out a derisive laugh. “I told her American boys are stupid. That they wouldn’t be intelligent enough to keep up with her, but would expect her to act like she is even dumber than they are.”

Miho glared at her.

Kara grinned. “You mean Japanese boys aren’t the same way?”

“Exactly the same,” Miho said.

“Not all of them,” Sakura added quietly.

“Oooh, Sakura likes a boy!” Kara said.

Whatever vulnerability Sakura had just revealed vanished in an instant. Her cynical, tough-girl mask reappeared, and she winked at Kara.

“I like them all. Except American boys.”

Miho glared at her. “You’re evil.”

But she couldn’t keep the angry face in place for more than a few seconds, and then they were laughing. Kara’s heart felt lighter than it had in days. She had never acquired a huge number of friends at home; she just didn’t have that kind of personality. But she missed Dawn and Toni and Aaron, the kids she’d hung out with in her high school in Massachusetts. She’d kept in touch by e-mail, but she’d been gone three months and already it felt like they’d forgotten about her. Out of sight, out of mind.

Which meant she had to live in the now, with the people around her.

“Say ‘cheese,’ ” she said, raising the camera.

Sakura and Miho grinned. “Chee-zu!” they both said.

Kara laughed. “It’s ‘cheese!’ I’m not the one pronouncing it wrong.”

“You’re in Japan,” Sakura told her. “We say ‘chee-zu.’ ”

“Because we say ‘cheese,’ ” Kara replied.

“Which is silly, anyway,” Miho put in. “Why cheese?”

Kara laughed. “Fine. Explain ‘chee-zu,’ then.”

Miho and Sakura glanced at each other, genuinely baffled, and Kara snapped their picture like that. She viewed the shot on the little screen on the camera and giggled, showing it to the girls.

“Who’s evil?” Sakura said.

Miho crossed her arms. “Kara is evil,” she said in English.

Kara nodded in appreciation. “Hey, that was pretty good.”

“We need practice,” Sakura said, also in English. “You should speak English with us.”

“I need practice, too,” Kara replied.

“We…,” Miho began, but switched to Japanese. “We should take turns.”

Which sounded more than fair. For the rest of the afternoon, they moved back and forth between English and Japanese, correcting one another as politely as possible. They were hungry and ate lunch in a small restaurant near the park. The girls were much more comfortable with gossip outside of school, and Kara learned the secrets-real or imagined-of some of the most popular students, not to mention some teachers. Some of the teachers she’d barely met, and some of the other students she’d never heard of, but Kara listened intently and laughed in all the right places.

Miho and Sakura weren’t content to talk just about their own world, though. They wanted to know about her life in America, and Miho, of course, about every boy she’d ever kissed, or wanted to kiss. They had questions about fashion, shopping, and the house she’d lived in, and Kara happily filled them in. An older woman who worked in the restaurant joined in on the conversation at one point, wanting to hear Kara speak English.

“You should learn to speak Japanese-English,” the woman said, “if you want us to understand when you speak your own language.” When she saw the confusion on Kara’s face, she went on. “The accent. If you speak English with a Japanese accent, it will be easier to understand you.”

Kara bowed her head in gratitude for the advice. As the woman walked away, Sakura rolled her eyes.

“Don’t listen to her,” Miho said. “You need to speak

American-English if we’re going to learn correctly.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Kara replied. “It’s hard enough to speak Japanese without trying to learn to speak English with a Japanese accent.”

By the time they finished lunch it was after two-thirty, and Kara knew she wouldn’t be hungry at dinnertime. Still, her fish had been excellent and the plums delicious. And since she’d never be able to finish her dinner, it made total sense to her that they should get some candy at the little shop just down the street.

They rode the bus back into the heart of Miyazu City, eating their sweets and talking about nothing. A boy who looked old enough to be at university admired Sakura, apparently taken by the dramatic cut of her hair or the collection of patches and pins on her jacket, though Kara thought it just as likely he merely appreciated the shortness of her skirt. Many Japanese girls would have looked away, either with a shy smile or in an attempt to ignore him. The culture avoided bold eye contact whenever possible, but Sakura had her own style, and it involved challenging convention whenever possible. She gave the boy a withering stare that eventually forced him to turn away.

