Harajuku Girl

Most days, she stays at home now, waiting at the window for her brother to return.

The glitzy electronica mix tape of last year's platform heels and pink-bowed lace dresses and silver bracelets clink-clinking is in her bedroom desk drawer, buried under unreturned RSVPs and advertisements for miracle diet cream. There was a boy who had come calling two days ago, and the sound of knocking on the door had frozen her blood where she stood leaning slightly against the wall, one hand clenched on the white curtains.

"Hokuto," he called through the door, and she did not answer him, but he kept knocking anyway. "Hokuto, are you home?"

The night falls and Tokyo is a neon daubed palette against the smoggy sky. The touch of wind sears her skin so she does not open the window, but sits there very silent and still, watching the cars shuffle to a stop at the intersection just below. The slightly acrid smell of exhaust and cigarette smoke rises between the window panes, seeps in through cracks in the frantic molecules that make up the walls of this apartment, of the very fabric of the city. She breathes deeply.

There is a sound from the entranceway and she sits up straight, listening to the dust swirl through the air in sluggish sparkles. It is not her brother, after all, just the sighing and settling of night.

She goes to bed a little later, hoping that her brother will return while she is sleeping. She leaves the hallway light on for him and a little bowl of snacks on the kitchen table. Her own bedroom is dark and cool, a lipstick smear of white-pink that seems to her suddenly nothing more than a farce, the empty runway after the spotlights have gone out. She thinks of the boy who had stood there knocking on her silent door, chasing after the girl who once bore her name, a diamond-studded phantom.

"I am not Hokuto," she thinks. "I am only Subaru's shadow."

When she wakes the next morning, Tokyo has crept in close to her window in a dreamscape of crosswalks, car horns, wheels across train tracks. But the world inside her bedroom is silent, and her brother is not there.