bolt cutters
timeline: canon-compliant minus the teary bonding session after the fireworks failed to satisfy Menma's wish.
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They rose like soldiers at roll call from the lightweight foldable chairs at the entrance ceremony, shoulder to shoulder in the crowded auditorium. The sound of chair legs groaning against the polished hardwood erupted cacophonously, mimicking protesters at a riot. The high school principal's sonorous commencement speech rose above their heads as they stilled and settled like dust after a disturbance.
Tsuruko inhaled deeply to mask a yawn, brushing against the sleeve of his pressed shirt as she hid her mouth behind a palm.
Yukiatsu's gaze slid over to her and his lips quirked. "Up studying for next month's exams last night?"
"Shut up," she muttered, shifting away from him and adjusting her ruby-rimmed glasses.
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Tsuruko wielded his name like reprimand, keen on the tip of her tongue. Yukiatsu. It was said incredulously every time, though she was no stranger to the syllables. Yu-ki-a-tsu. It was meant to pull him out of the grave he was digging himself, but he only shoveled on furiously like his life depended on it, emotional baggage piling up over his shoulder. He faithfully fed his ever-growing tower of bitterness, shielding himself from the stifling brilliance of the summer sun.
He always paused for a second at her warnings. A second and no more, long enough to say: I can't stop. You can't stop me. You are just as powerless as I am.
And Tsuruko never had any ammunition left after that, because he was right.
They were all going in circles.
She spoke his name like she was staring down a summer thunderstorm, a cumulonimbus in the making—warning, get inside, it's starting.
(Subliminally: but I'm not afraid of you.)
His name would always sound the same, even when the rest of him had long since soured into a blighted boy-turned-man. His insecurities circled his ankles, a ball and chain rooted to the past. She wondered if he thought she sounded like a broken record. If his name on her lips had become ambient noise to him, like the steady chugging of a train that leaves every fifteen minutes.
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Kono Amaya gripped the plate like it was the last shred of sanity she had to cling to—and a slippery one at that. Her petite hands were engulfed with soap suds and her mouth by a bland, pasty taste, something momentous yet mundane.
"Mom?"
Amaya turned too quickly, smiled too easily. "Chiriko. What is it?"
"I can wash the dishes. Don't you usually go on your walk at seven? You should go before it gets too dark." She was referring to her mother's latest escapades—first it had been yoga, but her father had nixed the notion, insisting they save every cent for her education. The tentative friendships Amaya had forged in her classes unraveled within days. No one contacted her, and she was too ashamed to initiate any conversations. I can't come anymore because it makes my husband think less of me. An ugly discomfort had wormed its way into her heart, a stumbling insecurity, and nothing had been the same since.
Then Amaya had taken to gardening, and her husband had snorted that "organic" really meant "unsanitary" and that they would more prone to ingesting bacterially-infested produce. So Amaya went for runs around town, through the small park near Tsuruko's middle school and looping around the convenience store on her way back. Tsurumi Takao had said nothing.
Tsuruko supposed he had nothing left to say.
He seemed to find fault with everything Amaya did for herself. Anything she did for the family was met with a hearty smile and a vestige of affection in his gaze. Tsuruko had always been close with her father—he had bought his daughter her first sketch pad at age six. But when she tested into an elite high school, he grew distant. Every smile he sent her way was laced with self-restraint.
"A-Are you sure? Don't you have schoolwork to do?"
"Aren't you the one constantly reminding me to take study breaks?" She swept her hair into a high ponytail and smiled reassuringly.
Amaya laughed, a husky, exhausted sound. "I can't beat your logic. Thank you." She hesitated, then continued, "I ran into Matsuyuki the other day, at the intersection by the local library."
"Oh?" Tsuruko scrubbed at the plate until it glistened, touch gentle yet firm. Yukiatsu hated running by the library. He would invariably bump into a classmate or an old neighbor. "Did you talk?"
"It was a bit of a one-sided conversation." Rubbing her neck, Amaya murmured while staring at the ceiling, "That boy's too polite. Makes you feel lonely for some reason... Chiriko?"
Tsuruko had frozen, sponge bunched in her first, dribbling warm water down her palm.
"He just needs to impress everyone, that's all." She resumed scrubbing. "Enjoy your run. Be back by eight-thirty, okay?"
Staring at her daughter for a moment longer, Amaya sighed and chuckled. "Yes m'am. See you in a bit."
Uncannily, her father sauntered into the kitchen the minute the front door swung shut. "Your mother's going out this late?" There was a quality of unsurprised irritation to his tone, a familiar disappointment. A surge of spite rose and fell in Tsuruko's chest. What right do you have to hold everything against her?
"She's just going on a run. It's her evening routine, remember?"
Grumbling, he shuffled back into his office.
Her cell phone vibrated with a text from Yukiatsu.
Let's stop by the mall after school tomorrow. There's something I need to do.
Tsuruko glared into the sink, anger fermenting in the silence punctuated by the lukewarm water lapping at the sides of the sink and clink of ceramic dishes.
She was always cleaning up after others.
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The six-year old slipped on her brown sandals, then reached to the ground, tucking her sketchbook securely against her side. She fingered her red hair-tie anxiously with her free hand, the plastic baubles clacking against one another.
"You look fine, Chiriko."
Tsuruko turned to see her mother smiling fondly. "It's cute."
"O-okay," she stuttered, embarrassed at her transparency. "I'm going, then."
She was usually the fourth to reach the base—Poppo was uncharacteristically prompt, followed by Anaru and Jintan. Menma had a knack for arriving just after Jintan, and Yukiatsu typically joined them last, grumbling about how his mother had (once again) dragged him along for inane errands.
Every Friday they hunted for rhinoceros beetles. Menma always murmured that she seemed to be terrible at locating them, but Tsuruko noticed she never approached any she saw—merely standing a good five feet away and making conversation with "Mr. Beetle."
Tsuruko never understood why they pinned the greatest number of points on the rhinoceros beetle. They were plain and rather common. Since Jintan found one ten feet up in a cypress, however, the system had been settled. The nocturnal beetles made themselves scarce during the day, so it became their challenge to disturb the critters from their rest.
The Super Peace Busters scattered for their weekly ritual, and Tsuruko hunkered down by the stream, staring at the colors reflected by the cool water. She pulled a golf pencil-sized pack of colored pencils out of her skirt pocket and began doodling. When her fingers became too sweaty to properly grip the pencil, she retreated into the shade a few feet up the slope, reveling in the texture of the grass with combing fingers. As her eyelids began to droop, she spotted a sudden flare of iridescent color by her feet. Blinking, she raised her chin slowly, as not to startle the beetle that had wandered in her vicinity. It was beautiful. Its exoskeletal wings were sectioned into metallic blue, green and red with white spots. It shone like gasoline in a rain puddle.
A rustle startled her from behind, and she glanced out of her peripheral vision.
"Yukiatsu."
"Taking a break? Smart idea. It's too hot out anyway." He started down the slope when she raised a hand to stop him. "Walk quietly," she whispered. "There's a beetle."
He obeyed, shifting subtly through the tall grasses. At last he reached her side, dropping to a low crouch.
