Chirahora

Chirahora (ちらほら): here and there; now and then; from time to time; occasionally

Everything one can ever feel about a person, she has felt about him.

She is in the first grade, seated on the blue plush rug, her short, stubby legs folded in crisscross applesauce. In the corner is a stain from the time someone threw up, on account of the most recent outbreak of the stomach flu. She sits in the opposite corner, her back perfectly straight, as she awaits her final fate.

The teacher is a sweet-faced woman with hair that flips above her shoulders like mirrored ski slopes. Craft tongue depressors rattle around as she shakes the repurposed can of instant coffee. Squinting, she extracts one stick and reads off the name scrawled out in black marker.

“Nathan.”

A boy’s head pops up, his hair poking up at all angles, as if he has just been electrocuted.

“Today, you will be pairing up with”—she shakes the coffee can; shack-a-shack-a-shack—“Ayumi.”

Ayumi’s eyes jump to Nathan. When her gaze meets his, he swings his arm around in a comically exaggerated wave. It is a miracle, she thinks, that he did not dislocate his shoulder.

She knows Nathan. Knows he is the cheeriest boy she has ever met. He laughs at the smallest, most ridiculous things, even the jokes printed in black sans-serif font on plastic taffy wrappers. He quirks his head to one side when he grins, as if he cannot possibly hold the weight of his own happiness.

This is what she thinks in the moment.

Later, she will realize she no longer remembers what he looks like when he smiles.

Once everyone has been paired up, the teacher herds the class outside, to the black-topped lab tables. It is science-experiment day, and, as she tells her students, “things are about to get messy.”

Ayumi clips her worksheet to her rusting clipboard. While she takes care of the administrative work, writing her name and Nathan’s at the top of the page, Nathan fiddles with the top of the roll of Mentos.

“This is so cool,” he says, picking at the foil. “I always wanted to make things explode.”

Ayumi’s head snaps up, her eyes wide. She casts a glance at the teacher, as if to scream, HELP! You’ve paired me with a maniac, but the teacher occupied with other matters, hoping to keep the students from sticking Mentos in their mouths and taking small sips of soda before she can even explain what these items are for.

Nathan cranes his neck until she has no choice but to look at him.

“Hi,” he says.

Ayumi frowns. “Hi.”

He tips his head to the left; she is reminded of her favorite video game, in which she plays with a virtual dog who barks at the sound of its name and, when confused, tilts its little pixelated head to the side.

“I don’t think we’ve ever been partnered up before,” he says. “We’ve talked and stuff, but not a lot. You don’t say much.”

Her cheeks grow warm. “I’m not really good at talking to people.”

She isn’t even good at talking to her virtual dog. It embarrasses her, having to speak into the little microphone. She drives her parents mad, repeating her dog’s name until it turns around.

“What do you mean?” Nathan asks, still working on the foil on the Mentos, a determined look on his face. “You’re talking to me right now, and you’re doing super good.”

Well, she thinks.

She reaches for the roll, eager to help. In her haste, her fingers brush his knuckles.

“Whoa,” he says, releasing his grip on the Mentos. The tube hits the table with a clank. “Your hand is super warm.”

He curls all his fingers around hers.

Later, when they are older, she will think of how easy it would have been to cling to his hand then. To beg him to stay. She would have been there for him, no matter what, and would have said so, had she known.

“Do you have a fever or something?” Nathan asks. “‘Cause if you are, if you’re sick, you should go home. Or else you’ll get me sick, and I’ll get other people sick, and at the same time, you’ll also be getting other people sick, and we’ll both be getting people sick, and then the whole world would be sick, even the doctors, and then what?”

He looks over at her, as if he’s expecting a response.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Then the zombies would come,” he says, nodding solemnly, “and we would all be zombified.”

She picks up the roll of Mentos and peels it open, foil spiraling out and hanging off the tube like smoke from a cigarette. “I don’t think I’m sick.”

He unscrews the soda’s cap. “Maybe I healed you.”

She lifts her head, her brow furrowed.

Then, smiling, she says, “Maybe.”

He initiates a game of jan ken po to see which of them will get to drop the Mento into the soda. She does not remember saying she has any interest in being the one to carry out the experiment. In fact, she would rather be the one to take the notes.

He wins anyhow.

She has just begun to wonder why she has, just now, begun to feel the slightest bit feverish—perhaps she is sick after all?—when he grabs the bottle of soda and says, “I’m gonna put in a whole bunch.”

Her eyes widen. “Nathan, wait.”

Too late. The bottle explodes in a fountain of amber froth.

Ayumi shrieks, struggling to shield both her head and their worksheet. With the hand not yet covered in soda foam, Nathan grabs her arm and pulls her under the table.

“Take cover,” he yells, presumably to the others. “TAKE COVER!”

He and Ayumi huddle under the table as the teacher sighs and heads for the sink.

“We’re in trouble,” Ayumi whispers.

