Chapter Text
I’ll tell you what I remember from that week.
Despite being unseasonably warm for nearly the whole month, there was a cold snap - forgive me for opening with the weather, but it is so often the easiest way into a memory, even a memory of remembering, like this one - like the spring weather had realized that it had shown up too early and sheepishly backed out. I remember thinking oh, warm clothing for Kyoto after all, then. I remember taking my scarf down from the peg on the back of my bedroom door. As I folded it, I realized that it still smelled like–
“Menthol? Really?” I tried to keep the skepticism out of my voice, but it was difficult.
“And eucalyptus,” she repeated. “That’s right.”
“Wouldn’t it be cold?”
“No. It’s warm. Your body only thinks it’s cold. There are receptors in your scalp that detect cold, and menthol binds to them. This produces a cooling sensation.”
“In your scalp?”
“Well, all over your body.”
“I see. Well, I like it.”
“Thank you. I do, too.” Umiri pulled her arms through the sleeves of her coat and shrugged it up onto her shoulders, then closed the door of her shoe locker. “Well - see you later, Taki-san.”
“You’re walking?”
“It’s not far.”
“It’s cold.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“No, really, it’s really cold.”
“I’ll be fine,” Umiri repeated. “Thank you for your concern, though. It’s gratifying to have someone care about my personal health and well-being.” Deadpan, but with the ghost of a smile hovering around her lips.
“Shut up. Put this on.”
Umiri took it from me. “Your scarf.”
“That’s right.”
“I see. And what will Taki-san do? Freeze?”
“Taki-san isn’t walking two miles from school to the television station in January. I’m taking the train home.”
“I see. In that case, then, I’ll accept it, and return it tomorrow morning. Thank you.”
For just a moment, as she unwrapped my scarf to put it on, I glimpsed the curve of Umiri’s neck.
Her pale skin, under my white scarf, under her black hair.
I turned back to my locker and closed it.
“I’m off, then.”
“Yeah, see you tomorrow,” I told the grey metal.
Biting cold. A draft. And then warm again, after the door closed. I stood there for what felt like a long time.
I don't blame Takamatsu Tomori–
No. Hang on. It isn't the right time for this yet.
There's plenty to say about Tomori, but it has to be in the right order.
Let me start over.
Sometimes learning something about yourself is like watching a flower open. Or, rather, it's like… not watching a flower open.
You can't actually watch a flower open, after all. Even the fastest blooms take hours and hours. To actually see it happening in a reasonable amount of time, you have to speed up the film or do stop-motion photography.
But even though it's that slow, it seems so sudden.
You go to bed one night in a world where the trees are bare, and the next morning you wake up and step outside and you're suddenly swimming in pink and white blossoms.
You're drowning in them.
That was what happened to me that day.
In the morning, I woke up and went to school. I took diligent notes.
I ate lunch on a bench outside and listened to Afterglow’s new single.
After school I pushed a broom down the hallway outside of the classroom where the Culture club met.
I complimented Umiri's new lotion.
I walked from the train station to my house without my scarf and despite my best efforts thought about what it might feel like to press my lips against the pale crescent of her neck, to dig my fingers into her back, to leave a red, angry mark just below the waistline of her skirt with my teeth and I closed the door to my room and sat on my bed and felt like I was drowning in the sudden, awful springtime.
With the symptoms finally too great to ignore, I surrendered to the truth: there actually was something wrong with me. There was a sickness in my heart.
It was a black and malignant thing, a wanting thing.
A childish, petulant, hungry thing.
I didn't eat that night. My heart was beating too fast.
The thing inside me hissed and spat and much, much later that night, before I fell into a restless sleep, I finally thought, not about Umiri, but about her.
About Tomori.
I thought about her until my cheeks burned and my heart pounded and my fingers wouldn't stop shaking, until the blood rushing in my ears drowned out the guilt that festered at the very bottom of my stomach.
I wanted.
On the train to Kyoto, we had assigned seats, but the entire car was Hanasakigawa students, so almost everyone had moved around so they could sit next to their friends. That was how Uika and I ended up next to each other. My original seatmate, a girl from Class A - Watanabe? Wakamoto? - disappeared not long after the train got up to speed, and Uika sat down with what seemed like an apologetic smile.
“I got kicked out,” she said, and I nodded.
