AN: I think I need a break from Stay Awake, need to scrap some stuff and start again... It's near the ending anyway. Lately, I dislike writing. This was done instead, for a little practice (nothing much happens).
It was the longest cold war between them, the summer break between Tomoki's middle school graduation and his first month in high school. They've fought before, there were times he didn't speak to her out of spite or annoyance, but it only lasted for days at most and never for entire weeks. But this time it did. Tomoki locked his door, something he never does before, and he never even looks at her even if they both eat together in the same dining table. He's good at acting she doesn't exist.
Even through her pride – if he doesn't talk to me, then I won't. Does he think I'm that desperate for attention? Sorry I'm not sorry for forgetting your stupid high school application – she feels hurt when they happen to pass by each other at home and he walks by so fast that it causes a small breeze to brush against her hair, and she feels stabbed in the gut with a knife made of wind. It made her pause before she could walk again.
When she learned from her mother that Tomoki was going to the same high school, it was dread, hope, and relief. Dread, at the thought about Tomoki swearing he'll ignore her there. Hope, that he'll get over this silent treatment phase. Relief, that he'll be there, in the same school, that his presence might be a comfort in that place of torture.
She still had hope for herself, but it felt like she's running out of time. Two years in high school, what the hell improved? She can now talk to a few classmates and Komiyama. She barely fulfilled her self-appointed quota of talking to at least one person per day. That short-lived classroom phrase, Kuroki-level fail, made her popular for awhile, in the wrong way. She was glad it died out before Tomoki could hear it.
Their mother didn't notice that Tomoki was ignoring her the whole summer break. During the first day of class, it was their mom who suggested they travel together to school. Tomoki just went off first after breakfast.
"Tomoki left first? You know him, he doesn't like waiting around, and he doesn't like to be late."
The first week of school, she found herself sneaking in the hallways to his classroom, pretending to pass by, but actually trying to spy on him and see how he was. There, sleeping on his table, while everyone around were laughing and talking during break time.
She knows why: one early morning of that week she had went to his room at 3 in the morning to make him go with her to the bathroom. She found him awake, sitting on his chair and staring out the window, watching the low full moon. The house was dark, and it was only there she saw how bright the moon actually was. That was the first time she talked to him since their summer break argument. He didn't even talk back, he just followed her out. That was the time first time he acknowledged her presence after long weeks of ignoring her existence.
At least it was a start. It was always a cycle, their fights: the silent treatment, the slow reconciliation, until they can talk like normal again. It is always Tomoko who has to swallow her pride and speak to him first. Then a fight would start again with Tomoko saying or doing something stupid... Then it will repeat again, somewhere there it will always be Tomoko's fault and Tomoki's revenge is cold silence.
#
In his classroom, he was always alone, sleeping on his table. She knows that feeling, sneaking in sleep every free moment she gets, sometimes even when there's class (but she doesn't do that now, since being caught and called out in front of the whole class would be a more dreadful embarrassment). Fifteen minutes of deep, undisturbed sleep during recess can be a relief.
So she drifted to his classroom every chance she gets, during morning and afternoon break, lunch time, and after school. They didn't go home together. She didn't know if he was in a club. The try-outs for the sports teams didn't start yet. Seeing Tomoki, reminded her of her own helplessness for the first months of school when she was in first year. She had started as optimistic... but after months, didn't even manage to talk to one person. She still hasn't seen him talk to another.
Did he feel that too? The crippling loneliness? She had a new nickname for him in her head now, 'loner bastard'. Maybe he was only putting up that front, of being the tough cool guy, me who-can't-feel-anything. Maybe he was like her, after all. So why weren't they together here? Why wasn't he the one swallowing his pride and be nicer to her?
She approached him, making up a quick excuse of borrowing his dictionary. It just happened that she did need one for class.
She had thought he would be grateful, but he only gave it to her and shooed her away. He seemed to panic, as if not wanting to be caught talking to her. That hurt her, but she hid it with her anger. Freaking fine. If you don't want me talking with you, you don't have to tell me to go away. I'd go away out of my own will.
It was his attitude that didn't attract people to him in the first place. She got out her notebook and made up rules for herself. She always listed personal rules – like the quota for the people she had to talk to per day. Now she had a more complex system in mind using points. For positive acts that can make her outgoing and social would be mean plus points. For negative acts, she'll get subtracted points. Getting a boyfriend was still too big and difficult goal, but how could she get there if she didn't even start with the small things?
She scribbled more notes on the 'system' and finalized it. She re-wrote it all neatly so it would be clear for Tomoki. She wrote rules, charts, and lists of positive and negative acts. She was his big sister, she had some responsibility towards him, and she should be a good example. The inspiration for this program was him anyway. They could help out each other here, and wasn't that what brothers and sisters are for?
