When You Were Here

texts from Kate and Jeremy and Ethan and everyone else. I close the piano, duct-tape it shut in several places, and then slap a sign on it that says DON’T TOUCH. REALLY. DON’T TOUCH.
    I leave the door unlocked so Jeremy and Ethan can come by whenever they want and do whatever they want. It’s an arrangement that works; I barely have to say a word, but there are people around now and then, making the house a little less empty. Then I leash up Sandy Koufax to take her for a hike in the Hollywood Hills. As we cover the hard-packed trails, I tell her about my last trip to Tokyo a year ago. I tell her about visiting the fish market while my mom wore her pink wig, about eating some strange octopus pancake from a street cart near the University of Tokyo, and I tell her about the time I wound up having lunch with a group of Japanese college students who invited me to join them at their table while they were playing a party game with chopsticks that made no sense to me, but everyone was laughing, and soon I was too. Maybe I could find them again. Go back to the same restaurant, learn how to play that chopsticks game.
    I tell her all this and more, and soon we’ve traversed miles, and the sun is so low in the sky that the paths are all shadow now. I find my way back to the rental car Kate got for me and open the front door for Sandy Koufax. She hops up on the passenger seat and curls into a ball, panting. I blast the AC for her as I drive.
    I park several houses away because there are cars everywhere, jammed up against every square inch of sidewalk, and the noise and the music and the madness is spilling out from my house and my yard and my pool. I’m surprised the neighbors aren’t complaining, but I guess I still have that free pass, so no one is saying anything as all of Terra Linda celebrates in my house.
    Have pool. Have fridge. Have at it.
    I steal inside, a quiet thief, and no one notices the host, the man of the hour—and that’s fine because I like noise much more than I like quiet.
    Besides, there’s a part of me that’s already out of the country anyway.

Chapter Five
    I clean up the next morning, dragging a garbage bag around my yard, tossing away the remnants of the party that became the background to another night in this house. Everyone is gone now, but I haven’t told anyone that I’m thinking of getting away. That I’m thinking a quick trip might be just what the doctor ordered. Besides, I’ve got to treat the Tokyo apartment like an investment, and to do that I should evaluate it closely, inspect it, consider it.
    Right?
    It would take my mind off this looming summer that stands like a cavern between today and the start of college, when I can bury myself in classes and get away from my house and all its rooms that echo, all the rooms I don’t enter anymore. Or maybe I should just spend the summervolunteering. Go to the library, shelve books, listen to that old, grizzled surfer dude who spends his days checking books in and out, chatting with patrons. I could smile and nod as he tells me about the waves he used to catch in the Pacific. I wouldn’t have to say a word. I’d just be his audience, and it’d be air-conditioned.
    It’s not as if I can play baseball like I used to in the summers. My baseball-throwing arm, which for years lobbed hardball after hardball, is shot, courtesy of a shoulder injury junior year. And it’s not as if I’m going to be taking care of my mom or going to the movies with Holland. It’s not as if I have any plans at all for the next three months.
    I grab the last bit of party debris and head back inside. As I toss the bag, my phone rings. Holland’s picture appears, and some vestige of self-preservation tells me to bury the phone in the couch cushions. But my desire for her is stronger, and it wins.
    “Hey,” she says, speaking first.
    “Hey.”
    “Remember that guy who used to paint himself in silver and do all those robot moves on the Promenade?”
    “Sure.”
    “And how he never talks? Even if you talk to him, he stays in full robot mode?”
    “Right.”
    “Well, he just got in a fight with some other robot. A gold robot!”
    I laugh. “Like, did they hit each other?”
    “They were about to, then some cop broke it up. Apparently the gold one was horning in on the silver one’s turf.”
    “Crazy,” I say, picturing painted-robot-people fisticuffs. That would have been a good way to kill an afternoon.
    “So,” Holland starts, and then stops,