Chapter title once again comes from a Tegan and Sara song. I wrote this chapter over the course of two days, wanting to get in another update before I leave the country tomorrow for the rest of summer, since this is that last I'll have of computer access until I get back. I'm very proud to have finished this. Please note that I made up the mentioned musicians and movie, and that I don't own the briefly mentioned Pokemon.

Thank you xxMikeyxx and loritakitochan. And see, I remembered Hatori!

The bit about diamonds and stars I learned from reading Salman Rushdie. That section in his writing was so astoundingly beautiful I reread it about five times. Not trying to plagiarize, just wanted to share it.

Deconstruction
VII:
Relief Next To Me

Hatori

Knuckles white, her hand gripped the armrest of the airplane chair. She'd asked for a window seat, and even though her head was turned away from me, I saw her face reflected in the window, pale, frowning.

I put my hand on hers and she looked up at me, wide-eyed, then relaxed. Her hand felt like coldness and intensity. "Are you all right?" I whispered to her, catching the faint, pleasant scent of her shampoo, which changed frequently, but always reminded me of spring.

"Yeah... I'm..." She brushed her hair back with her fingers, pulled it into a ponytail with one of the thin, black bands from around her wrist. "I'll be fine. I'm sorry, I always forget how much planes bother me. It seems like every time I get on one my life changes completely." She wrapped her arms around my shoulders, pulled me in as close to her as our seatbelts would allow. "And I like my life right now."

I ran two fingers along the area from her cheekbone to behind her ear, like tucking back a stray hair. Not that there was one. Then I kissed her lightly on the nose, which made her smile.

It was snowing on the runway, the lights from the plane causing the flakes to blaze against the blackness of the night sky and the asphalt, becoming nothing as they hit.

We were six months into our first year at university after applying to the same one and both getting in, not hesitating to leave our old town behind us.

When the news of Ren's suicide attempt reached me, I wondered if I ever should have left. And Akito being the one to find her... the thought of how traumatic that must have been would sneak up on me suddenly, like a gust of icy wind. I had to go back, to buy a ticket for the first plane going anywhere near there. A six hour flight, then a two hour drive. When I told Kana where I was going, she never paused to consider not coming with.

-/-/-/-

"She talks in her sleep."

"You've slept with her?" Shigure raised an eyebrow.

"Only in the literal sense." We were sitting on lawn chairs on his porch, looking out at road and gardens. It was a uselessly beautiful day, made of heat and colour, too hot to do anything but look at it. I felt like an ant trapped under a magnifying glass.

This was a long time ago. I'd been going out with Kana for almost a month. Most of my life, the things that happened before then, I can barely remember. Or I don't try to.

Shigure's eyes and most of his face were hidden behind opaque sunglasses and the rim of a baseball cap. He'd even eschewed the traditional robes he was so fond of in favour of an old-looking loose white t-shirt and a pair of tacky shorts covered in a pattern of exotic flowers.

He bounced the basketball, from the game we've long since given up on, lazily at his side, managing to dribble it twice before it escaped into the road, stopping in a yard across the street. Neither of us made any move to retrieve it. "So what's she talk about?"

It was after a school dance that it had happened. We had been flirting with each other, mostly awkwardly, but we'd had some amazingly comfortable moments, too, and when I was around her, there was an overwhelming feeling of rightness to the world. Of meaning. Of fun. We'd gone to the dance together, and though I was never much of a dancer, aside from the formal dances we'd been taught in gym class, the steps of which I still had (and have) memorized, like most things school related, I can truly say I enjoyed the experience. If I looked ridiculous, it would make her laugh, and then I would laugh too, and we would be laughing together. And if I did something right... well, that was good too.

She became suddenly quiet on the drive home. I asked her if she had a curfew, if her parents would mind that she'd stayed out so late. She shook her head, but her face seemed to close up, serious as a statue but something uncontrollable in her eyes.

I had since learned that her parents were one of the topics not to be mentioned to her, along with the years from when she was between ages seven and fourteen. It wasn't that she never talked about these things. Just that she would only speak of them on her terms, mentioning them briefly, anecdotes or sights or conversations, then move on to another topic. From what she said, she didn't seem to dislike her parents, or to have had a particularly unpleasant upbringing, but a lot can go unsaid.

