Parade.
Rukia's neck itched under the heat of her scarf, and she felt little streams of sweat slide down the groves of her neck into the dip of her button up shirt.
Her shirt was under a heavy jacket and sweater. All children must return home, as must all sweat.
She felt little raw stripes on her neck whenever she adjusted the wool of her scarf, the kind she got whenever she wore jeans too tight.
Her neck was drenched, courtesy the sweat that ran down her cheeks, and patched red from the heat. She was probably having some kind of episode in the minds of the other customers at the college bookstore she was at. She had to scratch her neck though; the itch was just too much.
She remembered being a kid, attending her first wedding with her brother. She baked in the sun that day, and her neck turned pink and then red in the same way it was doing now. She wasn't stuffy that day, she was being cooked alive. She hadn't scratched then, though.
She was much happier that day.
Standing under the wind jets of the ceiling fan above, she thought about what kind of gift one usually gets for a third date. Does the third date require a gift?
Probably not.
But this was a brew of several events Rukia was trying to digest. It was her third date with a particularly tall boy who had an awkward sense of style, as well as his last day of school before a week long break, which was beginning today with a trip to the beach. She also owed the boy quite a bit for all those cups of coffee he'd bought her on their first date.
She didn't owe him much monetarily, but the warmth of those cups on that blizzard of a day was still making her sweat weeks later.
She pushed the front strand of her hair up, and into the eye of the burning storm atop her head: her beanie.
She felt a little drop of sweat slide down her forehead and onto her eyebrow. That felt nice, like the remains of a spray bottle. She still wanted to take the beanie off, though.
Perhaps she could buy him a nice beanie? The bookstore had some supplies for the everyday day of college students.
She found that there were none. The isles were stocked with floppy sun hats and sun screen for beach season. The picture of the bottle was a green arrow pointed to the back of a pink neck.
She opened the bottle and put some on her neck, feeling an ice cube-like cream spread across her skin under the back of her scarf. It smelled like chlorine. She put the cream in the basket she'd picked up when she walked in.
She gave up on the beanie idea. I like making fun of his orange hair anyway.
She wondered if people at school made fun of his hair. It was a pretty big campus, so it had to have happened a few times. He looked pretty scrawny, too, so he probably didn't say much.
She didn't know how to feel about that. She had private lessons at home, so who was she to judge kids who got to enjoy actual college life.
He didn't really seem like the type of guy to read a lot of books either, and she laughed to cover the fact that she was in a bookstore. That part made her feel dreadfully inadequate in the squish of her gut.
She felt empty, but not hungry.
The tights on her legs let her body breath, though it was a strained breathing. Pores tried to rip apart the tights at the seam for the chance to suck in the polluted college air. She could smell cigarettes from an "employees only" door nearby.
She bent down, and eventually gave into sitting, when she got to the art supplies section. On their second date, he'd met her at a park bench, planning to go to the movies. They'd sat and talked for a few hours instead. He had a sketchpad with him that day, the leather on the front cover worn out like the back seat of her brother's teenage years car. He kept the leather in that car perfect, except for one patch of discolored hide in the back. When she laid her head down on that patch, she could feel the warm hum of the car on her cheek.
His car was pristine while working as a detective.
She rubbed her hands across the oiled leather of a sketchpad off the shelf, and remembered her date staring at her.
He said he'd been drawing the bench just next her, so she leaned back while he drew. She remembered not being able to look at him.
She put the sketchpad back. He doesn't deserve something so nice anyway.
Her lips stuck together now, little chips breaking apart. Hey body felt like a sweating drink, but her lips were withering away. She took out her chapstick and caked on as much as she could manage.
If her lips had to look like thin biscuits flaking apart, maybe she could make them taste like strawberry. People had to like strawberries.
She grew frustrated the more she walked around the store, and every part of her skin seemed to itch. She felt less like she had a body and more like she was in possession of a frame, made entirely of the itch.
Her fingers nearly stuck to her back when she lifted up her shirt to scratch. If she left them there too long, they'd stick like honey cough drops to the roof of her mouth.
She came up to a big rack of clothes, with unsorted male and female shirts of various sizes. It was the clearance rack for school shirts.
