The puck careens off the left bank and straight into my goal, landing in the receptacle with a resonant clatter. I never even had a chance. I buried my face in my palm as the jets of the air hockey table shut off, signaling the merciful conclusion to an 11-3 drubbing that I just received at the hands of Mads. 

All she had left to do was saunter over to my side of the table, arms folded haughtily across her chest and just the widest smug grin plastered across her countenance. She held out the palm of her hand.

“Triple or nothing,” I tried proposing in vain.

“Forget it,” she replied in defiance. “I don’t wanna be late for my cupcake date with Chihiro.”

With an exasperated groan, I reached for the wallet in my back pocket. “Goddamn cupcakes,” I grumbled, “If you like cake, just get the whole cake. Stop making so much trash with all those paper wrappers.” I fished out two 10,000 yen bills and laid them atop her waiting palm.

She folded up the money neatly and tucked it into her Rilakkuma satchel.

We exited the Taito Station game center and waited at the curb for the driver to pick her up.

“Oh, before I forget,” she announced, “You remember a couple months ago I sent in a recording for that summer music program at Stanford?”

“Yeah, did you hear back?”

“They’re having some admissions recruiters come to Tokyo to check out auditions in person. And I got a callback!”

I let my jaw hang lazily for a moment, my eyes bugging out in delighted shock. “That’s bonkers. So amazing!” And I meant it. She really had always been amazing, in that she was always finding new ways to amaze people.

“There’s still lots of work to do before I get in.” She was trying to play it off, but I could always tell when the hints of self-satisfaction were creeping into her voice. “They’re gonna allow some family and friends to watch as support. Do you wanna come?”

I pulled out my phone. “I’m gonna have to check my calendar--” But this gesture was only to feign at being unsure. “Are you kidding?” I called back to her just as quickly. “Yeah, I’ll be there!”

She finally allowed herself that full smile of self-satisfaction. 

“I’m gonna camp out the day before,” I went on. “I’ll be ting in a bag the whole night just to make sure I don’t lose my spot in line!”

“Don’t take it that far, Bear Grylls.”

“No, seriously, I’m totally in.”

She sighed in relief. “I hope dad can be there too.”

It still shook me how easily she referred to him as “dad.” I guess for someone who never truly got to know her birth father, she was always seeking someone to assign that title to.

“You haven't asked him yet?” I sought to confirm.

“He always just gives me the same ‘I’ll try my best,’ without even looking away from his computer.”

“Yes, I’m perfectly familiar with that, trust me.”

“Would it help if I sang something he liked? What’s his favorite?”

“Well, that’s easy. ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over.’”

“By Ariana and Miley?"

I chuckled, as I had to come to grips with the fact that there was in fact a whole generation of people who would identify that song with Hannah Montana and Cat Valentine.

“No, it was first by Crowded House. It was the song that made dad want to learn English in the first place. He was convinced he’d perform it for Phoebe Cates, and then she’d marry him.”

“Who?”

“You know, the actress from Fast Times at Ridgemont High? The character Rachel Hunter was spoofing in the video for ‘Stacy's Mom’?”

“Again, who?”

Oh brother, you know you’re old when the young people don’t even remember the parodies of what you’re trying to reference.

“Never mind.” I shook my head. “Don’t worry about dad. If I have to put his leg in a bear trap and drag him over, he’ll be there.”

“You don’t need to do the Jigsaw Killer routine.”

“Oh come on, you know Saw, but not Fountains of Wayne?”

“I’m not into bizzarro ,” she stated as the Aston Martin pulled up. She hopped into the backseat and shut the door behind her, being sure to give me a warm wave goodbye before the car departed.

Without plans for the rest of the day, I stepped back into Taito and got in a few games of Space Invaders Frenzy on the 100-inch screen. I was walking through the alleyway about to visit the vending machine that sold Asahi Super Dry (because trust me, that never gets abused by underage drinkers, like, ever) when she called.

“I picked up your jacket from the cleaner’s,” were her first words to me.

I grinned like a dope. I was developing a habit, and most likely she was the reason.

“I figure we could put it to use again tonight,” she posited.

“How do you mean?”

“You took me out to dinner already, so why don’t I return the favor? I can get us a table at La Rochelle. You know it?”

It was the second time that day when my eyes almost came out of my skull. La Rochelle in Minami Aoyama was the flagship restaurant of Hiroyuki Sakai, the Delacroix of French Cuisine and veteran of the 90s Fuji Television series Iron Chef.

“I’ve heard of it, yeah. I tried to get a table for my stepsister’s birthday last year, and apparently the wait list is about a decade long. How’re you gonna pull that off?”

“Just leave it to me. You only need to show up and look pretty. Can you handle that?”

“Won’t be as pretty as you, just so you know.”

