AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SUMMER, I tried to get on top of the whole moving continents thing by reminding myself I still had time. Days and hours and seconds all piled on top of one another, stretching out in front of me as expansive as a galaxy. And the stuff I couldn’t deal with—packing my room and saying good-bye to my friends and leaving Tokyo—all that hovered at some indistinct point in the indistinct future.
So I ignored it. Every morning, I’d meet Mika and David in Shibuya, and we’d spend our days eating in ramen shops or browsing tiny boutiques that smelled like incense. Or, when it rained, we’d run down umbrella-crowded streets and watch anime I couldn’t understand on Mika’s couch.
Some nights, we’d dance in strobe-lit clubs and go to karaoke at four in the morning. Then, the next day, we’d sit at train-station donut shops for hours, drinking milky coffee and watching the sea of commuters come and go and come and go again.
Once, I stayed home and tried dragging boxes up the stairs, but it stressed me out so much, I had to leave. I walked around Yoyogi-Uehara until the sight of the same cramped streets made me dizzy. Until I had to stop and fold myself into an alcove between buildings, trying to memorize the kanji on street signs. Trying to count my breaths.
And then it was August fourteenth. And I only had one week left, and it was hot, and I wasn’t even close to being packed. But the thing was, I should have known how to do this. I’d spent my whole life ping-ponging across the globe, moving to new cities, leaving people and places drifting in my wake.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this good-bye—to Tokyo, to the first friends I’d ever had, to the only life that felt like it even remotely belonged to me—was the kind that would swallow me whole. That would collapse around me like a star imploding.
And the only thing I knew how to do was to hold on as tightly as possible and count every single second until I reached the last one. The one I dreaded most.
Sudden, violent, final.
The end.
I WAS LYING ON THE LIVING-ROOM floor reading Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries when our air-conditioning made a sputtering sound and died. Swampy heat spread through the room as I held my hand over the box by the window. Nothing. Not even a gasp of cold air. I pressed a couple of buttons and hoped for the best. Still nothing.
“Mom,” I said. She was sitting in the doorway to the kitchen, wrapping metal pots in sheets of newspaper. “Not to freak you out or anything, but the air-conditioning just broke.”
She dropped some newspaper shreds on the ground, and our cat—Dorothea Brooke—came over to sniff them. “It’s been doing that. Just press the big orange button and hold it.”
“I did. But I think it’s serious this time. I think I felt its spirit passing.”
Mom unhooked a panel from the back of the air-conditioning unit and poked around. “Damn. The landlord said this system might go soon. It’s so old, they’ll have to replace it for the next tenant.”
August was always hot in Tokyo, but this summer was approaching unbearable. A grand total of five minutes without air-conditioning and all my bodily fluids were evaporating from my skin. Mom and I opened some windows, plugged in a bunch of fans, and stood in front of the open refrigerator.
“We should call a repairman,” I said, “or it’s possible we’ll die here.”
Mom shook her head, going into full-on Professor Wachowski mode. Even though we’re both short, she looks a lot more intimidating than I do, with her square jaw and serious eyes. She looks like the type of person who won’t lose an argument, who can’t take a joke.
I look like my dad.
“No,” Mom said. “I’m not dealing with this the week before we leave. The movers are coming on Friday.” She turned and leaned into the fridge door. “Why don’t you go out? See your friends. Come back tonight when it’s cooled down.”
I twisted my watch around my wrist. “Nah, that’s okay.”
“You don’t want to?” she asked. “Did something happen with Mika and David?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I just don’t feel like going out. I feel like staying home, and helping, and being the good daughter.”
God, I sounded suspicious, even to myself.
But Mom didn’t notice. She held out a few one-hundred-yen coins. “In that case, go to the konbini and buy some of those towels you put in the freezer and wrap around your neck.”
I contemplated the money in her hand, but the heat made it swim across my vision. Going outside meant walking into the boiling air. It meant walking down the little streets I knew so well, past humming vending machines and stray cats stretched out in apartment-building entrances. Every time I did that, I was reminded of all the little things I loved about this city and how they were about to slip away forever. And today, of all days, I really didn’t need that reminder.
“Or,” I said, trying to sound upbeat, “I could pack.”
Packing was, of course, a terrible idea.
