When You Were Here (16 page)

I am ready. To see more of this city, more of my mom’s friend, more of the places and people my mom knew before Takahashi returns in a few weeks.

They have ice-cream robots over here! Can we start those language lessons soon?

Seconds later she replies.
YES!!!! Ice-cream robots rule.

The robot hands me the cone, and I head into the crowds, keeping pace a few feet behind a loud, laughing group of friends out for the evening, coattailing onto their crew as if we’re all hanging out tonight in Tokyo.

Before I meet Kana the next day, I reacquaint myself with Dr. Takahashi. I’ve Googled him before. But I want to revisit him: his work, the research he’s done, the awards he’s received. I flip open my laptop and settle in on the couch, clicking and searching, until it’s all fresh in my mind. He was educated at Kyoto University, did a residency at Mount Sinai, then studied traditional Chinese medicine, especially herbal treatments for cancer. He returned to Japan and has practiced here for twenty-five years. He’s known for bringing a rigorous mix of Western and Eastern medicine to patients—meaning you come to him for science and spirituality. Collaborative cancer treatment, he calls it. He is a scientist and a Buddhist, and his research reflects that.

I scroll through a journal article about a study he worked
on involving clinical trials of new anticancer drugs and advanced therapies, then another one where he wrote about the roles of nutrition, physical exercise, and emotional health too in recovery from the disease.

I pause at those words—
emotional health
. My mom must have been his best patient, his top student in that class. I look away from the screen for a second; it’s ironic in a way. I spent the last four years working to the top of my class in school and pulled it off. I was always reaching, trying, achieving, succeeding.

But I don’t know a damn thing about emotional health.

I close the computer, grab my wallet and keys, and check my phone to see if the doctor has called me back yet, if the doctor can tell me more about this hazy, gray subject I definitely don’t excel at.

No such luck.

I can feel myself getting wound up, getting antsy. I know what my mom would tell me—what she always told me when I was impatient. When I was waiting to find out if I’d make the first cut of the baseball team, if I’d get that A in history, if I’d hear from UCLA—
Today, now, I want to know now, this second, if I got in
, I’d say to her.

Just be patient. Do the work, and it’ll all work out
, she’d say.

I do my best to channel her.
Soon
, I tell myself as I open the lobby doors and join the midday bustle and rush of my neighborhood.

He’ll call soon.

By the end of the next week I’ve learned that Kana says
ikemen
several times an hour as we walk around the city, usually when she’s staring at some dude she thinks is cute. It’s kind of funny to see a girl who’s so obvious about it, who doesn’t hide it and doesn’t pretend. I’ve noticed she likes skinny guys with punkish-looking hair, the kind that’s cut at long or jagged angles. When we meet up in the Harajuku neighborhood, weaving in and out of crowds of Little Bo Peep Girls and Purple-Haired Boys, she says
ikemen
every five seconds, it seems. Sometimes she will even tap a boy on the shoulder, say it to him, waggle her fingers, and walk away. She’s even snapped a few pictures too on her
real camera
, as she says, of her favorite boys.

“This is what you and my mom did? Troll for guys together?” I ask one afternoon. Then I shake my head and hold up a hand. “Wait. I don’t want to know.”

She laughs and says, “Some secrets are just between girls.”

Already Kana has taught me how to say:
You are a total hot babe, and I want to buy you a jelly crepe.
I don’t say this to girls on the street, but sometimes Kana makes me say it to her when she gets hungry, which usually occurs when we are three or four feet away from a crepe stand. They’re all over the place in Harajuku, wedged in between leather shops, techno-music-blasting T-shirt boutiques, and stores that sell tiny penguin or panda or armadillo erasers.
The only words I can get right with any regularity are
jelly
and
hot babe
, so we have created a new slang term:
jelly babe ikemen
.

