Chapter 17- Consequences
The new Mr. and Mrs. Kamiya left after the party for a cruise to New Zealand, so Kari stayed at their apartment alone.
She couldn't sleep, she couldn't eat, all she could manage was crying. She had known that this weekend would be painful, but she hadn't expected T.K. to react so cruelly.
She cried for so long that it made her sick. In the morning she couldn't remember how she had fallen asleep on the bathroom floor, still in her dress, with the previous night's makeup streaked down her cheeks.
Taking a shower helped her to feel a little better, but not much. She had finally reached the point, however, where she had no more tears left to cry, which may or may not be progress. Having passed through the uncontrollable weeping phase, now she just felt numb inside.
When Tai arrived to drive her to the airport, her face was blank and expressionless. He didn't ask her what was wrong until the silence of the drive became unbearable.
"So what exactly happened last night between you and T.K.?" he asked cautiously.
"We broke up," Kari stated calmly. She breathed deeply, making sure that she wasn't going to cry again.
He gave her a look that told her he wanted her to continue.
"I don't want to talk about it," she told him, concentrating on breathing steadily.
Tai turned his attention back to the road. "T.K. wouldn't talk about it either. I don't know when he left the party, but he came back to our place around midnight. I've never seen the kid so depressed."
That was not what Kari wanted to hear just then. "So what the hell do you want me to do about it? T.K. and I are done, Tai, and I don't want to talk about it!"
He nodded and shut up, finally getting the hint. "Well, Daivs'll be excited," he added.
"That's not funny, Tai."
"Yeah it is. Smile, Kari. I just can't understand how this happened. You and T.K. were meant to be together."
She interrupted him, "Tai, I said I don't want to talk about it."
"Fine, we're here anyways," he declared as he pulled into a parking spot.
He carried her suitcase into the terminal for her and waited while she checked in her luggage and got her ticket. The guards wouldn't let him through security so they said their goodbyes then and there.
"Tell Mom and Grandma Kate hi for me."
"Okay. And thanks for not talking about it," she commented sarcastically.
"Anytime, Kari. That's what brothers are for."
She laughed, rolled her eyes and hugged him anyways. "I love you Tai. I'm gonna miss you."
And to her enormous surprise, he started crying right there in the airport terminal, in front of the huge security guard named Paco. Sobbing hysterically he threw his arms around you. "Kari, everything's so weird now. Dad's married, you and T.K. aren't together, and you're going back to live in America!"
She rubbed his back telling him that it would be all right. "We'll see each other soon, Tai, I promise. Tell Matt I said good bye." She headed towards security, then she turned around and waved at her still balling brother. "E-mail me," she shouted back before joining the long line of people to go through the metal detectors.
The flight was long and boring, to say the least. This was her third time flying across and it seemed that each flight was worse than the last. The little monitor that counted down the minutes certainly didn't help the time go by any faster.
When the plane touched down at the San Francisco International Airport, Kari felt like worshipping the ground. She went through the now extremely familiar routine of baggage collection, customs, countless metal detectors, and body searches before spotting her Grandma Kate at the exit.
The next few weeks were a blur to Kari. School started the Monday after she returned, which gave her some distraction from her misery. When she was studying, her mind cleared of everything else and she could finally escape T.K.'s image.
The weekends, however, were torture. Mr. Thompson hired her as Mikey's fulltime babysitter, which offered some distraction on Friday and Saturday nights when he took her mom out. Yes, her mother was now dating her history teacher. At first it was a little awkward, but after that wore away, Kari was happy for both of them.
Lynn and Hannah bothered her for weeks, trying to learn all of the details about what had happened in Japan. Kari had yet to tell them everything, since she had decided to keep most of that week to herself.
Between schoolwork, following Lynn and Hannah around town, and babysitting Mikey, Kari had tried keeping as busy as she could, but when she was alone, things were different.
In those dark moments before Kari could fall asleep, T.K. was all she ever thought about. His eyes haunted her everywhere. His smile was imprinted on the backs of her eyelids. No matter how hard she tried to forget, she could still feel his lips against her skin, his hands on her thighs. Sometimes she awoke in the middle of the night remembering only that, forgetting that he hated her now. Sometimes she woke up convinced that he had never walked away, that she hadn't said the terrible things she had.
Perhaps that was why the first thing she did when she got home from school was check the mail for a letter from him. The first thing she ever did when sitting down to a computer was check her e-mail, praying for some sort of connection from him.
Between her times of forgetting and her times of heartbreak, the year flew by pretty quickly. Tai came to California during his winter break from school and gave her all the updates from Japan, carefully excluding any mention of T.K.