“Why?” he asks. “We did the right thing.”

They watch, still hunched under the table, as soda drips off the edge and onto the floor in a marvelous display of caramel rain.

“Just,” he finishes, “a little too much of the right thing.”

When she laughs, he looks over at her. “Hey. I’ve never heard you laugh before.”

Color rises to her face.

The teacher stops before them, one foot tapping out a fast, impatient rhythm. “Are you going to help me clean up this mess, or are you just going to crouch under there and make me clean it for you?”

Nathan opens his mouth, but Ayumi shakes her head.

Rhetorical question, she tries to tell him with her eyes.

He clamps his jaw shut.

They pull themselves out from under the table and begin to clean. Soda laps at her palm as she soaks up the soda with a paper towel. She has just turned to grab another when there’s a blur of motion to her left.

“Nice going, Nathan,” one of their classmates jeers. “Now the teacher’s gonna in a bad mood all day.”

“Why can’t you just follow directions?” a girl standing at one of the other tables asks.

Nathan drags his paper towel along the soda stains. Everything is sticky.

Ducking her head, Ayumi makes her way to the sink and wets a paper towel. When she returns, he looks up, as if he expected her to leave him all alone.

“I didn’t mean to make her mad,” he tells her.

“I know,” she says. “I believe you.”

He frowns at her for a moment. Then, as they resume mopping up the mess pooling around them, he smiles.

It is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.

~

Nathan seems to reach all the exciting milestones first. She supposes this is only natural, as he is five months her senior, but it still feels unfair. The only thing she has accomplished before him is completing her reading log. She was the first in the entire class to fill her grid with foil stars, her paper gleaming like the chest of a decorated veteran.

The most recent milestone Nathan has reached first is discovering a loose tooth. Ayumi, whose teeth are all still firmly in place, is both fascinated and disgusted by his uncanny ability to push his tooth forward with his tongue. She is reminded of knockdown dolls at the state fair, bowled over by a well-aimed toss of a softball.

One day, Nathan enlists her help with a super-secret project. It isn’t until Quiet Homework Time that he explains his plan to her. Even once he has gone through it, she’s not sure she understands.

Sliding past her, Nathan ties one end of a comically long piece of floss around the doorknob. The other end has been fastened around his tooth.

“Now,” he says, pushing the door open until it just barely brushes her arm, “you just have to slam the door real hard.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t do that. What if I hurt you?”

He waves off her concern. “You won’t. My cousin did it before. He got blood all over the floor, but he was fine.”

“He got BLOOD—”

“Not that much. Just a little.”

She crosses her arms. “You said it got all over.”

“He was probably overexaggerating.”

She frowns. She isn’t sure how one can overexaggerate. Isn’t exaggerating overstating something already?

“If I bleed,” he says, “we can clean it up later. Come on. Help me. Please?”

She glances over her shoulder. The teacher is in the middle of assisting one of their classmates with a problem he doesn’t understand.

When she turns back around, she is faced with a problem she doesn’t understand. Why Nathan would ever want to yank his tooth out of his head, she has no clue.

“Come on,” he says again. “Please? You’re the only one I trust.”

She blinks. “Really?”

He smiles. The floss is still tied around his tooth, as if to keep him from floating away. “Yeah. Of course.”

She holds his gaze for a moment, then nods. “Okay.”

His grin widens. “You’re the best.”

She watches, her arms crossed behind her, as he braces himself against the cubbies. Once he has curled his hands around the sides, to ensure he won’t shoot forward from the momentum of the slam of the door, he says, “Ready when you are.”

She takes a breath, then slams the door shut.

His scream is so impressively shrill, the teachers in the surrounding classrooms mistake it for the wail of a siren.

~

It isn’t the Great Pyramid, and isn’t a great pyramid either, but she takes pride in it, her small bright-blue creation.

She is in the second grade, stacking sturdy plastic cups on the floor of the pavilion. She and the others should be playing flag football, but it has been pouring rain for the past week, and the field is so muddy, several students’ shoes have been lost to the muck. After running a few laps around the pavilion, she was presented with the choice to play four square or stack cups. She would have preferred to do neither but has opted for the cups.

She lifts her head now, searching the pavilion. In the distance, Nathan plays a game of four square, laughing as he dives for the ball and whacks it with the heel of his hand.

She is just about to place the last cup on her pyramid when someone shouts. She turns, then shields her face as a red rubber ball crashes into the pyramid, knocking cups everywhere. Her arms drop to her sides as the plastic lips tick, tick, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick along the floor.

“Ayumi!”

Nathan’s by her side in an instant, abandoning his own game of four square to grab her spilled cups. He tries to place them where they were but ends up knocking most of them over again in his haste to catch more.

“Are you okay?” he asks, still reaching for the cups.

She nods, her eyes glassy.

He looks around, his brow furrowed. “Who did that? Say sorry to Ayumi for knocking over her cups.”

She ducks her head. “It’s okay.”

