Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kit
Kit liked who she was when she was around Ryo.
He knew about everything. He wasn’t fazed by the fact that she was younger than him but treated her as though she were his peer.
They were only a year apart, but he had lived already, in comparison to her small existence in Chestnut Hill.
He had traveled for a year before college already.
The night they had kissed, they walked hand in hand on the deserted streets and he’d told her, “I don’t know when I’ll have the chance again to be so carefree.
I’ll want to get a job at the right place when I graduate.
And I want to see more, participate in more, to witness life and places and not just talk about things in theory but know I’ve had experiences that are real. ”
Ryo had plans. And he never answered anyone with I don’t know, man. The way the boys back home did.
In the first few days since kissing Ryo, Kit was nervous.
She woke up early and listened for any signs of him moving around the house.
She wanted to appear nonchalant even though she wasn’t.
But the moment he saw her, he went straight to her, and any doubt she had of his feelings evaporated before her eyes.
A routine started to form. In the mornings Ryo waited for her and made her coffee when she came down the stairs, then invited her to join him to walk the dog in the park.
Ryo made her feel none of the agony she used to feel around Dave, waiting for him to glance at her across a crowded cafeteria.
And with this open reassurance of Ryo’s feelings for her, confidence emerged in Kit once again.
“But surely you have some other girls you are interested in, girls who are sniffing around,” she said one afternoon as they walked to his favorite café in Shibuya. Kit laughed as she said this, but it was not a joke.
“There are always girls sniffing around, Katherine. Just like there are always boys sniffing around.” He took her hand.
“Interesting.” She had never said this before, in response to anything before. A Ryo-ism.
Ryo ordered the coffees in Japanese, still holding her hand. She drank her iced coffee black now, just like Ryo did. At first she had found the taste bitter, but now the thought of a milky caramel frappuccino repulsed her.
“The thing is, you’re stuck with me. Until you don’t want to be. It’s pretty simple,” he said with a smile.
He wanted to see her, so he told her so, and sought her out.
Want to watch a film? Come join me for a swim.
Let’s go and get a bite. When she was out and she messaged him, he responded to her almost immediately.
He actively made plans for them. Come and try some kaki-gori, it’s the best on a hot day.
Ryo was thoughtful, so she didn’t have to second-guess, she completely lost her appetite, and her chest was beating with such violence all the time, as though a hummingbird were trapped inside her rib cage. She was infatuated with him.
She loved that Ryo knew about everything.
He had an opinion about the election year, the state of Japan’s economy, about macros in proteins and carbohydrates, about copyright laws in the music industry, about the gender pay gap, about racial identity as a third-culture kid, about plant-based diets and the latest album from Drake.
She felt out of her depth in his company, but at the same time managed to appear to know what he was talking about, even if it involved rushing to the bathroom and searching her phone for a summary of whatever the topic of conversation was.
He prompted her to listen to podcasts she had never heard of, even though she would stop them midway and put on sappy songs that inflated her feelings for him instead.
When she listened to him speaking, she felt pride swell inside her—though she was uncertain of exactly why.
Was she proud to be on his arm? Or was it pride in him as a person?
She watched him handle his sister with care.
Kit suspected that she would like Ryo even if they were just friends.
It wasn’t just his looks and athleticism, although this set him apart from anyone she had ever met before.
He was inarguably desirable, and she was the one he chose.
And this made her want to be the best version of herself.
Parents were not supposed to have favorites, but Yuriko and Rick Buchanan did. What surprised Kit, though, was Amy’s acceptance of her parents’ preferences.
The more time she spent in their home, the more she started to see the intricate family dynamic.
At the center, the eye of the swirling storm, was Amy.
Kit observed that Rick Buchanan practiced neutrality by hiding behind the wall of his work to excuse him from any real engagement in family discussions where she was involved.
Ryo, on the other hand, stayed quiet when his sister announced herself and her latest ideas, with a smile on his face that she would look to for reassurance, and occasionally Kit caught Mr. Buchanan and his son exchange a look to say Here she goes again.
