Storm. Amanda Sun

of matcha tea on the tatami in front of me. I bowed gently, my face to the floor. “O temae choudai itashimasu,” I recited from memory, reaching for the teacup and placing it on my palm to admire the cherry blossoms drifting around its ceramic surface.

      I thought of Tomo in Sunpu Park, the cherry blossoms swirling around him.

      The tea was always more bitter than it looked. The taste of it surprised me every time.

      “So?” Yuki whispered next to me. I looked at her with warning—we weren’t supposed to talk while receiving tea—but she looked straight ahead, as if she hadn’t spoken. Ayako was serving the next girl in line, and the teacher hadn’t seemed to notice us talking.

      “So what?” I whispered back, tilting the chawan toward my mouth to take another sip.

      “Did you and Tomohiro do it yet?”

      I choked on the tea, coughing and sputtering as I clunked the cup down on the floor. Ayako looked over with wide eyes, and the teacher shook her head disapprovingly. Yuki pulled out her hand towel and passed it to me. I wiped up the tea spatter on my chin.

      “I’ll take that as a no,” Yuki said. “What’s taking you so long?”

      I could feel the heat as it spread across my face. I guess saving the world had taken priority over other thoughts, for once. I see you finally have your priorities straight, Greene. Better late than never. “I’m just... I’m not ready yet.”

      Yuki frowned, reaching for her kuromoji, a tiny bamboo stick she used to carve a bite off of the pink bean cake in front of her. “You’re thinking about it too much. You’re not in America anymore, Katie. It’s not such a big deal here. Just go for it.”

      The heat spread down my neck. I was in Japan, yeah, but I was still myself.

      “You like him, right?”

      I stared at her like she was from another planet. “Yeah.”

      “Then just do it already.”

      “You say it like it’s such a casual thing,” I said. I lifted the chawan up to my lips so I could hide behind it. The other girls had to have heard her. Whispering or not, there’s no way they wouldn’t hear her.

      “Yeah, but you two make a cute couple,” she said. “Tan-kun tells me Tomohiro’s a good guy. So what’s to think about?”

      “I don’t know,” I said, spearing a piece of my pink flower cake with the kuromoji. It wasn’t really the thought of it that was tripping me up. It was the way Yuki could talk about it like it was no big deal. To me, it felt like something that should live in the quiet shadows of conversations with Tomo, not in a sunlit tea ceremony room at school surrounded by other students.

      Of course I’d thought about it, but I didn’t trust my own judgment. My heart and my mind couldn’t agree. What did I really want? Would I regret it? Would I regret not doing it? What exactly was I waiting for, and why? It was so hard to know what was true when I was already drowning in an ocean of ink, when the waves were already thrashing us against a nightmare shore.

      “The first time’s the hardest,” she said. “After that, it’s easy. Anyway, I’m sure Tomohiro’s done it before. Lots.”

      “Oh my god. Do you listen to the words that come out of your mouth?”

      “What?” Yuki said. The teacher glared at us and we looked straight forward, not speaking for a minute. Then Yuki added in a whisper, “He’s a Third Year.”

      “Yuki!” The last thing I wanted to picture was Tomo with another girl. It was embarrassing enough to think about him with me. Had he really done it before? Had he done it with Myu? Great, so if we did go through with it, he’d be all experienced and I would completely humiliate myself. Anyway, the fact that I couldn’t even think about it without choking on my tea just reinforced that I wasn’t ready, right? It was easy to put off the idea back in New York, when the dates I’d gone on hadn’t been serious, when nothing had sparked for me. But Tomo was made of sparks and embers, every touch of his skin against mine burning away thought and reason, lighting the darkness with stars.

      No, I knew how hard it was to stop with Tomo—how hard it was to think straight when he was all warmth and softness and sound. God, that sound he made in his throat when we kissed. And the tickle of his spiked hair on my neck. Being with him always felt right. Maybe Yuki was right. I was overthinking it.

      Yuki leaned toward me, her shoulder bumping mine. “You’re imagining it right now, aren’t you?”

      “Stop.” I giggled, shoving her with my shoulder. She pressed her lips in a tight line as Ayako shuffled in front of us to receive our teacups. She eyed us suspiciously as we shook with the effort not to laugh. The chawan rocked on my palm a little as Ayako took the cup from me, and then from Yuki. The minute she turned her back, we burst into laughter.

      Under the glare of the teacher, Yuki and I helped collect the washi papers, oily from the imprints of the flower-shaped bean cakes. “Do you think Tan-kun’s done it before?” Yuki asked.

      “Ew,” I blurted out. She raised an eyebrow. “It’s not that he’s gross,” I clarified, tossing the washi in the garbage bin. “It’s just that I don’t want to think about my friend like that.”

      “Well,” Yuki said, “I don’t mind if he hasn’t.”

      I turned to look at her; her cheeks looked a little pink, but not much. I admired how she could talk about all this without getting as flustered as I did.

      “Yuki, are you and Tanaka going to...?”

      “Probably not in this lifetime.” She sighed. “He has yet to ask me out on a real date.”

      We walked down the hallway together. She and Tan-kun had always been a unit, although when I thought about it, I’d never asked her to clarify exactly what that unit was. Best friends? Couple? Unrequited love? No, that couldn’t be it. Yuki was awesome, and Tanaka spent all his time with her. He had to feel the same, so why hadn’t he made a move?

      “Love is way too complicated,” Yuki said.

      That was the truth.

      Yuki slid open the door to the genkan and jumped down all three steps in one go. “Ne, did you fill out your Future Plan assignment yet?”

      I followed her over to our cubbies; they were on opposite sides of the aisle, but close enough that we could still chat while changing shoes. “Not yet,” I said, holding the wall to keep from falling over as I slid the slipper off. “I don’t even know where to start.” It was an assessment they did with all First Year students at Suntaba. They wanted to make sure you stayed focused on an end goal, that you thought about where you were headed after high school. So much of our time was focused on entrance exams that you needed to have a plan early so you could have enough time to prepare.