“Nuh-uh. That was a super-cool pyramid. I saw it.” He collects the last cup, slides it over to her, and rockets to his feet. “Who did that?”

She swallows. Everyone is staring. She wishes she could disappear.

Nathan pauses for a moment, his hands on his hips. He can do this, as they are still young, but in the years to come, standing in such a way will be deemed girly. Every boy who ever stands in such a way will immediately be called a slur.

“Do you wanna play four square with us, then?” he asks.

She shakes her head, her face burning. “I don’t know how.”

He holds out a hand. “I’ll teach you.”

She stares at his outstretched palm. Then, turning back to the cups, she gathers them up, places them back in their cloth bag, and sets the bag back on the folding table. After a pause, she takes his hand. It’s warm and raw from knocking the ball back and forth for so long.

She holds on as tightly as she can.

~

Every time she climbs the library stairs, she feels like a beautiful, graceful princess mounting the steps to her throne.

She is not a princess. Nor is she beautiful or graceful. She is twelve, with a blotchy bruise on her knee from taking a spill in the middle of PE. To her left is a corkboard, a flyer for the middle school’s book club pinned at the bottom-right corner. She glances at it, then turns away. The only book club of which she has ever been a part is the unofficial one she holds with her best friend, Nicole, and they don’t discuss the books as much as they gush over them, talking about all their favorite parts and, frankly, all their favorite love interests, from mysterious bad boys with hearts of gold to happy-go-lucky rays of sunshine.

Tightening her grip on her bag, she ascends. The chilled air and clean, bookish scent of the library bring a smile to her face. She often arrives early at school, holing up in the library and leaving at the very last minute. She knows the librarian’s name, as well as her favorite books, some of which Ayumi has read, with mixed results. Though she appreciates the classics, she can’t help but find the books she and Nicole squeal over far more enjoyable.

She checks books out every day, about almost everything. Though novels are her favorite, she also borrows the occasional nonfiction book on writing, art, or music. There are some books she has checked out so frequently, all the stamps on the right side of the due-date slip are hers.

She grounds a foot on the first step to the next floor, her grip on the railing tight. Her fingers clench, then unclench as she makes her way up the stairs. After all these years of friendship, she has never gotten over that fuzzy, fizzy feeling, as if someone has set off soda fountains in her chest.

The study section on the upper level of the library is small, about the size of a living room. The study desks are partitioned by long wooden barriers; the room resembles the maze of a caged white lab rat.

Nathan sits on the edge of a desk, his legs miles long and hidden under dark-wash jeans. He is careful not to place his shoes on the seat. She wonders, for a moment, if anyone else has ever noticed this before, this small display of consideration. She doesn’t think so. Most days, it seems as though she is the only one who sees every part of him.

He has changed over the years. Though his eyes have remained that sweet, hazelnut brown, his jaw has sharpened. His limbs have stretched. His brow is heavy, leaving him with a permanently skeptical, irritated expression. She supposes he perhaps is skeptical and irritated, being twelve years old, but sometimes, when he looks at her, she feels as though he is glaring at her. As if he is blaming her for sins she has not yet committed.

Today, however, he brightens at the sight of her. All these years later, and his smile is the same.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi,” she says. They are the only two people in the study section, but they keep their voices low.

He scoots to the side, one knobby elbow knocking against the partition. She takes the chair, the one on which he made sure not to place his feet, and smiles up at him.

Then she stops. She will not have braces for another year or two and is convinced her teeth are crooked and ugly, two pairs of yellowing picket fences handcrafted by a tipsy carpenter.

She covers her mouth with one hand. “Thanks for meeting me here.”

“Yeah, of course.” He tilts his head. “What have you been up to?”

“The usual. Homework. It’s whatever,” she says, trying very hard to sound blasé.

“Cool.” Nathan places a hand on his black heavy-duty camera bag. “I brought my camera today. Photography class after lunch.”

He too is attempting to sound blasé.

“Am I allowed to see?” she asks.

He raises a brow. “You think I’m gonna ramble on and on about aperture and shutter speed and not let you see?”

She grins as he starts to unzip the bag, pausing every so often, purely for dramatic effect. He’s fun, she keeps thinking. Or he can be, anyway.

“Voilà.” He takes out his camera. “Ayumi, meet camera. Camera, Ayumi.”

“A pleasure,” she says, extending a hand to the camera.

“This one is really good.” He is petting the camera now, as if it is his sleek, hairless cat. “It has these really cool settings. Most cameras can’t do this, but if you look here…”

She watches him, her eyes running along his face. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that he could, at any moment, raise his head and catch her staring.

She loves looking at him. The way his black hair sticks up at the ends. His face is angular, drawn by an unforgiving hand. His deep-brown eyes sparkle with excitement as he tosses at least half a dozen terms unfamiliar to her.

Setting an elbow on the desk, she rests her head on her hand. “If you could take a picture of anything in the world, what would you choose?”