Kari had gently informed her mother about Tai's relationship with Matt, and probably because she had been living in San Francisco for over a year, her son's homosexuality wasn't much of a surprise.
One night while Tai was in town, Grandma Kate and their mother had already gone to bed, and Kari and Tai were on the couch watching a late night movie.
Kari was sprawled across the couch, drifting off to sleep when her brother asked her, "Have you talked to T.K. recently?"
"You're kidding, right?"
"I think you should write him."
"Tai, we already had this conversation. T.K. and I are not a couple anymore. It's over."
"Look, Kari, I don't know everything that happened, but I can tell you that he still loves you. He might have been mad at first…"
"Stop, Tai," she interrupted him.
He ignored her. "I bet if you apologized…"
"Tai! Just stop! I'm over him," she lied. "I've moved on, and you should too."
She felt the tears coming and decided that it was a wonderful time to say goodnight. Tai left a few days after that, and Kari gave up hope of ever getting a letter or e-mail from T.K. There was no doubt that Tai would have told him was she had said.
Time flew by after that and spring arrived despite Kari's persistent state of darkness. Since it was her twelfth year of school, letters of acceptance started arriving from all of the universities to which she had applied.
None of her friends were surprised at the scholarship offers she received, Kari had always been a brilliant student, especially after her breakup with T.K. Because she had thrown herself so vigorously into her schoolwork to forget their relationship, she had scored amazingly on the American standardized tests.
She narrowed her decision down to two schools. The first was Stanford University, an Ivy League school just thirty miles south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley and also where Hannah and Tom were both going next year. She would be in driving distance of her grandmother's house and close to Lynn, who was going to the University of California: Berkeley with a soccer scholarship.
Her second choice: the University of Tokyo.
Obviously, the decision was going to be tough.
Another important even that arrived with spring was the senior prom. A dumb dance that all of her friends had been talking about since November. Kari learned about all of the details whenever she talked to her friends. Not only was there dresses, shoes, hairstyles, and manicures to worry about, but also matching the color of the dress with his tuxedo, renting a limo and a billion other things that Kari would never have cared about.
Kari gave up trying to follow the conversations. The worst part, however, was when Lynn found out that Kari wasn't going.
"Kari! It's the prom! You have to go!" she shouted across the lunch table in the middle of the cafeteria. Heads turned to stare. Apparently it was a crime to not go to prom.
"Lynn, I don't have a date. I wouldn't want to be a fifth wheel between you, Drew, Hannah, and Tom."
"Kari don't be ridiculous! Any guy in the school would jump at the chance to take you to prom."
And, sadly, it was true. Last fall the word had spread pretty quickly that she had broken up with her Japanese rock star boyfriend. T.K.'s fan club finally stopped sending her hate mail and there was always a group of teenage boys hanging around the sidewalk in front of her house.
At that very moment, at least ten boys had heard their conversation and were shouting over the lunchroom noise, "I'll be your date, Kari!" or "Kari, let me take you to prom!"
Later that day one boy even told her he would pay her to go to prom with him. Lynn, of course, laughed hysterically when she found out.
"See Kari, not only would you have a blast at the prom, but you could make some money too!"
"Lynn, keep your twisted humor out of this. I'm not going. I already told Mr. Thompson I'd babysit Friday night anyway."
Lynn didn't give up there, though. Friday night she made their limo stop at the Thompson's house, where Kari was already on the job. Mr. Thompson, ironically, was chaperoning the prom and taking her mother with him as his date.
Kari let Lynn and Hannah inside so Mikey could see them in their formal dresses, but it was far too late for them to convince Kari to join them, so they left reluctantly for their fun night.
Meanwhile, Kari watched a movie with the now almost twelve-year-old Mikey. He was probably responsible enough to be home alone, but she suspected that Mr. Thompson wanted an excuse to keep her coming around, since things were getting pretty serious between him and her mother.
After the movie ended, she had him brush his teeth, change into pajamas, and was just about to say goodnight, when he called her from inside his room.
"What's up?" she asked, poking her head in.
"How come you didn't go to the dance?" he asked innocently.
"Well, it's complicated."
"How come T.K. didn't come to go with you?"
"Well, Mikey," she stammered, trying to phrase her situation. "T.K. and I got into a fight the last time I saw him and he doesn't want to be my friend anymore."
"That's stupid. Did you apologize?"
"Don't worry about it Mikey, I'm sure we'll work it out eventually."
"Kari?"
"Yeah, Mikey?"
"I would have been your date for the prom."
She laughed. "Maybe when you're older."
She shut the door and wandered downstairs to help herself to a carton of rocky road ice cream.