Her house was enlarged by the silence of emptiness. At the doorway, when we embraced, she held me with surprising force. There was nothing aggressive about it, but she seemed afraid of something. "Don't go," she said.

I said, "Okay."

I was going to sleep on the couch, but she insisted I stay beside her. She took a long time to fall asleep, and the fact that I knew this meant I must have taken even longer. She lay flat on her back, stared open-eyed at the ceiling above, barely moved. Until she was asleep. Then she couldn't stay still, throwing the covers and pillows onto the floor, kicking my side. She was arguing against something. Most of what she said was mumbled, but sometimes it was alarmingly clear.

By the time she stopped, the sun was already starting to rise. I picked a bed sheet up off the floor and lay it over her. Then I fell asleep as well.

We greeted the next day in our slept-in semi-formal wear.

To Shigure, I said, "She said something about a fire and a schoolhouse."

He snorted. "Tori's dating a pyro."

"I know it goes against your nature, but could you stop being an idiot for one moment? She's not a pyromaniac. I think it might have been a memory from her childhood. She grew up oversees. She could have seen all kinds of things."

"Word traveler, huh? She's even crazier than a pyro, then." Noticing my expression, he says, more seriously, "And I thought you said she was Canadian."

"She is. She was born here, left, then came back."

"And where did she leave to, per se?"

"She spent four years in Africa. She also lived in Australia and Poland. That's all I know for sure. I got the impression her parents were some sort of emergency physicians, and they traveled a lot for work."

"Africa is a continent, not a country. Honestly, Tori, you should know these things. You're supposed to be the academic one, whereas I'm simply the suave and handsome best friend."

"I know it's not a country, Shigure. She just hasn't told me specifically where she lived there."

"Well then, that means there's a great number of tragedies and conflicts she could have born witness to."

"Like what?" I'm listening now.

He drums his fingers along the side of the now-empty glass he'd been sipping lemonade from. The rhythm reminds me of hoofbeats. He proceeds to name a dozen or so civil wars and conflicts between rebel groups and governments and between rebel groups and other rebel groups.

"You made some of those up," I say, wanting to believe he invented them all but knowing better than to entertain such a hope.

"Yep. But it will be up to you to find out which ones. I'm actually surprised you don't already know. You do get better grades than me."

The truth is, at this point in my life I did not know a lot about most topics I did not anticipate to be graded on. The events Shigure brought up had been only briefly noted or entirely omitted from the history books I'd studied. I said, "How do you know these things? It almost makes it seem as if you care about what happens in other countries. To people who aren't you."

"Oh, of course not. It's research for my novel. Disaster sells."

"You... actually, I don't think there's a word for people like you. And I hope there are never enough of you to require one."

"Don't be a meanie, Tori." He walked across the street, picked up the basketball, and tossed it to me. I caught it, took three shots at the frayed net and made two of them. Swish swish clunk.

I passed to Shigure, now returned from his journey. We took lazy practice shots for a few minutes, then put the ball away when heatstroke started to kick in again. On our way inside Shigure's house to numb our minds with video games and commemorate our seventeen-ness, the dwindling time we had left before officially entering the world of adults, he said, "Seriously, though. I hope it works out between you two. You both deserve to finally get a break."

-/-/-/-

Kagura

We go to Arisa's place. She lives in a basement. When we walk through the upstairs part of the house to get there, she hisses at me to be very quiet, and even drunk Cris is being visibly cautious not to bump into any of the furniture, which seems to be perilously balanced on itself. I can hear someone snoring in the house, but once we get down the stairs, careful not to creak them, we can talk at normal volume.

Arisa's room is noticeably more organized than the rest of the house, even though it looks like a normal teenage room. There are some stuffed animals that remind me of my own, and I feel myself get calmer. There's really no reason I should be scared, now that the mysterious snoring person isn't going to be woken up by us and go into a rage (I have... this weird mental image of a rampaging Snorlax).

A loud earthquake of a snore causes me to literally jump. But when I turn around, I see it's just Cris, flopped down on Arisa's bed and instantly out of it.

Arisa says, "You can stay here, too. If you want."

For a moment, words escape me. What a strange expression. Like I'm chasing after the words I know but they're running away, like little animals. "I thought you didn't like me."