Japan has different summer breaks, so Kana is still in school, but we try to meet up in the afternoons for crepe-eating and Japanese tutorials, sandwiching them between the visits she has to make to the apartments she and her mom manage. During our language lessons, we travel around the city by foot and by train, walking past skateboarders in checkered pants in Yoyogi Park, darting past the suits in the Shinjuku district, and avoiding the street hookers in Roppongi, who don’t speak to me in Japanese but do talk in perfect transactional English when they say to me, “Fifty dollars for a handjob.”

“Hey! What about me?” Kana says to one of the hookers.

The hooker wears tight camo pants that stop at the knee and a wife-beater tee with an American flag on it. It’s a weird homage to the troops, or to being American, or something.

The hooker is unperturbed by Kana’s request. She waves a hand in the air. “Fifty dollars for you too.”

Kana looks at me and rubs her thumb against two fingers, like she’s asking for money. I open my wallet. “Sorry, I only have a twenty.”

The hooker gives us a sneer and walks away. Kana cracks up and falls against me, her black hair spilling across my chest. “She really thought I was going to pay for one for me!”

“Kana, it’s an equal-opportunity world. The sooner you get used to that, the better off you’ll be.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m buying lunch, though,” she says, and she grabs my hand and we race down an alley. I don’t know how she can run in the sky-high royal-blue vinyl boots she wears, but she manages, and we land in a noodle shop.

She orders for both of us. “See. I am equal opportunity. I let you pay, and I decide what you eat.”

“Put a leash on me next. Walk me around. It’ll work out really well.”

“How is that dog of yours? Do you miss Sandy Koufax?”

“Totally.”

I pull out my phone and show her the latest
un-picture
, as I call them, that Jeremy sent me. It’s Sandy Koufax next to a cute redhead wearing a polka-dot bikini. Kana takes the phone and makes cooing sounds at my dog. “She is the most adorable dog ever!” Kana looks up from the phone at me. “Why don’t you ever show me your friend Jeremy’s picture?”

I give her a look. Her question doesn’t compute. “Why would I show you his picture? And why would I even have his picture?”

“I like boys. I like to check out boys. So maybe I’d like to see what this dog caretaker looks like,” she counters.

“Kana, that is
not
the kind of photo I am ever going to have on my phone. We don’t do that. We don’t go to the picture booths and lean our heads against each other and smile and then put decals on our pictures.”

She sticks out her tongue at me. “You are so not fun. Maybe I’d like to date him at some point.”

“Yeah, don’t know if you know this, but he’s halfway around the world. LA is far away.”

“I know. That’s why I want to go there!”

“LA?”

“To anywhere. LA. London. Montreal. New York. Paris. Doesn’t matter. I want to get away from here.”

“You don’t like it here?”

“Oh, it’s fine. But I’m not staying. My mother doesn’t know this yet, but I’m
not
applying to any colleges here.”

The waitress delivers our noodle bowls, and Kana and I say
arigato
in unison.

“Why?”

She waves her hands in the air as if the space around her is compressing, as if she’s claustrophobic. “Japan is wonderful, but it is very traditional. And some of the people here can be very judgmental. I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.”

“How are they judgmental?”

“Well, don’t know if you noticed, but I don’t have a dad,” she says as she breaks apart her chopsticks. I brace myself for a heavy conversation, and I’m almost afraid to ask what happened, but she answers before I can ask. “It’s nothing bad. I mean, I never knew him. My mom’s a single mom.”

“You mean…” I let my voice trail off as I dig into the noodles.

She nods and sings out in a faux-cheerful voice. “Yep. Daddy knocked up Mommy and then left her. Bye-bye!”

“So you’ve never known him?”

“Never. They were teenagers. My mom’s only thirty-four. She had me when she was seventeen. But people here—the kids at school—they look down on me because of it.”

“Are you serious? Because I just kind of figure most people have weird family stuff going on.”

