I tugged on Mike's sleeve: otherwise he might not've noticed me. "You security types DO know we're going to have to take a bus today? That's okay, right?"

He looked down curiously. "How do you know that?" He asked.

"I called the front desk from my room last night. I feel kind of responsible for our not having a tour guide, and I've never been here before. Maybe we should get one," I worried.

Johnny laughed at me. "I think we're safer with someone these boys can't possibly start hating all of a sudden. Relax."

I looked around. We were waiting for JC and Joey.

I covered a yawn with my hand and looked at Lance. "Is Joey always late too?"

Lance shook his head and for some confusing reason started laughing. "Do I have something on me?" I asked. Lance jerked his chin up in warning, still laughing, just as two hands grabbed my shoulders from behind.

"You're about to, though," Lance laughed as JC said deliciously close to my ear,

"What do you mean, too?"

I twisted under his hands, under the influence of a powerful desire to see his finely-sculpted masculine face. As I had suspected, that face was close to my left ear. I hadn't bargained, though, for the crinkles in the corners of his eyes, about which I was getting quite fanatical. I had the most bizarre, and yet, most perfectly understandable desire to close the gap of a few inches and put kisses in those scandalously enticing crinkles. What is with me? I wondered.

Deanna, you love him-of course. Yes, I had reached the point of having conversations with myself. True.

…Yes, that could certainly have been it. "I meant 'you,' you know, in Spanish. Tú. I said it so that Lance would know I was talking to him. The one I was looking at."

JC let me go. "All right then. Just wanted to make sure." We all moved towards the door.

Johnny held the door open. It was cute to see the five little ducklings in their hats and sunglasses duck through-with me, bare-headed, but I pulled my tortoiseshell-framed sunglasses out of my purse single-handed, shook them open and pushed them on.

I was in the second limousine with JC, Lance, Justin, Mike, and Don. Justin looked like a pimp or something from the head-absolutely opaque black glasses and a white handkerchief tied over his curls-an impression that wasn't entirely dispelled by a navy sleeveless shirt and jeans. The jeans weren't extremely baggy, though; just barely baggier than straight-legged, I judged. He stared out the window, chin in hand. He was a notoriously grumpy morning person who certainly looked like it. Lance, who seemed to like button-up shirts, wore a green one that would've matched his eyes (covered with shades).

"It's kind of late to start a tour," Lance remarked conversationally.

"I don't think this will take all day," I said. "It's not quite like Nara. There are other things in the area that you can go to, but basically the only important things are the two shrines. We'll have plenty of time to see them after lunch, and until then we're just going to wander around the little town, which will probably be very nice and picturesque."

Justin turned to me and tipped the glasses down his nose. I met his eyes and they weren't blood-shot, nor did he appear in the least dangerous. He even ventured an ingratiating smile as he said, "I need to talk to you today."

"Okay."

"In private," he added.

I raised my eyebrows in mock-shock and stared at him over the rims of my own glasses. "Wait-you mean all that was supposed to be a secret? JC, could you hand me my purse?" It was on the seat, much closer to me than to JC. (I was kidding.) "I need to call the New York Times back."

"Sure," he said brightly. His fingers briefly brushed my arm as he picked it up and I woke up another notch or two. Justin leaned back against the seat with his knees as far apart as they could get, that way some guys sit, and grinned from behind the gangsta glasses.

I took my purse from JC and looked inside for my phone anyway. I had a vague recollection of turning it off the night before, before the movie we had all watched in Justin, Lance and Chris's room. (Relatively uneventful… you all know what it's like to watch a movie in the dark on pins and needles and unable to concentrate because your mind is on every movement made by one person who shares the dark room. So, yeah. It had been relatively unexciting, except that JC had put his arm around me during it.)

My phone had been off, but there were no e-mails waiting-sigh. Of course, Mai seemed to have brought me up to date on her romance with Akira now, so I couldn't count on another from her until I mailed her back, which I wasn't going to do from the limousine. I put the phone away, after turning it on.

"What time is it, anyway?" JC asked Lance, not moving at all except for the rapid drumming of his fingers on the seat next to him.

"About ten."

"JC… what's the matter?" I asked.

Justin and Lance burst out laughing while JC said, sounding injured, "Nothing. Why?"

"Deanna," Justin said, "JC is just LIKE that." So I had noticed, and as Justin said, it didn't appear to be the result of anything wrong. It was just surprising. Besides absolutely adorable.