She blinks. The little animals seem too fast for her, too. "Is that what it seems like?"

"A little bit."

"I'm sorry. Really, I am. Jeez, was I that much of a bastard?"

I don't say anything. She says, "Look, I'm a jerk sometimes. I don't mean it. Truthfully, I think you're pretty cool. So there you have it." She yawns. "An official Uotani apology."

I can't tell what proportion of what she's just said is a joke and how much is serious, but I can tell she's not trying to offend me.

"Thanks," I say. She flashes a thumbs-up and smiles, showing teeth.

I call my mom on my cell phone and tell her I'm sleeping over at a friend's house. "With no pajamas or sleeping bag?" she says. I tell her it's fine, there's stuff here. She offers to bring mine over, but I say she doesn't have to. She asks which friend and I lie and tell her Tammy. She asks if she should pick me up in the morning, but I tell her I'll walk, it's not far (at least that much is true).

Arisa is looking at me when I hang up the phone, lying sideways on her bed. Her whole face is sideways. A vertical line of sight. She looks really tired.

"What?" I say, followed by a short, confused laugh.

"Nothin'. Just thinking. Do you think about it?"

"About what?"

"My supreme sexiness."

I stare at her.

"That was a joke. Dammit, I know, I'm weird when it's late. Didn't mean to scare you. No, what I meant was, what you just did, talking on the phone with your mom. Do you think about it, like everything you'll say, or does it just kind of happen?"

"Are you mad at me for lying to her?"

"That's not what I meant. It's just..." She sighs, takes a long breath like she trying to taste the air. I'm not sure why she'd want to do that. The air smells kind of like old food. "I have to write this thing for school, okay? A short story about an event that happened to my family. And I have to know what it's like to talk to a mom on the phone. Or at all."

I think about this. About what it would be like to make up a story about my family, if it didn't happen, if I didn't have my family. What it would be like to by story-less. "It just kind of happens, I guess."

"Thought so. Damn. That makes it so much harder to write."

Cris lets out another massive snore, startling us both.

"Anyway," says Arisa. "I need sleep. Good night." She turns over so that she's looking right at the wall, her back to me.

I sleep on the floor, wrapped in several blankets. There's more than enough room for me on the bed, but this actually looks more comfortable. There's a piece of paper with a drawing of a tree on it a few centimeters from my nose. I pick up the paper and see that it's a card. Inside, it says, "Marry chrismiss!! from Cris." I look at the outside again. The tree is hand drawn. It's incredibly detailed, with attention to the shapes of each branch beneath the hundreds of individual leaves. They cast shadows on each other, affecting the whole look of the tree.

Looking at it fills me with emotion. I'm not sure what emotion it is, but it makes me want to cry.

I sleep. I dream I'm in another country, or in another world. Everything is the same as back home, but I don't know anyone, and they're speaking a language I don't understand. I ask to go home but no one knows what "home" means. Then even I can't understand what I'm saying, I'm talking but the syllables don't make any sense. And then I lose my voice completely.

-/-/-/-

Akito

I'm sick the rest of the weekend. My head feels like it's in a pot of boiling water and the rest of my body has turned to ice. Saturday I literally do nothing but sleep. Sunday I eat all the cereal in the apartment, then go back to sleep again. When I sleep I dream I'm awake. I hear music, coming from nowhere, sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrible, constantly changing, a million different imaginary instruments. I know I'm awake when the music stops. The entire difference between awake and asleep is music.

When the weekend is over, I'm not convinced all of Friday hasn't been a fever dream, too.

I skip school on Monday. I'm not sick anymore, but I'm tired. Sleep has become work, and the more I do it the more exhausted I become. So I make myself wake up, get out of the house. The city library has a good selection, and I pick up fifteen books – seven non-fiction, eight novels. Not classic novels, either. New releases, things with interesting summaries on the back, dusty ones that looked lonely, even violating the age-old adage and choosing ones with eye-catching covers.

Whatever mysterious, potentially fatal disease I've acquired, it's put me in a whimsical mood. As I'm walking back, the bag of books heavy in my hand, I see a store selling antiques. I go inside. It smells like dust and wood-polish. I pick up a few things, feeling their textures and weight, old paper and leather and pottery and fabric. They all have an aura of fragility to them, but the fact that these have belonged to other people, been parts of lives and homes, survived to this time in safety, is reassuring. Even ancient germs, from the breath and hands of all the strangers these objects have been exposed to, seem powerless against all the history.