Leaning back, he rests his head on the partition. The excitement in his eyes has dissolved, making way for contemplation. “Anything?”

She bites her lip. “Anything.”

Say me, Nathan. Please, please say me.

He won’t. He can’t. He’s not the love interest in the books she reads with Nicole. He’s just a boy, still young. He loves cameras, talking shop, not awkward twelve-year-olds.

“Well, well, well. What do we have here?”

She and Nathan freeze, their blood running cold. She sinks into her seat, her side pressing into the desk, her eyes gluing themselves to the soft library carpet.

Nathan straightens up, the slides off the desk, his leg bumping her arm. He does not apologize. He does not even notice. His hand hits the wooden barrier, then the desk, then his thigh in a prolonged three-part collapse.

“Are we crashing your study date, Natey-boy?” one of the newcomers asks.

She winces.

“It’s not a date,” Nathan says.

“A nerd having a date in a nerd place,” one of the other guys asks. Then, to ensure his point has properly come across, he adds, “The nerd library.”

“I’m surprised you even know what a library is,” Nathan mutters.

The guy narrows his eyes. “What did you just say, nerd?”

Nathan turns his head.

One of the newcomers glances over at Ayumi. Nodding to her with his chin, he says, “Hey, Ayumi.”

She clamps one hand over her knee. “Hey.”

She and this boy share a home economics class. All she can remember about him, aside from the fact that he obviously hates Nathan, is that when they were supposed to make orange-dream smoothies, he neglected to put the top on the blender and sprayed the kitchenette with orange foam.

Funny. Nathan did something similar years before. She has always had this hypothesis that people hate those who are eerily like themselves. It’s like the uncanny valley, in a way, or a mirror shattered into so many pieces, it almost looks whole.

In any case, this is not the first time Disaster-Smoothie Boy has specifically called out to Ayumi. He thinks it’s fun to tease the shy girl. Fun to bully the happy boy.

So very fun.

Years later, she will think about it. The things she did not witness. She and Nathan were never in the same class after that first year. They were only in the pavilion at the same time in the second grade because their classes had been paired together for PE.

Afterward, they had to seek each other out, and though she always did her best to look out for him, there were countless hours she must have missed. So many times he must have been picked on. So many things he must have hidden from her.

Had he really hidden them, though? Or had she chosen not to see?

Once the other boys have left, she looks back over at Nathan. Every time she tries to speak, he shakes his head and turns away.

He never does tell her what it was that he would take a picture of. Yet she knows it would not have been her.

Because in the end, he leaves. The way he always, always does.

~

Hello?

Hi. This is Ayumi.

Yeah. I know. Caller ID.

Right. Yeah. I just…wanted to…I don’t know. Call, I guess. Because you weren’t here today. I was worried.

Oh.

Do you…have a fever? Are you sick?

No. I just…didn’t go to school today.

Oh. (The faint sound of a phone cord being wound around a finger. It’s an old phone, one her mother doesn’t have the heart to get rid of, though by this point, cordless phones are all the rage. Soon, no one will even have a landline.) Is everything okay?

Not really.

Oh. I’m sorry. is there anything I can do?

Not really.

Oh. Okay.

(A pause. For a moment, she thinks he has hung up. This is the first time they have spoken on the phone. He gave her his number before, but she didn’t know what to do with it. She isn’t allowed to text. She wouldn’t want to anyhow. She is a bit of a snob, convinced that texting, especially with abbreviations such as lol and omg, is an insult to the English language.)

(Had she been allowed to text, however, she might have texted him. Just with ha, ha instead of lol and oh my goodness instead of omg. These would have taken forever to type using T9, but she would have done it, if she knew he would answer.)

(As it is, she rarely uses her cell phone, except to call her parents. She is not even using it now, having chosen to call him from the landline, for reasons she will never be able to parse. Maybe she thought she would reach him better that way. Landline sounds a lot like lifeline.)

You don’t have to stay home just to avoid them, Nathan. You could tell a teacher.

They wouldn’t do anything. (A swallow so loud, she feels it in her own throat.) They never do.

What if I went with you? They can’t just ignore both of us.

Yes, they can. They do. And I don’t need you to fight my battles for me.

But…

(She is wrapping the phone cord tighter and tighter around her finger. The tip has blanched, in the throes of suffocation.)

Will you be back tomorrow?

Maybe. I don’t know. (An exhalation, as if he is upset with her.) I have to go.

Oh. Okay. But…Okay.

~

The grounds of the state fair are covered in red dirt, making it seem as though she, eighth grader Ayumi Chiraku, has stepped foot on the faraway planet of Mars.

It’s not a date, she tells herself, kicking up a cloud of crimson dust.

“It’s a date,” Nicole says, trying and failing to bite into her caramel apple without ruining her slick of pink lip gloss.

“It’s not a date,” Ayumi says, smoothing a hand along her knees. She has dressed in her best outfit, a floral skirt and a pink camisole, with a half-sleeved white sweater to finish off the librarian-chic look.

