Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-One
Kit
Kit had talked to Sabrina once about how love was thinking of that person the moment you woke and last thing at night.
“Yeah but if that’s really true, then that means that I love Mr. Hargreaves and this assignment on Thomas Hardy more than anything in the world, so there is no real science behind that.” Sabrina had laughed.
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She did wake and think of Ryo first thing, and every other moment she spent with him and away from him.
When she lay beside him in his bed when everyone in the household was out, she loved to listen to Ryo’s breathing as he slept.
His back went up and down slowly with every inhale and exhale, the fine, almost invisible hairs on his shoulders, golden from the sun.
She looked around his room, the shelves with trophies, and walls with no pictures.
In a week she would be home. Back to walking along Germantown Avenue to the ice cream parlor with Sabrina.
They might drive down to the shore for a weekend, or watch the sun go down from her treehouse as they talked into the darkness.
Soon, the summer would be over and college would start.
She wouldn’t know anyone—not really. A blank slate.
She wondered what Sabrina was doing. It had been over a week now since they had exchanged messages.
She couldn’t remember the last time so many days had passed without contact with her best friend.
Her imagination wandered further and further away from Ryo, like smoke that curled up from a forgotten burning cigar.
Five days before Kit left Tokyo, she sat with Ryo at the dining table; the whole family was out and Linda was at the store. Their legs were entwined under the table.
Kit rubbed a swollen mosquito bite on her leg and scratched at the top with her index finger. It had begun to bleed.
“What have you done there?” Ryo asked. He folded a napkin from the center of the table and pressed it on her leg. His hand was dry and cool. They looked like the napkins her mother bought for parties or at Christmas.
“So when will I see you after you leave?” He didn’t look at her as he asked.
“I don’t know. I mean, will you head out to the East Coast at all? I do go out west sometimes too. And our parents are friends, so…”
“Here’s a thought. Just something that came to me last night. Should I come out before the fall? Check out Penn? Keep my options open? There are some good schools out east, right? A transfer isn’t impossible.”
She didn’t respond to him. She was afraid of how her voice might croak, giving away the feelings that surged inside her, feelings she couldn’t quite name. Her heart was expanding, with the reassurance of love returned, rather than the contraction she always felt with Dave.
“Wow. I guess I should be offended.” He sighed. His neck started to color.
“No, no, no.” She grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard. “I just didn’t want to talk about what happens next.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t know how you felt, and well, this…I assumed was a summer fling. Not your first or last.”
He laughed. She waited for a response, hoping for an answer.
“This is different.”
She giggled awkwardly and regretted it when she saw the flicker of hurt cross his face.
“It’s understandable you’re laughing at me. But really—I wouldn’t consider such a huge thing like changing my college choice if I didn’t feel like we had something really special.” Something close to pleading passed through his face. Then it disappeared.
“But what if…what if this doesn’t last? What are your parents going to say? And then you’ve moved to another college and city and your plans have changed for something that didn’t work out.”
“I’m not making any big moves yet. I’m just looking at options, and transferring is one of them. How do we know if we don’t give something a try?”
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Two days later, Ryo told his father during a squash game that he wanted to visit Penn before the fall, in case he wanted to transfer.
When Kit walked into the dining room that night, Rick neither smiled nor frowned but sat at the head of the table and glanced at her before returning his gaze to his son.
Yuriko scrolled through her phone to look up university rankings, and Amy’s expression was surly.
Ryo looked at Kit and smiled, nodding his head toward the empty seat beside him, but her feet were welded to the ground.
“I can’t believe you’re just going to transfer like that. You can’t. It’s not that easy,” Amy snapped.
“Actually, it is pretty easy. I mean, I have checked and there really isn’t a payout as long as I transfer within the minimum time frame, and if I release the spot within the first semester, it won’t cost us much.
Providing I get a place at Penn, of course.
The programs at Penn are really fantastic, and some would even argue that it’s a better university for my interests. ”
Rick nodded, taking in his son’s announcement.
Kit wondered if this was worse than him shouting.
Kit’s father had never been the disciplinarian.
Instead, he disappeared when conflict threatened.
Rick struck her as a different type of father altogether.
As she sat at their family table, she could hear the sound of Linda through the doors washing dishes, and she wanted to escape into the kitchen with her.
Kit suspected Ryo’s father gave the impression of calm and safety but that he might later snap in a single movement.
“Why Penn, Ryo? You’ve never mentioned it before. The only East Coast colleges you were interested in were Harvard and Columbia. Is it because you two are…” Rick looked at Kit for a moment and nodded toward her.
Amy stared at her father, reeling him in.
“I’ve been thinking all summer. And it’s the one that has some of the programs I’m really interested in. And the business majors are great too.”
