Ink. Amanda Sun

      A girl lay back on a bench, roughly sketched in scrawls of ink as she looked out over the moat of Sunpu Park. She wore a school uniform, a tartan skirt clinging to her crossed legs. Little tufts of grass and flowers tangled with the bench legs, which had to be creative license—it was still too cold for blooms.

      The girl was beautiful, in her crudely outlined way, with a lick of hair stuck to the back of her neck, her elbow resting against the top of the bench and her hand behind her head. She looked out at the moat of Sunpu Park, the sunlight sparkling off the dark water.

      A pregnant bump of stomach curved under her blouse.

      The other girl.

      A queasy feeling started to twist in my stomach, like motion sickness.

      And then the sketched girl on the bench turned her head, and her inky eyes glared straight into mine.

      A chill shuddered through me.

      Oh my god. She’s looking at me.

      A hand snatched the paper out of mine. I looked up, my mind reeling, straight into the face of Yuu Tomohiro.

      He slammed the page face-down on top of the pile of drawings he’d collected. He stood too close, so that he hovered over me.

      “Did you draw that?” I whispered in English. He didn’t answer, staring hard at me. His cheek burned red and puffy where Myu had hit him.

      I stared back. “Did you draw it?”

      He smirked. “Kankenai darou!”

      I looked at him blankly, and he sneered.

      “Don’t you speak Japanese?” he said. I felt my cheeks flush with shame. He looked like he’d settled some sort of battle in his mind, and he turned, walking slowly away.

      “She moved,” I blurted out.

      He stumbled, just a little, but kept walking.

      But I saw him stumble. And I saw the drawing look at me.

      Didn’t I? My stomach churned. That was impossible, wasn’t it?

      He went up the stairs, clutching the papers to his chest.

      “She moved!” I said again, hesitant.

      “I don’t speak English,” he said and slammed the door. It slid into the wall so hard it bounced back a little. I saw his shadow against the frosted glass of the door as he walked away.

      Something oozed through the bottom of the sliding door, sluggish like dark blood. Did Myu hit him that hard?

      The liquid dripped down the stairs, and after a moment of panic, I realized it was ink, not blood. From the drawings she’d thrown, maybe, or a cartridge of ink he’d kept inside the notebook.

      I stood for a minute watching it drip, thinking of the burning eyes of the girl staring at me, the same flame in Yuu’s eyes.

      Had Myu seen it, too? Would anyone believe me? I wasn’t even sure what the heck I’d seen.

      It couldn’t be real. I was too tired, overwhelmed in a country where I struggled to even communicate. That was the only answer.

      I hurried toward the front door and out into the fresh spring air. Yuki and her friends had already vanished. I checked my watch—must be for a club practice. Fine. I was too jittery to talk about what I’d seen anyway. I ran across the courtyard, sans slippers this time, through the gate of Suntaba School and toward the weaving pathways of Sunpu Park.

      When my mother died, it didn’t occur to me I would end up on the other side of the world. I figured they would put me in foster care or ship me up to my grandparents in Deep River, Canada. I prayed they would send me up there from New York, to that small town on the river I had spent almost every summer of my childhood. But it turned out that Mom’s will hadn’t been updated since Gramps’s bout of cancer five years ago, when she’d felt it was too much of a burden to send me there. And Gramps still wasn’t doing well now that the cancer had come back, so for now I would live with Mom’s sister, Diane, instead, in Shizuoka.

      So much sickness surrounded me. I could barely deal with losing my Mom, and then everything familiar slipped away. No life in Deep River with Nan and Gramps. No life in America or Canada at all. I’d stayed with a friend of Mom’s for a while, but it was only temporary, my life stuck in a place where I couldn’t move forward or back. I was being shipped away from everything I knew, the leftover baggage of fading lives. Mom never liked leaving American soil, and here I was, only seven months without her, already going places she wouldn’t have followed.

      And seeing things, hallucinating that drawings were moving. God, I’d be sent to a therapist for sure.

      I told Yuki about the fight the next day during lunch, although I left out the part about the moving drawing. I still wasn’t sure what I’d seen, and I wasn’t about to scare off the only friend I had. But I couldn’t get it out of my mind, those sketched eyes glaring into mine. I wouldn’t imagine that, right? But the more I thought about it, the more dreamlike it felt.

      Yuki turned in her seat to eat her bentou on my desk. I wasn’t used to the food yet, so Diane had packed my bentou box from side to side with squished peanut-butter sandwiches. Yuki gripped her pink chopsticks with delicate fingers and scooped another bite of eggplant into her mouth.

      “You’re kidding,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand as she said it. “I still can’t believe you went in there.” She’d pinned her hair back neatly and her fingernails were nicely painted, reminding me of Myu’s delicate pink and silver nails. I wondered if they’d chipped when she hit him.

      “You didn’t even wait for me to come out,” I said.

      “Sorry!” she said, pressing her fingers together in apology. “I had to get to cram school. Believe me, I was dying inside not knowing what happened.”

      “I’m sure.” Yuki did like her share of drama.

      She lifted her keitai phone in the air. “Here, send me your number. Then I can call you next time I abandon you in the middle of the biggest breakup of all time.”

      I turned a little pink. “Um. I don’t have one?”

      She stared at me a minute