boyfriend, a basketball champion, school idol and Lovely's cover boy.”
“Wow! I hadn't realized I was so famous!” Adam stopped her, feeling uneasy.
“You can't avoid it, if you appear on the cover of the most famous magazine for girls. You have a future as an idol” Kira replied. She had always read Lovely, since her classmate M isaki had lent it to her.
“That was three months ago.”
“Do you mean that you aren't going to become an idol?”
“Exactly! Neither now nor ever,” Adam stated with a very broad smile which was trying to hide his pain and sorrow for having been forced to give up his dream. He had always been charmed by the fashion world and the idea of becoming a model had prodded him from the start.
His interview for Lovely should have been the best launching pad...at least till his father had accused the magazine of “having tricked his son with gay-like nonsense and trifles.” He had shouted to him that he'd rather die than see his own son walking like a “freak” dressed in “freak” clothes in the middle of “freak” fashion designers.
“There's a place at the Military Academy waiting for you, my son,” his father had told him proudly, since he loathed the possibility that Adam could do something else with his life, maybe something not very “heterosexual.”
He never knew whether it was those words' fault or his terror of being marked as homosexual by his father, but he had started going out with Youra the day after and they had paired off three days later.
He didn't feel happy though, but he was too scared to look for a different solution.
“It's a pity. I don't know why, but I've always thought you would become a model when you grew up...That's probably because I always see you modelling along the school corridors,” Kira said, bringing him back into the real world.
“Thank you for your kind words, but I've already decided to follow in my father's steps and become a soldier like him.”
Suddenly the girl burst out crying again and fell at his feet.
“Hey, are you okay? Have I said anything wrong?” Adam got immediately scared and leant down in front of her.
“I hate soldiers,” Kira could hardly sob.
“I thought you father was a soldier like mine.”
“He is actually... and I hate him too. I had to leave Princeton for his fault.”
Adam tried to speak again, but he was frozen by the girl's gloomy despair.
He could understand her so well: she was confined in a world she didn't want.
“So, is that the reason why you often come here and cry?” Adam whispered softly, trying to hold back the emotion that scene was stirring inside himself.
Unlike all the other girls in their school, Kira wasn't crying for a bad mark, for a love disappointment or for any other girlish foolishness. He was very struck by her.
“Would you like to go back to Princeton? To your friends?” he guessed again.
“To Lucas,” Kira moaned and sniffed her nose.
“Lucas? Is he your boyfriend?”
“No, he is my best friend. He is in danger and I'm not there with him any more, to protect him... I don't even know where he is at the moment and what's happening to him” the girl sobbed, showing Adam the sealed envelop she was holding in her hand.
Adam turned it upside down in his hands. The letter was addressed to a Lucas Scott from Kira Yoshida, but it had been sent back to her with the words “unknown addressee,” written by the post office with a big red stamp.
“Your friend might have moved home. Did your Lucas ever tell you anything?”
Kira stopped crying with a superhuman effort and she tried to focus on the explanation she should give him. She had never been in confidence with anyone in the last year, not even with her school mate Misaki, but at the moment she was feeling like offloading the burden she was carrying inside onto someone else.
She had never spoken to Adam before actually, but his eyes made her understand she could trust him.
“My father was moved to the USA five years ago, so we went to live in Princeton, next to Davenport...I met Lucas there. He is as old as me and went to my same school. I'm very fond of him and I've always tried to protect him from that alcohol addicted butcher, but...”
“Alcohol addicted butcher?”
“His father,” Kira explained and started crying again. “He beat him... Lots of times and I couldn't stop him. My mother tried too, but with no effect... however, we helped Lucas a lot by our presence and the violent scenes became less frequent, but I'm not with him any more now, I...I...”
A new burst of weeping.
“He is alone at the moment and there is nobody ready to protect him,” Adam guessed, feeling sorry for him. “What about his mother?”
“She died some years ago and left Lucas alone with his father” Kira answered in a very scornful and resentful voice towards that woman who should have looked after her own son instead of running away to the after-world, in her opinion. “I'm the only one who cares about Lucas in this world and I left him.”
That guilty feeling and her pain for that state of things struck Adam like a punch in his stomach, leaving him absolutely breathless.
“What will he do without me? I'm sure is father will beat him again and I won't be there. I'm not there with him any more, can you understand me?” Kira went on giving vent to her deep frustration. “My mother keeps saying that Lucas never answered my letters for his father's fault and that he probably never gives them to him... but after this last one, I don't know what I should think. Could anything serious have happened to him?”
“Can't you hear from him anyway?”
“Thanks to her previous job, my mum was able to learn that Lucas is well, even if his father has a lot of money in the last year because of some wrong investment. But that's not enough for me! I want to go back to Princeton! I should never have gone away! It's all my father's fault.”
“Your father was moved back to the USA embassy in Tokyo a year ago, wasn't he?”
“Yes, I prayed and begged him to leave me in Princeton. I was ready to go to college, but he didn't let me do it. The worst thing is that I was really sure I would stay there with Lucas. I had sworn to him that I would never leave him, instead...I don't know if he will be able to forgive me. He'll think I'm treacherous like his mother.”
“That's not your fault.”
“It's all my fault: each time Lucas feels pain, it's my fault, my parents are always quarrelling for my fault...” Kira burst out because she had noticed her parents' never ending night quarrels, when they believed she was sleeping in her bedroom. Leaving Princeton had been difficult for her mother too, because she had had to leave her job and her daughter was dejected and unrecognisable, so that had been a very bad blow