Out on the streets, already heated to a melting temperature in the mid-90s, I estimated (never having learned to think in Celsius, unlike centimeters), Chris took one look at JC and burst out laughing. "Oh boy. With JC like that and Justin not having had his cereal, who knows what's going to happen."

I looked in awe at Justin, along with the other guys, Johnny, and Don. Mike shook his head, and Justin said innocently, "What??" I had heard about the infamous cereal that Justin required each morning in order to function civilly. Perhaps the reports had been exaggerated. I shook my head mutely.

"What are we doing until lunch, again?" JC asked, bouncing on his toes. I was staring at him and forgot to reply-failed to even process that he was speaking to me. "Deanna?" He was just so adorable in his T-shirt (unfortunately, NOT sleeveless) and khakis, with the bucket hat he'd had with him the other day (well, he couldn't wear the blue Gap cap, and probably didn't want to admit to having the hypothetical red one).

"We are being tourists. We're wandering around this little town here and looking at cute things with no schedule, because I don't like schedules." I had to buy some presents for Mama, Papa, Kokoro, and Mai's little brother Eijii. (I had countless presents for Mai already because I buy them whenever I see one for her: handkerchiefs, bracelets and rings, a handful of CDs, a pair of sunglasses, various items of clothing I had bought on sale, and a hardback of a children's book I knew she liked.) (Not that there was any guarantee I wasn't going to buy her more; I just didn't HAVE to.)

Johnny arranged to meet us for lunch at 12:00 at a restaurant we could see from where we were standing and got back into one of the limos, on his way somewhere else, apparently (possibly just back to the hotel… but then why would he come with us?). I looked around, trying to decide where to go first, since no one else was making any moves. JC was looking supernaturally alert, Chris and Justin seemed to be playing "paper, rock, scissors," and Lance was dividing his attention between watching them and listening to Joey. The street we were on was pretty wide and nice and old, lined with quaint small buildings. Unlike in Japan's big cities, these weren't uniformly tall. It reminded me a little of the geisha districts of Kyoto, with wooden buildings dominating and all of them crowded close, but not looming so much over the street as they would in any city of reasonable size.

There was a huge carved wooden Manekineko, a Japanese cat god and good luck symbol, in the street at the end of the block. They symbolize welcome, so it was probably a souvenir shop. "Let's go there," I said. JC walked beside me, not surprisingly, and Don followed us immediately. The other four guys and two guards trailed behind.

"What's this cat for?" Joey asked, bending over to peer into its smiling face. The Manekineko had one paw upraised and a bell on the front of its collar, usually in addition to other decorations. This one was painted in traditional colors, white with red, green, blue and black.

"Good luck and welcome," I said, sticking my head back out the door to address him. "And DON'T rub its belly-that's not how you get the luck." He pulled his hand back and made a pitiful face that I turned my back on mercilessly.

Mai's brother, Eijii, was fifteen, which is one of the most stressed-out times of a Japanese person's life. Japanese teenagers commit suicide much more often than do US teens, and it's presumed this is because of stress. The Manekineko stands for good luck and specifically good luck with money, but it's also pretty much universally benevolent, and I was debating buying him one-a smaller version of the one out front, that is.

The town of Ise where we were was a huge tourist spot, and the shop was filled with predictable types of souvenirs, Japanese brocaded stuff like purses, fans and handkerchiefs and postcards and notecards, key chains, little models of buildings that were probably connected to the famous shrines (no one can actually approach the main shrine building to Amaterasu, the Goddess of the Sun and mythical ancestor of the line of the Mikado, or Japanese emperors). There were also some little tea cans that I rejected for Mama because they weren't unusual enough.

In the second shop I bought Mama a really beautiful furoshiki, a traditional cloth for carrying things in, usually silk. This one had a reproduction of a woodcut on it depicting the forest and was unusually large.

When we left that one, Chris asked what we were going to do besides shopping in a petulant voice.

"Buy something for Danielle," I advised, patting his arm. "I still have three presents to buy before we quit, and I don't know about doing anything else. I really don't want to go to a museum today, and I don't want to take a bus away from here when we only have about an hour and half left."