"I've never seen this kind before. Where did you find it?" His voice lacked its usual defensive edge, and Tsuruko watched his face as he stared at the beetle with rapt interest.
"It just came here," she replied. "I want to draw it."
As she reached into the grass for a pencil, the beetle twitched, and Tsuruko froze, eyes wide with dismay. Yukiatsu pulled a pack of opened crackers out of his front pocket, sprinkling a few crumbs in a sunlit patch in the grass, where he figured she would be able to see its colors better. They held their breaths as the beetle inched over cautiously to the crackers, curiously prodding at the chunks with its pincers.
Tsuruko began scribbling, possessed by an urgency he'd never witnessed. He craned his neck to see over her arm, but she angled away, all the while sketching with a determined glint in her eyes.
Afterwards, when the beetle had scuttled away—perhaps disgruntled with Yukiatsu's offering—Tsuruko shifted closer to Yukiatsu—which wasn't significantly closer, as she started off four feet away. But he flinched in surprise anyway, trying to read her expression as they froze in a tableau vivant of uncertainty. Smiling sadly, she unfolded her drawing and handed it to him. The rough off-white paper was crumpled in one corner where it had been in her fist a moment prior.
"It was a Tiger beetle."
"How do you know?"
"I read it in a book once."
You read books about beetles? Instead he said, "It's pretty good."
She said nothing, accepting the drawing as he held it out for her.
"You probably could have caught it, you know."
Sprawled out on the slope, she shook her head idly. "It would have fled."
"Still, there was a chance. I bet none of the others have seen one before." I bet Jintan has never caught one before, he meant.
Tsuruko looked away. "I wanted to keep it a secret."
He squinted. "You wanted to keep the beetle?"
"I wanted to keep quiet."
Yukiatsu didn't respond, but imitated Tsuruko's posture, unfolding on the slope. After a few minutes of silence, he raised his head. Her eyes were closed. "You'll be bitten by ants, you know."
A violet pencil rolled out of her loose grip.
Sighing, he pushed off of his elbows into a sitting position. "Tsuru-ko."
She opened her eyes then, a sudden shock of turquoise. Smiling indulgently, like she had just licked clean the last drop of the best ice cream ever made, she said, "Let's go back."
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And so the tradition continued—Tsuruko at the grassy riverbank and Yukiatsu dropping by when it suited him. He brought her beetles, sometimes, without telling the others. He had ridiculed her at first for keeping a "beetle journal," snorting, "You dress all girly but don't really act like one, you know that?"
She had simply rejoined, "You dress like a boy but you'll never be a man with those manners."
He never teased her about it again, after that.
She wasn't quite foolish enough to believe he participated out of kindness. The beetles he caught were always beautiful or intricately built, but never as large as a rhinoceros beetle. She figured Yukiatsu knew he was fighting a losing battle. Once Yukiatsu challenged Jintan, their leader would only go to extreme lengths, climbing towering trees and earning frightened cries from Menma in that dulcet, whimsy voice of hers. He didn't want to be reminded of how much Menma cared about Jintan. He didn't want to be reminded of how Jintan was brave, how he was broody. How the minute Menma and Jintan were involved, he lost. He didn't need to be reminded of these things to feel the weight of their truth.
He never came just to see her. The distance between them was his walk of shame, his disgruntled grimace after trying to get Menma to smile and only succeeding in chasing her off in search of Jintan. But he never brought his mood with him when he spoke to her. He slicked it back, swept it beneath the placid gurgle of the stream. Menma was the only one he ever grimaced over.
Still, she sat up a little straighter whenever he approached with his hands cupped.
"I've never read about this kind before," she commented, several months after the Tiger beetle incident.
Yukiatsu smirked lightly. "I had to wait for it to come out of hiding by laying a trail of crumbs."
"And that worked?" The girl quirked a brow while sketching the insect's contour with a pencil.
"See for yourself." He gestured smugly at the beetle and stretched out beside her, staring up at the sky.
He found himself infinitely glad, on afternoons like these, that Tsuruko did not pine after Jintan. The Super Peace Busters would've become something of a harem if she had jumped on the bandwagon. And that would've been no fun. No fun at all.
"Tsurukooooo! Yukiatsuuuu!"
Yukiatsu bolted upright, putting a good five feet between them. "Menma. What is it?"
He had forgotten their quiet rule, and the beetle scampered off. Tsuruko's gaze trailed its escape with detached attentiveness until it darted into the underbrush. Silently, she packed up her pencils.
Menma came to a stop just short of the slope, peering down at them rapturously. "We're going to visit Jintan's mom. You should show her your beetle journal, Tsuruko!"
The art hobbyist flushed. "E-eh, you knew about that?"
Yukiatsu eyed her skeptically. When had she ever stuttered—or blushed?
Menma laughed, gallivanting down the slope. "Super Peace Busters know everything!"
"Hey—be careful," Yukiatsu shouted, brows crinkled in worry.
Tsuruko rose from her crouch, dusting off her skirt. "Let's go, then."
Yukiatsu scrambled up the slope and turned around, offering Menma his hand. Obliviously, the girl reached for it, laughing and turning around once she gained her footing to do the same for Tsuruko. "It's a chain reaction!"
Tsuruko smiled, climbing onto the dirt trail with a tug from Menma.
It was a theme that would become somewhat of a motif throughout the years.
All good things come to an end.
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Yukiatsu called him Yadomi now, because Jintan was a name that commanded attention and admiration, Menma's in particular. Yadomi, on the other hand, was a mere grouping of letters left behind, by Menma, by society—and Yukiatsu would never let him forget it.
You're not special anymore. You're in the same boat I'm in.
When Yadomi began speaking to Menma in front of them like nothing had changed, his disgust simmered in his gut, rekindling the resentment that branded his childhood.
Cut the shit out, Yadomi. Stop reminding me how much I hate myself.
But he couldn't hate Menma. She was the antithesis of everything that made him who he was. She was the other side of the horizon. Everything too far to reach but close enough to yearn for.
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He had to exorcize his hatred, sometimes, when it got to be too much. He accomplished this with a snide comment here and there, a condescending sneer he littered over lawns of laughter and jollity. Let the others shoulder his burden if only for a while; he was sick of rotting in the sweetness of their happiness, decaying like a cavity that only drilled deeper inwards.
But he could never hurt Tsuruko. He knew this because he had tried. On numerous occasions. Only to be met with a deadpan observation that had him cringing from its veracity. No, he couldn't get to her, because she liked to be above it all, and he played at the bottom where it was dark and dour. Still, she was a benchmark of sorts. If she could go on unaffected by his remarks, he must not be all that bad. There must be some salvageable material in him that no one has appraised closely enough.
You're pathetic and disgusting.
Is what he spat at Yadomi, but took like a sucker punch to the gut.
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When he snapped, kicking the wooden post with vehemence, Tsuruko wanted to freeze the moment in time. She wanted to speak to him softly, ask him to stop hurting himself—but she would do neither of these things, because Yukiatsu was too prideful for softness. She had to be blunt with him. Blunt or silent.
He was a breathtaking mess of unfulfilled desires, at once tender and terrible. She swallowed and thought, Yukiatsu. There was no admonishment in her voice this time, only a limp sadness.
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She always liked him best when they were on the train.