There's a few tables of things that seem much too new to qualify as antiques. Pikachu figures, toy guns with foam bullets, a remote control that doesn't seem to go with anything, stuffed animals that make noises when squeezed, their mass-produced mechanically-stitched seams still intact. There's a small box of used crayons. It makes me think about who would bring in such a thing, were they surprised when it was taken off their hands and replaced with maybe a few pennies, or did they expect it, feel perfectly entitled to sell their barely-old, half-gone crayons? And the set-up has them so proudly displayed, does the shopkeeper really expect someone to buy them? Will someone buy them?

I'm smiling like a fool, just the thought of these things is very entertaining. There's a camera on the same table, one of the kind that still uses film and prints the photos out as soon as they're taken, to watch the gray ghosts solidify to real colours right in your hand. I buy the camera. It's five dollars.

At the grocery store, I buy a loaf of bread, a bag of spinach and a jar of lemon juice, for some reason feeling like these are the exact things it is important to own. I forget to replace the cereal.

Back at my apartment, I start reading one of the books. It is a non-fiction book, and it is about space. It talks about reactions inside stars, the gases they burn, turning matter into energy to keep existing, numbers of temperatures and of lifespans that are too big to mean anything but a sense of abstract awe. Heat and pressure turning carbon into diamonds, gravity pulling them into the center of the star. Diamonds falling like rain from all directions. I read two-hundred fifty-three pages. Then someone knocks on my door.

When I open it, Tohru is there, in her sunglasses and black dress, her dog beside her looking noble and poised. She smiles at me (Tohru, not the dog). "Akito! Hi, can I come in?"

"Of course," I say. I hastily try to tidy up as discretely as I can. Mostly this involves pushing empty bags out of view and putting stuff in piles. I lead her to sit down on my (unmade. Maybe that gives it a sort of charm?) bed, because the kitchen side of the room is worse. "Did you come here on your own?"

"With Chella," she says.

"Who?"

"Oh! My dog," she laughs. Then she says, "You're not allergic, are you?"

"No. I'm not allergic to anything."

"Okay, good. I forgot to find out. I'm so thankful you're not."

Chella is stretching on the floor by our feet. I say, "Can I pet Chella?" then remember hearing somewhere that you're not supposed to pet seeing-eye dogs.

But Tohru says, "Go ahead," and I do. Chella's fur is short and smooth, and she makes appreciative sounds. She looks at me with dark shining eyes and I'm sure she smiles (actually the dog this time).

"So, how did you know how to get here?" I ask Tohru.

"I talked to your friends. They were also worried about why you didn't come to school today, but when I asked if they wanted to come with, they said they didn't think they should."

A noncommittal noise buzzes through my closed lips.

I can feel her eyes moving over me. "Are you okay?

"I was sick. I had a fever, and I couldn't get out of bed all weekend. And today... I'm still kind of sick, I think. I don't know how long I've been sick for. You might want to go, so you don't catch it."

"If you're sick, I still want to be here with you. I want to help you get better. That reminds me." She turns around and takes off the backpack she's been wearing this whole time. She withdraws a grocery bag and hands it to me. "I brought you fruit."

"So you did," I say, looking in the bag to see a bunch of bananas, a container of raspberries, some peaches, plums and pears, and a single grapefruit.

"It's kind of a random gift, isn't it? My grandpa and I both went shopping and we didn't know each other were going, so there ended up being way too much for us to eat and I thought you might like some, because most people like fruit, I think..." She trails off and her face goes red. "I'm talking too much."

"No, it's fine. And thank you. This is – it's a really good gift. I personally fail at grocery shopping, so this is perfect." She laughs. I say, "Seriously, I'm amazingly bad at buying food. I spend all my money on lemon juice and I don't get anything to use it on, that kind of thing." This makes her laugh even more. "I guess it is kind of funny... now I'm talking too much, aren't I?"

"I like how you talk."

Is she flirting with me? She likes me, right? After what happened at the party, she must return my feelings to some degree, and her coming here, it has to mean something. Doesn't it?

