If You Follow Me Read Free

of bootleg videos and a cooler of imported cheese. This is downtown Shika, the town where the Japanese Ministry of Education placed us, despite our request to live in a major Japanese city.
    I turn onto the coastal highway, a narrow ribbon of a road at the edge of the cliff s, high above the Sea of Japan, which stretches blue as a bruise all the way to Korea. Steering with my knees, I open the glove compartment and grope among the crumpled rice ball wrappers for the pack of cigarettes I forgot to throw away when I decided to quit. I light one and stick my head out the window to exhale. Harvested rice fields stretch to the bottoms of distant hills, and water surrounds the cropped brown stalks, reflecting the silver-bellied clouds. When the wind blows, the earth shimmers. Every quarter mile or so, a blocky apartment building sprouts from theserice fields, deserted-looking except for the occasional futon flung over a chipping red fire escape. “Always air your futons,” Miyoshi-sensei told me when we got here, “so your neighbors will see you are clean.”
    Carolyn is standing on the curb in front of Hakui High School, a three-story beige stucco edifice that looks like a carbon copy of Shika High School, down to the round analog clock set in the second story grille. She’s shivering in a pink miniskirt, which she borrowed from me, a black cardigan, green argyle knee socks, and her ancient army boots. Her hair is growing out from its old buzz cut, the cherry dye faded to a more conservative auburn, and she looks almost girly. She glances around before lifting one leg into the passenger-side window and then the other, arching her back and lowering herself onto the seat like someone doing the limbo. White circles of chalk dust her breasts, where she must have rubbed against the blackboard while teaching. I reach out to brush off the front of her sweater, and she seizes my fingers as a pair of high school girls skip in front of our car, pausing to wave and yell, “Bye-bye Miss Kyarorin!”
    â€œBe careful,” she says.
    â€œSorry,” I say, squeezing her knee instead.
    â€œIt reeks of cigarettes in here,” she says as she opens the glove compartment and fishes out the pack. Carolyn claims to hate everything about smoking—the smell, the taste, the look she describes as my “craving face.” She claims never to have been addicted to anything, only to smoke the occasional cigarette to make me feel guilty for corrupting her, but I think she wants a vice of her own, something to tether her. The matchbook is limp and she tears through a half-dozen matches before I take the cigarette and light it for her. She smokes like a kid: fingers stiff, cigarette close to her palm, lips pursed. I ask how her day was and she says that it was crappy.
    â€œDidn’t you read my fax? My supervisor kept insisting that I have a secret lover.”
    â€œDo you think she knows about us?” My pulse jump-starts at the thought.
    â€œShe has no clue. She thinks I’m dating Joe.”
    â€œJoe Pope?” I laugh. “What gave her that idea?”
    â€œI don’t know,” she shrugs. “Because we’re both foreign, I guess. I couldn’t possibly be with a Japanese guy, let alone another woman.”
    â€œMaybe you were right about being open with people from the start,” I say. “They would’ve had to deal with it. Now it seems too late to tell them, like they’ll think we were lying to them or something.”
    â€œWe were,” she says. “We are.”
    Carolyn came out in high school. She has been with a thirty-year-old biker chick, a homeless busker, a divorced lawyer with two kids. We met in college, where we lived in the same dorm, our rooms stacked one over the other, and I sometimes think our relationship bored her in its simplicity. We had to make our own complications.
    â€œI’m actually glad no one knows,” she says, throwing