For thirty minutes she entertained the feeling of forever, with time measured only by the number of telephone poles they passed.
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"Loving someone is a miserable business, isn't it?" He sneered, one end of his mouth quirking upwards. The challenge hovered in the air between them, and there was something perverse about the self-destructive glint in his eyes, goading her to rub salt in his wounds because he couldn't bring himself to accept the truth.
She stared straight ahead. "You would know, wouldn't you?"
He snorted and leaned back in the plastic blue chair on the train station platform, exhaling softly.
Tsuruko revealed her smile then, taking him by surprise. Her eyes, however, were cold.
Subzero cold.
"But you're right. It's terribly miserable."
She returned to internalizing mathematical proofs from a small, red pocketbook and he observed idly that it was a new one, that she must've finished with the other, brown, leather-bound book on contemporary politics, which she carried around for the longest time (she usually blew through a pocketbook in two weeks, but spent a month grasping the glories and failures of world leaders).
And he knew, whenever she turned down his offers to meet in the evenings, that she was collecting data for a new pocketbook. She made the study guides herself, assimilating from their textbooks and practice tests and online material. He'd made a habit out of gifting her blank pocketbooks every Christmas. Tsuruko liked simple, elegant designs. She drew with oil pastels in shades of light, pale colors, but donned dark, rich colors herself—forest green and deep turquoise. The burst of red on the frame of her glasses remained the boldest color she dared to wear. It was as if—as if she shied away from wearing pastels because they belonged to the past, to someone else.
So when Yukiatsu gifted her a white notebook with delicate, cerulean flowers over the front and back, she'd frowned.
(She knew she didn't have the right to blame him for being moored to the past because they'd thought of the same person at the sight of the white and blue pattern, hadn't they?)
It had been an accidental frown, a knee-jerk reaction she should've schooled better. Tsuruko eventually learned to refine her frown into a tight line—not a far stretch from its original disapproving gesture, but a step nonetheless. But she had already conditioned the reflex; Yukiatsu committing a gesture for her while thinking of a silver-haired girl made her frown.
Yukiatsu had never bothered to make much of her frowns before, but he caught onto this one.
He gifted her a solid purple notebook the next year, a light lavender.
She'd smiled, then forced her facial muscles to relax, as if steeling herself against the inevitable onslaught of cold water to douse her forbidden happiness.
He only gave her solid-colored pocketbooks after that.
He didn't know why he cared, really, but he felt better when she smiled.
Yukiatsu never liked studying outside of school. Studying at home was the worst—trying to force his mind ahead while his memories tugged at him from behind, swamping his efforts to become someone different—because after all this time, he was still burning and prickling with the heat of humiliation.
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She pulled out her desk drawer, staring at the hairclip.
Staring at her reflection as she snapped it in place with the eerie sensation of inviting another dimension of space into her room. The curtains didn't flutter ominously but perhaps they should've.
Look what you've done to me—no—what I've done to myself.
Tsuruko knew better. She knew better but couldn't extricate herself from the magnetic pull of her memories, of a boy tugging his baseball cap lower to hide the wetness that burned in his eyes when he lost again, of a boy smiling as an autumn leaf landed on her nose, still for a moment before she sneezed. She wanted his presence in her life far too much to divorce herself from the excruciating reality that he could not acknowledge the fact.
Tit for tat, he would've sneered, had he known. My pain for yours.
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Heat flared along the walls of her throat as she opened her mouth and made no sound.
"I was serious about my offer, you know." He leaned in, wiping Anaru's tears away with a thumb.
Voice soft, velveteen.
There was a hot knife twisting in her chest that heaved for breath and trickled red, red, red.
And Tsuruko couldn't explain, for the life of her, why she still harbored so much hope over a boy so manipulative. He had filled the cavernous ranks of her ribcage with a swelling pulse that trembled from its exertion in loving too much, too deeply, too invisibly.
Her fingers clenched at the realization that he used Anaru and used her with the same disregard for who they were. It was only when she witnessed his laughable passes at Anaru that she wondered if what they had was similarly risible. If there was a grain of truth to the disdain her classmates heaped upon her for feigning importance to Yukiatsu, because she clearly wasn't. Not in a way that mattered. She began to doubt all of the progress she made over the years. Everything came down to the question—was she just a convenience to him?And then most troubling of all—isn't that what she'd aimed for from the start? Setting the bar low enough to be satisfied?
Yukiatsu chuckled wryly as Anaru glanced at him through weepy eyes. "We were the ones left behind."
No. You don't get to say that. As if no one else knows the meaning of suffering.
She didn't know how to use his name anymore—her vocal chords couldn't make it past the first syllable just then. She wanted to set fire to his name, watch it go up in smoke.
Tsuruko was decisive by nature. She didn't like dallying. She didn't drag her feet. When it was time to go, she left. When it was time to wake up, she rose. So when she began to doubt herself and the sound of Yukiatsu's name on her tongue, she scrambled to equilibrate, to steady the boat before it flipped over and all that was certain became laughable.
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Yukiatsu had never seen Tsuruko shed a single tear: not when she received three hepatitis shots in a day as a child, nor when she slipped on the bottom step in elementary school and painted a savage gash on her knee, nor when her grandmother blinked out on a hospital bed in the middle of a sentence. Not even when Menma died.
But when his fingers curved demandingly around the juncture of her elbow, she turned barely, just enough for him to glimpse the clench of her jaw and the wet trail that soon spanned her cheek.
Tsuruko's tears, at last.
Later, he would be partly pleased that she was not as strong as she seemed to be. That she had descended from her pillar of calm, skirting the fringe of chaos. After all, misery loved company.
But in that instant, in the instant she turned and something caught the light, outlining the gentle slope of her cheek, he felt the rug being pulled from beneath his feet. Stunned, his fingers loosened, and she ran. The past few years had been a dark blur. A montage of keeping up. In her tears there was a moment of clarity, but as per usual when it came to Tsuruko, he couldn't decipher it.
He had trouble faking an insouciant smile when some girls across the hallway giggled and waved.
Something had shifted. Yukiatsu didn't know if he liked it. He counted on her aloofness; she was one of the only constants in his life. He had taken her to the outermost reaches of his personality, to the repulsive pettiness, desperation, and obsession. He had shown her his worst and she had stuck around.
On some days, he wondered if she had an ulterior motive. If she was waiting to see how low he could go before delivering a finishing remark about how pathetic he had become. But he figured she probably had no one else in her life to spend any time on. She had always kept to herself, and even now their classmates rarely approached her except for student council activities.
Wasn't she using him, then, as much as he was using her?
She needed him so she wouldn't be completely alone. He needed her so he wouldn't have to face himself on his own, rotten personality and all. What they shared could never pass for a healthy friendship, but it had kept him sane. Kept him going.
On other days he felt her presence in his life as a fundamental law of nature. Something you don't question, partly because it's obvious, and partly because it's sacred. When clouds grew heavy, it rained. When he woke up and became conscious of his own breathing, he would get dressed, shovel a meager breakfast of instant coffee and raspberry jam on bread into his mouth (or walk to the convenience store for a red bean-paste bun), then head on to the train station and take the 7:45 with Tsuruko.
Fact.
