let herself fall onto the bed, feeling miserable and lost because of her deep emotions.
Someone knocked at the door soon after.
She didn't answer, but the door opened anyway.
Her mother was there.
“Can you tell me what happened, darling? Lucas was crying when he walked away! I hadn't seen hin crying for such a long time...Kira, you too! Are you crying?” Elizabeth immediately got worried, because she wasn't used at all to seeing her daughter shedding tears. Kira had always been very Zen and not very emotional, excepted before some injustice.
“I'm not crying!” she sobbed, her face drenched with tears.
“Kira, darling, what happened to you? Did you and Lucas quarrel?”
“I don't know...I...I don't know what seized me” Kira tried to explain and kept whining. “I gave him the t-shirt we bought at the market and then...he said that he finds Jane nice and I...I...”
“Are you jealous of Jane?” her mother suggested, trying to hold back an amused smile in front of what seemed to be quite a jealousy scene. She had been wondering in the bottom of her heart what that very particular friendship between Kira and Lucas would turn into, when the two of them left puberty to enter teenage. Could her daughter's fondness towards him accept the presence of another girl next to Lucas? Would he ever be able to part from his best friend?
She had gotten more and more certain in the last years that the tie between those two children could never break up and that sooner or later she would find them petting behind the garden hedge.
And now, seeing that her daughter had fallen victim to jealousy and was suffering for her first love pain, she couldn't avoid smiling and feeling pleased with her excellent intuition which had never disappointed her.
“I'm not jealous!” Kira got into a huff.
“So, why are you crying? Tell me the truth, are you falling in love with Lucas?” Elizabeth supposed, pretending to be indifferent to the evident blush on her daughter's pale face.
“No, I'm not! What are you saying, mum?”
“I'm just saying that getting so angry because Lucas likes another girl is very strange... By the way, you've grown up now and it had to happen sooner or later. To him or to you...” she teased her.
“Lucas is mine!” Kira got dejected and started crying her eyes out again. “I'm not going to share him with anybody!”
“Kira,” her mother whispered, getting moved and troubled.
“I don't want to lose him! I love him, mum.”
“I know, sweetheart,” Elizabeth sighed and hugged her daughter to comfort her.
They kept hugging each other for a long time, till the girl stopped crying.
“Was Lucas really crying?” Kira asked after a while.
“Yes, he was. I hadn't seen him crying for ages” her mother told her with sorrow, making her daughter feel terribly guilty. “You should apologize to him.”
“Yes, you're right. I didn't mean to make him cry” she just mumbled as she felt very ashamed of her behaviour.
“What about making banana biscuits with chocolate drops and bringing them to him?” her mother suggested, trying to cheer her up.
“Lucas loves those biscuits!”
Wiping away sadness, Kira and her mother started making a large baking tray full of flower-shaped biscuits. Being busy in making perfect biscuits, Kira forgot her conversation with Lucas and just focused on making peace with him.
The biscuits were almost perfectly baked in the oven one hour later and Kira was really looking forward to taking them out and bringing them immediately to her friend. She couldn't wait clearing her conscience which was weighing on her.
“What a sweet smell of biscuits!” a male voice burst out behind them.
They suddenly turned and saw Kenzo Yoshida's imposing and decorated figure.
“Daddy!” Kira shouted in the seventh heaven and rushed to hug her father. She hadn't seen him for almost a month. Even if it took just an hour by car to get to the base, Kenzo could go back to his family just a few times a month or even less.
“Darling!” Elizabeth followed her, running into her husband's arms. “Why are you already back? You said you wouldn't come home before August.”
“I'm on leave and I've got great news for us all!” the man answered smiling.
“Tell us everything, please.”
“We're moving back to Tokyo!” Kira's father exclaimed.
“What do you mean?” his wife asked puzzled.
“I've understood me, Ely. They have moved me again, they are sending me back to the American Embassy in Tokyo. Kira, are you happy? You're going to see granny again. I'm sure she is looking forward to hugging you again.”
“I don't want to go back to Japan!” his daughter burst out, as soon as she realized what that news meant.
“Kenzo, I've got a job here and I didn't think...”
“Ely, you haven't understood how the matter stands. This is not something negotiable, it's orders from above and you can say thanks to your dear friend Darren Scott,” the man explained in an icy voice.
“What a bast...”
“Don't speak like that in front of the child,” her husband stopped her, as he didn't want his daughter to listen to swearwords.
“I'm not a child any more and I don't want to go back to Tokyo!” Kira meddled again, on the verge of tears.
“I want to leave before the new school term begins. I'm going to share my time between home and the embassy, while you can stay at my mother's, like before. I've already contacted Kira's old school and they have place for her! She will just have to pass an exam and she will be able to attend intermediate school” her father went on carelessly, making his daughter get very anxious: she looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“No, no, no, no, no!” the young girl kept shouting, shutting her ears.
“Kira, you knew we were going to stay here just for four years!” her father tried to make her use her head, grasping her shoulders, but she started squirming and crying desperately.
“No, no, no! I don't want to leave! I want to stay here! In Princeton! With Lucas!”
“I'm sorry, child. But that's impossible!”
“No, I don't want” Kira shouted her heart out, pushing her father violently away, rushing out of the back door and to the garage to take her bike.
Her father's reproaching shouts and her mother's desperate ones were completely useless.
Panting breathlessly and with terror deep inside her heart for what was going on, the girl took her bike and, before her father could get to her, she rushed into the street and started riding it with all her strength: she knew the boy's home was five long kilometers far.
When she got to the Scott family's sumptuous and majestic villa, all the muscles in her legs were burning and she felt pain in her throat because of the strain.
Luckily there was a light wind that day, so each tear which had tried to streak down her face, was almost dry before coming out.
Using the small passage Lucas had made three years before by breaking some part of the fencing, Kira was able to walk stealthily into the villa and ran breathlessly into the house.
She knew that Lucas' father would never allow her in, as it had always happened in those four years, but she could identify the window of her friend's bedroom, so she ran underneath and called him, with the little breath that was left to her.
After