I spotted a rather unusual store, one whose window was filled with teapots. I probably wouldn't find a gift there, but I was drawn magnetically under the shade of a red awning to gaze through the window into the dimness inside at the rows and rows of round-bellied exquisite shapes. I was gazing at a particular shelf, where one carved entirely out of wood with the natural curve of a branchlet worked into the handle sat between a small cast-iron pot and a gorgeous pale green one that was almost a perfect sphere except for its fat little spout and the elegant sweep of handle.

Justin lifted his sunglasses and bent over to look under the awning. "I bet my mom would like it in there," he said disinterestedly, dropping them back into place. None of the guys could want to go in, but I slipped in the door anyway and let it shut behind me with a jangling of bells tied to the edge. The light inside was low, so I took off my sunglasses.

An elderly Japanese man bowed and welcomed me with the traditional Japanese greeting. I expected to just circle the room with my hands behind my back admiring the contents of the shelves, but I discovered it was not just a teapot store, but a tea store as well. I found a much nicer and more distinctive tea can, filled to the brim with fragrant green leaves of a variety I had never tasted. When I asked the shopkeeper, he named it, but acknowledged that it was somewhat less common than some of the other types I reeled off of the top of my head. I bought it for Mama, and I coincidentally found some exquisite tea cups. Kokoro was taken care of… and I emerged with a large plastic shopping bag, shading my eyes and fumbling for my sunglasses in my purse. Where are you, damn things?! I squinted and turned back towards the shade.

Then a bar of shadow passed my vision and I felt a gentle touch at each temple. JC pulled my sunglasses from the top of my head and carefully lowered them to in front of my eyes with a smile that suggested it would be too mean to laugh at me for being so absent-minded. "These what you were looking for?" He asked with the laugh he hadn't laughed lurking in his voice. I stuck out my tongue at him and shot him a glance out of the corner of my eye as we trailed after Joey and Chris down the sidewalk.

The sunlight was heavy like a molten metal blanket and so blindingly bright that it reflected white off the curves of JC's shoulders in the red shirt, giving extra definition to the muscles. Which I really didn't need to be staring at.

"What are you looking for?" He asked a minute later as we stood outside the open doors of a confectioner's shop and I squinted at the Chinese ideograph characters on the label of something I didn't recognize.

"Something for Papa." I looked up from the package, which contained petit-four type things sweetened with bean curd (believe me: these SUCK. I can't understand how they can eat things sweetened with bean curd at all. I know they didn't have sugar for thousands of years, but you'd think they'd switch over completely as soon as they had the opportunity). I looked up and saw Lance inside the store. He smiled encouragingly.

"Papa?"

"Mai's dad… my first host father. I'm going to see them in Yokohama?"

"Oh."

I dragged them all out of that store because I made the mistake of telling Chris what some salty squid crackers were made out of and he started to speculate about what the squids would think about being made into crackers-in a squeaky voice.

I held my head in my hands out on the sidewalk and slumped down onto a bench. "Mental list of places not to go: places with cute girls for Joey to bug me about, places with squid crackers…"

"Oh, come on, Deanna. They didn't know what I was saying," Chris laughed.

I looked up with murder in my eyes. "Be very grateful for that fact," I said dangerously.

"Awwww."

Joey patted Chris' shoulder comfortingly and whispered something in his ear that made him go from mock-forlorn to what looked like mock-pleased, but could have been real.

I looked from JC to Justin, to Lance (who was on his cell phone, turned half away with his free hand covering his other ear against the noises of the street). "What did he say?"

The two best-looking musicians in America and quite probably in the world glanced at each other and then looked back at me with identical shrugs.

I had followed Justin out of a small museum in a building that had certainly originated as a large house because he turned the full force of a pity-inducing look on me and mesmerized me. Not really, but it sounds good. However, I'd never realized before that the looks he gave just be sticking out his lower lip were usual just a playful shadow of the staggering power of what he looked like when sincerely distressed, like a fallen angel or a god, or a hero of mythic proportions with the weight of the world on his shoulders… or the weight of a female pop-star, far heavier. (Figuratively.)

The place to which I had followed him was a small parking lot we'd reached stumbling blindly through the first door we found, and we were in a parking lot that was laughably small by American standards but pretty amazing by Japanese tourist-town ones. It was screened from the street by a fence opposite the museum and thick shrubbery on the remaining two sides. The most amazing thing about it, though, was that it wasn't entirely full: there were two empty spaces.