It was that simple.
He waited for her at the train station the next morning, but she didn't show up. By the time he arrived at the classroom, she was already in her seat, intently studying for their multivariable calculus midterm the following week. There was a conspicuous lack of chatter within a three foot radius of her desk. There was a certain edge to Tsuruko's calm page-turning wrist-flicks, a certain ruthlessness in her perusal of the textbook that unnerved even the most carefree of students, spurring them to cram for the test they had previously intended to blow off.
"What's she trying to prove?" Someone snickered to his right. "She's only fourth in class anyway. You'd think all that studying would improve her standing."
"You've got it wrong," another girl chimed in righteously. "It's because of all that studying that she's fourth."
A boy laughed. "So you're saying she's so stupid she needs to work her ass off just for fourth?"
"No! I didn't mean—"
He silenced the trio with a pointed stare.
Yukiatsu seated himself two desks diagonally from her, resignedly flipping through his notes.
When he looked up, he caught the sunlight shining through the pressed white of her blouse, illuminating her slender arms. His eyes traced the curve of her cheek as he wondered why they were friends.
Or used to be.
Tsuruko had the potential to be well-liked by her classmates; she was truthful, insightful and not at all unpleasant to look at—but seen in his presence, she was only disliked. The students were more taken with her flaws than her features. And that was fine by him. Let her have her cross to bear.
They could suffer together.
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Everything he did for Menma, he did out of consideration for her. Everything he did for Tsuruko, he did to alleviate his own misery, to polish his pride. It was this insurmountable abyss between his calculated kindness and impulsive affection that she knew he would never cross for her.
No one ever expected much from him, aside from his parents and teachers. He was an only child, and had his father's shoes to fill. The principal was always overbearingly kind to him, since he boosted their test averages. The admissions department had to deal with an increasing amount of applications as matriculation became more coveted.
But Jintan would always be number one among the Super Peace Busters.
Tsuruko, however, seemed to expect the worst from him.
He usually met her expectations.
There was only one way to truly understand Yukiatsu: by building walls around your heart.
Only then could one realize the loneliness of longing.
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"Look, I know you like your answers in black and white, but I'm not like that. You're not like that. In fact, no one's like that." Yadomi rubbed his neck uncomfortably. The fact that he was indirectly defending Yukiatsu when he had no reason to spoke volumes of his character. Tsuruko smiled faintly. He relaxed at the sight. At the end of the day, he could count on her to see reason.
"You're too kind for your own good," she remarked offhandedly.
Yukiatsu arrived late. He peered into the base and when he saw only Tsuruko and Yadomi and a small smile on her lips, his eyes narrowed. "Where's Poppo?"
Yadomi overcompensated for the tense interruption by speaking louder than necessary in the cramped space. "Ah, he's, uh out in the woods, gathering some plants."
Tsuruko's smile wilted into a frown that matched Yukiatsu's. Distractedly, he wondered why he always made her frown. She felt Yukiatsu tense from ten feet away, felt his posture change and knew an insult was forthcoming—most likely about how the entire dinner-for-Menma was a waste of his time and did Jintan really think he could change the past by playing house with the dead?
"Yukiatsu."
He flinched, hating the pathetic sense of betrayal churning in his gut. "What?"
"Poppo should be back by now. Let's go look for him."
Though exceedingly dense with matters of the heart, Jintan caught on quickly. "Good idea." He stood, busying himself with setting the table. "I'll get things ready here. Text me once you find him."
Wordlessly, Yukiatsu turned and cut forward, letting the tent flap fall back into Tsuruko's face.
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Tsuruko blinked, eyes adjusting to the green glow her alarm clock cast on her walls.
12:46 AM.
She curled up on her right side and fisted the pillow, gritting her teeth. Two rooms over, her mother slept alone in a king-sized bed. Her father was in his study on the ground floor, staving off any form of proximity with his wife. He harbored a parasitic resentment towards her for feeding his inner cynic by giving him too much fodder to work with. He always had to point out her oversights, always had to rain on her parade because she looked silly, couldn't she see that? If she spun around and snapped at him, they might have resolved their differences. As it was, she bore his censure by becoming skittishly inclined to please, which only worsened her actions as they strayed from her original intentions. He had not fallen in love with her for her meekness. Most of his female classmates had hinged on love to fulfill their lives. Not Amaya. She had been self-assured and even a touch arrogant in her independence.
But now.
She slept alone and clutched the spare pillow to her chest because it gave her something to hold onto.
They had been divorced for seven years, but remained under the same roof to secure as much as they could for Tsuruko's post-secondary education.
Tsuruko had never been particularly close with her mother, given her reticent nature and Amaya's forceful exuberance. But in that instant she felt closer to her mother than ever before.
She understood perfectly the sense of self-abandonment that oft accompanied the one-way act of love.
We can never go back to the way it was. We can't go back. But we can't let go either.
She was reminded of a Great Gatsby quote concerning boats and currents and pasts and growled in exasperation.
Sleep, take me now.
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In a way, Tsuruko supposed, she was lucky Menma was the only girl to have ever snared Yukiatsu's undivided attention. Tsuruko did not even have to lift a finger in competition—because there was no competition. She was easily tired of the ruses Yukiatsu had pulled in striving to undermine Jintan; she had no desire to partake in anything of the sort if that was what it meant to love someone.
It had driven Anaru and Yukiatsu to deceit and desperation.
Tsuruko missed the peaceful afternoons spent coloring beside Menma, who would invariably launch into song or hum a nonsensical tune while scribbling something similarly incomprehensible.
Her emotions had plateaued at "decently content" when Menma was still alive. Now they oscillated between flinch-inspiring, ironic pain and unnerving, simple-minded bliss.
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Her phone was warm when he hung up.
She held it for a moment longer, then resolutely set it on her nightstand.
Two hours and a throbbing headache later, she sharpened four pencils and placed them in a red pencil pouch, drawing it closed slowly, filling the space of her room with the sound of a dragging zipper. One of Tsuruko's favorite moments was the instant her pencil left the paper after completing the final question. The instant she could claim the thought, I did it. It's done.
The scores were always posted after class so they wouldn't prevent the students from internalizing new material. It was a bother for Tsuruko to hear her score from someone else, so she always began packing up five minutes before the bell, making her way to the bulletin board swiftly.
The sight of the rankings on the cork board was familiar, but hardly friendly.
100 Matsuyuki Atsumu
98 Tsurumi Chiriko
Pivoting sharply, she strode down the hall, narrowly avoiding a collision with the rumble of oncoming students scrambling for an affirmation of their intelligence (or something close to it).
Yukiatsu was waiting for her at the gate, looking bored. She forced herself to tune out the whispers and as she approached him. He never mentioned his academic standing with her. He'd tease her for studying all the time, but that was it. She had never been particularly concerned with besting him before—only keeping pace. But being only two points away from equalizing their scores made her anxious. It tempted her to anticipate some sort of reaction from him, when she knew there would be none.
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Anaru laughed and tossed the desultory insult back in her face. "At least I have a life."
"But are you making the most of it?" Tsuruko groused, annoyed.
"More than you are, at least." She sighed, rising from the booth. "Do something outside of your comfort zone, Tsuruko. Put yourself out there. Cry a little more."