It is not a very location-appropriate ensemble. It’s a hot day, as it always is in spring, as if the weather must somehow make up for bitter winter, and a white sweater and red dirt is a disaster waiting to happen.

“It’s a date,” Nicole says again, one hand rising to her ear as she absentmindedly fiddles with her earrings. The plastic strawberries jingle on their silver hooks. “What will you do if he tries to hold your hand?”

“He’s not going to try to hold my hand. And for the last time, it’s not a date.”

Her phone buzzes. She glances down.

Nicole, now attempting to extract the caramel from her teeth with one perfectly painted nail, cranes her neck. “Is that him?”

“He’s here,” she says, her words tumbling over Nicole’s.

“Got it. I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.” Switching her caramel apple to her other side, Nicole reaches for Ayumi’s hand, squeezes once, then lets go. “Have fun. It’s a date.”

“It’s not,” Ayumi calls out.

Nicole sticks out her tongue, takes a bite of her caramel apple, and turns back around, strolling away like the impossibly cool girl she is.

A moment later, Nathan appears, lifting a hand and waving it in a circle, just as he did when they were all of seven years old.

She laughs. He laughs too. She falls silent just to hear him.

“Hey,” he says as he reaches her side.

“Hey,” she says back. “Thanks for meeting me.”

“Of course. This is gonna be fun. I haven’t been to the state fair in years. I don’t remember it being this huge.” He peers down at his shoes. “I remember all this dirt, though.”

She makes a face. “I didn’t. If I had, I wouldn’t have worn this sweater.”

He glances up at her, scanning her outfit. She fights the urge to cross her arms.

Of course, there’s nothing to hide. She has no real curves. She never really will. Her body speaks of her misguided determination to forever stay on the straight and narrow.

“We’ll try to keep it clean,” he tells her with a small, silly salute. “Soldier’s promise.”

“Oh, so you’re a soldier now?”

He shakes a head as they start walking. Neither knows where they are going. “Nah. I’m not cut out for JROTC. Photography’s more my speed.”

“And aperture,” she jokes.

He laughs. “And aperture.”

His attention is everywhere. She does her best to follow his gaze, trying to see it all through his eyes. The swinging boat. The spinning ride. The Ferris wheel. The bumper cars.

“There’s so much to do,” he says. “We could stay here forever and never run out of stuff.”

She nods, her mind hooking on his words: We could stay here forever.

As a teenager, she will ruminate on the concept of forever.

As an adult, she will instead focus on stay.

“Oh, man,” he says, his eyes lingering on two people hanging upside-down in a roller coaster car. “That looks terrifying.”

She winces. “Please don’t make me do that.”

A shadow passes across his face. Her stomach drops, as if she has swapped places with the woman whose sunglasses have tumbled off and clattered onto the roller coaster’s floor.

“I would never make you do anything,” he says.

Ayumi’s face falls. Her lips part, then purse, then part again.

He does this sometimes. This immediate shutdown. She never knows why it happens or how to bring him back.

When they were little, he told her everything. About the silly things, like his favorite joke—I was reading a book on helium; I just couldn’t put it down—but also about the more serious things. He’s hapa, the son of a mild-mannered white man and an affectionate Japanese woman. When his parents had married, his father took his mother’s surname, Horamoto, which they then passed down to him.

It felt so empowering to her, this departure from tradition. She didn’t have a story like that. Both she and her mother have her father’s last name. Even if they didn’t, she would always have a Japanese surname. Had her father taken her mother’s name, it wouldn’t have been nearly as groundbreaking. It would have felt, in a way, like he had simply walked into the wrong house on the very same street.

That being said, she often dreamed of it. Of having a new last name. Not her mother’s, or her father’s, but his. Horamoto.

Yet as much as she cared for him, she sometimes could not understand him. As they waded through the swampiness of their middle-school years, through the cruelty and the awkwardness and the fear, he began to pull away, one day at a time. He stopped spending so much time with her, stopped telling her his best bad jokes. He wouldn’t smile at the sight of her unless he was sure they were alone, and even then, it was rare, like a treasure. Like a treat. He missed school, days at a time, and wouldn’t ever tell her why.

They step into the line for the Ferris wheel. A woman bites into a salted soft pretzel, the child in her arms babbling angrily as he reaches for everything he can’t have.

“So,” Ayumi says, running a hand along her brow. “How have you been?”

“Fine,” Nathan says. “It’s pretty busy here.”

“Right? I didn’t think it would be so busy.” She shifts her weight from foot to foot. “I guess that’s just how it is at the state fair.”

He tilts his head. Then, raising an invisible microphone, he asks, “And what do you think of the state of the fair? How would you judge the fairness of the state?”

She blinks up at him, momentarily confused as he holds his fist out to her. After a moment, and a wiggle of his brows, she breaks into laughter. “You’re ridiculous.”

