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Makoto gets it early on. Girls come with different standards, abide by different rules.
Girls like pink. They have straight, shiny hair achieved with the help of honey-infused shampoo, hair treatment, a blow dryer, a portable hair straightener, and a vanity mirror lined with tiny LED lights. Girls’ hearts throb with excitement when that one cool upperclassman passes by their classroom. Girls put two fingers up in a bunny sign for pictures. Girls watch their weight. Girls put on sunscreen in the day and moisturizer at night. Girls wear tinted lip balm and clear nail polish despite school regulation prohibiting them. Girls carry tiny, quilted leather bags with gold hardware and nothing but lipstick, a coin purse and wipes inside. Girls text a mile a minute, kaomoji game impeccable, phone charms dragging against the hallway floor with how many there are – but one will always inexplicably be a gift from a senior on the same club as them from a class trip. Makoto gets all of it, but what she doesn’t get is – who is making these rules?
Girls are making these rules, she concludes, 13 years old and midway through her fourth attempt at a ponytail. She realized this afternoon that her usual braided pigtails were passé, and that everyone else had left theirs behind in elementary school and switched to soft, straight, shoulder-length hair seemingly overnight. One girl – by far the sparkliest in their grade – had even tucked a lock of hair behind her ear effortlessly while reciting in class that day. She had looked like a Korean TV star.
To hell with these rules, Makoto thinks next, face flaming red and jaw clenched. She tries to fling the hair tie holding up her wilting ponytail, but it snags on her frizzy locks almost immediately and rips several strands of hair from their roots. Her eyes well with tears.
She decides then and there to list her own standards – the ‘Things Only Kurume Makoto Understands are Worth Living on This Lousy Planet for’ list – and immediately includes pizza, Anna Karenina, snack crepe, and yuzu kosho, the latter of which her mom smeared on her chilled soba dinner last night and is all Makoto has been able to think about since.
She thinks of rose-scented bath salts next but scraps it. Too girly, she tells herself, not me enough. (She is 13 years old and hasn’t shaken off binary thinking.) She likes bath salts very much, however, and settles for lavender-scented bath salts instead. She debates on whether she likes croquettes enough for them to make it on the list – she does, but amends, croquettes with mayo – and as she falls asleep decides to include pancakes, Howl’s Moving Castle (the book! not the film adaptation!!), and fluffy fleece blankets. She wonders how she would rank them if asked.
From then on Kurume Makoto becomes a growing list of the things she likes.
(It’s only later she realizes they were a list of things 13-year-old Makoto deemed the necessary trade-off for the void-like and peculiarly adolescent loneliness of permanently feeling left out, and only much later that she realizes the trade-off was never necessary to begin with. It’s a bittersweet realization when it hits, but it’s years and years away from now, when Makoto is discussing the premise of a second manuscript with her editor and her glasses and braids have been discarded in favor of contacts, brick red lipstick, BB cream and even, now and then, a dainty hair bun held expertly in place at the back of her head with bobby pins.
Her favorite things have changed irretrievably by then, but yuzu – to future Makoto’s delight – has always, in one way or another, stayed on the list.)
***
Makoto puts on a track jacket, washes her face, braids her hair into pigtails and heads out for a walk. On the rare Saturday morning she does not sleep in, she enjoys walking to the second-nearest convenience store and picking out snacks for the weekend. Today it is rice crackers, dried squid, and dark chocolate. Her hand hovers over a box of cherry blossom-flavored mochi – a seasonal treat – but retreats to the pocket of her jacket as she instinctively goes over her list, decides (again) that sakura-flavored anything wouldn’t cut it. She walks home and adds convenience stores to her list. She is looking forward to a light novel and warm, lavender-scented bath at home.
She is 15 years old.
