Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Kit
That day with the mooncake, which was the last time Kit slept at Sabrina’s house, though neither of them knew it then, Kit was preoccupied by her friend’s significant plans for summer, and moreover, by the fact that she had made no such plans for herself.
As always, she relied on the safety net of her parents’ annual rental of a beach house.
Dave’s family, the Harrisons, would rent the house next door.
She would go to parties down the shore with the same people from the year before and the year before that.
Her parents accepted that Sabrina would stay with them at the beach house for a few days every summer.
Back at home in Philly, Kit would sunbathe at the country club pool when temperatures soared, and when she felt like company she’d invite Sabrina to join her.
But now, Kit was overcome by an impulse to leave Chestnut Hill as soon as possible.
And preferably before her friend, because she always did everything first.
What Kit couldn’t tell her mother or Sabrina was that the most pressing reason she had to travel after graduation was to get away from Dave Harrison.
When Sabrina revealed her plan to go to China for the summer, within a matter of hours Kit decided that she too would leave for her own adventure, as though she had come up with the idea herself.
As the end of high school drew near, everything in Chestnut Hill was a searing reminder that her heart had been brutally discarded and she had no way to mend it unless she could be somewhere where he wasn’t.
The final semester of high school had been weighed down by the clandestine embraces and heated kissing in corners of houses out of anyone’s sight, followed by his distance from her in public.
Most days, her eyes flickered over the length of the hallways, searching for his silhouette, waiting for him to acknowledge her.
She never learned from the pain she felt as he looked through her.
She just continued to hope that one day he’d be different.
···
The next weekend, Kit was lying on her bed daydreaming.
She’d spent the last week creating a full picture in her head of what her own adventure abroad would look like.
She heard her mother’s footsteps passing down the hallway and called out to her.
Sally stood in the doorway with a vase of wilting flowers. Kit never called for her mother.
“Mom,” Kit said, turning onto her back and shuffling herself up to sit against the headboard of the bed. “I think I want to travel.”
She watched her mother’s expression, a rearrangement of thoughts for a moment.
Kit had expected a different response, enthusiastic support for her declaration.
It occurred to her that she should have waited a day or two to bring this up; they had put their family dog down that morning, and though Kit had felt sad momentarily, Tripper had been her mother’s dog, not hers.
But her self-reprimand evaporated as she rationalized, She needs to know as soon as possible.
Flights need to be paid for, and where was she going to stay in Tokyo anyway?
Kit started to imagine herself checking into a hotel on her own, pulling a suitcase along to the check-in desk and waving her parents’ “emergencies only” credit card at the receptionist. She wanted to laugh aloud at the image she’d built in her mind, as though she were playing house at the Please Touch Museum.
“Sure, of course you do,” Sally answered, fixing her expression, which did little to hide her surprise.
“No, you don’t understand. I want to travel this summer .
Like in the next couple of months. To Japan.
I know my ethnic heritage has always been a little blurry, but you know how I’ve always had this really strong pull to Japan, right?
Sabrina and I were talking about our Asian heritage.
I think it would be good before college starts to have a better sense of my identity? Don’t you agree, Mom?”
Her mother stared at her. Kit noticed a redness around the edges of her green-gray eyes from the tears she’d shed earlier over Tripper. Kit didn’t really see her mother cry, she only heard her behind the closed doors of her bedroom sometimes.
Kit stared back at her, unable to control her smug expression as she felt a surge of pleasure from the delivery of her words. The satisfaction of stating the importance of her beliefs, the phrase sense of identity , felt good coming out of her mouth.
“I…what?” Sally asked, looking for her words.
“Mom, you don’t need to answer now. I just needed to ask you, okay?” Kit said.
Kit felt she had truly done a good deed: thoughtfully giving her mother advance notice. And she smiled at the fuzzy internal glow of her mature generosity.
“Kit, this is not the time,” was all her mother said finally.
“Mom,” she groaned, knowing that the more she pushed, the better the chance her mother would acquiesce. But for now, Sally had shut her down.
“What is it, Kit?”
Kit looked up, hostility starting to build.
“I’m sorry about Tripper, Mom. I am. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked right now. But I think this is important too.” She waited for the recognition of her empathy, the olive branch extended.
Instead, Sally walked away, and Kit felt a hot anger spread inside of her, right up to the roots of her hair.
“Where are you going?”
Her mother continued down the hall to her bedroom, and Kit sank down and screamed into her pillow.
She rolled over and stared at the ceiling, but her fury dissolved quickly. Kit’s life suddenly seemed ignited with possibility.
She relished the thought of sharing the news at school the next day: how she had planned to go to Japan to find her roots.
It had always been Japan to her, after all.
Finding her roots and finding her birth parents were two very different things, and the former was far easier to stomach, with less possibility for unwelcome surprises.
In the eighth grade, Kit had decided that her birth mother had to be Japanese.
It took almost no time for her self-declared origin story to become the truth in her mind and others’, because it was never questioned.
Nobody would question the adopted mixed-race girl with white parents.
Why shouldn’t she be Japanese if she willed it to be so?
The boys in her class were going through a Nintendo anime game phase.
The female characters were drawn with long legs, short skirts, and big brown eyes with floppy fringes.
One day Todd Peterson announced after a soccer game that Kit’s lookalike was one of the characters in a game they played.
The other boys gathered around his phone and looked up at her and back, and they hooted and laughed at the resemblance.
“Hey! Come see this, Kit. It’s you,” he called as he waved the phone at her.
She stood, welded to the ground. A quick internal fight over whether she should ignore him or not took place.
She hesitated and then walked over slowly.
The heat rose up her neck and to her cheeks.
She tugged at the neck of her T-shirt. She peered over Todd’s shoulder as he zoomed into the image.