Driving is an unpopular method of transport in Japan, even on long vacations, because it's relatively impractical. In Tokyo, you have to present written proof that you possess a parking space to get your driver's license, and parking situations are as severe in smaller cities all over the place. Japanese small cities are generally the size of American BIG cities. Japanese towns, on the other hand, are quite similar to the very few of their equivalents that exist in rural areas of the South, West and Midwest. The difference is that they maintain the lack of parking in Japan and have excellent public transportation. And they're never far from civilization. I estimate that the furthest you can get from another city or town is up high on a mountain. I believe even Mt. Fuji hosts more than one at pretty high altitudes, though. They use every inch of available space. Most of the tourists in this small town, bustling as it was in the summer, had arrived via train and bus. You probably know that trains are much more common over there.

…And I've somehow gotten really far away from the point, which is that Justin paused next to a rather small white vending machine and said immediately, "I think she's mad at me."

I squinted even behind my sunglasses; the sun was behind him and thus facing me, and the white handkerchief on his head didn't help by reflecting it all into my eyes. "Why do you think so, Justin?"

He put his hands on his hips and let out a low sigh, looking somewhere over my head. I couldn't find anywhere to look that was much easier on my eyes, because the green leaves of the shrubs behind the machine were glossy enough to reflect light, and the asphalt, though black, still hurt my eyes. Justin finally said, "Oh, she was acting differently when I talked to her last night. She got the roses, and she was just… funny like she was thinking about something else the whole time. I expected her to be happy, but I assumed she was just upset about her dancers, you know? That wasn't it, though. I really think she was mad at me."

I was doubtful. He sent her roses and she was mad at him? "She was probably just stressed, Justin."

"No… she seemed, I don't know, kind of cold and it's not like when she is stressed. I mean, God, what a joke. Isn't she stressed all the time? So am I, for that matter. I just… felt that she was angry with me."

Well, this was tough. I had told him countless times that his own expertise from their long friendship and the kind of obsessive observation that everyone indulges in with regard to the person they love made HIM the Britney expert. He was now telling me his expert opinion. The trouble was, if I believed him, I really couldn't tell him what to do because I couldn't think of any explanation for her behavior.

"Okay, Justin," I decided. "I believe you."

"Thanks." I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic, but usually that's a safe assumption with him.

"I think you should call her right now. Then I'll be able to hear and… um… make elaborate gestures if divine inspiration strikes and I suddenly know the magic word."

He raised his eyebrows, which was kind of funny when you couldn't see either his eyes or forehead. "Isn't that 'please'?" He asked, but he was pulling his cell phone out of his pocket. It was cute but not as cute as Japanese ones. Of course… I may be partial.

"What time is it where she is?" I asked.

He glanced at his watch. "Not midnight yet. She had a late concert… it'll be fine." I made no further comment, just crossed my arms and leaned sideways against the vending machine, since the heat was making me kind of dizzy. Then I changed my mind and opened my purse to look for my change purse while he dialed the number. I popped the change into the machine and got a lemon-flavored iced tea in a juice box from the slot as he was saying in a soft voice I hadn't heard from him, "I know it's late, but you were up weren't ya?"

Britney's reply was too quiet for me to make out; I could just hear a fuzzy sound. I pushed the straw through the top of the box and took a drink. It was sour, but I was thirsty. For a while I gave up on understanding what he was saying; he never uttered a complete sentence, just a few that were cut off and some "yes"es and "no"s and "what"s.

I perked up when Justin said, sounding and looking genuinely injured, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"What happened during the day yesterday, then?"

"Uh…"

"Some flowers arrived before a concert. Normally, I would only think it's sweet of you, but…" I couldn't hear the rest of this.

"I sent you roses yesterday! You got roses! Yes, I sent them!" Justin returned when she finished it. I had a feeling that whatever her tone, getting annoyed was a bad idea. Justin! I mouthed, shaking my head, and tried to make a "quiet" motion. He gave me a short, tight-lipped nod.

Suddenly I could hear her voice again, pretty clearly. She exclaimed, "I know you!" I had a feeling from her snappish voice that the conversation was pretty much lost. She added, "What do you WANT, Justin?" The experienced ear (that would be mine) could tell she was on the verge of tears, tired, and possibly PMS-ing.

However, the in-love and desperate, egotistical yet uncertain and male ear heard an attack. It drove him over the edge, and he replied disastrously, "YOU!" It wasn't so much the fact that he'd said it as that he'd practically screamed it, not to mention in the middle of a fight. When she hung up, I wasn't at all surprised.