“You’re ridiculous.” He grins. “It’s not fair how ridiculous you are.”

She giggles, the sound frothy. “You’ve got me in a state.”

He hesitates, then leans a little closer. While most of the boys in their year have fallen victim to the allures of ridiculously strong body spray, he just smells like soap. Soap and sunscreen and just the slight hint of sweat.

“A state of what?” he asks.

Of falling for you.

“Hey, Nate!”

She flinches, first at the sound, then at herself. For the rest of her life, she will never forget that single thought of hers. That single, stupid thought.

She turns, her face flushed, and catches sight of a group of guys.

“This your girlfriend?” one asks.

Nathan’s jaw clenches so tightly, it’s a miracle his teeth don’t shatter. “No.”

She drops her head, her eyes on her red-dirt-stained shoes. They were white once, she thinks, but will never be clean again.

She keeps her head bowed, her heart pounding, as the guys elbow Nathan.

Stop, she tries to say. Don’t.

She bites her tongue until she tastes the tang of blood.

They leave, laughing like crows. Nathan won’t look her in the eye.

Two silent minutes later, they step onto the Ferris wheel. Their gondola sways. It takes everything in her not to reach for him.

“Nathan,” she says as they rise on the wheel. “Whatever those guys said, don’t let—”

“Don’t let.” His leg bounces. The bottoms and sides of his shoes bleed a harsh dark red. “Don’t let. As if this is all a choice.”

She closes her mouth, then peers out, her hands twisted in her lap. Down below, people are ants, small and inconsequential.

Stupid. So stupid. There has never once been a stupider girl.

In the days leading up to this, their great, momentous non-date, she let her anticipation build, little hopes gathering in her chest like cotton candy sugar crystals. She imagined him purchasing a cone of it to share, the two of them picking pieces off the paper base and tossing blue fluff into the other’s mouth. She imagined him leading her over to the face-painting tables, slowly inching his hand closer and closer as a stranger turned her into a butterfly. She imagined them at the carousel, the two of them choosing horses so close that, no matter where they were going, no matter what was happening in the real world, he would be right beside her as they spun around and around.

You know what the best thing about the Ferris wheel is? she wants to ask him. Even if you faint on it, you’ll still come back around.

It’s true. He always does. Just not then. Not that day. Because once the ride is over, before she can tell him how sorry she is for having stood there and done nothing, he says he’s going to go. Then he leaves her there, alone.

That evening, once she is home, having never told her mother she spent the last two hours by herself, she strips off her clothes, tosses them into her hamper, and cries into her pillow.

At the very least, she tells herself, Nathan kept his promise. Her white sweater remained absolutely spotless.

~

They stop speaking after that. Stop waving. Stop smiling. She keeps her eyes on the ground, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, as if to protect what has already been broken.

Nicole is furious on her behalf. Ayumi, doing her best to sound mature, informs her that there’s no point in trying to hold on to someone who keeps letting her go.

“You got that from a book, didn’t you?” Nicole says.

Ayumi bursts into tears.

The school year ends. She and Nicole begin high school. Early into the year, Nicole starts dating a boy in her history class who turns out to be one Mr. Nathan Horamoto’s new best friend.

“I’ll break up with him,” Nicole says the moment she finds out.

“Don’t,” Ayumi says, though she is secretly pleased with Nicole’s immense display of loyalty. It feels like something two book characters would do for each other, sacrificing their happiness to save the other.

“I can,” Nicole says. “Really. I don’t mind.”

Ayumi sighs. “You can’t do that, Nicole. What if this guy is the love of your life?”

“What if Nathan was supposed to be yours?” Nicole shoots back. “And what if he’s just too dumb to realize it?”

“He’s not dumb.”

“He is,” she insists. “Anyone who would ditch you like that is stupid.”

Ayumi shakes her head. She’s imagining it now, her heart pounding as she positions herself under the blade of the guillotine.

For you, Nicole, she thinks.

The rope burns her hands as she swiftly lets it go.

Yet in the end, her great sacrifice turns out to be relatively painless. Though her breath leaves her in a puff as soon as she sees him again, it takes only a matter of days for the tension between them to dissolve. They fall back into old habits, build up old jokes like they’re stacking cups on the floor of a gym. She has so much fun with her friends, her teachers sometimes catch her grinning in the middle of class, still ruminating on their last conversation.

The four struggle through their first semester of high school, clinging to the promise of winter break. After all those hours of studying for final exams, they promise to spend as much time together as possible, with absolutely no talk of school.

Then, suddenly, he leaves.

One day, they are joking about having caught senioritis three years early and musing about what their second semester will be like. Nathan is making plans to deliver presents to the three of them, his so-called Santa Trip, and Ayumi is furiously texting Nicole for advice on what to write on his gift tag. Your friend? Sincerely? With my utmost gratitude? The four of them are taking bets on which of them will take the worst photos of the fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Ayumi is trying to drop out, claiming she never takes good pictures anyhow, but Nathan keeps telling her that’s the whole point.