I say, "About what happened on Friday. I'm sorry-"

She gently presses a finger to my lips and I go quiet. "Don't be."

"Okay."

"So much happened that day. A lot of it was confusing, and strange, and complicated, and some of it was bad. But what we had, what happened between us, that wasn't any of those things. I look back on it and I can remember exactly how it felt, and it makes me so happy." She touches my arm. Wherever she touches me feels instantly more alive, more me than it ever was before. She awakens me. "I really like you. And I think we could have something, again."

Is this real? I feel like I'm dreaming, but I know this is real. I can feel her tracing patterns on my arm. I can feel so many things. "I'd like that."

"But," she says, "I think I have to know more about you."

"Ask me anything," I say, and I mean it.

She folds her legs up on the bed with her. It looks like she's meditating, so concentrated. "Ummm. What's your favorite colour."

"Black. Yours?"

"That's hard. Either red of really bright purple."

"You put a lot of thought into that."

"It's the kind of thing I think about. Your turn to ask me."

"What's your favorite food?"

"Okay, you're going to think this is really weird, but eel."

"It's not weird. I've had eel before. It's really good."

"Glad my answer didn't scare you away. What's yours?"

"Bread. The white kind that's supposed to be bad for you. It doesn't even have to have anything on it, I like the taste."

We talk for a long time, but it doesn't feel like a long time. I find out her favorite musician is a pop singer from the nineties who never quite caught on but wrote very sincere ballads about everything that caught his interest, from love to historical occurrences to the tree in his backyard.

Her favorite time is sunset in late-summer, her favorite plants are lilacs, rock (my questions were so creative): quartz, mode of transportation: walking, favorite age: seventeen (right now), movie: a Japanese one she saw as a child that she doesn't remember the name of (she thinks it involved a samurai whose fiancé was turned into a butterfly, and he wanders through a forest filled with spirits searching for a spell to turn her back into a human, and at the end, although he doesn't find this spell, a forest god repays a favour to the couple when they rescue him from hunters, and he makes an offer to turn the samurai also into a butterfly which the samurai accepts, and he and his wife fly away together to explore the world.

Although Tohru says it's entirely possible her memory and imagination distorted the film completely from what it actually was, or that the whole movie is entirely made-up), she doesn't have a favorite city because she's seen so many of them and has loved them all.

My answers, respectively: a female pianist and singer-songwriter, midnight, evergreen trees, "Umm... I guess sandstone" ("Haha, how can you not know, it was your question!" "Yeah, but it's not something I've really thought about because I never expected anyone to ask me something like that."), walking (something in common, finally!), really young like five or six, it's been so long since I've seen a movie that I can't think of one ("Really? I have some good ones on my computer, we can watch them when we get a chance!"), Vancouver, even though I've never been there, but from what I've heard ("Oh, Vancouver's so nice, you should definitely go sometime!").

Conclusion: we are different. We are very different. Not just as different as night and day, more like as different as night and... pie.

At least, that's the conclusion I arrive at. Maybe Tohru's is entirely different, because once we run out of words, she leans in and kisses my cheek. Right up close, I can see through her sunglasses. There are flecks of lightness in her eyes, shining like... well, stars. Billion degree stars full of diamonds and life.

She smiles. "I should get home now. I'll see you at school tomorrow?"

"Definitely."

-/-/-/-

The next morning, before school, I look at myself in the mirror and wonder if I'm deceiving her. If I'm deceiving me. How do I expect this to work, exactly? I can't let myself think I can be close to her without letting her know who/what I am. But how am I supposed to bring something like that up, anyway? Hi, by the way, did I mention I'm a girl? So, um, swing that way? I thought our relationship might have some kind of future, but if you're not into that kind of thing, I understand completely...

I try to cut off that train of thought, but my head is still spinning with questions.

The weird thing is, I honestly didn't think about these things yesterday, at all. They didn't seem important. But now they're mixed into everything I feel. Yesterday I was just me. Now there are words for what I am, and they're words that make listeners flinch, that stick like oil on my tongue after I've said them, that are treated as somehow more obscene that any swear I can think of. And worst of all is that I know it's not the words that bother anyone, it's the ideas behind them.

After a brief internal debate, I pick up my backpack, open and close the door, and turn to face my life.