“That’s my point! But Japan can be very traditional. They don’t like you marrying outsiders. They don’t like you leaving. They don’t like you not being like them. And literally everyone I know at school has a mom and a dad. And I’m the freak who just has a mom. A
young
mom at that. Can you believe that? Crazy! They’re crazy.” She says the last part as if she’s mocking the other kids, but underneath I can tell it’s her shield; it’s the way she makes sense of her life.

“So where are you applying to college?”

“NYU. Berkeley. Northwestern. University of London. McGill. Paris-Sorbonne.”

“That about covers it.”

“I’ll go anywhere. Anywhere but here.” There’s sadness in her voice. Wistfulness. “That’s why I like hanging out with you,” she says, cheering herself up quickly.

“But I love it here.”

“I know, I know. It makes me like Tokyo more, seeing it through your eyes. Besides, you’re a freak too.”

I laugh, then remember how Holland and I talked about
being
freaks like us
here in Tokyo. Holland replied to my e-mail from the other week. Then sent another one too. But I’ve been deleting the notes without reading. I don’t trust myself enough not to cave if I see her words, so I trash her messages before I even look at them, before the words seduce me into a reply. The pills I take every morning in the apartment—
my
apartment—as I look out the window at the busy streets below help. They’re like vitamins; each daily dose gives me strength to keep moving on. They’re a protective coating to help me stay the course. Or maybe Kana is the armor. Maybe she is my Kevlar vest.

I point a chopstick at her. “Speaking of freaks, I seem to recall you promised to tell me why you hissed at that woman the day I met you.”

“Ah, good question, my student.”

I shake my head, but I’m smiling.

“Whenever someone looks at me funny, I give it right back to them,” she answers.

“By hissing?”

She hisses again, sibilant and slithering. “Say it. Say I have the best hiss in all the world.”

“Nobody hisses better than you, Kana. Nobody, nobody, nobody.”

“That’s why I started dressing like this too,” she adds. “To own it. To own the fact that I already stand out at school.”

“Really?”

She’s smiling and nodding. “Everybody already thought
I was some sort of freak. So why not just go wild? I don’t have to impress anyone by being a prim and proper schoolgirl. So I dress for myself. I wear the things everyone wants to wear but is afraid to because of what people might think. Besides, it’s pretty hard to be unhappy when you’re carrying a panda purse and wearing a pair of boots that a drag queen would drool over.”

The other day she wore a white petticoat, orange tights, and a yellow tank top with an illustration of a lollipop on the chest. Another time a red, white, and blue cheerleader outfit with black combat boots. It makes sense now why she dresses so wildly; not for show but for sanity. Fashion makes her happy.

And, sure, I’m happy in the moment with her friendship. I like her teasing, her hissing, her wise old soul. I like the way I feel as if I’ve known her my whole life and the way I feel steady with her. Most of all, I like that I
feel
alive, I feel good, I feel that thing my mom was said to have felt—
happy
—for more than just a few seconds at a time. But is that enough? I can’t take Kana back with me to California; I can’t hold her in front of me like a shield for the rest of my life. I have to find a way to be happy even when she’s not here. I have to keep seeking out the answers, and I know they won’t just be found in language lessons and crepes, much as I enjoy both of those.

“Kana, will you show me the temple my mom went to when she was here? I need to see more. I need to connect with her,” I say, and I couldn’t feel more exposed than I do
right now as I say these words aloud for the first time, as I blatantly, patently, ask for help. Asking for more, even when she has given so much already.

But this is Kana. She does not take advantage. She does not keep score.

“It would be a complete honor.”

We leave the noodle shop and head down the nearest subway steps and onto the next train. The doors close, and we’re whooshing through the tunnels underneath Tokyo. Kana’s hand is right under mine since we’re sharing the same strap. She notices, shrugs playfully, and then shifts her hand deliberately so it’s on top of mine. It’s not a romantic move; we don’t have that sort of chemical attraction. But as she laces her fingers through mine, I make room for them and then squeeze her hand back.