A/N: Here's Chapter 11! My apologies for the long wait; life became hectic, and I didn't have much time to write. I hope you all enjoy. Feel free to let me know how you think I did with this one.
I should mention that there's a reference below to the fanfic Rain of Terra, in which Tomo is a police officer. It was written by Ratatosk.
Chapter 11
It was an amber-tinted evening, with the sun casting a golden light across the butter colored clouds that hung in the sky. I had the lamp on at my desk and an opened suitcase on my bed; I was almost finished with fitting clothes and toiletries into the weather-beaten brown case.
As I folded a yellow swimsuit on top of towels, and checked to make sure I had a tank top and sweatpants as sleepware instead of pajamas dotted with cats, I started to dream of the trip again. The daydreaming had been happening on and off for three days, ever since I had arrived at home, told my parents of Chiyo-chan's invitation, and been given permission to go. I kept picturing sand under the light of the sun, and the sky reflecting light off the waves, and the feeling of the ocean as I waded into the deep green, brine-scented water, my friends beside me.
I hadn't allowed myself to think that I would ever get to go on a vacation with friends. Overhearing discussions of trips to the beach and amusement parks had given me the idea that it was almost sacred, this gathering of people one was close to, and spending time with them.
What would happen, I wondered, after I went back to school? Would news of the vacation be a signal to other people that I was approachable, that I was a person they could talk to and get to know? Would it help dispel the rumors?
I wasn't sure if I wanted more friends. Certainly it would be nice to spend more time with Kaorin, but for the most part, Yomi, Tomo, Chiyo-chan, and Osaka were enough. It was odd; I had spent so much time longing for a friend that I had never taken the time to think what might happen when I did find some. Now I knew: feeling content was what happened. Feeling whole.
A soft knock at my door awoke me from my thoughts, and I turned my head to see Mom standing at the doorway.
"Hi, mom," I said, smoothing out the swimsuit across the towels as I did so.
"Hello," Mom said. "Could I come in for a moment?"
"Yes."
My mom walked through the doorway, her waist length hair swinging with every step, and a face that always seemed to say that anyone she met was welcome to speak with her. Yet I had never fully explained my school life to her. I had alluded to the fact that I wasn't the person with the most friends, but had never breathed a syllable of the rumors.
What would she say if she knew, this middle aged woman with her clear, understanding, brown eyes, and her habit of making sure that I was as happy as I possibly could be?
Mom sat down on my bed beside my suitcase. She smiled down at the bag for a moment—I recalled a photograph of her holding the same bag as she stood on a train platform—then she focused her attention towards me.
"Do you need any help with finishing up packing for your trip?" she asked.
"No, no thank you," I said. "I have everything I need, I think."
"Did you remember extra toothpaste?"
"Yes." I showed her a pocket in the interior of the suitcase, where I had tucked face cream and two tubes of toothpaste. Light danced off of the plastic like uncertainty flickering on a face, and I swallowed the second-guessing down. I had packed enough. "I remembered."
I felt guilty. Here my mom was, allowing me to go on a trip with my friends, when I hadn't told her how everyone else at my school was terrified of me. I was repaying her with less than half of the truth, while she willingly gave me her trust. She had cheered me on at sports events for years; she bought me nice clothes; she gave me gifts of plush cats or CDs on my birthday.
"Good. Are you excited for the trip?" Faint creases appeared in her forehead, as if she was worried that I might say that I wasn't looking forward to it at all.
"Yes." That was true, of course it was true. Yet there was also a part of me that was dreading the drive to the beach, dreading the sound of the waves crashing endlessly, dreading the moment when everyone fell asleep, and I was left alone, to ponder over any possible moment that signified that they didn't want to be friends with me.
The four of them had chosen me, I reminded myself. They had picked me; they had done what no one else dared to do, save Kaorin—approached me, spoke to me, smiled at me.
I hadn't realized how good it would feel, to be smiled at by a friend.
If I told my mom of how long I had wanted that to happen, then it would seem like I was complaining about what fate had decided to give to me, and there was no way that I could do that. I would have to keep pretending that I was all right, as I always did.
"Sweetheart?" Mom patted my knee with a hand, and I blinked at her. The lines on her forehead deepened, but her frown spoke of concern, not anger.