It was the next day that she finally had the courage to approach Tomoki about it. It was her week's accomplishment, inventing her system to start her change. This time, she would make it. Maybe he would even be impressed that she thought out something like this. It would take him a while to open up, but Tomoko would coax it out of him gently. She felt that she had somewhere to go to now, now that she had goal of helping someone else.
She breathed deep and went in a rush to his classroom. The first thing she heard was the whispers of girls...
"If you want to give cookies to Kuroki-kun, just be sure to give them to the three other guys as well so you won't be that obvious," said one girl to another blushing girl with short hair.
"Would it be really okay?"
"Sure, I'll go with you."
Tomoki was there with a group of boys standing in a corner, and he must be saying something funny because he's smirking like he's saying something mocking, and the guys around him laughed. Girls watched and listened in the sidelines. They were all... captivated. He wasn't scowling, it wasn't his default irritated facial expression when they both talk, but he's smiling. He never ever smiled at her. The last time he smiled at her was years ago.
She stormed off fuming, back to her classroom and her seat. She subtracted his points, slashing her pen through the page of her notebook while writing the reasons. Pretending to be a loner when he wasn't. Getting confessed to by a girl. Being given cookies and chocolates by girls. He'll reach past negative hundred points and I'll kill him.
He had everything she didn't have. He had all of what she wished for before.
She breathed though gritted teeth, her hand shook while she held her pen in a tight grip. She wrote in hard strokes, as if stabbing the paper, and tears from anger and envy stained the page. It was the worst of all feelings: jealousy. Of all people, the one to rub in to her face the fact of her loneliness was her brother. Him. It was always him. It makes him win here too, right? That she's wasting her mental space over him.
Not like he'll understand what it does to her anyway. That's what made it difficult, that no other mind but herself would be the victim of these obsessions. They were self-inflicted anyway. It was hers alone to bear. She only stopped tearing her notebook when the teacher came in. It was only then she noticed all the wasted paper in her notebook, she'll have to scotch-tape her torn notes and buy a new one. All because of the bastard's fault.
After class, she went to the bookstore to buy a new notebook to replace the one she tore. Maybe if she can go home after 7 they'd have eaten dinner, she won't have to share the table with him. As if on cue, she stepped to one alley to look at the hardbound journals (she was thinking of starting a diary to track her progress, a separate one so she won't mix them up with class notes) and came face to face with him who also happened to be there. He was also buying notebooks, pads, and pens. He dropped all of them to her basket without a word, and he was the one who paid for them, including her notebook.
They went home together. His face was smug and she wanted to punch it, for all the things he made her feel without him aware of it. But she keeps the violent fantasies only in her imagination. She knows Tomoki can hurt her worse. He did once, and she still quaked inside from that – it was a reminder never to go far with annoying him, because if he's decided he'll hurt her he will, not only by force, but the added silent treatment hurt more than bruises ever could.
She had forgotten what it was they were fighting about.
"Do you want me to punch you in the face?" Tomoki said, his clenched fist shaking.
"Then do it! You can't anyway!" She dared him.
Tomoki punched her in the face and she cried. He got a long sermon from mother, and she also got angry at Tomoko and told her to stop testing Tomoki's patience.
Back to the present, she still didn't talk to him. Like a scab, it took a while to heal the drift between them.
She logged on the computer instead, spending hours on it watching anime or reading manga or just kill time with mindless browsing. She wasn't even popular there. She figured that to have internet attention one must take cute selfies, or be a good artist, or write something. She can't draw anyway, she doesn't know how to write, she doesn't have any talent to show off or video herself for, her pictures suck. She wasn't popular there, she doesn't know anyone even on the internet. In despair, she only turned it off and lay in bed, wishing for sleep to come but it is always late.
#
She's always puking. Maybe that's why she was still stick-thin and underdeveloped unlike the girls her age with shapely bodies. It might be bulimia, chronic puking disorder, her mother's even asked if she secretly had anorexia. She didn't, she liked eating, she ate a lot of everything actually. But most of it goes undigested, out again through her mouth and down the sink's drain or flushed in the toilet.
She looks at herself in the mirror, she vomits on a paper bag. She gets nervous talking to people, she vomits in the bathroom. Some teacher forces her to interact with others, she vomits on the toilet. She kept it a secret, pretended it wasn't worse as it was, her mother worrying would mean going to a doctor and she didn't want to bother her when to herself there was nothing wrong.
Lately, she vomited more times a day that she did eating. The taste of bile and vomit was always in the back of her tongue, and maybe the inside of her throat was now scrubbed red and bleeding from all the hydrochloric acid of puke. Sometimes swallowing food hurt. Sometimes her spit had streaks of blood on it.
She's always passing out. Maybe caused by too much puking. She can't count how many times she's woken in the infirmary since first year, all for varied reasons – too much exhaustion, or hunger, or heat stroke. At least the medical certificates can make her exempted from strenuous exercises in PE. Maybe all that's wrong with her mind is brought about by some disease, some defect in the immune system she didn't know.
