Astra’s singing was just tender enough to do the trick and tease those happy tears from Ruse’s still-closed eyes. She laughed softly as the little droplets fell to the rickshaw seat. Then Astra placed the tiniest smooch on her little forehead and released her face.

“That was beautiful,” Ruse commended her. It was no wonder she managed to win that singing contest. Her voice was beautiful. Ruse pulled the stickers that were still on her face from the convention off and cast them into the wind. If Astra continued to be the way that she was, they weren’t going to last much longer anyhow.

“I try, haha,” Astra said. Laughter seemed like a staple in her speech pattern, and it really fit. She was such a charming delight of a girl. “That wasn’t too much, was it? I just felt like you could use some kindness—”

In the middle of her sentence and out of the corner of her eye, Astra noticed Kevin looking back at her from the bike, and he had a disgusted expression on his face. He clearly hadn’t liked her from the minute they met, even though she had done nothing to deserve his attitude. Ruse had forgiven her for stealing, so why couldn’t he? She winked, purposely showing off how easy this was for her. How easy it was for her to carry on with his cutie of a bestie.

“You doin’ okay, bro?”

“I’m fine,” Kevin grunted. He turned his eyes back to the street. How dare Astra think she could be the bard of this campaign? He was the bard! He had the instrument! They didn’t need another bard! One was plenty! She could be the barbarian; she sure looked the part.

“Ruse told me you speak Japanese when we were back at the rickshaw lot,” Astra kept on at Kevin, a grating fake cheerfulness in her tone. She knew perfectly well he wasn’t ‘fine’; she just wanted to poke the bear. “Are you?”

Ruse was in the middle of wiping her face dry with her pink sweater sleeve, too in her emotions to interject. But the sudden look in her eye said everything, she knew what Kevin would say, and that it was not going to be good.

“I am in spirit,” he answered. “It’s called being trans-racial. I’ve always been Japanese, I was just born in the wrong country.” He sounded very proud of this, though with the two girls, it did not sit well.

Astra mouthed ‘racist?’ to Ruse. Ruse nodded.

Kevin didn’t like the silence his explanation was met with. He disliked it even more than he disliked them ignoring him to obnoxiously flirt with each other. And he especially disliked it even more than he disliked Ruse telling Astra why she wouldn’t let him play music in his own car, before even telling him the reason. He wanted to scream, to demand an apology. He stood up off the seat to pedal harder and his banjo began to clunk on his back with each pedal rotation.

Astra smirked at his scorned reaction. “That’s a cool banjo,” she said loudly over the noise. “I like the stars.”

There were yellow stars, sparkles and swirls painted on the blue face of the instrument, right below its bridge. This charming art was painted not by Kevin but by the instrument’s previous owner, and Kevin had always been a fan of it. But Astra seemed to be making fun of it in a casually callous way.

“’Can’t believe you wanted to assault me with it back at your shop. That’d destroy it, which would be a shame…” She seemed to be implying that she, a teenage girl, was some sort of tank, able to absorb serious blows from a large bulky weapon like a stringed instrument. So presumptuous. “You know,” she added, “I’ve always wanted to learn how to play so I could pick up chicks.” As if she hadn’t already ‘picked up’ Ruse and wasn’t just rubbing salt in Kevin’s wound.

“If only it was that easy…” Kevin snarled under his breath.

* * * * *

A little over half an hour later, the Fukuda street courthouse came into view. And the sight of it in its state of disrepair was quite a shame. Just earlier that year, it had been in regular operation. Now it just slouched there in its plot, looking ominous and abandoned. The buildings to either side looked out of place with how new and kept-up they looked by comparison. To the courthouse’s far left, past a tall cinder block fence, was an ice cream shop with pictures of red bean, ube and matcha ice cream plastered on the windows, and to its right was a Chinese import, a cheap retail store called MiniSo. Both were closed for the night, and they still looked more lively. The eyesore of a courthouse between them just begged to be replaced with something equally as alluring and bright.

Kevin pulled the rickshaw to a slow halt in the gutter in front of the building and climbed down from the bike seat. He brushed cherry blossom petals from his grimy mop of hair and looked back to the girls.

“Can I leave this here safely?” he asked Astra, referring to the rickshaw. “Only asking because apparently you’ve been living in this condemned dump, and only you would know how safe it is.”

Astra, who still had Ruse spooned up against her, put her hand up and simply replied, “it’ll be fine. You know the crime rate around here is lower than everywhere else in the state. I mean, me stealing from your store is probably the biggest thing that happened here today, and the cops won’t even hear about it.”

Kevin once again felt that hatred toward her for having thought of something before he did. He couldn’t even lightly insult her without her sharp wit coming back to bite him in the ass. And it stung knowing Japantown PD couldn’t know about her shoplifting, because if they did find out, not only would it hurt Astra, it would hurt Ruse. Kevin grumbled a few unkind words about Astra in Japanese to himself.