“Katherine, my dear, would you mind terribly just letting us have a moment?” This time Rick looked at her again and Kit felt herself want to shrink into her chair. His eyes were cold.
“Oh, of course, yes, I’ll head up. I’m sorry,” Kit said, pushing her chair back loudly and cringing at the thought of the scratch it might leave on the wooden floors. At the same time she thought, I want to go home.
“No, don’t. Stay.” Ryo grabbed her hand. Kit looked at him, pleading for him to let her go. “I told Dad earlier this afternoon and we just told Mom and Amy.” She felt his grip loosen over her hand.
“You need to talk this out with your family. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said quietly. Rick forced a stiff smile and nodded.
“Thank you for understanding.” Kit smiled uncomfortably, and quickly fled the room. She couldn’t make out what Rick was saying as he spoke to his son in a hushed voice.
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“Are you guys serious right now?” Amy’s voice carried down the hall, however, as she slammed her fists onto the table. The glasses rattled.
Kit could hear their voices rising as she climbed the stairs. Ryo talked calmly to his father. He argued his point, with no edge of frenzied emotion to his voice.
“You’re just going to throw away your place at Berkeley for her ?” Amy’s voice traveled up the stairs again.
The truth was, Ryo wasn’t throwing away his place for her, but he wanted it to be an option. Kit knew this about him, he liked to have choices. And it was easier for Kit to accept this than to think he was turning his life upside down just for her. That would have been too much, even for her.
This was the difference between them. Ryo Buchanan, she was starting to realize, took chances because most of the time, or all the time, things worked out for him.
For Kit, the path to the next day was more muddled.
It never occurred to her that she might sail effortlessly, with perfect winds and conditions, through the waters.
To Kit, risks meant a borderlessness she had feared her whole life.
This wasn’t her mother’s interpretation of boundaries—Kit often heard her mother say to her father, “Kit’s the kind of child who needs firm boundaries” — this was about limits she could set for her own abilities, for how far she was willing to travel, how far she was willing to look beyond the safety of the only home she knew.
But she hadn’t found a place where she felt she belonged yet, nor had she really found the courage to venture out by herself.
Not really. Even here, everywhere she looked, she had the soft, safe padding of her mother’s arrangements.
Sometimes it brought a profound fatigue and melancholy, a longing for a life she ought to have the nerve to live.
For Ryo, it was different. As far as Ryo Buchanan was concerned, everything was for the taking.
Privilege did that, being ha-fu in Japan did that, and having a father who was an ambassador did that.
He didn’t have to stay within the confines of a small world he had grown up in, because he had already broken out of it while he was growing up. He’d already joined the wider world.
The following day, Rick and Yuriko called Sally from their bedroom, not knowing that Kit stood outside Ryo’s bedroom door and listened to her mother’s voice on speakerphone.
“We have some concerns,” Rick said.
Kit knew that this was the type of phrase that would send her mother into a frenzy. She swallowed, a mixed lump of relief and fear. Rick was managing her mother.
“Can you even hear anything?” Ryo whispered to Kit from the bed.
“Ryo and Kit, it seems, well Ryo has decided he wants to visit some colleges on the East Coast, with the possibility of transferring. I don’t know exactly how much of it will actually happen…
he made all the changes himself and looks like he wants to visit before September. So we may be coming to Pennsylvania.”
Kit could hear her mother’s silence. It lasted too long to put up any pretense of happiness at this news.
“I think it’s because of this relationship they’ve begun. I am a little concerned, but I’m trying to avoid placing any firm brakes in case things just fade out.”
Kit didn’t look at Ryo as she heard this.
He was on his computer looking something up.
She felt affronted at the parents’ lack of belief in their blossoming love.
But somewhere in the deep recesses of Kit’s mind, she was also terrified of what this would do to her carefully laid plans for college.
She was grateful to Rick Buchanan for delivering the news of Ryo’s interest in transferring instead of having to tell Sally herself.
It saved Kit from another argument with her.
She also knew that her mother would be afraid of losing control.
While Sally and Rick continued to make arrangements, Kit started to think about looking for her birth mother, and how Sally would deal with the news of Ryo transferring, and the cocoon of safety on Gravers Lane started to feel like it was made of fragile, thin glass.
A little mishandling could leave her whole life shattered on the floor.
Kit had built a fence around her story and the parts she didn’t want to explore or discuss, and she was starting to realize how the people in her life—her parents, Sabrina—respected it.
Kit realized that she wasn’t so sure she wanted to know, even though all this time she had acted as though she did.
Because she would lose control. The truth was, she was always going to be different, unlike Ryo, Amy, Sabrina, or any of the other children she had grown up with in Chestnut Hill.
She would always have her origin story, whatever that was.