“Aren’t you a charmer?” I couldn’t be entirely sure, but I guessed she was smiling on the other end of the line. Or at least I hoped it. “I’ll have to be careful with you. 7:00, see you there.”

I felt a lot of optimism at that point for how the night would turn out. Said optimism went away almost immediately when I realized I had lost my train fare to Mads. 

---

I hitchhiked on the back of a pickup making propane deliveries and got close enough to my place to be able to walk back.

I ran my body under the streams of my shower, brushed my teeth for a good three minutes (I did consider this a special occasion, after all), then applied aftershave even though it wasn't time for my customary once a week shave. It wasn’t because I was lazy about shaving, by the way. My facial hair just honestly doesn’t grow very fast. I donned my navy trousers, white dress shirt, and black wingtips. I also did manage to remember the tie this time, though lacking Mads’ help, I needed to look up a tutorial video for the Windsor knot.

I hailed a taxi because I didn’t want to be bumping into any of the sweaty zombies on the Tozai Line at rush hour. I wasn’t about to risk getting contaminated, not unless I had some kind of, I guess we’d have to call it a “fragrance shield,” but I couldn’t imagine such a thing actually existing in real life and chided myself silently for having an unproductive imagination.

The cab pulled up to the destination and I disembarked. As I walked past the black iron gate, I saw her standing near the blue awning bearing the restaurant's name.

She wore dark suede kitten heels and a black satin cocktail dress with bustier-seamed bodice. The skirt ran to slightly above her knees, and the sweetheart neckline did just enough to highlight her humble s. However, and this is something I’ve always had to ask forgiveness for possibly sounding so strange, what I found to be her most flattering feature was her clavicle. Its shape gave her entire torso this stunning symmetry, which suggested all parts of her body existing in total harmony with each other. 

I could only say to her the first thing that came to mind: “You look beautiful.”

She curled her ruby red lips into a flawless smile. She produced it so effortlessly, I had the feeling she must’ve practiced it endlessly with countless other people speaking countless other words. And yet, it touched me in a profoundly personal way that had me convinced it was a curated response to just my message in just that single moment.

Her hair was changed from last time. The style was kept pretty conservative, tied up near her neck in a simple side ponytail hanging over her left shoulder. But the color was a vivid shade of robin’s egg blue.

My navy jacket was draped across her arm. She handed it to me, and I slipped my arms through the sleeves and settled it around my shoulders.

“You’re lucky that suit is such a solid standby,” she remarked. “Looks great on you always.”

“I don’t think it's been this clean since I bought it.” I held the cuff up to my nose and took a sniff. “Smells nice, what is that?”

“I paid an extra 500 yen for the fragrant steam treatment. Apricot and lavender.”

“Sparing no expense, I appreciate that.”

“Do yourself a favor. If you’re just gonna go to yakitori or the odd sports bar, buy some cheapo jacket from the department store instead. This one’s a Hugo Boss. Take care of it and save it for grander adventures.”

“What, like here, for example? With you?”

“That’s more like it.”

“Well, thanks for letting this thing finally live up to its full potential.”

She gave me a gracious nod in affirmation. “By the way, be sure to tell your girlfriend thanks for letting me borrow you for the evening.”

I titled my head quizzically. “My girlfriend?”

She undid the golden zipper to her Hammitt black leather bag and eventually found a strip of photos. “Found these in the pocket.”

Surely enough, they were of Victoria and me, taken at a purikura booth in Harajuku. True to the overall kawaii aesthetic of the genre, the color scheme was deliberately oversaturated, especially highlighting warm pinks and reds and teals. Both Victoria and I had cartoon diamond tiaras photoshopped atop our heads, and various twinkling and glittery accents were strewn about the borders as well. Most of the images could be construed as fairly innocent, just her and myself making an assortment of silly faces to the camera. In fact, it was pretty common for purely platonic friends to engage in purikura. But there was a single one where she and I were clearly locking lips alongside a caption reading “ベスト キッス!!!” (“best kiss,” with dynamite sticks as exclamation marks).

“Oh,” I said with a minor cringe as she handed the photos back to me. “Look, Victoria and I--”

“You don’t really owe me an explanation.” She tried to sound as cool as possible, but I could’ve sworn I detected the faintest whiff of jealousy somewhere in her tone. “We’re just two friends about to have dinner.”

I had to admit, the “friends” determination stung me in a tender spot. “Well, just for the purpose of being upfront, she couldn’t properly be called my girlfriend.”

“Oh?”

“Every time we’ve tried to classify it as something specific, it just never ended up being as good. So we kinda have left it open-ended on purpose.”

She pursed her lips in contemplation. Eventually it seemed like she had made the determination this was too complicated for it to be worth her trying to figure out. “That’s for you guys to decide in the end.” She hung her bag on her shoulder again, motioned to the restaurant’s glass front doors. “Shall we?”

