Chapter Forty-Five #2
For two years, she’d been meeting Kenji behind her parents’ backs.
They would get pizza at La Val’s or browse new titles at Comics and Comix.
Sometimes they’d just sit on the Glade and talk.
It wasn’t every week, only when Kenji came home to visit his mom.
Then one Friday he invited her to visit him at Stanford and discovered that she didn’t know how to drive.
“I’ll teach you,” he offered.
She’d waved off his invitation, but he insisted. “Baseball season’s not until the spring; I’ve got plenty of time.”
So began their Sunday tradition of Kenji coming up from Palo Alto to give her driving lessons in his orange Datsun.
The pumpkin, he called it. They started out with laps around the Golden Gate Fields racetrack parking lot, where Marigold practiced changing gears and parallel parking.
As she grew more confident behind the wheel, they explored the Bay Area together, watching the sun glitter over the Golden Gate Bridge, looking in vain for turtles at Half Moon Bay, and meeting her uncle in Chinatown.
Now that she had passed her driving test, Marigold wished that for once she hadn’t been such a good student. There’d be no more reason for them to see each other every weekend.
“I expect you got ninety-nine on the exam?” Kenji teased as they continued walking toward the arcade.
“A hundred. You’re a good teacher.”
A sunny smile took over his face, but under the gray sky his eyes looked misty.
Typically they headed straight to the pinball machines, but today Kenji motioned toward the tables and ordered two Cokes. “I want to show you something I found in the garage.”
Marigold recognized the spiral sketchbook right away. “Your diary from junior high!”
A flush tinged Kenji’s neck. “Just a bunch of goofy drawings.”
He sat next to her, and they flipped through the book, laughing over his caricatures of their former classmates. There was even the dreaded Coach Harkness as a cartoon villain with laser eyes and horns.
A snort bubbled out of her nose. “I forgot about the old windbag. He really had it out for me.”
“He had it out for everyone.” Kenji tried to take the book back. “The rest aren’t so good.”
Marigold didn’t let go. “What, you’re not going to show me my pictures?”
“Who said I ever drew you?”
“You used to slap your sketchbook shut whenever I passed by. Probably gave me four slimy eyes with razor lashes and warty tentacles coming out of my chin.” She gave him a look over her glasses. “I know I would’ve.”
“There’s only a couple, they’re not very good—”
Marigold flipped forward several pages, landing on a drawing that brought her up short.
There she was, sitting at her desk, reading A Wizard of Earthsea.
She wasn’t a villain; she wasn’t even a caricature.
She was sketched in careful, thoughtful pencil, somewhere between a memory and a dream.
She looked prettier on paper, the intensity of her gaze softer, her often-pursed lips rounded into a gentle almost-smile.
Her hands especially—elegantly wrapped around her book, every crease of her gloves captured in wisps of graphite.
The picture was titled Bright Eyes Mari, 1969.
Marigold was speechless. She swallowed before finding her words. “I thought I told you not to call me Mari.”
“Do you know what it means in Japanese?”
She shook her head.
“Truth.”
The word sparked her fingertips, a twinkling sensation traveling across her skin. “Okay, I like that,” she admitted. “But bright eyes?”
“Sometimes when you were reading a library book, the light would reflect off the laminate and make your eyes, you know, shine.”
Marigold’s heart skipped a beat. She felt how close Kenji was sitting, their fingers almost touching on the sketchbook.
She took three quick sips of her Coke that she prayed might chase away the heat rising to her cheeks.
“You’re smooth.” She laughed awkwardly. “No wonder all the girls liked you, Yamamoto.”
“Not all of them liked me.” He was looking at her intently.
Her mouth went dry. What was she supposed to say to that?
Kenji downed his Coke in one long gulp. “Fireball’s open. I’m going to start a game. Coming?”
“Soon.” She kept turning the pages, finding more drawings of herself.
They were mundane slices of classroom life: She was raising her hand to ask a question, she was fidgeting with the screw on her glasses, she was tutoring a freshman in the library, then—Marigold turned to the last page in the series.
It was the only drawing in the book that was in color. She faced herself at sixteen. Her glasses sat at a crooked angle on her nose, her mouth pursed in concentration. She was holding the hand of an unseen patient, wrapping a finger with a roll of white gauze.
Clearly the drawing had been rendered by an older, more accomplished Kenji than the rest of the book. There was a tenderness to each stroke, a care that even Marigold’s untrained eye could appreciate.
The stub of a pencil had been carefully taped to the side of the drawing.
She fidgeted with her gloves, feeling the urge to touch the pencil and read what secrets lay beneath. But she was too much of a coward.
She took the sketchbook to where Kenji was playing pinball. “Why’d you keep the splint?”
Kenji glanced at the sketch. The blinking lights from the game cast a scarlet glow on his face. “I might have had a little crush.”
“We hated each other.”
“You hated me, I never hated you.” His bangs fell over his eyes as he slipped a quarter into the machine for her. “Ready?”
Her heart had become a restless drum. She could hardly breathe as she gripped the plunger. “Do you still have that . . . little crush?”
“Not anymore,” he said in a low voice.
Oh. She pulled the plunger. It was a skillful shot.
The ball fired into the playfield, lighting the top bumpers and racking up points.
It went chiming and kachinging past the bumps and standups, then it whirred around the spinning disc in the middle.
A second ball was released. Usually this was her favorite stage of the game, having multiple balls in play, but today Marigold’s focus was off.
She zipped the flippers shut too late, losing the first ball into the trough, then the second ball rolled down and shot into the pit.
Kenji held out another quarter. “Try again?”
Her gloved fingers hovered above his palm, her thoughts roiling. The last time she’d touched him—really touched him—was when they were kids.
She yanked off her glove.
“Mari, what are you—”
It was just a touch. As simple as breathing for most people. But for Marigold?
She heard music in the lines of his palm, a warm swell of cellos and fluttering flutes when she traced across his skin, invisible sparks stimulating the sensitive nerves in her fingertips.
Nothing about it hurt. Her lungs didn’t pinch, her throat didn’t go tight.
And what she saw, what she felt, was her heart leaping at a montage of stolen glances and hidden smiles, of excuses to spend time together—like offering driving lessons or showing the latest games in the arcade.
She saw him standing behind her in the cafeteria line in high school, smiling to himself when she bought a strawberry sundae cup and pried open the lid as though it were an illicit treasure—her face going as bright as her namesake.
Because, for longer than she dared believe, Kenji . . .
“You like me,” she breathed, her heart hammering. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I said I had a little crush.”
“You said not anymore.”
Understanding cleared his eyes. “Yeah, that’s right,” he replied. “Now it’s a big crush.”
He leaned down to her and lightly brushed his nose against hers. It took Marigold’s breath away, how such a simple touch engulfed her with warmth, with giddiness—with desire. Would it be dangerous to want more?
She threw her arms around him, tipping her lips to his. To hell with it all—there, in the middle of the arcade, surrounded by the flashing lights, Marigold decided to find out.