"I'm fine. Just thinking." I placed my hand on top of hers and curled my fingers around it, trying to reassure her.
I'm fine, I'm fine. A mantra that I would repeat until I believed it.
"These are nice girls, right?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "They are. Chiyo-chan is mature for her age, and she doesn't hold her intelligence over anyone. She's kind, and polite. Yomi-san is always friendly towards me. Tomo-san is somewhat hyper, but I do think she's good at heart—" remembering the look in Tomo's eyes when she realized she had gone too far, her saying that she was treating me as she did Yomi, "—and I like Osaka. She always has something interesting to say."
"Osaka?" she checked, sounding confused.
"Yes. Her name is Ayumu, but Tomo gave her the nickname of Osaka, because that's where she lived before moving here."
Mom laughed. "I don't know what to make of that, but as long as this Tomo-san is being nice to you—"
"Yes," I said again. "She is."
"Good." Mom squeezed my hand in hers, then stood up, smiling down at me. "I better get to bed, I just wanted to check and make sure everything was okay. I remember that I was nervous about going on my first vacation trip with friends."
"I do feel a little nervous," I said, embarrassed at admitting it, but glad all the same that she had felt the same way.
"I'm sure you'll have fun. And if it doesn't turn out to be, which I doubt, call me and let me know."
"I will. Chiyo-chan called me earlier to tell me that Yukari-sensei and Kurosawa-sensei offered to drive us, so they should be able to keep things under control." Truthfully, I was doubtful of Yukari-sensei's abilities to not add to a lack of control, but perhaps the more polite and sensible part of her would emerge.
"Oh, Kurosawa-sensei is your PE teacher, right? Has she talked to you about any sports competitions?"
"No." My stomach clenched as I thought of running down a track in front of a pack of faceless, emotionless students, all determined to win, focusing every atom of their being on crossing over the finish line first. "She…she hasn't. But the athletic festival happens after we come back from vacation. There should be plenty of races."
"Well, I'm sure you'll do well in those." Mom smiled at me again, her face full of a quiet joy that I knew I could never bring myself to crush. "You always do."
I made myself smile back at her. I could feel my heartbeat quickening, feel it beating inside my chest.
"Yes," I said, hoping that she couldn't hear my heartbeat. "I do."
Kurosawa-sensei, seated in the front seat of her car, was blankly staring at the steering wheel. I was sitting behind her, in the back seat, and I thought I saw her shoulders shaking. It was the next day, and we had met at Chiyo-chan's house before starting our trip to her beach house. While Yukari-sensei had seemed enthusiastic about driving Osaka and Chiyo-chan, Kurosawa-sensei didn't seem to be quite as excited.
Yomi sat beside me, and was busy calling out her open window to Tomo. "Hurry up!"
"I am!" Tomo shouted back, and I heard the trunk of the car slam. "You rub the fact that you have a great body in my face during the summer, don't make me rush to put my bags away!"
"That again," Yomi muttered, casting an eye roll in my direction, as if to say, Can you believe her? I offered a sympathetic smile in return.
Tomo walked past Yomi's side of the car and threw open the door to the passenger side. "Ease up, Nyamo-sensei!" she said, and Kurosawa-sensei jumped as if stung. "With me in shotgun, this ride'll be a blast."
"I didn't rub it in," Yomi said, closing her window with the flick of the button, before she leaned over the top of the passenger seat to talk to Tomo.
"What?" Tomo asked, glancing behind her in surprise, a look of mechanical glee on her face.
"My supposedly great body," Yomi said, in a flat tone. "Now put your seat belt on before you do something crazy, like honk the horn too many times."
Without turning her head, Tomo put out her hand in the direction of the steering wheel, but Kurosawa-sensei grabbed her wrist.
"Listen, Tomo-chan," Kurosawa-sensei said sternly. "I deal with a half-comatose Yukari on the way to school every day. Don't think I don't know what I'm getting into when I allowed you to take shotgun."
"I could have taken shotgun," Yomi said, as Tomo bucked her seatbelt with a huff.
"You could have," Kurosawa-sensei agreed as she started up the car. "But I didn't want to put Sakaki-san though an hour's long drive sitting next to Tomo."
"Hey, I'm not that bad!" Tomo said, an indignant tone coating her words.