Even the thought of it was oppressive. Like if I stood in my room too long, the walls would start tightening around me, trash-compacting me in. I stood in the doorway and focused on how familiar it all was. Our house was small and semi-dilapidated, and my room was predictably small to match, with only a twin bed, a desk pushed against the window, and a few red bookshelves running along the walls. But the problem wasn’t the size—it was the stuff.
The physics books I’d bought and the ones Dad had sent me cluttering up the shelves, patterned headbands and tangled necklaces hanging from tacks in the wall, towers of unfolded laundry built precariously all over the floor. Even the ceiling was crowded, crisscrossed with string after string of star-shaped twinkly lights.
There was a WET PAIN! sign (it was supposed to say WET PAINT!) propped against my closet that Mika had stolen from outside her apartment building, a Rutgers University flag pinned above my bed, Totoro stuffed toys on my pillow, and boxes and boxes of platinum-blond hair dye everywhere. (Those, I needed to get rid of. I’d stopped dyeing my hair blond since the last touch-up had turned it an attractive shade of Fanta orange.) It was so much—too much—to have to deal with. And I might have stayed there for hours, paralyzed in the doorway, if Alison hadn’t come up behind me.
“Packed already?”
I spun around. My older sister had on the same clothes she’d been wearing all weekend—black T-shirt, black leggings—and she was holding an empty coffee mug.
I crossed my arms and tried to block her view of the room. “It’s getting there.”
“Clearly.”
“And what have you been doing?” I asked. “Sulking? Scowling? Both at the same time?”
She narrowed her eyes but didn’t say anything. Alison was in Tokyo for the summer after her first year at Sarah Lawrence. She’d spent the past three months staying up all night and drinking coffee and barely leaving her bedroom during sunlight hours. The unspoken reason for this was that she’d broken up with her girlfriend at the end of last year. Something no one was allowed to mention.
“You have so much crap,” Alison said, stepping over a pile of thrift-store dresses and sitting on my unmade bed. She balanced the coffee mug between her knees. “I think you might be a hoarder.”
“I’m not a hoarder,” I said. “This is not hoarding.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Lest you forget, little sister, I’ve been by your side for many a move. I’ve witnessed the hoarder’s struggle.”
It was true. My sister had been by my side for most of our moves, avoiding her packing just as much as I’d been avoiding mine. This year, though, she only had the one suitcase she’d brought with her from the States—no doubt full of sad, sad poetry books and sad, sad scarves.
“You’re one to talk,” I said. “You threw approximately nine thousand tantrums when you were packing last summer.”
“I was going to college.” Alison shrugged. “I knew it would suck.”
“And look at you now,” I said. “You’re a walking endorsement for the college experience.”
The corners of her lips moved like she was deciding whether to laugh or not. But she decided not to. (Of course she decided not to.)
I climbed onto my desk, pushing aside an oversize paperback called Unlocking the MIT Application! and a stuffed koala with a small Australian flag clasped between its paws. Through the window behind me, I could see directly into someone else’s living room. Our house wasn’t just small—it was surrounded on three sides by apartment buildings. Like a way less interesting version of Rear Window.
Alison reached over and grabbed the pile of photos and postcards sitting on my nightstand. “Hey!” I said. “Enough with the stuff-touching.”
But she was already flipping through them, examining each picture one at a time. “Christ,” she said. “I can’t believe you kept these.”
“Of course I kept them,” I said, grabbing my watch. “Dad sent them to me. He sent the same ones to you, in case that important fact slipped your mind.”
She held up a photo of the Eiffel Tower, Dad standing in front of it and looking pretty touristy for someone who actually lived in Paris. “A letter a year does not a father make.”
“You’re so unfair,” I said. “He sends tons of e-mails. Like, twice a week.”
“Oh my God!” She waved another photo at me, this one of a woman sitting on a wood-framed couch holding twin babies on her lap. “The Wife and Kids? Really? Please don’t tell me you still daydream about going to live with them.”
“Aren’t you late for sitting in your room all day?” I asked.
“Seriously,” she said. “You’re one creepy step away from Photoshopping yourself in here.”
I kept the face of my watch covered with my hand, hoping she wouldn’t start on that as well.
She didn’t. She moved on to another picture: me and Alison in green and yellow raincoats, standing on a balcony messy with cracked clay flowerpots. In the picture, I am clutching a kokeshi—a wooden Japanese doll—and Alison is pointing at the camera. My dad stands next to her, pulling a goofy face.
“God,” she muttered. “That shitty old apartment.”