For a while, neither of us said anything.
I stared out of the window and she flicked through her phone.
It wasn’t that Uika and I weren’t friends. For someone who had achieved her level of success so young, Uika wasn’t what you would expect.
She wasn’t stuck-up at all, for example.
Sometimes you can tell that kindness is part of the mask that an idol is wearing - they order coffee and smile the rehearsed smile that doesn't quite reach their eyes and sing out “Thaaaa~nks!” in the same voice they use for the press and the audience and the stagehands.
So far as I could tell, Uika Misumi was a member of a rare breed: When she said “thanks,” she actually meant it. When she smiled, the smile reached her eyes.
“Umiri-san’s not here after all,” she said, and I looked around at her.
“No.”
“That’s too bad.”
I paused. “What do you mean after all? ”
“Well, I think she wanted to.” She smiled a little wistfully. “But… her schedule.”
Uika flicked upward on her phone, pressed something on the screen, and handed it to me. The calendar app displayed Monday through Sunday, and on each day, bubbles of various colors stretched out to fill the slots between two times. All of Umiri’s were red and labeled with her name.
Yahata, Hanasakigawa Girls’ High School. Yahata, Fuji TV, Yahata, Natalie interview, and Yahata, practice w/ Killdeer, Livehouse RiNG. A dozen others, all red. I gave Uika a skeptical look.
“It's a lot, right?” Uika took her phone back.
“A lot,” I repeated. To be honest, it seemed insane. I spent almost every night of my week working, practicing or both, and my band was something I was doing for fun.
Well, supposedly for fun.
“She’s so diligent,” she said.
“Yeah. She's amazing.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Uika leaned in suddenly. I could smell her shampoo, sharp and citrusy and just a few centimeters away from my face. Something deep in my stomach twitched. She lowered her voice.
“Have you been to the circus?”
I was certain that I hadn’t heard her correctly. “The circus?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I’ve never been to the circus.”
“Well, I have.”
“A… alright.”
“No, listen. At the circus, one of the things they do is– oh, there are clowns at the circus.”
“Yeah. I know about the clowns.”
“You don’t know about the clowns. Listen. One of the things they do–”
“I promise I know about clowns.”
“Listen. One of the things they do is, they have a trick where they have a really long, thin stick - two meters, maybe, or taller.”
“Okay.”
“And on top, on top of the poles, they’re balancing these plates. Dinner plates. Wide ones, like at a French restaurant.”
I had never been to a French restaurant. “Okay.”
“And they spin the plate around on top of the pole. And it stays up there, because there’s momentum, or something, and the stick is wobbling in time with the plate. But the clown has to keep it going by spinning the stick every few seconds. You see?”
“Yeah.”
“And he does it again and again and again. Two plates, then four, six, ten, all spinning at the same time.”
“On the same pole?”
“What? No. He has a lot of poles. How would that even work? It’s one pole per plate.”
“Okay.”
“So he’s spinning them, and he has to keep them all going. He makes it look really easy, but you know that’s just because he’s been doing it for so long. He touches a rod here and there to keep it spinning, and they’re all just… going. It’s a little hypnotic to watch. But eventually…”
“Eventually…?”
“There get to be too many plates. And they start falling. And when one of them falls, it causes this chain reaction - it knocks over another one, and he grabs the pole, and maybe he can save the plate on that pole, but that distracts him from another pole, and that one falls…”
“Right.”
“You get it?”
“I do.”
“And the thing is, it’s funny.”
“Because he’s a clown,” I said.
“It’s not funny if it happens in real life,” she said. “You just have a lot of broken dinnerware. You know?”
Kyoto was a blur.
We were instructed to pair off - our English teacher, one of the chaperones for the trip, called it a “buddy system.”
Uika immediately grabbed my hand.
I found that strange. She had lots of friends, after all, who she knew a lot better than she knew me. But maybe she thought that, by saving me from approaching another of my classmates, she was doing me a favor. It annoyed me, but not as much as the thought that she might be right.
Over the next few days, our class took buses and trains all over the area to the big cultural sites. Kinkakuji. Tenryuji. The one temple that looks out over the city, I don’t remember the name. The giant buddha, the giant zen garden. I took pictures with my phone. I deleted most of them.
