The Waking

8

M id-morning on Thursday, while she was supposed to be paying attention in her history class, Kara couldn’t stop thinking about Ume and Sakura’s behavior the day before. Not even twenty-four hours had passed, and she was already sick of watching her back, waiting for whatever Ume might do in retribution.

At least Kara had gotten some sleep. Her father had given her Ambien. She didn’t like taking the pill-it made her feel groggy in the morning, and she didn’t want to have to rely on medication in order to get some rest-but at least she’d been able to sleep, and she hadn’t dreamed at all, which was a major bonus. This morning she felt more alert, more aware, and only now did she realize just how much her restless nights had begun to wear on her. As bad as she had looked-the dark circles under eyes, her sallow face-she’d felt even worse.

Today she found herself more able to concentrate, and that meant a focus on recent events that she hadn’t been able to manage earlier in the week. What seemed surreal and impossible just the day before now seemed vivid and credible. Others were having bad dreams-Ume and the other soccer girls, some of the boys they hung around with, Sakura, and Kara herself. But Miho claimed she hadn’t been troubled by nightmares, that only Sakura’s sleeplessness had interrupted her slumber.

So where were the connections?

Sakura claimed Ume had something to do with her sister’s death, and that Ume and her friends were being haunted. Despite the cat and the terrible dreams she’d had, Kara couldn’t bring herself to believe that. But clearly, something was troubling them all. Ume thought Sakura had drugged them, but that seemed not only improbable but ridiculous.

Kara had no answers, only questions. Foremost among them was how she fit into the whole scenario. She had never known Akane. If Ume was right and Sakura had done something to them, why would she include Kara? She wouldn’t. And if Akane had decided to haunt Ume because the girl had been involved in her murder, again, why haunt Kara as well?

None of it made any sense. And, as much as she thought the girl was a shallow bitch, Kara didn’t think Ume capable of murder, or even of being an accomplice without falling apart. Sakura had lost her sister; it made sense that she couldn’t be objective.

But maybe she’s half right, Kara thought. Maybe Ume knows who did it. Maybe they all do, and what’s haunting them is guilt.

Not that Sakura would talk about it. Neither she nor Miho had elaborated any further on the reasons for the animosity that seethed between Sakura and Ume. After the clash with Ume and her friends, going to buy candy had seemed like a silly thing to do, but Kara had seen it as almost a last supper. After all, as soon as Ume reported the violence, Sakura’s punishment would be swift. Ume’s friends would support whatever version of the truth the girl wanted to put forward. Kara had no doubt that Sakura would be expelled, or at least suspended.

She glanced at the clock and wondered how long before Sakura would be called in to see the headmaster. Had it already happened? If not, then why not? If there weren’t any repercussions, that meant Ume hadn’t reported the assault. And the only explanation for that was that she was planning some other form of retribution.

Someone knocked lightly on the door.

Every student in the room turned to look, but Joken-sensei completed his thought before surrendering command of the classroom. Looking perturbed at the interruption, he went to the door and slid it open.

Through the gap, Kara caught a glimpse of Mr. Matsui, which surprised her. He must have had a class to teach, so what was he doing out in the corridor?

Joken-sensei stepped into the hall and the two men spoke in low voices, not quite a whisper but not loud enough for the students to hear more than muffled inflections.

Oddly, it was Mr. Matsui who poked his head back into the classroom.

“You will be on your own for several minutes. Misbehavior will not be tolerated. See that you conduct yourselves properly until Joken-sensei returns.”

Without further comment, he withdrew, sliding the door closed.

For perhaps ten long seconds, the class remained silent, staring at the door and at one another. Then a current of murmurs swept the room as they began to wonder aloud about what had just happened. Had Joken-sensei had some sort of personal emergency, a terrible message Mr. Matsui was delivering? Or-given the grim expression on Mr. Matsui’s face- had he been called away to handle another school crisis?

A terrible feeling came over her.

Sakura, she thought.

