A Little Pink Flower
Hallo :) I probably should've mentioned this earlier, but this is one of my first-ever pieces that I wrote in third person. It's not going to be terribly good, because of my lack of experience writing like this, but still...please read and leave constructive criticism.
Chapter 2- In Which Ryoma Learns
No matter how sleepy or sad Sakuno was, she couldn't help but feel awe, looking at Ryoma's new house.
It was a mansion, in the full sense of the word. Impossibly, it was even larger than his home in Japan, and in Sakuno's opinion, much more beautiful. The house was newly constructed and contemporary, painted in light colors. It was a somewhat narrow house, but it was tall, three or four stories, not including the attic and the basement. A mural of a park was painted in the entrance hall, with a picture of a tree leaning over the door and cobblestones drawn onto the ground. They disappeared into the kitchen, which had a marble island in the center, a breakfast nook, and a glorious view into the massive backyard.
The basement was slightly larger than the first floor. There was plush carpeting and wood-paneled walls, and windows high up let in enough sunlight to keep the basement brightly lit. Some sunken circles indicated where heavy equipment had once been.
Sakuno had yet to see the bedrooms, but she knew that all six of them must be giant.
"Honey, why don't you go with Ryoma to pick out a room?" Rinko asked, smiling warmly.
"Hai." Sakuno turned and met Ryoma by the wide spiral staircase. He was picking at something on his white baseball cap, and didn't look up when Sakuno came by.
"Alright. I'll show you the rooms and you can pick any of them except the master bedroom on the end of the second floor. It's my parents`."
"That's fine."
They climbed up the stairs in silence, with Ryoma never looking up and Sakuno fearing for his safety. At the second floor landing, Ryoma stepped onto the carpet and pushed open the door of the nearest bedroom. He peered inside, then waved Sakuno over.
"This is one of the rooms you can have. One of the normal rooms has its own bathroom. I think it's this one."
It was empty as of then, but it was still surprisingly small. The window looked out onto the street out front, and the view of the neighborhood was unobstructed. Sakuno liked the room and its coziness, but the way the window allowed all to see in and out bothering her.
"You don't like the room?" Ryoma asked.
"I- I don't know. Can we see the other rooms first, then, Ryoma-kun?"
Ryoma shrugged and led her out.
The other room was significantly bigger, with a large window that showed the backyard and the pool. Next door, the master bedroom took up a huge space and had windows on both sides.
Upstairs was another set of bedrooms. They were all the size of the second bedroom on the floor below, which was considerable, and two of them had windows that faced from the sides of the house.
One room, however, was in the interior, and had no windows. It was the largest and shaped somewhat like a hexagon, and the light cover for the bulb on the roof was colorful, dying the beige walls slightly red, blue, yellow, and everything else on the rainbow.
Sakuno took a liking to it at once, and she told Ryoma so. He nodded and walked out of the room, leaving Sakuno alone in her new bedroom.
She went about putting her clothes up in her closet and setting pictures down on the ground, since she had no idea as to how she would get a table. After it was all done, Sakuno sat down in the space where she wanted her bed to be and looked around.
Her room felt strangely crowded, despite the size and number of items in it. Perhaps it was because of the sheer number of glossy photos strewn about the room. Sakuno hoped that it would be better once she got something to keep her photos altogether on an elevated area and put her bed in its space.
Suddenly, Sakuno saw a picture of her and her grandmother that was tucked away into a corner. It was a rare photo from before Sakuno's parents died, when she was about eight. Sakuno and her grandmother were both in an ice cream shop, and little girl Sakuno was being handed strawberry ice cream by her obaa-chan. A radiant smile was on her cherubic face, and her brown braids were in the middle of a swishing motion as she reached.
Sakuno stretched out a hand in the direction of the photograph. How she wished she could take back that moment, frozen in time forever. How she wished that she could go back to when her innocence still existed, when her parents would lift her up and call her their little sweetheart.
She didn't want to live in a world where she was alone.