Kara and Miho shared a smile over that.

“You look tired,” Miho said quietly, in English, adjusting the bow in her hair. “Are you feeling all right?”

The change of tone and subject was abrupt. Kara blinked and looked at her, but Miho’s gaze was elsewhere.

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she confessed, also in English.

“ Soudesuka,” Miho replied with a nod. “Sakura hasn’t either.”

The word meant something like I hear you and understand. Kara enjoyed how versatile the Japanese language was. After a couple of months in Japan, shifting between the languages had grown difficult. If she was thinking in Japanese, it wasn’t easy to switch to English.

“What haven’t I been doing?” Sakura asked, moving across the bus to sit beside Miho.

Seeing them next to each other-the mousy, proper girl with her cute glasses and the wild child-usually made Kara smile at the contrast. But on the subject of sleep, she couldn’t muster a smile.

Kara switched to Japanese, hoping they would stick with it. “Sleeping well. Why not?”

With a shrug, Sakura unwrapped a small candy and looked away from them. “I haven’t slept well since Akane died.”

“This is different,” Miho said. Sakura ignored her, but Miho leaned toward Kara and whispered, “Bad dreams.”

The words made Kara flinch, thinking of her own nightmares of cats and no-face girls and all that blood. A chill snaked up the back of her neck and she would have asked Sakura to elaborate, but then the bus slid to a halt and the doors opened.

“Let’s go,” Sakura said, leading the way.

The streets of Miyazu City looked nothing like an American or even European city. There were markets and shops everywhere, monks in white, police officers stopping bicyclists to see their riding permits, and tourists buying souvenirs of Ama-no-Hashidate. Some of them were embarrassingly American, one man even wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a cowboy hat, as though he had dressed up expressly for the purpose of becoming a caricature. Kara cringed at the sight of him, but nobody else seemed to notice, as though this man in his sandals and sunglasses was what they expected of Americans.

Don’t be nasty, she thought. He might be perfectly nice.

Still, the shirt had to go.

They visited Miho’s favorite dress shop, where a saleswoman seemed to adopt them as her personal mission, though none of them bought anything. Sakura dragged them into a bookshop, where she introduced Kara to her favorite manga and they both spent too much money, and then into a music store, where Miho insisted Kara pick out some American music for her. Since she hated J-pop-the bubblegum pop music a lot of Japanese kids liked-Kara was happy to oblige, grabbing the latest Alicia Keys and an ancient Nine Inch Nails, just for variety.

Outside a little store where Sakura had bought them each a spangly hair band and herself a pair of bright orange socks, they stopped for a break near a fountain. Kara thanked her for the gift, and Sakura seemed pleased.

“A keepsake of our day,” she said.

Then her smile went away. She couldn’t manage happiness very long. If Kara judged just by her appearance, she’d have thought it was part of the persona Sakura had crafted for herself, but she felt sure it had much more to do with Akane and the way their parents seemed to have just left Sakura here and forgotten about her. Maybe the girl felt like she shouldn’t be happy.

The thought made Kara’s heart hurt.

Sakura surprised both Kara and Miho by suggesting they visit Temple Chigenji, which had been built by someone named Takahiro for his mother, who’d been a Buddhist saint.

“I didn’t think you’d like history,” Kara said.

“Just because I don’t have respect for authority doesn’t mean I don’t have respect for the past,” Sakura explained.

Standing in front of the temple, Kara felt exhausted. It had been a very long day.

“My mother would have loved it here,” she said. “She never liked the idea of leaving home, living someplace so far away. But she would have loved it here. Sometimes beautiful places made her cry. I think Ama-no-Hashidate would have had her in tears. It feels like the top of the world… like you could sail north and find-”

Kara faltered. She’d been about to say find heaven, but she couldn’t finish the thought. If that was where her mother had gone, Kara wished she would come back.

Miho touched her arm. “I haven’t heard you mention your mother before.”

“We know your father,” Sakura added. “He gives too much homework.”

Kara smiled, a twinge of sadness still in her heart. “He’ll lighten up. He likes to put a scare into his students at the beginning of the year to make us take him seriously.”

Both girls were still watching her but did not speak, as though waiting for her to go on.