"That's true," I said in the silence that had filled the car. "You brought a camera, after all."
And, I thought, you had said to Chiyo-chan that inviting me was a good idea. Warmth sprung up in me at the thought, the type of happy feeling I always associated with a kind gesture from a friend.
"Thank you!" Tomo said to me, then turned her head to glance back at Yomi, who merely adjusted her glasses in return. "See, Sakaki-san cares about me!"
Yomi sighed, then said, "She's not the only one, you idiot. Just don't make Kurosawa-sensei crash the car. I really don't feel like dying in a car accident because you thought turning on the windshield wipers was a good idea."
"But it might rain." Tomo indicated the sunshine outside, then glanced out of the window herself. "Clouds could show up."
I looked out of Yomi's window. The sky was a clear light blue that signaled nothing except heat.
Lowering my gaze from the sky, I saw Yukari-sensei in her own car a few feet away, further up Chiyo-chan's driveway. She seemed to be talking to Osaka and Chiyo-chan, judging by how she was looking towards the back seat.
"Are any of you very religious?" Kurosawa-sensei asked as Yukari-sensei started up her own car, which looked, frankly, like someone had taken a hammer to a car that had fallen off a cliff for the tenth time.
"Isn't that somewhat personal?" Yomi said, confused.
I glanced back over at Kurosawa-sensei, and saw her head jerk up once, in a rough semblance of a nod. "My apologies. But Yukari's going to need all the prayers she can get if she's going to drive safely."
As Yukari-sensei's car began to leave the driveway, it zipped by us at a speed I was sure was less than legal. Tomo made a sound that was half-astonishment, half-awe.
"I see," Yomi said as, ahead of us, Yukari-sensei accidentally went into reverse, made her car drive backwards in a circle, then readjusted the gears and managed to leave the driveway.
Kurosawa-sensei let out a long-suffering sigh, and I saw that she had raised a hand to rub her forehead. "I wish I could have fit all of you in my car."
"Wow," Tomo said, awestruck. "I want to learn to drive like that someday."
"Don't you dare think about that," Yomi grumbled. "You'll get so many speeding tickets, they'll have to make a new position just to give you them all."
"I won't be able to get a ticket when I'm part of the police force, Yomi," Tomo said matter-of-factly. "Don't be stupid."
"They can give officers tickets," Yomi shot back as Kurosawa-sensei also began to leave Chiyo-chan's driveway, albeit at a slower speed than Yukari-sensei and without driving backwards.
"Not if those officers do a badass job of taking down criminals," Tomo said.
"And how would you do a badass job of taking down criminals, exactly?" Yomi sounded as if she regretted speaking of speeding tickets in the first place, but I hadn't heard much of Tomo's aspirations for a career, so I was interested as she spoke of breaking up kidnappers, gambling dens, and cults.
"And I'll do it all with a gun and a katana," Tomo finished with a pretend swipe of a sword.
"A katana," Yomi repeated, her voice filled to the brim with sarcasm. "You're going to defeat bad guys with a katana."
"Don't talk crap about katanas, Yomi," Tomo said, as we turned onto a main road; ahead of us, Yukari-sensei's car served from side to side, with occasional side trips to the other lane.
Tomo sounded somewhat serious for a moment, just as she had when she had thanked Yukari-sensei for driving us earlier. I wondered if the summer heat was making her feel lethargic.
"Okay, okay, I'll stop talking about how katanas aren't useless," Yomi said. "But you'd need a partner, right? Someone to make sure you wouldn't cause complete destruction to the police force?"
"That would be you, Yomi," Tomo said, and then abruptly straightened up to look at the windshield better. "Nyamo-sensei, hurry up! Yukari-sensei's getting ahead!"
"It's not a race," Kurosawa-sensei said, although I swore that the car increased its speed, if only slightly.
I heard something that sounded like a sniff, and glanced over at Yomi, who looked pensive.
"You could drive," I said to her, wondering if she wanted to be left alone for a moment, but thinking I should say something anyway. "That way, there'd be no speeding tickets."
"What—oh—" Yomi adjusted her glasses, swallowed, fiddled with her hair, then glanced over at me with something that looked like an approximation of a smile. "You're right. I guess I could drive."