The girl did look like her. She could see the resemblance.
Kit’s skin tone was a shade or two darker, but the heart shape of her face, the light brown specks in her eyes, and the way the bangs she had been growing out fell just over her eyebrows were like her.
In that instant she decided she would keep her bangs and told herself to remind her mother to book a hair appointment.
Her chest filled with pride, and she felt a rush of happiness at all the eyes on her. She felt like the heat of the afternoon sun was warming her through the windows, just like a dog might be lying blissfully in the glow of the sunshine.
“Yeah, man, this is you. So weird! Even your hair.” Todd pulled at her ponytail.
From that moment, Kit decided she was a little Japanese.
And over the years, the fictional narrative became a reality.
In her mind, her birth mother also had the large shiny brown anime eyes.
The mother she imagined would have worn a kimono on New Year’s Day, and sometimes Kit would scroll through her Instagram feed to look at the Japanese mothers who posted elaborate lunchboxes, rice balls with cute googly eyes and octopus sausages that were both appealing and repulsive at the same time.
She followed her favorite stars and influencers, and when they posted from Tokyo, she would like the images.
Her mother bought her a vintage travel poster of springtime in Tokyo, and she had it framed on her wall.
As the years went by, the frame became dusty and hung askew, and eventually most of the image was covered by other moments in her life she wanted to display more.
Photographs of her and Sabrina, a Valentine’s Day card from the tenth grade that she was convinced Dave had left in her locker.
But somewhere back in the same recess of her mind where she was grateful for her white adoptive parents, she believed she might really be Japanese.
As Kit had expected, four weeks before the end of high school, her parents gave in and gave her a graduation present: a plane ticket to Tokyo.
Sally called her old family friend Rick Buchanan, and it was agreed that Kit would stay with him and his family in Tokyo for the better part of the summer.
Rick’s two children were about Kit’s age, a boy and a girl, and he held a senior position as a diplomat.
Kit’s comforts would be taken care of in every way that was within a mother’s control.
It seemed the perfect arrangement, but Kit still wanted to apply her own conditions. Am I going to be chaperoned all the time, Mom? It’s important to me that I am independent, you know. Especially before college starts.
In truth, Kit felt some relief knowing that her mother was watching over her, because venturing so far from home scared her.
Leaving her hometown, the familiarity of the same street she’d lived on her whole life, going so far away from her anchor points was terrifying.
A controlled freedom was what Kit craved.
Freedom that wasn’t too extreme or daring, with the soft landing of her mother’s touch.
She was thrilled at the thought of sharing her plans to travel with Dave.
What better way was there for her to tell him that his silence over the phone and at school was hardly noticed, than her bold decision to travel to the other side of the world.
Her trip. She would explain to him in detail the long journey, the jet lag, and the mystery of a completely different land.
When the Harrisons came over to watch the game that weekend, what would have been an awkward afternoon of Dave and Kit deliberately avoiding each other’s gaze suddenly gave her the hope of shifting the power paradigm between them.
“Kit has decided she is going to have an adventure this summer in Tokyo.” As her mother announced her news, she flushed with self-satisfaction but still found herself avoiding Dave’s gaze.
Kit shrugged. “I figure, this is a good time, you know? Before college.” She surprised herself with her feigned nonchalance while her heart raced, hoping that Dave would pick up on the implication that it was her trip, to be taken on her initiative.
Mrs. Harrison gasped with delight. “Wow, Kit, this is so exciting! Honey, remember I told you about our friend from high school who is a diplomat? His name is Rick and his gorgeous wife is Yuriko,” she said to Dave, who wasn’t listening to his mother but grunted in acknowledgment.
“Oh, and do you remember, Sal? When he introduced her to us? She was like a little doll just sitting there.”
“I wrote to Rick,” Sally told her.
Dave looked up from his phone. “How long you going for?” he asked before returning to his text message.
Kit wondered who he was messaging.
“Six weeks. That’s quite awhile, isn’t it, sweetie?” Sally said, answering Dave’s question for her.
He looked up again. Kit searched his face for signs of a reaction, but after their eyes met for a moment, he looked at his phone again.
“Yeah, it’s basically the whole summer.”
Dave heard her. She knew him well enough now to see the impact of her words. He put his phone down, closing the screen so she couldn’t see what he had been doing.
A year ago, Kit had sat on the beach, shoulders pink with sunburn as Dave stood over her, his shadow stretching out along the sand. Hey, come down to Troy’s party later? His voice made it sound like it wasn’t really a question.
That night, as they sat on the sand watching the orange flames of the bonfire, her leg fell against his, and he didn’t move.
She wanted to look up at him, to see any expression in his face that might give away his feelings, Instead, she studied the parts of him that she could take in up close.
She studied his legs, the golden-blond hairs, and his hands.
She liked Dave’s hands. His nails were always clean and short.
She had noticed this about him long before he’d started to make her heart soar.
Hygiene and pride in appearance: Kit cared about these things.
For the rest of her life she always noticed men’s nails.
And if their nails were too long, unclean, she would instantly strike them from her mind.
When he stood up and reached for her hand, she let him take it, and he led her down the beach. She only realized after they had walked for five minutes in silence, her hand in his, that she had left her sandals by the bonfire.
He draped his arm around her neck, and she felt herself lean into the side of his body, until he stopped suddenly and turned quickly.
They were face-to-face, and she could feel his breath on her lips.
It wasn’t what she had thought it would be.
The kiss. She had expected tenderness and feeling; she wanted words from him, but instead he said nothing.
His tongue stabbed at hers, her mouth awkwardly open, feeling too wet, as he rubbed his hands over the small of her back, and then around to the bare skin of her stomach.
When he stopped and came up for breath, she stepped back to search his eyes, but found nothing.