The next thing she knows, he’s not answering their texts, and he’s not picking up their calls, and when she and the others convince Nicole’s mother to drive them out to his house, they find it empty. They return to school and ask his homeroom teacher where he’s gone, and she says, “I’m so sorry. He left.”

He left. He left. What does that mean? Where did he go?

No one knows.

It isn’t just him. His whole family is gone. Someone says they heard his dad transferred for work. Someone else claims they’re in witness protection.

Yet when asked about Nathan Horamoto, most people say only, “Who?” and Ayumi, despite knowing she is not familiar everyone in their freshman class either, feels like tying all their teeth up with floss and slamming every door as hard as she can.

~

In her mind, there is a door labeled Nathan. For the past two and a half years, she has kept it tightly locked.

The summer after a stressful junior year, she decides to further stress herself out by beginning the college application process early. She hopes to go somewhere far.

It will occur to her, later, that it wasn’t so much that she wanted to get away from her hometown as much as it was that she wanted to get away from the person she was there. The girl so easily left behind.

Yet in the moment, as she studies the backs of two cardboard boxes of shake-and-bake chicken—one name brand, the other StarMart’s cheap knockoff—she is thinking only of the doors that college will soon throw open for her.

Then she turns, and something in her slams shut.

“Nathan,” she says, his name soft in her mouth. She isn’t even sure she’s really said it until he looks over at her, his brows lifting as he takes her in.

“Hey,” he says, as if no time has passed at all.

She shakes her head, overcome by a feeling so vertiginous, she’s worried she’ll throw up on his shoes. “It’s you.”

“It’s me,” he says, in a tone so close to sorrowful, she almost cries herself.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. “I thought you left.”

“I did.” He licks his lips. “But I’m back now. We all are. My whole family.”

“Oh.” Ayumi rakes a hand through her hair. “Wow. Since when?”

“I don’t know. A couple weeks?”

“A couple weeks,” she echoes. Later, she will lambaste herself for not having known earlier. If she really cared, she would have known. She would have sensed it. She would have felt it deep in her bones. “For how long?”

He doesn’t seem to know how to answer this question; she doesn’t know how to better explain it.

“Are you coming back to school?” she asks instead.

“Oh. Yeah. A different one, though.” His fingers pinch themselves into air quotes. “A fresh start.”

“Oh, ha, ha,” she says, as if this is somehow funny.

A beat.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” she says. “I never thought I would see you again.”

“Yeah.” He pauses. “Hey, so it’s been nice to see you. Could I give you my number? We could catch up sometime, maybe.”

Now it’s her turn to pause. She already has his number. She has had it since middle school. He’s the one who should ask for hers, since he keeps deleting her, again and again.

“Yeah. Sure,” she says. “What’s your number?”

~

In her first year of college, while taking Introduction to Psychology, Ayumi learns depression affects cognition. Those who experience trauma, on any scale, may experience a sort of dissociative amnesia, the brain’s way of distancing a person from the painful parts of a past.

I am a painful part, she finds herself thinking. That’s why he keeps forgetting me.

~

It is spring. She stands with her hands pushed deep into her jacket pockets. Sticky seed pods scatter the ground around her feet. She has a packet of tissues in her bag, in case of a sudden sneeze attack.

She turns as the sliding door opens. A part of her keeps turning, a clay ballerina on a music box. She cannot believe she is seeing him again.

“Ayumi,” he says.

She keeps her jaw clamped shut.

He is different now. Older. He has a hint of scruff. She is thrown by this. Alienated. He should still be in the first grade, should still be begging her to yank out his first loose tooth.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s weird to see you here.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Weird.”

She wants to cry. She wants to cry. She wants to fall to her knees and rock from side to side and cry.

“Are you here for spring break?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “I’m just…here.”

Forever. She couldn’t go anywhere else. As it turns out, small liberal arts colleges are expensive. She received partial scholarships to some, but her parents told her it wouldn’t be worth it.

You don’t even know what you want to do yet, her father said, and though this was true, and he had not said it unkindly, she will never quite forget it.

If Nathan survives by forgetting, Ayumi survives by remembering. Memories are all she really has.

 “We should hang out sometime,” she blurts out, before she can think twice.

To her relief, Nathan doesn’t keep her in suspense, nodding immediately, as if he had been thinking the very same thing. “Yeah. Sure. Of course. Let me give you my number.”

She stares at him for a minute. Then, shaking her head, she says, “Sure.”

They meet up again. They talk. She falls for him once more. She thought she wouldn’t this time, thought she had finally grown cold enough to be the one to leave him hanging, but she hasn’t, and she can’t, and she’s so, so stupid.

She wishes she could talk to Nicole, but the two have fallen out of touch. Unlike the climaxes of their favorite novels, there was no real drama. It just got hard, once Nicole was accepted to college in some faraway land and Ayumi stayed exactly where she was.