The A-student glanced to her childhood friend, exasperated at how artlessly the girl wore her heart on her sleeve. "Cry...?" It hasn't done you any good, Anaru.
Anaru nodded matter-of-factly. "Let yourself be vulnerable for once."
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.
At first she had tried to ignore it.
Puzzling over Anaru's words only meant they had gotten to her. That somewhere, there was a chink in her armor, and somehow, incriminating words had snuck in, framing her as a frigid, distanced coward, afraid of being cast aside, afraid of suffering indignity. Tsuruko ruminated in defeated silence as the classroom buzzed with the fevered queries of students cramming for an exam.
"What's the mechanism for hydroboration again? Which one's the nucleophile?"
"Hell if I know."
"Obviously hydride acts as the nucleophile… right, Matsuyuki-san?"
Yukiatsu smiled hollowly. "Yeah."
It was simple for Anaru to advise Tsuruko to expose herself more. In effect, she had said, "change yourself," the stock answer for all troubled hearts. But that wasn't the issue here. Tsuruko was content with the way she was. Sure, she was somewhat of a prude—solitary, bookish and unable to hold a conversation with most of her classmates for long without politely excusing herself—but that wasn't a fault. It made her who she was.
But sometimes.
Sometimes she was tempted to think it was all her fault. That she was lacking in some indeterminable way, a puzzle piece made for a nonexistent picture, sticking out like a sore thumb. She didn't believe in soulmates any more than she believed Yukiatsu would discard the white dress in his closet.
He'd stopped, smiled bitterly, and even murmured a heavy "thank you."
But he'd never throw it out. Tsuruko kept her thoughts to herself; Yukiatsu kept his memories of Menma alive. They tended to their burdens as one watered a potted plant—with duty.
Her parents had never quarreled with such acrimony before her birth. They had never made each other miserable before she came into existence. Her neighbors had never ceased to walk their dog until he bit Tsuruko. She later heard from her mother that they had sold the creature to another family.
It was hard not to see everything as evidence, sometimes.
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Tsuruko hesitated in front of the cafe's heavy oak door.
I have two essays due tomorrow. But they're done. I could start reading next week's material. But I already skimmed it on the train. I could...
The last time she was here, she had ended up insulting Anaru for the blissful ignorance she could never possess. It was odd that her steps had retraced to this very spot now, as she sought to clear her mind of all that cluttered it. She fidgeted with the strap of her black school bag before letting out a long exhale.
"What can I get for you, miss?"
"I'll have a cup of black tea."
"That'll be 200 yen."
She nestled herself into the corner of the raised countertop lining three walls of the establishment, shifting on her elbows as she blew lightly on her tea.
"I'm sorry miss, we're all out of green tea."
"Ah… then, black tea will do."
Tsuruko watched with distanced interest as a smartly dressed woman in a black blazer and knee-length skirt settled to her right, tea in hand. There were two mahogany stools between them, but in the sparsely populated café, it seemed that the woman was right beside her. She found herself studying the woman discreetly, taking in her impeccable composure and appearance. Her brows pinched together suddenly, her mouth drawing downwards in an agitated twitch.
Glancing back to her cup of tea, Tsuruko wondered what a troubled expression like the one she had just witnessed was doing on a woman who epitomized the image of put-togetherness. A sigh unwittingly escaped her lips, and she sipped at the warm beverage in the manner of a child slurping her mother's homemade soup after a long day at school.
"Rough day at school?"
Blinking rapidly, Tsuruko turned towards the woman again. "Pardon?"
Chuckling softly, the black-haired woman commented, "You were sighing with a fatigue better suited for someone my age."
"You don't look very old," she replied, noting the appreciative twinkle in the woman's eyes.
"Thank you for the obligatory reassurance. Really, though." She took a sip of her tea, then shook her head in amazement, uttering tangentially, "Black tea has this way of replenishing my fighting spirit. It's bitter and comforting in the perfect balance."
Tsuruko found herself agreeing, smiling wryly, "It's my comfort drink."
"Green tea would be mine. What are you in need of comfort for?"
Alarmed at the personal question, Tsuruko paused for a moment before choosing her words carefully: "I just need to reassess how I'm spending my emotional energy, I suppose."
The woman laughed. "What a professional characterization of love troubles."
"Love troubles?" Tsuruko repeated, incredulous. "It's nothing like that." It was, in fact, something like that, but hearing it vocalized in such a prosaic form made her deeply displeased with herself.
"To be seventeen again," the woman murmured wistfully.
"Do you usually come here after work?" Tsuruko ventured, shying away from the spotlight.
"I would if I could. By the time I get home on a typical day, the café is closed."
"It sounds like you work very hard."
"I've been diagnosed as a workaholic. But it's my choice, and I wouldn't have it any other way."
"What's it like," the high-school junior inquired, "to have so much control over your life?"
"What's it like?" She mused aloud. "It's liberating. And threatening. I feel like I have too much to lose to risk anything big, but all I ever wanted was to dream big. Funny how that works. It's like my world outside keeps getting bigger while my world inside keeps shrinking within the confines of my chest. Allow me to impart a piece of advice. People can be cruel," she continued in an undertone. "They want warmth and they'll skin you alive if you look the least bit cozy. So you learn to look after yourself. But be careful; after a while, looking after yourself can become an excuse to run away."
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Yukiatsu halted before the café entrance, checking his phone one last time before pulling the door open.
No texts from Anaru.
He glanced at his digital watch. She's late.
After settling into a corner booth with a cup of coffee, he scanned his phone again. Anaru had sent him a message through LINE a minute ago, apologizing. She had other plans and couldn't make it.
He pocketed his phone, swallowing a scalding sip of coffee to redirect the irritation.
As he coughed into his arm, he noticed the Nagoya preparatory school insignia on the blue vest of a girl sitting on a stool two booths in front of him. He froze as she turned to chuckle at something the woman to her right said, giving him a view of her profile.
Tsuruko.
He ducked lower in his seat while straining to catch wind of their conversation.
"You're too young to be cynical. You've got to be at least thirty to earn that privilege."
"But it just seems impossible," Tsuruko refuted calmly, "if you think about all the potential obstacles."
"You have to believe in love, kid. Otherwise you'll end up like me."
Yukiatsu choked on his coffee. They were having a conversation on love? Tsuruko was willing talking about her feelings in public? Granted, she hadn't said anything revealing, only agreeing with or arguing against the older woman's statements. But Tsuruko had never even relinquished her stoic mask long enough to broach the topic with him. Not that he'd have anything enlightening to offer on the topic, he admitted. As his eyes flickered to the window, he spotted a familiar face crossing the street.
Kono Amaya walked briskly past the café, then backtracked, whipping around to confirm that yes, her daughter was laughing freely and smiling while conversing with a businesswoman who looked to be around her own age.
Swiveling around before she could make her presence known, she continued on her way, her light cotton skirt flapping in the breeze.
Yukiatsu let out a breath of relief, noting that Tsuruko's mother had appeared hurt upon spotting her daughter comfortably chatting with a stranger. He figured she had never witnessed this side of Tsuruko either. Staring at the blank screen of his phone for a moment, his eyes narrowed. Lurching into an upright sitting position, he entered his password and emptied his inbox and LINE threads.