Kara turned to find Miho watching her, just a few desks away, and she knew the concern in the other girl’s eyes was reflected in her own. Joken-sensei looked the part of the venerable old professor, with his white hair and bushy eyebrows and narrow glasses, and he clearly had a position of great respect among the faculty. If Sakura were about to be expelled or disciplined in some way, it made sense that he’d be called away.

But what about Matsui-sensei?

Kara shook her head at Miho. She didn’t think this was about Sakura after all.

Other guesses were discussed in low tones. Kara glanced around, then her gaze landed on the door. She wondered where her father was, and if he’d been pulled out of his class as well.

“Do you think there’s a fire or something?” a boy asked.

Ren turned toward the kid, rolling his eyes. “Don’t be stupid. They’d evacuate us, not close us in here.”

“Definitely,” Kara said. “Seems to me they don’t want us going anywhere.”

Most of the class looked at her then.

“You think something’s going on they don’t want us to…,” Miho began, but her words trailed off as understanding dawned on her face, followed by sadness.

Ren swore. “Do you think they found someone else?”

That silenced everyone. Nobody wanted to believe it. The grief of Jiro’s death was still very fresh, but it was awful enough as an isolated incident. If they were being kept in class because another student had been killed…

Kara stood and went to the door.

“What are you doing?” someone snapped.

“Sit down,” a boy named Goto said, angry. “We’ll all get in trouble.”

Kara took a breath and slid the door open a few inches. No one shouted at her from the hall; as far as she could tell, there was nobody in the corridor to notice her. Off to the right, she heard voices from the direction of the stairwell, and heavy footfalls, but not coming toward her.

She slid the door further open and looked out into the hall. At the eastern end of the corridor, Miss Aritomo leaned against a window, looking down. When the art teacher began to turn to scan the hall for activity, Kara pulled back into the classroom and shut the door.

“Something’s going on outside,” she said.

Several students got up and headed for the windows. Maiko, who sat in the front corner, was the first one against the glass. Half a dozen others followed, and then Miho, Ren, Kara, and both Soras joined them.

“You idiots,” Goto chided them. “What are you doing?”

Nobody answered him.

From her seat, a girl asked, “Do you see anything?”

At first, Kara didn’t. The field behind the school and the dorm off to the right of the property and the trees in the distance were undisturbed. But then she noticed movement in her peripheral vision and looked down and to the right. At the far corner of the building, several teachers stood on the pavement of the parking area, necks craned as they stared up at something.

“Oh, no,” she started to say.

“The teachers are down there,” Ren said at the same time.

Maiko fumbled with a latch and slid open the window in front of her. For once, Goto said nothing. When Kara glanced back at him, she even thought he had shifted in his chair, as if he wanted to get up and join them but didn’t dare.

“Someone’s up on the roof,” Maiko said. “A girl.”

That got them all standing, rushing to the window in a clatter of desks and chairs and falling books. Kara was jostled and nudged and she nudged in return, feeling a little sick even as she did so, hating that they were all so desperate to watch the spectacle unfold. Was it horror or fascination or excitement that made them all so determined to see? She didn’t want to know the answer.

Maiko hung halfway out the window, with a couple of girls holding onto her so that she didn’t fall. She twisted around, looking up at the far corner, trying to get a glimpse of whoever stood at the edge of the roof.

Through the open window, they could all hear the teachers’ voices now, shouting and calling to the girl on the roof.

“Can you see who it is?” Miho asked.

But Maiko didn’t need to reply. The teachers began to call out a name, and they all knew, then.

“Hana, no!” they shouted. And, “Hana, wait!”

Though she wasn’t a boarding student, Hana was one of Ume’s friends-one of the soccer girls.

Maiko drew back inside the classroom, one hand over her mouth. She backed up until she stumbled over her own desk and sat hard on her chair. Her eyes were rimmed with red and she looked ill, but her sickly appearance wasn’t new. Maiko had already admitted that the nightmares were making her fall apart. This could only make it worse.