Sakuno took a deep, shuddering breath and fell onto her back on the unforgiving wooden floor. A clunk marked the meeting between her head and the ground, and the burst of dull pain made Sakuno flinch. She sucked in another deep breath, trying in vain to stop the flood of tears she knew was coming. Her attempts being unsuccessful, Sakuno flattened her hands against her face and wailed into her palms.
Ryoma had heard the thump from the next room over, but he didn't go to check on Sakuno until he heard her crying. He tried to push open the door quietly; still, Sakuno heard him, and she looked up.
In the moment before Sakuno composed herself and went back to her usual personality, Ryoma could see hurt in her eyes. Not the hurt that came from a dead goldfish, or even the hurt that came from a dead relative; it was the kind of pain that could come only from when one was totally abandoned and helpless, and without a hint of how to push on. The look only lasted for a heartbeat or less, but it was there, and in spite of Ryoma's stoical nature, it pierced him, and he could feel what Sakuno had most likely felt for a long time.
"Hi." Sakuno pushed herself to her elbows. "I'm sorry if I disturbed you, Ryoma-kun."
Ryoma's face heated up. Sakuno's sleeves were rolled up, and the bottom of her pink sweater had been scrunched, revealing part of her stomach. The edge of her skirt also showed a dangerous amount of skin on her thigh from her lying down.
He shook his head and looked away, willing away the redness. This, he told himself sternly. Is the wrong thing to think about a girl whose grandmother just died and is trying to live without falling apart. And yet, he replayed that picture in his mind.
"I- uh- do you m- um. Furniture downstairs, you can get it- I'll help-" he stuttered, trying and failing miserably at being cool.
"That was English." Sakuno swiped at her eye.
Whoops. Ryoma tried again. "The furniture and boxes of stuff are downstairs, and I can help you get the bed set up and if you need anything else go ahead help yourself."
It was a run-on sentence, but Ryoma's ability to speak seemed to have taken a vacation. To heaven-knows-where.
Sakuno stood up and brushed at nonexistent dust specks on her blue skirt. "Arigato, Ryoma-kun. I would greatly appreciate your help." She brushed past Ryoma on her way out the door, and it was all Ryoma could do to not imagine The Scene again.
Rinko, Nanako, and Nanjiro were already tearing open the cardboard boxes to get to the furniture. Pieces of a simple box-shaped bed frame were already out, and Rinko gave the pair permission to take it up to Sakuno's room. With great difficulty, Ryoma and Sakuno lugged the pieces up the stairs and assembled the bed, and then they realized that they had to get a mattress. Once more, they trudged down, grabbed the nearest unpacked mattress, and dragged it back up.
In the next few hours, the bed was assembled, the mattress was covered and placed, a bedside cabinet was brought up, a lamp was set up on the cabinet, and a bookshelf was constructed to accommodate Sakuno's books and pictures. As an afterthought, Nanako fitted metal poles into the shelves that contained pictures and put little curtains on. "That way, if you don't want to see them, you can cover them." Ryoma's cousin explained to a grateful Sakuno.
"Arigato. But I think..." Sakuno tugged at the curtains. "I think I won't ever use them."
Luckily for the Echizen family and Sakuno, their jetlag had been overcome early by forcing themselves to go by American time at their hotel, so they could all sleep pleasantly and wake up the next day to continue furnishing the house.
However, it was only eight thirty at night. No one could sleep. Even though soreness spread through Sakuno's legs from the busy day, and her back hurt from carrying heavy items, but she couldn't get her eyes to close. It wasn't her preferred sleeping time yet.
So, Ryuzaki Sakuno was up and about, looking at everything in the house.
She opened cabinets, sifted through the books and magazines that had been taken out of their boxes, and admired the considerable amount of food that had already been moved into the fridge. She looked into the boxes that were still full, cleaned spots off of a mirror that lay on the floor, and tried to learn basic English from Nanako.
"Water. Wah-tur." a very patient Nanako enunciated.