He wasn't so hopeless as to believe that it would all get better with time.
He needed to make that first step.
Just one step to start again.
But in what direction?
The boy he had become was a grotesque consequence of the boy he couldn't live up to. Of the girl he couldn't grow up with. It's because she's gone, he thought, with a stab of wronged anger, that I'm this way.
It's a lie. He knew. Since he first laid eyes on Menma, he knew his own meanness. She made him taste his own bitterness by forcing him to suck the slander through his teeth as his cheeks ballooned with the effort to tame his tongue. All the inky hated he couldn't expel he swallowed, staining his blood.
Tsuruko suddenly laughed at something the woman said, shoulders shaking slightly.
He was assailed with the abrupt, absurd desire to know what her hands felt like—if her fingers had callouses from gripping mechanical pencils for long hours, or if they were soft and vulnerable, the hands of a girl on the cusp of womanhood.
She shifted and her hair spilled forward past her shoulders, parting smoothly at the nape of her neck. He swallowed thickly, looking away.
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"Hey."
Tsuruko's eyes widened marginally as she slipped on her indoor shoes.
Yukiatsu leaned against the lockers, staring up at the ceiling. "I have a request."
She knelt down to pull her socks up. His gaze flickered down for a moment before darting elsewhere.
"My grandmother's birthday is coming up. She's been sick lately so I figured I should do something."
The Friday afternoon sunlight was as absolutory as it filtered through the dusty windows, bathing the wooden floorboards in golden melancholy. Tsuruko could never quite capture that quality of light in her paintings. She'd strained for it, but only achieved an artificial sunniness or pale butter-yellow.
"I want to make her something. A cake, maybe."
Tsuruko tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
He brought his gaze down to her jawline. "So I'd like your help."
She turned and met his eyes steadily with a small smile. "Sure."
Yukiatsu wondered critically and slightly peevishly why her every motion seemed so effortless.
Tsuruko turned away and exhaled softly, eyes closed.
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Yukiatsu bowed slightly as he greeted Tsuruko and her mother at the doorstep on a Saturday afternoon. "Thank you for letting me borrow your kitchen today."
Amaya grimaced in the likeness of a smile. "No need to be so proper, Matsuyuki. You're welcome anytime. I'll be upstairs should you two need anything." As she made her way to the foot of the stairs, Yukiatsu blurted, "Kono-san, the recipe for the cake I have in mind is rather... involved, so if you have time, it'd be great if you could lend us a hand."
Tsuruko quirked a brow as she led Yukiatsu to the kitchen.
Similarly nonplussed, Amaya shuffled forward uncertainly. "I could lend a hand, but..." She glanced to her daughter, but Tsuruko only shrugged. Sighing, she smiled, "Alright. What kind of cake will we be baking today?"
"Mont Blanc."
Amaya gasped in delight. "Your grandmother has good taste." Emerging from the pantry to the left of the refrigerator, she tied on an apron and threw a smaller one to Tsuruko, who caught the bundle and blinked bashfully, as though entrusted with a small animal to be handled with care.
Observing the two dark-haired females in matching petal pink aprons, Yukiatsu stifled a snicker. Tsuruko threw him a baleful glance as she scooped several cups of flour into a large mixing bowl. As she turned swiftly to retrieve the sugar, she collided with her mother, sprinkling white crystals over the hardwood floor.
Tsuruko mumbled an apology and snuck another glare at Yukiatsu, who, sure enough, was smothering a chuckle with a cough into his fist. As she leaned in to vigorously cream the butter, Yukiatsu squinted at the oven for a few seconds before preheating it to 275 degrees Fahrenheit.
As the oven beeped, Tsuruko pulled it open, cringing as a wave of heat hit her in the face.
Her mother set the baking pan on the top shelf, turning around with a thumbs-up sign. Tsuruko smiled faintly and turned to Yukiatsu with a glowing look of accomplishment.
He was washing the mixing bowls and butter-coated spoons in the sink, the sink Tsuruko had stood before the previous evening, worrying about the present day and what it meant—about the future and what it held.
But how could he know? To him, it was just a sink. And looking out from the window, there was just a sidewalk and a crooked fence. He didn't know she had tried to climb over the fence once and fell onto the unforgiving concrete because the salivating dog from next door had chased her out of her own lawn.
He turned the faucet to the left then nudged it back to the right when he noticed the abrupt warmth of the water, and Tsuruko tamped down on the absurd wave of disappointment that rose and fell within a second. Jintan would've reacted belatedly with a yelp at the first sign of steam, jerking the faucet all the way to the right and sighing as the icy water nursed his mild burn.
Subconsciously she had been hoping Yukiatsu would burn himself and thereafter remember the sink and the day he washed flour off of his hands and forearms in her kitchen.
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.
"I'm not like you," he said casually, as if commenting on the weather. "I'm no good at hiding."
"What would I have to hide?" She humored him, eyes amused yet guarded.
"See? You're doing it even now. It's like your second nature."
"If it won the Darwinian race, it's legitimate, right?" She turned a page in her emerald-green biology pocketbook.
He chuckled, and she was struck with the realization that she had given up on being noticed for being nearby—that she had dug herself a hole for hiding and didn't know how to climb back out.
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.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to look at him.
The rounded innocence of his cheeks had long since given way to a defined jawline and cheekbones. She had always kept a certain distance between them, but the distance had never seemed more impossible to close than it did now. He mimed her preferences, always seating himself several feet away after she had done the same that first time on the train when an entire row of seats had been free and she'd settled in four down from his. She didn't know if he'd simply adopted her habit, or just wasn't comfortable being near her.
Even so, he always waited for her by the school gate after class.
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.
"I bought the sparklers at the convenience store last night," she mentioned conversationally.
"I'll swing by later to pick up some drinks," he replied as they exited the classroom for lunch break.
The Super Peace Busters had decided to celebrate the day of Menma's wish fulfillment every year at their base. Poppo tidied the place up for the occasion, and Anaru would even bring a small vacuum, complaining that the boys were tasteless enough to celebrate in a pigsty.
It would be their first reunion since Menma's final disappearance.
Tsuruko would be lying if she said she wasn't apprehensive, but she was also looking forward to making new memories with her old friends. She wanted to hear how Jintan and Anaru were doing, wanted to hear how Poppo was getting by, if he was looking after himself properly.
It occurred to her then that she seldom wondered about Yukiatsu's life.
No. That wasn't quite right.
She'd never allowed herself to wonder.
Wondering became wanting.
Tsuruko had anchored herself at the shore of acceptance for too long to consider breaking the chain and wading into deeper, more daring waters. She would lose her place all over again, flitting between storylines spun from old literature in search of a window through which she could see a path to follow.
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.
Yukiatsu was the kind of person who understood, instinctually, bitterly and cynically, just why the status quo kept its head afloat in the raging river of change, life cycles, economic cycles and climatic cycles.
Because all change occurred in cycles.
Even change was the status quo, wasn't it?
He thought on that for a moment, then sighed.
Logic dwindled to guesswork in the scheme of things.