I was a tourist inside my own country. Sometimes I felt like a tourist inside my own clothes.
My phone buzzed.
Anon flashed ‘peace’ up at me from the screen in front of a palm tree in Okinawa. Tomori had turned her head and was trying to inch out of the frame, and it made her blurry. It was followed by a message:
CA: rikki how is kyoto!!
ST: fine
CA: quit holding out on us!!! i want to see some pictures, you must have seen something fun
ST: not really
ST: it's like Tokyo but there are more people at the shrines
CA: you didn't take ANY?? tomori was hoping to see some too, you know
I flicked my camera roll open and sent off a couple of the photos.
On second glance, I guess the one I took of the Senbon Torii that morning was framed in a way that I liked. I had seen two girls from a different school climbing the path just far enough ahead of me that they seemed to traverse the vanishing point of the repeating gates.
( Their hands had touched as they stepped upward, just as my thumb grazed the trigger of the camera.
The detail was too fine to make out on the screen.
Maybe I had imagined it.
Or maybe, seeing it, I had imagined the meaning.
Even so, the weight had clung to me for the rest of the morning. )
“You know,” Uika said, “I used to think you were pretty scary.”
I looked up, and the world became real again.
We were sitting at a table outside a cafe called L’Ingenieux. All of the tables inside were full, and despite the weather, most of the ones out here were, too . The inside of my nostrils were burning. My coat was pulled all the way up around my neck. “Huh?”
“You don’t really say much in class. You have kind of a vibe, you know? And the first couple times you made coffee for us at RiNG, you seemed mad about something.”
“I have a vibe? ”
“Like you should be riding a motorcycle in a movie about teens getting in trouble.” Uika leaned back in her chair and tapped her chin. The way she looked at me made me feel like a piece of beef, or maybe like one of the slices of cake behind the glass counter inside. “You aren't that tall, but your eyes are so pretty, and your hair is long, so you have kind of a femme fatale thing. It was really intimidating the first time I saw you. Mana-chan said you made her heart pound.”
Was that even a compliment? My traitorous cheeks flushed anyway. I couldn't think of anything to say.
“You know what changed my mind about you being scary?”
I shook my head.
“Umiri-san. She always calls you Taki-san.”
I didn’t understand. I shook my head again.
“Well, she calls Saki-chan Togawa-san. She calls me Misumi-san. But you?” Uika grinned. She looked like a particularly satisfied cat. “She calls you Taki-san. After I noticed that, I think it changed the way I saw you. Umiri-san doesn't care if someone is quiet, or blunt, or mean–”
“Hey.”
“-because Umiri-san is Umiri-san. She takes everything as it comes, head on. She treats everyone the same. Except, for you, she goes out of her way, and that definitely makes you special.
“Plus,” she added, and nodded at my phone. “I saw you smiling at your phone just now. You looked like a different person. Like you were just wearing that mean face around for everyone else's benefit, and I caught it when it slipped off for just a second.”
“I smile all the time.” I said, though I wasn’t.
“See? And there it goes again. Back into the nest, like a bird that only comes out once or twice a year.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. My cheeks were still very warm. “This isn’t like any conversation I’ve ever had before,” I finally said. “You’re pretty strange, you know that?”
“Am I? You should meet the rest of the band.”
“I have.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“What do you mean that she goes out of her way? ”
“Hmm?” Uika tilted her head and smiled. It was coy, and I immediately disliked it.
“You said that Umiri goes out of her way for me. What does that mean?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she drained her cup of coffee in a single long swallow, then placed it upside-down on top of the saucer.
“Is Maki-san still playing in the orchestra?” she asked.
My fingers tightened on my cup.
“You know, it's going to be two whole weeks before we can practice again,” I said into the phone.
I had stepped outside of the youth hostel to take the call. Cigarette smoke drifted over from a bench on the other side of the hostel, where the hostel’s owner sat with another adult.
“It can't be helped,” Anon said. “Soyorin is out of town next week. It's the time of year for this kind of thing. Can you believe her class is going to Disney Sea?” She sounded nearly livid with indignation. “Disney Sea! So we have to take a band trip this year, just the five of us!”
“We can't. We'll have to shake the rust off when everyone gets back. We'll be out of practice.”