Ever time, Sakuno's tongue would fold around the tur, and the syllable would come out like a deh. The problem stumped both Nanako and Nanjiro, who joined in with the lesson about fifteen minutes in.
"It's not really that hard. Try again. Water. Water. Waaaaaah tuuuuuuuuuuuuhr."
Sakuno threw her hands up in frustration.
Ryoma watched from the hallway that led to the first-floor bathroom. A tiny smile tugged at the corner of his lips. It was amusing to him to see Sakuno, an extremely competent girl at almost everything, fail so badly at English. At least he was better than her at something that wasn't tennis.
It was eleven PM when Sakuno and Nanako finally gave up on the words that Sakuno struggled with. They each went to their respective rooms- Sakuno on the third floor, Nanako on the second- and Ryoma was left on the first floor with his mother.
Rinko was texting Ryoga, Ryoma's adopted older brother. Quiet dings signaled each new message, as did Rinko's content tapping on the screen of her iPhone. At one point, Ryoma peered over her shoulder. Apparently, Karupin's travel papers had been completed. A picture of the fat Himalayan cat, lying with its stomach exposed to the world, appeared, and Rinko cooed.
"He's such a dear," she sighed, finally putting her phone down.
Ryoma assumed that she was talking about Karupin, because Ryoga did not seem to be a dear to him. "Yup."
"I wonder if Sakuno-san likes cats?"
Ryoma stiffened at the girl's name. Rinko noticed, and she laughed.
"Oh? Does my son like Sa-"
"Stop it, Mom. Don't let her hear." Ryoma hissed in English.
"Honey, you...oh well. If you like her, be open about that." Rinko replied with as much ease as Ryoma. Ryoma growled and bit down on an apple.
Rinko kneeled down in front of Ryoma on his stool. "Look. You need to give the girl more credit. She lost her parents when she was eight, and now she doesn't even have her grandmother any more." Her tone were serious, and her brown eyes locked onto Ryoma's golden ones. "If you do love her, let her know. I think she needs to feel needed right now."
She stood up. "Consider what I've said, dear." Rinko said in a much more gentle voice. "Please."
Ryoma chewed on his apple and nodded.
At around three in the morning, Ryoma got up to use the bathroom. The house was still unfamiliar to him, and the darkness blinded him. He fumbled around until he reached what he thought was the third-floor bathroom and opened the door.
Instead of a bathroom, however, it was Sakuno's room.
Ryoma took a step back, knowing how wrong the situation was- him, a teenage boy, peeking in on a sleeping girl his age. However, he couldn't help but look in.
Sakuno was lying on her side, facing the door. Her arm, which was tucked under her head, moved slightly with each quiet breath that she took. One of Sakuno's feet poked out from her blanket. Long, unbraided brown hair was spilled across her pillow, shining in the dim light.
Wait. Where was the light even coming from?
Ryoma squinted and made out a phone, clutched in the girl's hand. Its light was starting to die, but even from here, one could see that on the screen of the phone was a picture of little Sakuno and her family. Sakuno was on a man- her father's- shoulders, and a woman- her mother- was chiding him, probably for not being careful enough with their daughter. The grandmother- Ryoma's former tennis coach- was next to the mother with her arms folded.
The phone's light petered out.
She used to be happy, Ryoma thought. He glanced back at Sakuno. Her usually-smiling face was now blank, with a touch of a frown on her lips. Briefly, her eyes squeezed together.
Ryoma quietly backed out of the room and shut the door. After the click of the closed door sounded, he stood there for a long time. And he thought back to all the times that Sakuno had went to his tennis games, passed him in the hallways, or tried to wake him up when he fell asleep in class. She always wore a smile and spoke kindly, but he had always felt it was forced.
In the end, he was right.
She has to act, every single day, he said to himself. That girl has to deal with all the pain and pretend to have a perfect life, all at the same time.
Now he hated himself for ignoring her.
Like with my other story, this one probably isn't going too well. I'm not feeling so good this week, so gomenasai...please forgive me for this.