Tomo, who had been cheering on Kurosawa-sensei, despite the latter's protests that she couldn't drive above the speed limit, glanced back at us. "Did you say you could drive, Yomi?"
"No, but in your fantasy of becoming a police officer, and me being your partner, I'd drive so you wouldn't crash the car."
"I wouldn't crash the car," Tomo said, offended.
"You would," Yomi said, as though she knew exactly what would happen. "And then I would have to drive it."
"Is it possible," Kurosawa-sensei asked with an emotion close to annoyance, "to not talk about crashing a car?"
We all took a moment to watch the out-of-control whirlwind of energy that was Yukari-sensei's car. Staring at the gray blur, which was moving faster than I thought cars could ever move, I hoped that Chiyo-chan and Osaka might just be able to make it out okay.
"I still want to learn how to drive like that," Tomo said, after a moment of silence.
"That's exactly why you'd crash the car," Yomi said.
We reached the beach house, and Chiyo-chan managed to unlock the door after she finished trembling. Osaka wasn't much better off—her usual dreamy expression was tinged with panic.
"I'm never gonna be afraid of those roller coasters again," she kept saying.
Tomo, meanwhile, had forgotten to take her suitcase from Kurosawa-sensei's car; she was too busy shooting question after question at Yukari-sensei about where our teacher had learned to drive.
"Practice," I overheard Yukari-sensei say as I walked up the beach house's wooden steps, carrying my suitcase in one hand and Tomo's in another. I wondered if Tomo had packed rocks instead of clothes as I struggled to move her suitcase.
At least we were here—at least I could smell the salt and seaweed—and the sight of the beach house's interior of driftwood planks was a pleasant sight for my eyes when I finally reached the door.
Chiyo-chan was seated on the floor a few steps away from the doorway. I slid off my shoes, put the suitcases against the wall, and went to join her.
"H—hi, Sakaki-san," she said when she noticed me. A blush doused her face in light red. "Do you—do you like it?"
Assuming she meant the house, I nodded. I sat down beside her, waiting for her to speak, and catching the scent of warm sand from somewhere, like long ago memories of baking bread.
"You wouldn't have been afraid of—of—the—Yukari-sensei's—" Her eyes glazed over, and she brought her knees up to her chest, as if to make a wall between her and the air, the house, the dented gray car outside.
A question or a statement or a belief—I couldn't tell which Chiyo-chan had spoken, but she needed an answer.
"No." I said the word gently, trying to sooth her fears and keep my own fears inside, where they belonged. "I would have been. Anyone would have. But you're safe now."
It could have been the sunlight streaking in warmly through the windows, or the distance I had put between myself and the school, or the knowledge that Yukari-sensei's driving would terrify anyone.
I was never sure of why, but no eyes were there to stare at me in that moment. There was no fear awoken inside me, no pounding heartbeat, no paralysis that kept me rooted to the ground. I had tensed, waiting for all of it to swoop over me, but the only emotion that I felt was relief.
Chiyo-chan blinked up at me, for even when we were both sitting on the floor, I was still taller than her. "Really?"
"Yes."
A thought of a contented expression stole across her face, but then it slipped away. "Did everyone get their bags in okay?"
"I think so." I glanced over towards where I had left the door open, and I could see the five of them still out there, silhouetted against the pale brown sand, framed in the wooden doorway. They were like a photograph, like a treasure, and I wanted to never look away.
And then Tomo tore up the steps, Yomi just behind her.
"We need to smash a watermelon!" Tomo announced, taking a few steps into the room, throwing her arms up in the air as if having just won an award.
"Take your shoes off," Yomi said, as she did so herself. "And we do not need to smash a watermelon."
"But it's fun!" Tomo whined, turning around to stare at Yomi, who let out a sigh.
"First of all," she said, setting her suitcase down by the door, "we would need a watermelon—"
"Which I brought with me," Tomo said, and my aching shoulder blades seemed to light up in pain as I realized that must have been what had in Tomo's suitcase.
"Why would you do that—?" Yomi asked as she stood up, her long auburn hair swaying as she did so.
"I knew that you would forget it," Tomo said. "And geez—" I saw her shoulders slump, like she had enough of making herself watch a particularly annoying perfume commercial, "—will you stop showing off?"