When Nathan leaves, again, to return to one of forty-nine states she will never see with her own two eyes, she tries to keep the conversation going over text, as she did with Nicole.

It fizzles out. Of course it does. She can’t even blame him, really. They have nothing in common but those few precious years, all those lifetimes ago. He’s stepping out of his past and into his future. It’s time for her to stop clinging to his ankles. To stop begging him not to go.

She closes the door again. This time, for good.

~

Every time she sees him, it’s like she’s thrown back in time.

Despite having closed that door all those years ago, in her dreams, she still runs into him, her hand automatically rising to his shoulder as she says, Sorry. Then she sees his face, and he sees hers, and she’s touching him, as if she needs tangible proof that he’s here. That he’s real. That he’s back, and they are young, and everything is still okay, as evidenced by the cheesy soundtrack led by a family-friendly pop star.

Now they’re here, standing inches apart, and she is frozen solid—and not just because she’s reaching for the ice cream in StarMart’s frozen section.

“Nathan,” she says.

He turns his head. She holds her breath, expecting him to fumble for her name, or else smile politely, as if she is an elderly woman mistaking him for her grandson.

Instead, he smiles.

And she melts on the spot.

It does not matter how many years it has been. How much they’ve gone through or how much damage they’ve done and repaired and redone and re-repaired. She will never quite get over him.

“Hey,” he says. “Long time no see.”

She nods. She will not tell him she has been seeing him all along, in bursts, when she closes her eyes and opens her heart enough to let him in again.

“What have you been up to?” he asks.

She turns her head. She doesn’t know how to tell him she works as a remote call center agent for a travel agency. Nor does she know how to tell him she doesn’t like traveling, or agencies, or call centers, and though it’s great to work remotely, there’s so much turnover in the agency, she feels like she’s working at a rotisserie chicken shop.

“Working,” she says.

“Cool. Me too. Doing what?”

“Nothing really,” she says. “It’s just some stupid job.”

He gives her a look, as if she’s said something very strange. She is not the girl he remembers. She doesn’t think she will ever be that girl again.

“It’s a temporary thing,” she admits, even as something in her brain screams for her to stop. “I’m actually going back to school to become a librarian.”

His jaw drops. “You’re kidding. Ayumi, that’s amazing.”

She blushes. “Yeah. Nicole was actually the one to encourage me to try.”

It was a tragedy that had brought them back together. Not long after Ayumi first began losing hope that she would ever do anything besides get yelled at for an erroneously booked trip to Bora Bora, she received a message from Nicole: did you hear the news??

After wiping her frustrated tears and calming herself down, Ayumi picked up her phone. What news?

In response, Nicole sent a link to a press release. Their favorite middle-school book series was being revived, the rumored sixth book set to release a good decade and a half after the fifth.

NO WAY, Ayumi responded.

I’VE ALREADY PRE-ORDERED, Nicole type-screamed.

The two are different now, as expected, their texts more sporadic and their hangouts far less frequent. Yet they have slowly made their way back to each other, learning the big things—Nicole has two children now, a fact Ayumi cannot comprehend—and relearning the little things, fitting the puzzle pieces back together.

“That’s so great,” Nathan says. “I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks.” Ayumi pauses. “Can I ask what you do?”

“Of course you can ask. It’s you.”

And it’s you, Nathan. But when did I last mean anything to you?

“I’m a youth counselor, actually,” he says, “at this really great nonprofit.”

“Oh,” she says, her breath catching in her throat. “Oh, wow. That’s great. Wow.”

She pauses.

“Sorry,” she says. “I sound like Owen Wilson.”

He laughs, his eyes sparkling, just as they did when they were little.

“Wow,” he says, in that trademark adenoidal tone.

“Wow,” she echoes, laughing, one hand rising to cover her mouth.

They stop for a moment, regarding each other carefully like they’re waiting for the other to pounce.

“Well,” he says, “I don’t want to keep you.”

Keep me, she wants to tell him. Keep me the way I could never keep you.

“It was nice to see you,” he says.

“Right. It was nice to see you too,” she says.

All the yous.

She whirls around, the door once again slamming shut, and heads for the self-checkout.

Beep, beep, beep, beep. She’s scanning her items so quickly, a child stops to point at her.

“Thank you for shopping at StarMart,” the machine chirps.

She grabs her receipt and heads for the exit, blinking hard. She has just stepped out, her hands numb from the cold, when her phone begins to buzz.

Nathan Horamoto, the screen reads.

She stops, her heart pounding. She stares out at the parking lot. Imagines snapping a picture of it, of saving this moment, before it all comes tumbling down, plastic cups on a hardwood floor.

“Ayumi!”

She bites her lip. She should know better than to hope.

Yet she feels it, excitement bubbling up in her like Mentos in a bottle of soda.

She slides her thumb across the screen to answer his call. Then, raising her phone to her ear, she turns, her fingers warm, and slowly comes back around.