She is thinking of her new . . . friend group? circle? at West Tsubame High School. A smile worms its way out of the corners of her mouth as she grapples with the proper term for them in her head, peels the wrapper of a rice cracker open and starts munching. She wants to add rice crackers to her list but thinks there are too many food items in it already. Just yesterday she was thinking whether to add seafood-flavored instant ramen (with a runny egg on top, of course). She wonders what each of her friends’ favorite flavor of instant ramen is and resolves to show Mitsumi some of the seasonal cup-noodle and sandwich flavors at the convenience store near their school next week.
Makoto guesses that Egashira doesn’t eat instant ramen; that Mitsumi likes original beef; and that Yuzu likes . . . maybe curry-flavored, or maybe she doesn’t eat instant ramen, either.
The next school day, Makoto finds out she was right on two of three counts. When she asks Yuzu if she eats instant ramen at all, Yuzu responds brightly, “All the time!” She pauses, then adds almost sheepishly, “But seafood is by far my favorite – add an egg on top and you have yourself a certified Yuzu night.” Her cadence grows more confident as she talks about herself, like she’s remembering it’s Makoto she’s talking to and that Makoto will never, ever judge her for liking the things she likes. “What about you, Makoto?”
Makoto replies that that’s her favorite too, and the corners of Yuzu’s eyes crinkle as she nods like she’s not surprised at all.
Makoto realizes that she isn’t, either. “Let’s show Mitsumi the limited-edition spring cup noodle flavors after class,” she says with a grin, and Yuzu groans with relief as if Makoto has read her mind again.
(Later, Makoto will find out that she had been right on only one count. Egashira had been lying about not eating instant ramen, and Makoto will learn that Mika’s favorite instant ramen is spicy beef flavored, cooked with slightly too much water and a slice of melted cheese on top. Mika makes one for each of them and Makoto has to resist including it in her list with all her might.)
***
Makoto loves to re-read. Reading encompasses re-reading and has been in the list for a while, but re-reading really might have to be its own entry at this point. It’s what Makoto is thinking anyway, as she turns the corner of an early volume of Kino’s Journey. Her arms hang out of the bathtub so as not to accidentally drop the book in the water.
Her mind drifts, and she’s relaxed enough now to admit that she’s been thinking a lot of Yuzu lately – how she reached out to Makoto, how alike their humor is, and how incredible it is that she and Makoto can have anything in common at all.
It feels nothing short of miraculous. Here is just the type of girl Makoto has raged against her entire sentient life, ticking off all the things Makoto would generally hate on principle, and Makoto finds that she just can’t. Everything about Yuzu is right – her light makeup, her curled eyelashes, the whiff of flowers Makoto has finally realized doesn’t come from Yuzu’s perfume but her shampoo – and Makoto is ready to cut any bitch who dares reduce Yuzu to a sparkly girl, hypocrisy be damned.
Yuzu is smart. She grew up with Kino’s Journey and – just like Makoto and frankly, anyone with a functioning brain did – preferred the earlier volumes to the later ones. Yuzu pays attention to the things her friends say and like. She loves her dog Chiffon more than anything in the world. She is not used to talking about herself. She is terrible at drawing but so determined to get better she even joined the art club. Makoto likes Yuzu and – more astonishingly still – she likes everything about Yuzu, the parts that are just like Makoto and the parts that are anything but.
(But the list of Things Kurume Makoto Likes about Yuzu is a story for a different day, for a more mature and less perpetually-embarrassed Makoto to think up. She’s a writer at heart and won’t just snort and say, everything, but the list is so detailed it comes pretty close.)
***
Makoto is sitting down for a portrait.
“I don’t want to do this,” she attempts to say without moving her mouth. Yuzu is mostly silent behind the easel. Makoto can hear the pencil moving in quick strokes over paper.
After a beat, Yuzu peers at her as if from behind the corner of a wall, only one eye visible. “I’ll treat you to snack crepes.” Her tone is dead serious. She is staring at Makoto but her hand continues to move on the canvas.
“Thirty minutes tops,” Makoto concedes through her teeth. Yuzu is still staring, but the corner of her eye visible to Makoto crinkles in a smile.
