When You Were Here

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 aboutbeing 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 thoughtI was some sort of