“Obviously I don't mean we should go right now! Rikkiiiiiiii…”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“I mean it! We work too hard. We have to capture our precious youth before it flies away!”
My brow furrowed involuntarily. This wasn't uncommon during conversations with Anon. I rubbed it. “Is that a song lyric, or something?”
“Yeah! I wrote it on the plane. What do you think?”
“I think we should leave that kind of thing to Tomori.”
“She said that she liked it!” More indignation.
Something turned over in my stomach, hot and sharp and unpleasant. “You shouldn't bother her with that kind of stuff.”
“It’s not a bother ! Honestly, Rikki, you and Tomorin…”
My mouth felt dry. “What about me and Tomori?”
“Nothing,” she said, suddenly petulant. I could hear the pout of her lower lip from 1500 kilometers away.
“Did she say something?”
“No! It's just–” The noise she made was halfway between a sigh and a tsk. “She doesn't need a big sister holding her hand when she crosses the street. You just want her all to yourself.”
I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek. It tasted a little like metal, and then, a lot more like metal. I winced. Tears sprang into the corners of my eyes.
Oh, came the distant thought. I actually hurt her feelings this time.
I couldn’t sleep. By 11:30, I gave up trying, and very carefully stepped over three other girls on the way to the door. I might have been headed for the bathroom, but in truth, I just didn’t want to wake anyone else up with my phone’s screen.
The hallway was bathed in frigid moonlight, and I knelt down in a pool of it to type.
ST: i don't ‘just want her all to myself’
ST: i don't even know what that would mean
ST: i was just being difficult earlier. it sucks here and I'm not having a good time and i'm lonely okay? i'm lonely. i miss everyone. i miss you and i miss soyo and the stray, and I miss tomori even though I can't even look at her anymore without feeling rotten and broken and sick
I stopped, closed my eyes, sighed, and backspaced the last message before I sent it. The inside of my cheek was still tender, and it ached when I ran my tongue over it.
ST: i was just being difficult earlierST: we can work on a new song when we get back
ST: we only have one new one for the next show anyway so we need another
The door to our shared bedroom slid quietly open, and Uika sat down next to me. After a moment, she rested her head on my shoulder. Every muscle in my body froze.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, of course. I was just…”
“It's fine. I don't want to pry. I just woke up and saw your futon was empty.”
“Just band drama,” I said. “You know how it is.”
I felt, rather than saw her smile. In the pool of cold light her skin glowed, pale and perfectly smooth. The moon had seemingly revealed a girl, not of flesh and bone and muscle, but carved from marble piece by piece and joined together with desperate attention by some expert hand.
“My best friend - the person that I love more than anything else in the entire world - lives in my loft,” she said. “She lives out of a suitcase. She has four changes of clothes, two pairs of shoes, a tablet computer, and a doll. So… yes. I do know how band drama can be.”
“And she has you,” I said. “That has to count for something.”
She lifted her head from my shoulder and looked away, down the hallway.
“It's late,” she said.
The next morning, I saw the ‘Read’ badge appear next to the messages I sent, but Anon didn’t respond.
“This is stupid,” I said.
“You’ve never done anything stupid before?”
“Not career-endingly stupid.”
“How about you let me worry about that.”
“I don’t think you’re worrying enough. You have two careers to end.”
Uika’s cheeks were bright red, and my face was hot. The tall, fat-bottomed bottle was on the floor between our beds. An orange sticker that read ¥800. Plastic cups on the nightstand. It was the last night in Kyoto. From the luck of the draw, we had a hotel room all to ourselves.
“What do you want from me, an apology for endangering the moral fabric of society? Call my manager about it.”
I laughed. We were each on our respective beds, me on my side with a pillow propped under my arm and her on her back staring at the ceiling. When I laughed, she turned her head to look at me. She was glowing.
“That’s a sound I haven’t heard much,” she said.
“One night only,” I responded in English, and reached over the side of the bed for the bottle. “This time next year I’ll be performing it at the Budokan.”
“I’ve played the Budokan before, you know,” she said. Her grin was a wolf’s grin, toothy and wide and inviting. “With Mana-chan. It’s not all that exciting.”
“Really?”
“No, it’s terrifying. I puked twice before the show and once after.”
We both dissolved into laughter again. After it faded, the only sound was our breathing.