I nodded back. I tucked the strip of photos back into my wallet this time.

She and I walked across the rich brown tile of the floor and approached the maitre d’ booth together. He was a wiry old man with wisps of white hair resting atop his head and a pencil mustache to match.

Lisa greeted him first and announced us as “Mr. and Mrs. Bruschweiler.” To that, I immediately did a double take, to which she placed a soft hand on my arm to quell my shock.

The maitre d’ offered up a “Grüezi mitenand” before having another staff member lead us to our table. The interior decor was elegant and pristine, white tablecloths against black chairs. Partitions of frosted glass broke up the overall space and gave each table a more intimate and closed in atmosphere. 

Once the staff member left us with our menus, I leaned toward Lisa and asked, “When did you and I get married? And become Swiss, by the way?”

She tittered in delight. “The Nomura Real Estate Group rents out this place for their reps to give individualized presentations to potential investors. My stepdad gets invited all the time, but he works most nights and can’t make it. It’s a pretty sweet deal, if you ask me. You listen to a few facts and figures about growth projections and debt-to-revenue ratio, then you get a free meal by the end.”

“How often do you come to stuff like this?”

“They rotate the staff about every month or so. Nobody’s recognized me.”

A rosy-cheeked waiter with a Kochi accent (“Just like from the samurai films” Lisa would later comment) came next to take our drink orders. Cutty Sark on the rocks for me, a citron presse for her.

“What’s tonight’s dessert?” she also asked him.

“Creme fraiche mousse with rhubarb and orange granita.”

“Sounds lovely. Can I have that first?”

The waiter made that on teeth noise that Japanese people often did when confronted with a difficult proposition. “That might be a bit challenging...” he trailed off, presumably in the hopes that Lisa herself would step in and acquiesce.

“I really don't mean to be a bother,” she replied apologetically. She placed her hand on her stomach. “It’s just that the baby is giving me all kinds of cravings.”

I sputtered on my sip of seltzer water.

The waiter stammered his way through a response of “I’ll check with the chef.”

As I worked through my coughing fit, I could see her trying to conceal her grin behind a well-manicured hand, nails painted the hue of candy apples from your local state fair.

She ended up getting her mousse after all, which she ate while a Nomura agent sat to my right at the table. As Lisa had explained, he rattled off some stats about domestic inflation and showed me handouts with graphs of sales forecasts. I tried to follow along to the best of my ability. In the end, she was the one to give the polite rebuke, mentioning that she’d have to wait to see how some of our ventures in Malaysia would play out before being able to make a commitment. 

That seemed like it appeased the agent just fine. He gave a courteous bow and left us to our meal. And as she promised, it was a great meal. Escargot with parsley and garlic butter to start, a main course of duck a l’orange (she had to sneak a few sips of my Bordeaux since she was still feigning pregnancy), and I ended up sharing some of my own dessert with her at the end too.

I got to learn more about her, which I’d even say was a better experience than the food. She was born in Thailand. Her parents got divorced pretty early, but her mom remarried to a Swiss man who was visiting the country as part of his culinary apprenticeship. The family moved to Korea when her stepdad got a job at a bistro in Seoul. She talked about the difficulty of having to learn Korean so quickly, but mentioned she did so largely through listening to secondhand CDs of H.O.T. on her thrift store stereo. In school, she hated history but ended up enjoying math. In fact, she and Rosé first met because Rosé had forgotten to do her geometry homework and asked Lisa to copy off hers. Lisa agreed, and Rosé tried to repay her by offering to dye her hair. However, Rosé didn’t know that Lisa was on the swim team, and neither girl knew that chemically lightened hair was especially vulnerable to getting turned green from the chlorine in pools.

“At least you figured out the hair coloring eventually,” I chimed in.

That brilliant smile of hers again. 

Her stepfather was now executive chef at the Blue Room restaurant in Toranomon’s Edition hotel. She worked at a daycare in Akasaka. Most of her students were children of foreigners on international assignments. Speaking as many languages as she did made it easier for her to deal with kids from so many various backgrounds. She lived with her mother and stepfather for now, but was saving up to get her own place. She claimed it didn’t matter much where, so long as they allowed pets because for sure she was getting a pug as her first act of independent living.

She changed her hair pretty often, revealing that she has a tendency “to get bored with things quickly.”

I asked how she knew she wouldn’t get bored with the dog.

“You're right, better start with a fish or something,” she conceded.

My turn to laugh now.

---

As we exited to the cobblestone path outside the restaurant, she told me “I had fun.”

“Had? Or having?” I sought to clarify. “Because if you’re still having fun, why put an end to it?”

She found some sense in my logic too, so we went out for, what else, more dessert. This time it was something more traditionally Japanese, kakigori. But given the chilly nature of the frozen treat, she ended up getting cold again, so once more I let her borrow my jacket. This time she put her arms through the sleeves, but since they were a bit long, she had to roll them up.