The girl looked right at Kara, returned her stare. Then Maiko gave an awful, brittle little laugh.

“Am I awake?” she asked, her voice very small.

What terrified Kara was the look on the girl’s face. Maiko really didn’t know.

More shouting drifted in from the open window. Kara leaned against the glass, looking out at the teachers. Even at this distance, she saw the sudden change in their faces.

Mr. Matsui actually screamed.

Hana plummeted, without any screams of her own, and when she struck the pavement, she crumpled like a discarded rag doll, bones giving way.

There were shrieks inside the classroom. Miho reached out and took Kara’s hand and they stood together. Ren turned from the window, wiping tears from his eyes.

Everyone looked at Maiko.

Who gazed out the window, not seeing any of them, expression entirely blank.

“I wonder how she got up there,” Maiko said quietly, in a tone that suggested not horror but envy.

“When I decided to come to Japan to teach, I never imagined anything like this,” Rob Harper said. “I know bullying is an epidemic here, but this kind of ugly stuff feels so American to me. I guess I figured I was leaving it behind.”

Kara sat on the floor just outside the closed door of her father’s classroom, knees drawn up beneath her. Inside, he and Miss Aritomo were talking quietly, and though it was obvious they thought otherwise, she could hear almost every word.

“I wish I could disagree, but suicide has become more common here in recent years,” Miss Aritomo said.

Mr. Matsui appeared from his classroom down the hall, glanced up and down and caught sight of Kara. He gave a bow of his head and she returned the gesture. Mr. Matsui walked toward her but turned to go downstairs, no doubt to some kind of gathering of teachers and administrators.

Otherwise, the upper floor seemed deserted. There were police in the building, and there must be plenty of them outside, and the faculty were scattered all over the place, but the students were gone. They had been kept in their classrooms for nearly two hours-through lunch, though no one in Kara’s room seemed to have much of an appetite-and then they had all been dismissed. The boarding students had been the first to be allowed to leave. Only when they had departed, in an orderly fashion, of course, did the day students get the go-ahead to leave.

There would be no o-soji. And the homeroom teachers informed their classes that school had been canceled for the following day, which was Friday.

Kara wanted to go home. And not to the small house she and her father had rented near the school. Home.

Instead, she was the only student still at the school.

Her thoughts drifted, her mind numb, and she wouldn’t even allow herself to think about Sakura or Akane or Jiro-any of it. She rocked a little, impatient, wishing her father could leave now.

Hana had been nothing to her except another sour-faced, jeering girl who took Ume’s lead and sneered at the little gaijin bonsai. But the idea of anyone throwing themselves off the roof, hitting the pavement so hard that their bones gave way in an instant, collapsing like a house of cards… The idea was hideous.

She couldn’t stop wondering why Hana had done it. Maiko had said that she was falling apart because of the nightmares and her inability to sleep. Had the same things driven Hana off the roof?

Kara pushed her palms against her forehead. No more.

In her father’s homeroom, he and Miss Aritomo lowered their voices. Kara listened harder. The only reason for them to quiet down would be if they didn’t want to be overheard. She should have granted them some privacy, but curiosity beat courtesy, and she put her ear close to the sliding door.

“How can you be so certain there’s no connection between Hana and the boy who was killed this weekend?” Rob Harper asked.

“There can’t be,” Miss Aritomo said. “They knew each other from school, of course. But the school isn’t very big; it makes sense that they would know each other. Hana killed herself, Rob. No one pushed her. Half of the teachers saw her jump.”

“And that boy, Jiro, drowned. Two suicides, by students who knew each other? It could have been some kind of lovers’ quarrel.”

Miss Aritomo did not reply at first. Kara could feel the weight of her silence, even through the door.

“What is it?” her father asked.

“Jiro may not have committed suicide.”

“That’s not what I was told.”