Astra hopped out of the seat and offered her hand to Ruse, who graciously took it to help herself down.

With her feet back on the ground, Ruse turned back and dusted the cherry blossom petals from the rickshaw seat and floor space, and while she was doing so, Astra extracted some other petals from her hair. All the while, Ruse was humming a song, something she never did.

“I like that one,” Astra commented.

“Huh?” Ruse had no idea what she was talking about.

“Return To Sender, it’s an Elvis song. It’s one of my favorites.”

“Was I…?”

Astra nodded, a big ‘gotcha’ grin on her freckled face. Ruse looked away quickly and returned to her cleaning. Since when did she act like this? Astra laughed; Ruse was gosh darn adorable.

When she was happy with the cleared seating area, Ruse grabbed her two bags and handed Kevin’s fedora back to him, which he placed back on his head.

Kevin took one last glance at the rickshaw, squinting at it in an attempt to frighten it to stay put, then cast his eyes to the courthouse: a sand-colored two-story boarded-up building. There once had been green grass and a hedge of camellias growing around the front border, but since the property had been abandoned, the flora had been neglected and everything had turned yellow. A faded sign with the kanji for ‘courthouse’ above, English below, sat to their left. The boarded up double-door entrance to the building was inset and under a short awning. On either side of the doors on the further-outward walls were three tall boarded Gothic windows. There were six front-facing windows on the first floor in total. Above the entrance, on the second story, was an enormous circular rose style window that had been busted to pieces and was not quite as boarded up as the rest of the building. A faux layered pagoda roof with several missing shingles topped everything off, and placed almost randomly throughout the outer walls were several white and red ‘DO NOT ENTER’ posters. Chances were it was cold and dry inside, but that would most likely offer a reprieve from the heat of the summer night outside…

“I haven’t even had to worry about other people sneaking in here after me yet, and I’ve been here a week,” Astra said. “People are so respectful here, you two included.”

It seemed as though she was being sincere, even after being treated like a pest by Kevin.

But Kevin was determined to kill her mood. “You spent a week here instead of getting a fucking job?” he asked her in a spiteful tone of voice.

“What am I gonna write on my résumé?” Astra asked sarcastically. “I’m a high school dropout with no home address, man. I doubt that’ll do me any favors.”

As with almost everything Astra had said to him so far, Kevin hated how fair a point that was.

The three of them stood on the sidewalk in silence for a minute, only accented somewhat by Kevin’s quietly grumbled backtalk, then Astra said, “welp…” and set forward through the dead dry grass toward a boarded window, with her pin-covered bag still making muffled crunching noises.

She examined the gaps between the window boards for a few seconds, then looked back at Kevin on the sidewalk and frowned.

“Is something wrong?” Ruse asked.

Astra looked like she was doing measurements in her head, then coming to an uncomfortable conclusion. “We’re gonna have to remove some of these boards,” she ultimately replied. “Your gentlemanly friend probably won’t fit in through the gap that I use to get in.”

There were four wooden boards across that window, and the gaps between them were only about one and a half square feet or so in size. Astra and Ruse could easily slip between those gaps, but Kevin…that would be a different story.

Kevin crossed his arms. “As if I’m gonna damage a government building,” he grunted indignantly.

“Dude,” Astra snapped, sounding so tired of him, “they’re gonna demolish it soon. I dunno when…” The signs all over the walls indeed had no demolition dates posted anywhere. “...But they’re gonna bulldoze it and put a Starbucks or whatever here. I mean, look at this place, it’s already in awful shape, why bother trying to preserve it? Besides, they already started the construction for the new courthouse on the other side of town. You know, over by where the convention was? Nobody’s gonna care if you take a board off of a broken window.”

“Be reasonable,” Ruse added. She didn’t like how difficult her bestie was being. This could be so easy if he just gave Astra a chance. “I’m going in,” she told him. “Don’t you want to join me? I mean, I know you can fend for yourself, but I don’t wanna do this without you…”

Kevin rolled his eyes. She knew he couldn’t say no to her when she was being this way. So he surrendered. “Fine.”

“Atta boy,” Astra said. And no, she didn’t sound guilty at all over addressing Kevin like he was being a child. Because he was sure as heck acting like one. “’Wouldn’t want you stuck out here all night anyway, it’ll probably be hot as balls when the sun comes up.”

He gave Astra the side-eye as trudged forward through the dead grass. He would do what she asked, but he certainly didn’t have to like it. He placed his fat fingers on a board, then pulled it off with a satisfying splintering noise. One nail fell to the ground while the other remained in the board. After dropping the first board to his side, he removed the next two below it in the same fashion as the first. Then he dusted off his hands on his trench coat. What remained before them was a tall thin window frame bordered with tiny glass shards a foot or two above the ground, large enough to fit even the most rotund gentleman. Inside the building, there was pitch blackness.