“I gotta ask,” I posited, “What’s with the thing about having dessert first?”

“Simple.” She sipped some icy syrup through her neon green swizzle straw. “Dessert’s the best part of the meal. Why not skip straight to the best part?”

“Skip to the best part,” I repeated. “That philosophy must make you really popular with all the boys.”

“Wouldn't know,” was her flippant reply. “I’m already spoken for.”

I wasn’t sure then if I was actually hurt by this revelation. Because I probably didn’t have the right to be hurt. She’d never promised me anything beyond a few dinners. I decided I didn’t want to spend any more time figuring it out. It’d be selfish of me to hold up the conversation over this strictly “me problem.”

The best way I could think of to keep things going was to ask “What’s his name?”

She didn’t look up as she spooned up some more shaved ice with condensed milk topping. “Jennie.”

And for the third time in the same day, my eyeballs sought to escape my skull.

“Surprised?” she asked.

“I guess I shouldn’t be,” I finally stated. “It’s the 21st century after all.”

“The way I see it, love is love. When you feel love, you feel it for a person, not a gender. Just because Jennie’s a woman, does that make her less smart? Does it mean her jokes make me laugh less? Just because she’s a woman, does that make her worse in bed?"

“I mean, I’ve only ever been with women, so I wouldn’t know how to compare it. And I couldn’t imagine how it’d work if I had different...” I chewed on my spoon as I rooted around in my vocabulary for the right terminology, “Equipment.” Mission not accomplished. “I will say I haven’t had any complaints, though.”

“You haven’t had any complaints, or you fall asleep before the feedback stage begins?”

“Cheap shot!” I bemoaned.

“Oh! Why don’t we call Victoria and ask what she has to say?”

“God no!”

She cackled in immense pride at how thoroughly uncomfortable she’d just made me.

“You’re terrible,” I said in jest. OK, half jest.

“You love it.”

That much I couldn’t deny. “Yeah, I do.” I was starting to love much about her.

---

Even after we finished our food, we still decided to keep our stroll going. We happened across another Taito Game Station, and since I felt like I hadn’t lost enough of my money to that place, we stopped in so I could try my hand at the claw machine. Try as I might, as positive as I may have felt that the metallic phalanges had wrapped themselves entirely around that gigantic plush stuffed Nemo, every single time that blasted toy just ended up falling right back into the pit.

I let my forehead fall listlessly against the cold glass, the one barrier between me and the prize I had been seeking since 2,000 yen ago.

“Let me try,” she eventually spoke up.

I stepped away from the machine with a sigh of resignation. She popped in a 100 yen coin of her own and took the joystick in her nimble fingers. After taking almost the entirety of the allotted 60 seconds to find the most perfect position (she even walked around to the side so she could see it from another angle), she pressed down on the pulsating red button reading “GO,” and the claw made its descent. Just like it had with me, the claw clamped around the plush Nemo. Just like it had with me, the claw started to rise. But unlike how it had it with me, the claw continued to grip the Nemo. The claw hovered to the corner of the machine and unclenched, releasing Nemo into the prize receptacle. 

Lisa reached down to pluck away her trophy. She could barely get her arms around it.

I shook my head in disbelief and could only manage an incredulous “How?” 

“Let me teach you something so you don't spend your whole life savings at this place.” She set Nemo on the floor for a moment. “That claw is programmed to have two settings. Let’s call one the soft setting.” She held out her hand in front of me, her fingers fully extended to further illustrate her point. “The other is the hard setting.” She closed her hand into a tight fist. “Most of the time, the machine is in soft setting, and it doesn’t matter if you get that claw entirely around the toy.” She placed her hand on my wrist and wrapped her fingers around. “It just slides right off.” She slipped her hand away, her fingers hardly putting any grip on me. “You have to wait until the claw is in hard setting. Then it can grab hold.” She placed her grip on my wrist again. “And it won't let go.”

I smiled back at her, grateful to have learned something useful, yes, but also grateful for her touch.

“Life is like that sometimes,” she went on. “You have to wait for the right time if you want to hold onto something.”

While waiting for the taxi to take her home, she offered to let me have Nemo because I had spent the most money already. I argued it’d be put to better use with her because she had mentioned she’d try a fish first to see if she could handle having a pet. I told her to have Nemo in her room for a little while, and if she doesn’t get sick of him so easily, then she’ll know she's truly ready for that dog. She agreed and stuffed Nemo into the trunk of the taxi. She took my jacket again because it just didn’t seem like any cabs in the whole of Tokyo had well-working heaters.

As I watched the car pull away, I again pondered on whether she could be correct in her claims of life following such simple principles. Would I be able to hold onto what’s most dear to me, if only I kept myself waiting for the right time?