At length, Kara glanced away. “My mother died in a car accident, almost two years ago. It’s just the two of us, my father and me. She left us to take care of each other.”

“But she loved you,” Miho said.

Kara looked up to find a sad smile on the girl’s face. She nodded.

Sakura did not smile. Her expression was hard, and her eyes difficult to read. But she met Kara’s gaze.

“That’s a treasure,” Sakura said. “And you’ll have it as long as you live.”

Kara startled her with a quick embrace. By the time Sakura started to return it, Kara was already stepping away. The three girls looked at one another for a moment, and then the subject changed and they were talking about nothing and everything again, heading back along the street. Heading for home.

And they were friends.

Jiro had his window open, and the night breeze brought the powerful scent of cherry blossoms into his room. So strong was the aroma that he blinked in distraction and pulled his attention away from the television set. He spent too much time in front of the TV, his parents were always telling him. But the stupid game shows helped numb him.

Ever since September, when Akane had died, numb had been his goal. They’d been close friends-maybe even best friends-and he’d known that she didn’t love him any other way. But his feelings for her had been so strong that it felt like love to him, or the way he thought love should feel. He still wasn’t sure he knew what love really felt like, but no one else had ever made him so happy inside, so nervous, and so lighthearted, as though he could rise off the ground and fly.

Ume certainly never made him feel that way, and she was supposed to be his girlfriend. But then, he knew Ume had never been in love with him. She used the word, but Jiro didn’t think she knew it was supposed to mean something more.

The light from the television flickered blue off the walls of his bedroom, the only illumination in the room except for what streamed in through the open window. He shivered. It was probably too early in the year to have the windows open so wide, but the chilly spring air felt good. All winter he had let himself shiver with the cold; it fit perfectly with how alone he felt. His best friend had been taken from him, and her sister, Sakura, wouldn’t even talk to him. Every time she looked at him, he could see the blame there. But Jiro hadn’t killed Akane. He would have given anything to have her back.

With a deep breath, he inhaled the aroma of the cherry blossoms. The scent was so strong it had gotten into his clothes, into the walls of the room itself.

He frowned. The odor was so overwhelming that it seemed weird. The nearest cherry trees were in a small park across the street, and there weren’t even that many of them. Akane had loved the smell of cherry blossoms.

The light flickered again, but he glanced at the TV and realized it wasn’t the odd game show that had caused it. Something had passed in front of the television.

Jiro looked around the room, confused. He was alone. It had to be just a trick of the light. With a shake of his head, he focused on the TV again and laughed at the absurdity there, as three women tried to drink some noxious brew. The one to drink it the fastest without vomiting would win. He began to feel queasy himself and changed the channel, searching for a movie or something else to occupy his mind. He felt tired but wasn’t ready to go to sleep yet. Tomorrow was Sunday, after all, and tonight he could stay up as late as he liked.

Outside his window, a cat yowled.

Jiro shuddered at the sound, then laughed at himself, startled by a cat. Still, when the cat’s mournful cry came again, he felt a prickle of unease move up the back of his neck.

And then it let out a terrible cry, as though something had attacked it, and Jiro scrambled to his feet. His heart raced, pounding in his ears, and he stared at the open windows, waiting for the sound to come again. What had caused that cry, and why was the cat silent now?

He listened, but no other sound came… until he heard the tiniest mewling noise, like a newborn kitten or the sigh of something dying. Jiro didn’t even like cats, but he had to respond. If the cat had been hurt, he wouldn’t just leave it out there.

He started for the window but faltered at the sight of the dark silhouette that appeared on the other side, outlined in moonlight. Though he could not make out her face in the dark, the way the girl’s hair fell on her shoulders and the way she cocked her head, the curve of her body… he knew her.

A breeze blew in through the window, her hair dancing around her face, and the scent of cherry blossoms grew even stronger. She beckoned to him and he went to her, feeling as though he must be dreaming.

They stood face-to-face in the light of the moon and the blue flickering from his television, he inside the room and she beyond the open window. She reached in to touch him and Jiro closed his eyes, weak with relief.

Her fingers closed on his throat, and relief blossomed into terror.

When she dragged him through the window, he did not even have the breath to scream.