She slipped her gloves on to avoid ruining any of the shirts, and her fingertips dissolved into oceans of sweat crammed into a tight vessel that surfed along the faded shirts. She found a particularly long one, too long for even him.
She laughed and threw it into the basket. She had one more thing to get.
When she finished paying, she texted him that she was inside the student bookstore, waiting, because she didn't want to stand in the heat outside.
He came into her vision far faster than she expected.
"Oi Rukia, why are you in waiting in the bookstore?" he said.
"Eh Ichigo, you expected me to freeze for you? No, it's much warmer in here, thank you," she said, feeling the sweat from her back invade her tights.
He smiled, his face tilting above the "Rock-off" t-shirt he had on, black skinny jeans and white sneakers. He had twin belts that hung over the zipper of his jeans, as well as a bag that hung across his shoulder like a snake. His sketchpad was probably in that bag.
She wondered what that park bench looked like to him.
"Hey, what'd you buy here? Anything cool?" he said, pointing at the bag in her right hand.
"What's it to you? Does the perv want to know what kinds of things a lady buys?"
"Shut up, we're at a college bookstore," he said. His face was red, just like hers.
She grabbed the sun screen out of her bag.
"I imagine you get burned pretty easily. You don't seem like the prepared kind of guy."
"I've got sun screen in the car, eh, dummy," he said.
She was a little embarrassed.
"I kind of want to buy a shirt while I'm here, though. You know I don't have any shirts at all from this school?" he said.
When she was behind him as they were heading to the clothing isles, she saw a big mass of sweat, clinging for life to both shirt and body.
"You know, I've had my eye on a shirt for a while, though," he said.
Her feet felt cramped in her boots, laces tightening around each one of the toes. They couldn't breathe.
She bumped into him at the clearance rack. Her breathing melted the insides of her mouth.
"Ya, I'm not sure I can afford a full price one, but I found one on the clearance rack I like a lot," he said.
She must not have seen it.
"It's even a size too big for me, which is good for the beach," he said.
"Hey, Ichigo, remembered when you bought me all that coffee?"
"Yea, uh, it wasn't that long ago. Why?" he said.
"Do I owe you for that?"
He grabbed her scarf, his fingertips grazing over the sweat on her neck, scratching the itch. She felt good for a few seconds.
"Damn right you do! I expect you to pay for my train ticket today! Hehe," he said.
His smile was crooked. She wanted to fix it with a sharpie. He'd look nice with a mustache. She felt a punch break through her stomach.
"In your dreams, Ichigo, I'm paying you back right now!"
She felt his eyes on her as his hand let go of the scarf. She pulled out the shirt she bought him.
"I owe you nothing, Ichigo. Here's your stupid shirt, now let's go."
She hit him straight in the face with it.
When he got back from the bathroom, she laughed at the "Dropout" logo that ran down the left side of the shirt. T
"They sold out of these in a week. Pretty cool huh? I owe you."
"Really fucking stupid, if you ask me Ichigo. Now let's go. I want to get this beach thing over with."
It felt quite like winter outside.
The metal bar under her seat felt warm on Rukia's calves on the train ride back from the beach. She bit into her scarf, and breathed cold air through the slits of her front teeth. She wondered if she could get it to freeze.
She wrapped the arches of her feet around the bar, sticking her knees up. Her boots sat on the ground beside her feet, wet from the ocean.
Ichigo was asleep, leaning the other way, on a rather hard beam that connected the roof to the floor of the train. She wanted the train to jolt.
She pushed the last strand of her hair up into the warmth of her beanie, because hair tips felt like pricks on the red of her nose when it was cold.
She bit her lip when the train did jolt, and Ichigo didn't seem to move at all. She tasted strawberry though. She liked strawberry a lot.
Without many people onboard, she decided to take a nap herself. It'd be a while before they had to get off. She laid her head against the window behind her, and tucked her feet underneath her body. Beneath her jacket, sweater, and button up shirt she felt the warm grip of something like a wool blanket.
What a wonderful bookstore.
Biting into her scarf and closing her eyes, she imagined what the "Dropout" logo looked liked running down the left side of her body, the same as his.