School days repeated one after another, the routine of assignments, quizzes, and periodical exams. Weeks and months pass and everyday is exactly the same.
Time passed, Tomoki became the known Kuroki, and no one noticed or mentioned that they were siblings. Tomoki didn't talk about her, she had no one to talk to about Tomoki anyway. Many girls had a crush on him, including Komiyama, and she couldn't get it. What was so attractive about him? Maybe he was mysterious to them (to her, empty and boring), maybe because he was a cool football player (to her, nothing else interesting there), or maybe they couldn't see very well and liked his looks (to her, just a scowling face with eye bags, what's good-looking in that).
#
She woke for the nth time in the infirmary bed again. It always causes a temporary amnesia, and she can't recall anything that happened before waking up. The nurse working there already knows her by name. Sometimes she sleeps there so she won't have to attend classes.
Someone else is sitting on the bed, it was Tomoki.
"Why the hell are you here?" she asked.
"Mom said I'd have to take you home," Tomoki said, wore the white Adidas sling bag across his shoulder. He had brought her bag, too.
"Don't you have class? And I can go home by myself."
"She said I had to. What, do you think I want this? I already asked permission from the teachers," he said, sighing as if it was all trouble. "At least I'm excused and I can go home for the afternoon and sleep until night. Come on, let's go home."
As they walked past playgrounds and empty streets, she thought she could see ghosts of their past selves running past them, chasing after flying moths and dragonflies. She imagined she could hear their laughter, but they faded, the sounds and the images, as she followed Tomoki who was walking fast.
Here comes again the unwelcome shards of flashbacks, triggered by a found notebook a decade old, and cicadas in a box labelled Memories of Summer, still amber-golden all this time. Tomoki used to adore her, look up to her, all now replaced by indifference and disgust. She knows why. If she were Tomoki she'd feel the same towards herself too. She wonders what the hell happened to her. What if she stayed as the decent, respectable older sister? She was not able imagine it. She couldn't recall exactly why things had changed. And she knows they'll never be the same.
#
Days went by all the same in school again, until one day she woke in a hospital bed with needles inserted into her arm attached to transparent wires. She's woke up from fainting before. As usual, she didn't have any memory of how she ended up here. White sheets, white tiles, white curtains, and she was wearing a white hospital gown.
Even the sky out the window was almost white, it was the kind of clouds that covered the heavenly sky-blue with a sheet of palest grey. There was no sunlight. Maybe I am in heaven or hell or the afterlife, maybe there is no divine palace nor divine punishment. If I am dead, then I died a virgin, what a wasted life.
All imaginations about a possible afterlife vanished when her mother went in with hospital food on a tray. She glanced at the wall clock, it was exactly lunch break.
"Tomoko, good thing that you're awake now. You didn't wake since yesterday," she said.
The door opened again and there was Tomoki. He brought a plastic bag of fast-food for him and their mother. There were two large bars of chocolate, one for him and another for her. He ate and left without a word, he still had class. Tomoko figured that it must be a weekday, as he was wearing his uniform.
Mom's phone rang. It was father, them talking about how she was, that she was okay, and he was going home soon...
#
The next day, or how many uncounted days in between, she wasn't aware of them.
For some reason unclear to her, they had to transfuse blood into her. Her rare blood type needed a close relative, and so it was from Tomoki's veins. It was a weird kind of incest, she thinks as it pulses into her, it was blood that coursed through his heart, all over and inside his body and now through hers.
She slept the hours away.
When she opened her eyes again, she found herself in her own room and lying in her own bed. Her brother was there, seated on her chair and watching her. Now that she's woken, he stood up to leave. Mom probably made him do that, since he never stayed in her room if he could.
For a moment, she wanted to tell him many things but she couldn't find words.
Love me, adore me, be my brother and stay beside me forever. Forget about all of them and tell me you want to marry me again. Let's make wedding rings out of dead cicada shells. We can draw imaginary wedding bands on our fingers for every day of our lives. I can use my pen. Let's live in a fairy tale where I am the princess forever and save me all over again, let's kill ourselves together maybe or die happily ever after.
All the confusing thoughts she only managed to say one word out loud.
"Stay."
He stopped halfway on his way out.
He turned back, and in the dark the moon cast slashed slits of light on the tiled floor. He stepped towards her, and sat beside her. He touched his arm for warmth, and how she craved it, having another human body near. On a whim, she took his hand and kissed it. Maybe it was the sedation that made her do it. She hugged his arm, and he let her.
"I'm going back to my room," he said.
"Just this night, I swear," she said, almost begged, and rested her cheek on Tomoki's arm. He stayed, and he made her feel warm and safe. He sighed, let her hug his arm while he sat beside her. He slept while sitting up. It was only for tonight anyway...
end. will not be continued.