He had an inkling Tsuruko wasn't telling him something important despite being fully cognizant of its importance—that precisely because of its importance she reeled it in behind sealed lips. He knew that she didn't like losing her footing—that she loathed being caught speechless, that she would sooner die than admit to tearing up during that one scene in the old, foreign romance film Anaru raved about whenever they met up. Tsuruko always sighed when Anaru referenced it, commenting that the film was "too self-fulfilling to be taken seriously" and that she envied Anaru's "naiveté."
He knew he would never push her to reveal the deluge of thoughts she kept behind a mental dam. He knew it because he didn't like wandering into unknown territory without adequate preparation—because he hated being vulnerable, and he had a feeling whatever she couldn't say would leave them both pretty damn vulnerable. He liked where they stood—on an ambiguous plane no one else could reach. He knew he would never even consider getting close to any of the girls who stared at him in the halls. No—he enjoyed their one-sided anguish far too much for that. Let them know the ache of overreaching yourself and still not reaching far enough.
Yukiatsu was prepared for routine.
He had been surprised at his reaction to Tsuruko's pale, exposed neck, but wrote it off as a hormonal response. Yadomi had gotten back on his feet after Menma's final push. Poppo had cleaned the secret base up, even touched up on its paint job. Anaru had grown a backbone and stood up for whatever she felt like in front of her friends.
All these were to be expected. They were inevitable progressions. Menma always had a knack for making them painfully aware of how to improve themselves.
And his reaction to Tsuruko—that too was inevitable, if in a different sense. If he wanted to, he could blame science. It was vastly preferable to the alternative, which he didn't even dare to think.
She was bookish and boring and biting.
Why on earth would he—
Yukiatsu could not be honest without feeling disgusted with himself.
Would this always be the price of sincerity?
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.
He couldn't justify himself, so he avoided her.
He would seize up at the sight of her red umbrella (bright red like her glasses) and turn the other way. Everything made him inexplicably frustrated. He snapped at classmates and brusquely brushed off the feminine advances of girls in the library, knowing it would do nothing for his reputation.
Everything that he had polished to the point of pristine—everything—just seemed futile now.
False.
Fraudulent.
He gained spiteful satisfaction from the fact that despite his mental turbulence, he was still ranked first after every test. He avoided eye-contact whenever Tsuruko approached, and told himself he didn't absolutely hate the silent train ride to and back from school every day.
He always noticed too much—how the businessman reading the paper also leaned over to read the fervent texts a pigtailed schoolgirl (with eyelashes as thick as Anaru's on a bad day—which was, to be frank, too thick) was sending while brushing up intentionally against her thighs, how the old woman across from his seat seemed to fold into her wrinkles and coughed so vehemently he feared the tissue she held to her mouth would come away red, how the little boy nagging his mother for a story to pass the time stilled in obedience when she hissed in an undertone that she would revoke his television privileges if another word escaped from his mouth.
His observations distanced him from even himself, and he didn't know where to begin looking again.
Who was he, if he wasn't stewing in bitter contempt? It was a disturbing thought.
It almost tempted him to seek out Tsuruko and ask her, point-blank, who she thought he was.
But he feared she would only list off the traits that made him despicable.
That had been all he had shown her, hadn't it? How could she know that his favorite childhood pastime was building model aircraft, and that he never participated in a model competition again after watching his prized biplane crash into a tree and tumble to the ground in chunks of balsa wood?
It had taken everything he had to give Menma that hairpin.
He'd known full well the cost of losing: the stifling silence in the car on the way home from the competition and how his father didn't have to say anything for him to hear it—that he should have used sturdier glue, that he should have given his plane more time to dry instead of endeavoring to sketch a sophisticated blueprint that would outshine those of his competitors, that he should have agreed to meet with the club's model overseer to go over the components of his draft instead of sneering that he could use the library's resources.
And it had just been another failure. Menma ran after Jintan. And so it went.
When he arrived at home, he fast-walked to his room and rifled through the boxes in his closet, choosing firmly to ignore the box in the rightmost corner where a white dress was folded carefully. At last, he brandished a long box that held all the projects he had never gotten to—all of the planes he had never believed in himself enough to build.
When his father knocked on his door for dinner, he answered that he wasn't hungry.
He awoke in the middle of the night to a gurgling stomach and a half-completed Nakajima Ki-43-I lying on the floor, encircled by plastic parts he had yet to piece together. He needed to buy more glue, get a new X-acto knife and replenish his stock of pins and toothpicks for applying small details.
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.
Having finished the plastic model, Yukiatsu contemplated waiting for the 7:45 train again. He had been taking the 7:00 train and spending most of his morning before first period in the library. He allowed himself to move once his watch read 7:30, slipping out the door.
Tsuruko boarded the 7:45 without a glance in his direction.
She'd probably gotten used to his absence. He had avoided her for a good two months. The girls in the halls had gone rabid with glee at the turn of events. He hadn't even waited for her at the school gate. He knew she must have had it tough, with the rumors getting out of hand.
He was curious to see what Tsuruko would look like in a state of weakness.
He vanquished the thought as soon as it burgeoned, gritting his teeth. How dare he. How dare he think of Tsuruko as if she—as if she was Yadomi, as if he had something to gain by her loss. He was still as nasty as ever, model plane passion or no.
Damn it all to hell. If he was cursed, he'd rather be cursed along with her to keep the madness at bay.
Too anxious to heed the whispers as he strode down the hall, he cornered the class representative outside the staff offices and muttered, throat dry, "Can you meet me by the school gate after class?"
A request.
He was putting through a request, as if he still expected her to comply.
Tsuruko could have responded in a dozen different ways but she chose to push him out of her space and step past him, pausing only to reply in a clipped tone, "Fine."
He knew she was wearing that taut not-quite-a-frown as her steps echoed down the stairs.
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Tsuruko had no fantasies worth constructing. She grasped where she stood in life. That was enough.
She waited by the school gates as the students drifted past, several stopping to spare her a pitying (or satisfied) glance.
What right did they have?
What right did he have?
Why was she still standing there?
The solitude his absence left behind gave her a chance to think in peace. She always looked forward to the morning train ride, staring out the window at the flushed sky. Her mother had recently begun reaching out to her more, inviting Tsuruko to join her on her evening strolls. On exactly the fifth stroll, her mother had informed her that she would be moving out once Tsuruko went off to university, since there would be nothing to keep her around anymore. Tsuruko had been furious with herself for believing her mother had come to terms with herself and was now comfortable with their life. She had only been trying to find ways to soften the blow.
But Tsuruko couldn't blame her.
Not with the way her father arrived home much later than usual, nearing midnight, with pronounced circles beneath his eyes.
These things just happen, her mother had said, without contrition, without shame. Things fall apart.
She had resented morning train rides, after that. Things fall apart? Don't you mean "people"? Or perhaps, "you"?
Everywhere she looked she saw things that made her cold.
Her breath fogging the window was warm but her palm pressed to it was not.
The same girls who wasted their breaths heaping insults upon her shoulders huddled together after class, poring over study materials and fretting over their upcoming entrance exams, about their future careers and whether they would be able to make a living doing what brought them happiness. They were partly decent at those times, Tsuruko would admit. But decency was a second cousin to vice; virtue was a ghost that only appeared from time to time to urge them onwards—and again Tsuruko was reminded of the Great Gatsby quote about boats and currents and pasts.