Ryo managed to hold a position that was a fine balance between being an adult and being her greatest ally.
Ryo occasionally teased Amy, but Kit could see that he protected her most of the time, finding ways to swiftly divert his mother’s attention from Amy when tempers started to rise.
Yuriko’s shoulders would tighten when her youngest child was present.
Her eyes squeezed at the edges when she looked at her daughter, the way a person without children looked at a toddler having a tantrum in the middle of a crowded store.
Amy was like a faulty alarm, set to go off at any time without warning, with no possibility of deactivation.
Her unpredictability and whimsy vexed Yuriko.
The moment Amy arrived, Yuriko’s voice changed.
Must you sit that way, Amy?
Are you not going to say hello to us?
Really, why do you always have to draw attention to yourself?
The more Amy acted out—and this, Kit realized, was a daily thing with Amy—the more Yuriko became preoccupied with the order in the house.
Amy’s instinct for order was as underdeveloped as Yuriko’s need for hygiene and harmony was overdeveloped.
Kit learned over the days she spent at the house that Ryo and Amy’s mother had a highly sensitive sense of smell.
Kit watched Yuriko walk into a room and take a deep breath through her nose.
Kit could only smell whatever ornate bouquet of flowers was displayed in the hall.
Sometimes a scent of cooking would escape from the kitchen, but it was always agreeable—never too tantalizing or invasive, but just enough to alert curiosity from the appetite.
Kit also learned that Yuriko ran her hand over the furniture in order to check for dust. On one occasion she saw Yuriko through the kitchen doors, sniffing the marble top of the kitchen island.
She glanced at Ryo, who was too absorbed in his phone arranging something for them to do later that night.
I’m sorry, Linda-san, but I can still smell it, it’s damp, it’s something. Maybe it’s the cloth? Please get some of the bleach and spray and then wipe away with hot water. Right away, please, Linda-san.
Kit tried to imagine Yuriko in Chestnut Hill, walking alongside her on Germantown Avenue to the Weavers Way Co-op for groceries.
Would she even eat the food there? She tried to imagine her at a parent-teacher conference, how the other parents would act toward her.
What would Mrs. Harrison say to her at a family barbecue?
What would Sabrina think of her? Would she seem glamorous or would the other parents at CHA talk to her in a raised voice the way they sometimes did to Mrs. Chen?
But Yuriko was on a different plane than Lee Lee, and even her own mother, Sally.
Yuriko would do everything she could to fit in.
She tried to imagine what it would be like to have a mother like Yuriko, and how nobody would ask her where she was from if they were walking together.
She shook away the uneasy sense of disloyalty to Sally. She would never tell Sally any of this.
“You’re just different from the girls I knew in high school here, you know?” Ryo said one afternoon as they walked through the Pachinko arcade in Shinjuku. The noisy balls echoed all around her.
“In what way?” Kit felt giddiness rise in her, the promise of a compliment, reassurance of his feelings in the air.
“I’ve just never met anyone like you. You’re not trying to be anything. Like, you’re you. There’s not a prissy kind of pretense at coyness. I don’t feel like you play games. And we can talk about real things.”
For a moment Kit’s face froze in a smile, as she thought about the pretense of indifference she had put on for almost a year toward Dave.
The way she felt herself put on her “Kit-ness” before stepping out to meet Ryo each time.
She wished right down in her belly that what he said was true.
She also felt a small pang of hurt as she longed for him to tell her she was the most beautiful girl he had ever been with, even if it wasn’t true.
“You couldn’t talk about real things with girls before?”
“Not like I can with you. We have so much expat privilege here. And most of the girls I know, I don’t feel like they’ve come from the real world.”
“I guess you can’t get more real than Philly.” She laughed. “And Tokyo feels really really far away from that,” she heard herself say, although the words felt a little like a lie in her mouth.