“Probably because your daughter is a student here,” Miss Aritomo said. “They wouldn’t risk the other students finding out the truth.. . or worse, their parents.”

“Or they didn’t tell me because I’m a gaijin.”

“That’s possible, too.”

Her father sighed. “So the boy was murdered?”

“The police have not been able to say for certain,” Miss Aritomo replied.

“That’s why they’re still saying he drowned?”

“Jiro did drown, but from what I’ve heard, that isn’t the only reason he died,” Miss Aritomo said. “When they found him, he had been

… most of his blood was gone.”

Kara flinched, trying to process that. She stared at the door.

“How is that possible?” her father asked.

“The police are suggesting that he might have been bleeding into the water,” Miss Aritomo said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Kara’s father said. “That much blood doesn’t just leak out. He’d have to have been dead before he went into the bay, but that doesn’t work, either, because Jiro couldn’t have swallowed water if he was already dead. Drowning wouldn’t have been part of the cause of death, unless whoever did it had some way to drain his blood-or pump it out, or something-while he was in the bay. That’s insane.”

“Yes. I do not understand how it is possible. But now you see there can’t be any connection between Jiro’s death and Hana’s suicide, unless she was in love with him and killed herself in grief.”

Kara couldn’t listen anymore. Head spinning, she stood and knocked on the door, cutting off the conversation inside.

“Come in,” her father called.

She slid the door open. Her dad and Miss Aritomo looked at her with a mixture of guilt and suspicion, as though they’d been caught in something illicit. That look made Kara think back to a moment she’d barely noticed in their conversation. The art teacher had called her father by his first name, sort of an intimate thing in Japan for a man and woman who were only colleagues.

“Hi, honey. Sorry to keep you waiting,” her father said. “Actually, it’s good that you knocked. We’re supposed to be downstairs by now, I think.”

“I saw Matsui-sensei going down,” Kara said. She glanced at Miss Aritomo and gave her a small bow. “I don’t want to be any trouble. I know there’s a lot going on. But I’d really rather not sit around an empty school waiting, and I know you don’t want me going home alone. Would it be all right if I go over to the dorm and hung around with Miho and Sakura until you can leave?”

Her father considered for a moment, and then nodded. “I’ll come and get you. What room are they in?”

Kara told him, and then the three of them walked down to the first floor together. She hugged him good-bye and went down to the genkan to put her street shoes on.

Outside, all but a single police car had departed. In her mind’s eye, she pictured what the parking lot side of the school would look like. At the back corner, there would be police tape. On the pavement would be smears of blood, the school waiting for permission to wash it away.

She went the other way, around the side where Sakura always went to smoke, where they’d run into trouble the day before. The spot where Hana had died might not be as awful as she imagined it, but then again, it might be worse. Best to just avoid it completely.

Even as she walked across the field between the school and the dorm, Kara didn’t turn to look. But there were plenty of students who were. At least twenty kids-boys and girls both-were outside the dorm, sitting on the stairs or just standing around, some of them pretending to play catch. They all seemed to be moving in slow motion, mesmerized by death.

It startled Kara to see Miho sitting on the steps by herself, staring across at the school, the sun glinting off her glasses. Of Maiko and Ume and Hana’s other friends, there was no sign.

“Where’s Sakura?” Kara asked as she sat down next to Miho.

“Upstairs, watching TV.”

“I guess she thinks she knows why Hana did it?”

Miho looked at Kara. “Because she was haunted. Yes. I’m really worried about her. She doesn’t seem sad, or even surprised.”

Kara wanted to tell Miho about the conversation she’d overheard between her father and Miss Aritomo, but with so many people around, now wasn’t the time. Instead, she asked a question, keeping her voice low.

“I still don’t understand,” Kara whispered. “What aren’t you telling me, Miho? I know what Sakura said about Ume, but what’s the connection between Jiro and Akane?”

Miho studied Kara’s face, then glanced around at the other students who surrounded them and shook her head.

“It’s not my story to tell.”