“It wasn’t shitty. It was—palatial.” Maybe. We’d moved from that apartment when I was five, after my parents split, so honestly, I barely remembered it. Although I did still like the idea of it. Of one country and one place and one family living there. Of home.
Alison threw the pictures back on the nightstand and stood up, all her dark hair spilling over her shoulders.
“Whatever,” she said. “I don’t have the energy to argue with you right now. You have fun with all your”—she gestured around the room—“stuff.”
And then she was gone, and I was hurling a pen at my bed, angry because this just confirmed everything she thought. She was the Adult; I was still the Little Kid.
Dorothea Brooke padded into the room and curled up on a pile of clean laundry in a big gray heap.
“Fine,” I said. “Ignore me. Pretend I’m not even here.”
Her ears didn’t so much as twitch.
I reached up to yank open the window, letting the sounds of Tokyo waft in: a train squealing into Yoyogi-Uehara Station, children shouting as they ran through alleyways, cicadas croaking a tired song like something from a rusted music box.
Since our house was surrounded by apartment buildings, I had to crane my neck to look above them at this bright blue strip of sky. There was an object about the size of a fingernail moving through the clouds, leaving a streak of white in its wake that grew longer and then broke apart.
I watched the plane until there was no trace of it left. Then I held up my hand to blot out the sliver of sky where it had been—but wasn’t anymore.
Thursday, June 30 to Friday, July 1
LONDON
When Aubrey thought about the trip, she imagined her whole life expanding.
She imagined moving beyond the walls of her tiny room in London and beyond high school and beyond everything that had seemed so important when she was a kid. She saw herself on a train, watching the world become a rush of color outside her window. Feeling like everything she’d been waiting for was about to begin.
But that didn’t mean she was ready.
“Of course you are,” Rae said over the phone. “You’re so ready it’s disturbing.”
“Disturbing how?” Aubrey perched on the edge of her bed. In one corner of the room, she saw everything she’d already packed for tomorrow: her new backpack filled with T-shirts, shorts, and SPF 50. Beside it, a stack of paperbacks from her summer reading list and a folder of all the train schedules she’d printed out over the past few weeks. In the opposite corner sat two open suitcases with a few sweaters resting inside and a different pile of books—her favorite ones, the ones she’d been carefully curating since March, the ones she would bring with her to New York.
Aubrey turned away from that corner.
“You have the organizational skills of a robot,” Rae said. “You’ve wanted to go to Columbia since forever, and you’ve been planning this trip all year, and—ow! Crap! Ow!”
“What is it? What happened?”
“Nothing. I’m toasting marshmallows for dinner, and I burned myself.”
“Rae Tara Preston. What would your mother say?”
“She’s right here, and she says, ‘Give me some. I’m hungry.’”
Aubrey pulled her legs onto the bed and crossed them. Down the hall, she could hear her brother, Chris, blasting Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in his bedroom while her parents washed the dinner dishes in the kitchen. The kids next door must have been playing in their backyard, because squeals of laughter floated up through her open window. It all felt so normal and familiar. Aubrey swore she could close her eyes and convince herself that this was a regular summer night. That in a few weeks she would be going back to the London American School. That all her friends would be right there with her.
“Guess what?” Rae asked, breaking the silence. “In less than twenty-four hours, we’ll be in Paris!”
Aubrey sighed and lay back. “This is a good idea, right? I mean, we’re not going to get axe-murdered or anything, are we?”
“Do axe murderers hang out on trains?”
“They did in that horror movie. The one Jonah and Gabe made us watch.”
“Oh my God. That movie was such sexist trash.”
“Fine. But what about Strangers on a Train? Or Murder on the Orient Express? More murderers, more trains.”
“Aubs,” Rae said, “this is supposed to be fun. We’re young and we’re free and we get to travel around Europe for, like, nearly two weeks. You get to make out with your boyfriend in five major European cities.”
“Weird,” Aubrey said. “Don’t talk about me and Jonah making out in front of your mom.”
“She’s sketching something. She can barely even hear me. Besides, I think she knows you guys make out. She knows you’re living together next year.”
“We’re not living together. Columbia and NYU aren’t even in the same part of Manhattan.”
“Yeah, okay, but—Ow! These fucking marshmallows!”
