When You Were Here

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