Her words are getting through.
This is where strangers meet.
An alien makes contact with one of her own.
For the first time, maybe ever, she realizes that she wants to communicate. Then, just like that, she’s talking to me, at hyper-speed.
So I start decoding her, my dream girl, at hyper-speed.
I spent the rest of my summer learning all sorts of things about her. Like why she knew—and how she could remember—all those movies.
“I saw them over and over.”
“Over and over?”
“I was at the movies, all day.”
“What do you mean—why?”
“When Mommy doesn’t want me around, she gives me a movie ticket (she has an endless roll of them—I think they’re a shareholder perk or something), and orders me to stay there.”
She tells me all about her little sister—her half-sister—who stays at home when my dream girl is sent (alone) to the movies. Kind of sounds like my dream girl is being banished. She sees the same movie over and over. She sits in the back row, by the door. That way, when Mommy calls, the staff at the movie theatre know where to find her. They relay Mommy’s orders: You can come home now.
(Pretty sure I don’t have to remind you that nobody had cell phones in 1985. Phone cards had only been around for a couple of years.)
On standby until Mommy calls. She has things to eat and drink, and she goes to the toilet whenever she needs to. Otherwise, she sits back and enjoys the shows. She sucks them in—or they suck her in. She remembers everything.
She’s seen Once Upon a Time in America—a brutally long film about a brutal Jewish mobster. Too complicated for any kid to wrap her head around. Still, she’s dipped into that world.
She’s seen Gremlins. Three rules for Mogwai owners to live by.
She’s seen The Terminator. An unkillable assassin sent back from the future.
She talks and talks. She shares her worlds with me. Worlds I’ve never known.
It’s almost like communing with the spirit world.
I read her at hyper-speed. And I fall for her at hyper-speed. She keeps me well fed with fresh dreams. And because I’m probably the first person in her life to kind of understand her, she wants to be close to me, too. This isn’t like—this is love.
Our dates are limited to The End of the World and its remote territories. That basically means the bus stop, the local shrine, the village office, the hot springs, the mountain trail. Our forest friends surround us: the graceful mourning cloak, the ultra-ultramarine flycatcher, the serow that the other kids see as a three-headed hellhound. Of course, all we do on our dates is talk. Just talk. Or—the way I saw it—interpret dreams.
Our dreams go everywhere we go. We have access to twenty or thirty different worlds (how many are there, really?), far beyond the reach of—and of no interest to—the others. But we never badmouth them. We never look down on them.
All that matters to me is that she’s happy with how we are.
We. Me and my sixth-grade girlfriend.
My first girlfriend.
My most momentous moment at The End of the World happened in the schoolyard—by “the weather station”, the closest thing we had to a monument. And it was monumental. When my first girlfriend gave me my first kiss. History of mine! Let the day be marked.
She’s two or three centimetres taller than me, so she sort of ducks down to kiss me. Her boobs hit me in the chest—with a good amount of force, too. This is all really new to me, but I’m surprised they don’t feel softer. What a letdown. I blame it on the bra.
In the moment, I have no idea what our kiss means.
I have no idea what it means when—for the first time ever—she stops talking.
“Everybody get on the bus,” the director is shouting. “Find a seat, and keep both hands flat on your lap.”
My memory gets a little fuzzy after that kiss. All data for the next twelve hours or so is irretrievable—forever lost. But the next big scene I remember, for sure. It was Lake Okutama. Maybe we were visiting Ogochi Dam? Or the Centre for Water and Nature?
It was the last day of summer break.
Could have been 31st August, or not. Does it really matter? All I know is that it was the day my beautiful summer came to a cold, brutal end.
The bus was idling in the parking lot. I was following the director’s orders—lining up to get back on the bus. But, after a couple of seconds, I realized something.
She isn’t here.
It smacks me like a whip. Red alert. Alarm bells are ringing. WHERE. IS. SHE? I do a three-sixty—to get a full scan of the parking lot. I see her. There. Over by that stupid red sports car. There’s a woman in her thirties standing by the passenger door, a man in sunglasses—age unclear—in the driver’s seat. The woman’s talking to somebody.
To her. My girlfriend.
I watch my girlfriend squeeze into the back seat of the car.
But she’s looking back. Looking at the bus. Looking for me. Our eyes meet and sparks fly. The alarm in my brain goes off. BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.
That woman has to be Mommy, here to take my girlfriend home.
How could I be so dumb?
I never saw this coming. I never thought she was going to be taken away. When she showed up at the start of summer, I was convinced she was here for the long haul, like the rest of us. But she was just a summer camper. Sent to The End of the World to stay out of Mommy’s hair, until Mommy came back.
She was being taken away.
We were going separate ways. That was our fate.
But I had been too stupid to notice.
Red alert.
Once my girlfriend was buckled up in the back seat, the car took off. I broke out of line and ran after it. What was the director saying? Keep both hands flat on your lap? Are you kidding me? More like, keep both hands on your girlfriend and never let go.
Never let go.
I leap onto the highway that runs next to the lake. The highway that runs here all the way from Hikawa Campsite. National Route 411. I’m a hitchhiker with an emergency. The station wagon coming towards me screeches to a stop. Well, more like I bring it to a stop by standing in the way. They were probably yelling at me, but I don’t remember. I think they were campers, in their twenties.
I’m all worked up. “They took my sister!” I scream. “Follow that red car!”
It all sounded very dramatic—and they took my word for it.
I mean, it was a lie they could believe. My girlfriend was banging on the rear window, crying and screaming, playing her part to perfection. Saying something—to me.
“Come on! Catch them!” I yell. The station-wagon driver floors it. The adults in that sports car had to be completely unprepared for the station wagon speeding after them—this was a scene from a movie they hadn’t seen. We chase them through tunnel after tunnel—Omugishiro, Murosawa, Sakamoto. Drumcan Bridge to our left. Flying west down NR 411.
We’re getting close to Kamosawa. As in: “Kamosawa, Yamanashi Prefecture”.
Tokyo’s about to end.
And we’re catching up. I scream: “Ram them! Make them stop!”
But next thing I know, we get cut off. Something pulls between the station-wagon (that I kinda sorta hijacked) and the sports car. It’s the bus, sliding sideways, blocking the whole highway. The station wagon swerves to a stop.
The bus driver sped up and killed the chase.
A highway with only two lanes. Game over—just like that.