My eyes began to feel heavy, and my chin sank onto my chest. I think I began to drift.
“We have a lot in common,” Uika said.
I looked up, feeling a little dazed by the non sequitur. It took a few beats to process.
“We have exactly one thing in common,” I said. “Umiri.”
For a moment, she was quiet. When she spoke again, her voice was steady, quiet, and serious. The voice of someone explaining something very important to a child.
“Umiri-san calls you Taki-san so you don’t hear your sister’s name coming out of her mouth. Because she wants you to know that she’s saying your name, and not anyone else’s. She likes you. She wants to stay near you, but she doesn’t know how to show it, and she doesn’t have the words.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
“It isn't like that with her,” I said.
“Like what?” Her eyes glittered impishly.
“Please don’t make me say it,” I murmured around the rim of my cup. “We go an all-girls’ school. Everyone I know goes to an all-girls’ school. I don’t want to be that kind of girl. I don’t want to be whispered about or avoided. I just want to go to class, play music, and graduate.”
“I was nine,” she said. She was looking at me with an expression that I couldn’t parse, somewhere between defiance and contempt. “The first time I knew. You don’t know anything when you’re nine, so maybe that makes it easier. I learned the only thing that matters: I want the rest of my life to belong to her. I don’t care about anything else.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“You’re–” My voice hitched, and I drew my knees up to my chest. “You’re talking about something better . You’re talking about fate. Or destiny. Soulmates. The kind of thing where it doesn’t matter who the other person is. Whether they’re a boy or a girl. The thing you’re talking about is pure. The thing I want is rotten and dirty.”
“There isn’t a difference,” Uika said. Her voice grew unsteady. “Saki-chan lives in my loft, and I make coffee for her on Saturday morning. You walk Tomori-chan home three nights a week, just so you can stand next to her for as long as possible. Umiri-san calls you Taki-san. Mercury loves the sun, even though it burns, and burns, and burns.” She clenched her fist, and there was a crunch.
“You’re so stupid that I can’t stand it,” she said. She relaxed her grip, and her crushed, empty cup fell onto the carpet. “Saki-chan and Tomori-chan have started talking again. Did you know?”
Numbly, I shook my head. My stomach was turning over and over. The inside of my cheek throbbed. My wrist ached, and when I looked down at it, I realized that it was because I had been gripping it in my other hand.
“No,” she sneered. “Why would you? They started talking again, which means that I get to hear all about how brilliant Tomori-chan is. I get to hear about how raw and real her lyrics are. How happy it made Saki-chan to reconnect with her old friend. Saki-chan says that Tomori-chan is so lucky to have such a good friend like you looking after her.”
If you had asked me just then, I might have said that the girl sitting on the bed across from mine had never smiled in her life.
That she had forgotten how.
It was a face that put the lie to every smile that she had offered before.
“I don’t look after Tomori,” I said. I suddenly couldn’t meet Uika’s gaze. “That isn’t the relationship we have.”
“It isn’t the relationship you wish you had,” she corrected, and not gently.
“I don’t want anything different than what I have now,” I said.
She pointed at me. “And that's why I'm mad. Because you're just telling yourself that you're content. You're happy. You’re going to burn yourself up in the orbit of a little girl who doesn’t even know that you’re looking at her. Are you even her friend? Or are you just her big sister? ”
I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed them into my knees. It didn't help keep anything inside of me - it just got my knees wet.
“If you were honest with her, and she turned you down? That's one thing. But that isn't what's happening. Saki-chan is looking at her. She's looking at Saki-chan. You're looking at her. And Umiri-san is looking at you.” Her laugh came out high, and too shrill.
“Stop,” I said. My voice was muffled. I was speaking into my knees. “Please.”
My weight shifted slightly as Uika crossed the room and climbed onto my bed. She put her arms around me and pulled me into her.
Her lips touched my shoulder. They were cold. The smell of cheap sake hung around us. I didn't pull away.
“Take it from someone who knows,” she whispered, now very close to my ear. “If you follow her around for long enough, you're going to have to start wearing a mask, too.”
The light of the winter moon filtered through the blinds on the window, painting the room uneven and jagged.
On the train home, Uika fell asleep with her head resting on my shoulder. I pulled my scarf a little tighter around my neck and stared out of the window as the bullet train made a blur of the world.