A group of boys snickered as they passed, and Tsuruko wasn't self-centered enough to suspect they were laughing at her—but that didn't matter.
She'd felt a white hot twinge of humiliation all the same.
At last Yukiatsu came out of the building, nose buried in a book.
That was odd.
On any other day, she would've calmly inquired for the title, but as it was she could barely glance at him without wanting to get away, because she would not become her mother; despite all the respect and concern Tsuruko harbored for her, she would never concede to demurring in the face of uncertainty, only to sigh at the end that things fall apart. She clutched the handle of her schoolbag tightly and watched him realize she was still standing there, watched the surprise flit across his features.
As if he'd forgotten altogether.
Tsuruko turned on her heel, finally regaining her senses. Figures; she only felt in control when she was chastising herself. She was incapable of encouraging her spirits to rise, knowing they could just as wantonly, just as foolishly plummet.
But damn him for wringing out those tears, damn her for shedding them like clouds shed rain, slowly then suddenly, natural as can be—except not; it had felt like waking up in the wrong body, like watching time tick counterclockwise. She'd been completely disoriented, as if somebody was shining an LED beam into her eyes until they strained bloodshot and watered involuntarily, without her consent or discretion.
"Wait," he hissed, catching her by the arm, and she was reminded of that moment a year earlier.
"You're hurting me," she repeated quietly, twisting her arm slowly as though any sudden movement would unleash unbidden quantities of pain. She closed her eyes to close her mind to the words I've been waiting for far too long.
"I'm not," he insisted, voice strained. He did not want to pantomime what happened last time. He was through with reenactments. He was tired of the burden of giving chase.
"Tsuruko."
"You're cruel," she told him matter-of-factly, still with her back to him.
"And the sky is blue," he bit out impatiently, knowing the wrong words were hovering in the roof of his mouth and willing them to stay put. "You've always known that. Why should it matter now?"
"Why should I matter now?" she snapped venomously. "Why does it suddenly matter, what I think? It's never mattered before."
He didn't have the best track record when it came to being honest. But he'd been honest before, and hot on its heels was always mortification. Honesty was a virtue, he'd been told. Others were rewarded for their honesty. But he was only shamed. Because honestly, he was petty, selfish, and envious; virtue was too painful to reach for when sin was quick to soothe. Virtue only stung, inflaming his wounds. Truth would spear him without blinking. Deceit would lower him into his grave softly, gently, and pause to shut his startled, lifeless eyes.
Yukiatsu was silent for precisely seven seconds.
"We—I think we—we help each other out," he spoke gruffly, head lowered. "I trust you. You should trust me, too."
"Is that all?" she murmured, reclaiming her arm with a terse tug. "I'm busy today, so I'll be leaving now."
She moved; he followed.
"Stay away from me," she growled between clenched teeth, trembling beneath the weight of eleven years of secrets. I've been looking at you since I was five. I have loved you for over half of my time on this planet. I know that you built your first airplane kimiki puzzle at age six—I know you were afraid to show it to the Super Peace Busters for fear that Jintan would be spurred to build a better one. I know because you showed me, and huffed in annoyance when I took it apart and put it back together—I wanted to have something in common with you. I know you were late for the first day of second grade because you couldn't find the matching sock and wouldn't even think about appearing in public unprepared. I know that your favorite time is dawn, because that's when the world holds its breath with you.
He'd spend the rest of his life distracting himself from what was essential if she wasn't around to point out what wasn't. He needed her. He needed her badly, and he knew it.
He didn't need her as one needs a crutch to stand when they've fractured a bone in their foot. He needed her as blood needs to clot to heal, as a boy peering down on society with a wrinkled soul that spat on everything he couldn't have despite chasing desperately for it in his dreams.
Because he felt at peace with her.
Like he could stop trying to carve himself a space to exist in, because she gave him plenty of room to breathe and stretch his legs.
"Stop," he snapped, and she paused mid-step as he caught her wrist again. "Stop pretending none of this affects you."
Without turning, she laughed, short and sharp. It was unbelievably difficult to stay the current of indignation surging through her at their unexpected exchange of power. He afflicted her with the disease of chronic heartache, and now that she had given him a trifling headache in return, he was complaining?
"I'm perfectly fine. Unlike you, I can look after myself."
He smirked, ducking his head. "You can get pretty harsh whenever I hit bull's-eye, you know that?"
The turnabout struck her off balance, but she quelled the tremors in her knees with grim resolve. You're right, Yukiatsu. I'm always nastier when it comes to you. She turned to face him, chin quivering imperceptibly as she forced out breathily, "Give me one good reason why I should trust you."
Yukiatsu grit his teeth, looking away.
The school courtyard was deserted but for stray, windswept leaves and it was only due to this circumstance that his pulse was placated.
"I... I can't lie to you. You're the only one I can't... fool."
Self-disgust threatened to overtake him and his grip on her tightened as if he was readying himself for the piercing sting of a flu shot.
A moment later, his hand slid down to her knuckles.
There was something about his inflection of you're the only one that made her afraid to breathe, so she held it in until she could no longer.
She felt his grip loosen and thought maybe he had given up again.
Tsuruko unfroze.
She wanted to curse herself for the traitorous thrum in her veins, the accelerando she didn't write into her life but abided by all the same, because he put it there; he wrote the tempo and she kept time. It had been that way for years, since they were children. He always found her when he was the seeker, despite the fact that she was quite good at keeping still and not making a sound and crawling into her own mind, hiding, always hiding—he found her with a nonchalance that convinced her of her paltry value.
But he always found her.
She would do the same, if he was waiting to be found.
"...I can't help the fact that you're so obvious it's painful to watch." She shifted her weight from her left leg to her right, smiling with the weary concession of someone extending an olive branch.
The tight fist of anxiety in his gut uncoiled so abruptly he let out a staggered, inelegant breath.
They discussed the preparations for the upcoming cultural festival as Yukiatsu slowed his gait to an andante, for once, in time with Tsuruko's steady strides at his side.
.
.
.
The cultural festival began without a hitch.
Tsuruko was sporting a minor case of carpel tunnel from cranking out fourteen two by seven foot banners in three days, but all was well. Her penmanship hadn't suffered from the chaos upstairs. She stretched and yawned discreetly in the shade of a Sakura tree, leaves green in declaration of summer. Casually glancing over to the runners positioning themselves at the starting line, her gaze rested on Yukiatsu at the leftmost lane. As if sensing her attention, he turned, grinning from across the racetrack, eyes glistening, unabashed. Tsuruko's breath caught.
Watch me, his eyes flashed.
Idiot, she thought, hiding a smile behind a pocketbook. I already was.
.
.
.
It was the first time in years that she wasn't marking off days on her calendar. She had utterly no clue nor care as to what day of the week it was tomorrow. It frightened her but it had already begun budding in her chest before she could deny its bloom. It was like a creature that reached desperately for the sky despite its narrow footing along a bluff, itching for the wind of flight in spite of a visceral instinct to curl up and lie very, very still.
He wanted beyond his reach while she reached only for her needs.
They met somewhere in the middle.
She let him reach her, let herself want him to.
.