Aubrey exhaled a laugh. It was starting to get dark out, so she sat up and flicked on her bedside lamp. A pool of light illuminated her old-fashioned alarm clock and the two framed pictures beside it. One was of her and Chris at their grandparents’ old house in Shelton, Connecticut. The other definitely hadn’t been there earlier—her mom must have found it in the closet when she was helping Aubrey pack. It had been taken only a few weeks ago, after the last performance of the summer musical, but already that night seemed untouchable. Like something from a completely different part of Aubrey’s life. Her friends were a frozen blur of messy hair and smudged stage makeup. A poster for Singin’ in the Rain hung on the wall behind them. Clara waved a bouquet of red flowers over their heads, and Aubrey stood next to Gabe, her eyes crinkled at something he’d just said.
Instinctively, she turned off her lamp, making the image of her friends disappear. Like a curtain had fallen over them.
The room went dark, and outside the window, she could see the heavy violet of the sunset sky, bruised with clouds. She got up and peered out at the line of trees that separated her street from the ones behind it. She craned her neck, trying to see between the branches, imagining the short path that led from her house to Gabe’s—past pubs and shops and bike racks, following the River Thames before finally reaching his front door.
“Aubs?” Rae asked through a mouthful of marshmallow. “You still here?”
Aubrey dropped into her desk chair. “I’m still here.” She played with the keyboard on her laptop, flicking between open tabs on her browser. “Hey,” she said. “Did you know that tomorrow we’ll be in Paris?”
“Dude, yes. I am so unbelievably ready.”
“Yup,” Aubrey said. “Me too.”
And she tried to believe it—she tried again to think of this as a beginning. As the moment her life spiraled outward into something bigger and more exciting. But now when she pictured herself on a train, all she could see was it moving quickly into the distance, everything behind her getting smaller and smaller—until it was gone.
“I made coffee,” Rae’s mom, Lucy, said as she opened the front door a few seconds after Aubrey had knocked.
“Thanks.” Aubrey put her backpack down by the coatrack and accepted the purple ceramic mug.
“Mom,” Rae said from the top of the stairs, her American accent contrasting sharply with Lucy’s crisp British one. “We don’t have time for coffee. We’re going to miss our train.”
“It’s almost one in the afternoon,” Aubrey said. “Did you just wake up?”
Rae gestured at her bed head and frog-printed pajama pants. “Your powers of deduction are outstanding.” She disappeared back into her room, her dog, Iorek, trotting at her feet. Aubrey exchanged looks with Lucy, who shrugged and said, “She’ll mellow out post-coffee.” Rae’s mom was dressed the way she always was—in an off-the-shoulder top, paint-splattered jeans, and feather earrings that made her look more like a cool older cousin than a parent. Although, to be fair, she was pretty young for an adult—Aubrey had come over for her thirty-seventh birthday party just last month.
“You should sit down.” Lucy cleared a box of paint tubes from a blue velvet armchair and gestured for Aubrey to take a seat. The living room seemed even more chaotic than usual. New hiking boots and rain jackets were heaped on the floor alongside shopping bags and open shipping boxes.
Aubrey had been hanging out here since she’d moved to London seven years ago, but she still couldn’t get over how little the inside of the house matched the outside. Rae and her mom lived near Hyde Park in a row of terraced homes that, together, looked like an immaculate white sheet cake.
The exterior of their house was all grand columns and Juliet balconies and elaborate moldings, but inside, Rae and Lucy lived among mismatched antique furniture, handmade clay sculptures, and canvases propped up against one another. Each wall was painted a different color, some of them with lines of pink hydrangeas added, others with white clouds sponged on.
“How are your parents?” Lucy asked. “They must be excited for you.”
Aubrey sipped her coffee, which had way too much sugar in it. “They’re—hyperventilating, I think. But okay.” She didn’t add that before she’d left that morning, her dad had made her recite the phone number of every American embassy in every country she was visiting.
“Don’t let them worry you,” Lucy said. “You’ll have an amazing time. It’s the perfect age for traveling around and being aimless. You don’t have to make any big life decisions yet.”
“Actually,” Aubrey said, “I already know what I’m going to major in.”
Lucy held her coffee mug over her mouth, trying to hide a smirk. Right, Aubrey thought. She probably means different kinds of decisions.
Bigger decisions. Not that Aubrey could think of a bigger decision. She’d known she would major in English since she was fourteen, and she’d always hoped she would get into Columbia. After she graduated from college, she would get her master’s and then her PhD. And after that, she would apply for jobs as either an editor or a literature professor. She had it all. . .
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