Yuzu finishes the sketch in 48 minutes. Makoto doesn’t once complain. She stretches, comes around the easel, and finds a 2-D, bespectacled face staring back at her. Even she can tell this face is not her likeness – the eyes too large and close together, the proportions slightly off – but the smudged pencil shadows Yuzu worked on the left side of Makoto’s face are pretty professional-looking. And, like most of Yuzu’s works, Makoto can tell that the drawing was made with a lot of love. Already Yuzu is much better at drawing than she was the first few weeks of school.
“What do you think?” Yuzu asks tightly.
“It’s good,” Makoto says. Yuzu lights up, even though this is all Makoto ever says about all her works except the truly, hilariously bad ones, which she laughs at until she has to wipe away tears. “Let’s go get snack crepes.”
Snack crepes are still at the top four of her list, which she runs through in her head almost automatically and at regular intervals, like a favorite song. Pizza, Anna Karenina, snack crepe, and Yuzu.
(She is 15 and doesn’t realize there is any change in her list. When she does, she can’t remember when this change started. She doesn’t change it back.)
***
When Makoto is assigned to buy more art materials for their class’s school festival preparation, it feels natural to bring Yuzu along. Makoto finds her inside the art club room working on the piece she will be exhibiting during the festival. Makoto can’t make out what it will be at this point. If she had to guess from the outlines, she would say it was an animal in a field of flowers; Yuzu loved animals. It was probably Chiffon.
She doesn’t pry. All she says is, “I’m going downtown for more art supplies backstage,” and Yuzu says, “I’ll come.” She covers her work-in-progress and they head to the restroom so Yuzu can wash her hands and reapply her makeup. Makoto reads while she waits, her back against the sinks.
***
This is what friendship is, Makoto understands now. It’s more than common interests and that us-versus-them camaraderie hard and pitted in her stomach even as she enjoyed the quiet, steadfast company of Mocchan and Sugita back in junior high. There’s a selflessness to friendship – a sincere and whole-hearted acceptance of another person so unlike yourself and like yourself at the same time it is its own kind of love.
Makoto is 16 and eating crepes again with her two best friends. They’ve treated her to hers as a belated birthday treat after learning she’d let her birthday pass last month without telling anyone. For some reason she’d been feeling adventurous and decided to eat the fruit parfait crepe with sakura whipped cream, and there’s a bounce in her step as they walk along the street now – it’s delicious.
Mitsumi is enjoying hers as well; she’d gotten the same thing as Makoto, and at the last moment Yuzu had decided to get the same topping so they all matched.
The sakura trees are heavy with fully bloomed flowers, and petals fall left and right around them and on their hair as they walk. The cherry blossoms look good on Yuzu, Makoto thinks with a smile, and Mitsumi too. Just the sight of them happy and sharing crepes with her as a belated birthday gift moves Makoto to tears, suddenly, which she immediately blinks back behind her glasses.
“I’ve never really thought about it before, but I really love the pink of cherry blossoms,” Mitsumi says then, her face turned towards the trees and away from Makoto. Mitsumi has always been the most perceptive of others’ feelings without trying.
“Me too,” Yuzu chimes in, the corners of her eyes crinkling in that way that has become so familiar and dear in the span of a year.
Makoto clears her throat, looks up at the sakura trees herself. They are the perfect pink of spring and the exact shade she would pick out for her friendship with Egashira, Mitsumi, and above all with Yuzuki.
“I love it too,” she finally admits.
(Could it be, she thinks later on in bed, reflecting on the afternoon and trying to sear it into her memory, that I was the one making up those standards for other girls all along? To pretend I was nothing like them?
Wrong again. But Makoto has only just turned 16. She has a lifetime ahead of her to figure out the things that need figuring out – about herself, about girls in a society plagued by double standards, about the precious friendship peculiar to girls a certain age.
For now she is a high school student eating sweet crepes with her friends underneath the pink spring of cherry blossom trees, which she has just added to her growing list of favorite things.)