"I'm not showing off," Yomi said, as she pushed past Tomo towards Chiyo-chan and me; her feet tapped in a steady rhythm on the smooth wooden floor as she walked over. "That's all in your head. And this is Chiyo-chan's beach house. Not yours."
Yomi sat down beside me, her left leg tucked partly underneath her; the other leg she positioned so that her knee faced the celling, and her right arm wrapped around it, as if she was holding together something fragile.
"But it's a great beach house," Tomo said as she turned to stare at Yomi, crossing her arms while she did so.
"That doesn't belong to you," Yomi said, glancing back up at her.
"I—I really don't mind if you want to smash a watermelon, Tomo," Chiyo-chan said, still sounding a little shaken. "I, um, I don't think we have a bat, though."
"See!" Tomo beamed a triumphant grin at Yomi, who looked as though she wished there was a bat lying around so she could use it on Tomo's head.
"You can't smash a watermelon by hoping the protons and neutrons fly apart," Yomi said. "Physics doesn't work like that."
"I know that," Tomo said, as she sat down with a thump beside Yomi. "I can use my famous karate chop on it instead. Don't be stupid, Yomi."
"You've never even done karate," Yomi said.
Tomo grinned. "Ha! You're stupid!"
"Who's stupid?" Yukari-sensei asked, and I glanced over to see her panting in the doorway. She managed to catch her breath enough to ask, "Is it Nyamo?"
"I'm not the one who drives like a maniac," Kurosuwa-sensei said as she came to stand beside Yukari-sensei, Osaka right behind her. I noticed that Kurosuwa-sensei was not out of breath in the slightest, and that Osaka looked pale at the mention of Yukari-sensei's driving.
"I'm not the one who teaches sports for a living," Yukari-sensei said.
"Remember that time you were trying to show your homeroom class how to play soccer?" Kurosuwa-sensei asked.
Yukari-sensei sighed. "They all looked like they were dying of boredom. I thought I could try to wake them up a bit."
"By hitting us in the head with a soccer ball you threw at us," Tomo put in. "That's not waking us up, that's giving us a concussion."
"Don't lie like that," Yukari-sensei said. "Or I won't teach you how to drive." She folded her arms. "Anyway, I never intended to hit you in the head."
I heard Chiyo-chan whimper, and I glanced over at her to see that she looked like she could very well throw up. "Yukari-sensei's…going to teach Tomo…?" She couldn't finish her sentence; the idea of it must have been terrifying.
"No," I said. "They wouldn't get out of the driveway."
Chiyo-chan sighed, relieved, but whatever she was going to say next was halted by Tomo saying,"What do you mean, we wouldn't get out of the driveway?"
I glanced over at Tomo; she looked livid, but behind the anger I thought I saw some sense of humor dancing in her eyes.
"Physics," I said, and left it at that.
I had forgotten what it was like to feel the grainy, pale sand baking under my feet, and hear the waves crashing in their soothing rhythm from only a few feet away. I had forgotten, too, that the yellow bikini I had brought with me was more revealing than I would like, but as long as Tomo or Osaka didn't make any more quips about me being an "American," I supposed that I would be fine.
I sat down on the sand, wanting to take the sight of the beach in for a while before rushing into the sea. It was smooth, but as I was sitting in front of the line of seashells that marked the place where the waves wandered up to, it wasn't damp.
I could never get over the fact that sand felt so different that dirt. Gardening with my mom, the dirt always seemed so crumbly, so much like it could break up into millions of pieces of dark brown earth. But here, the sand was already in pieces, and I wondered if that was why it felt so silky to the touch.
"You know them hemorrhoids…?"
I darted a glance to the left, and saw that Osaka was sitting next to me. Not that I was bothered that she had wanted to sit next to me—but then—why hemorrhoids, out of nowhere, just dropping out of her brain and out of her mouth?
"…Ehh?.." was all I could think of to utter. I liked Osaka well enough, but this was beyond even my scope of daydreaming.
"Some folks call 'em hemorrhoids," Osaka continued, as if we had been naturally discussing them, as if I wasn't sitting there with a flummoxed expression, "but others call 'em 'roids. Why does the one not have an 'h' in it? Which one's right?"
It doesn't have an 'h' because referring to them as 'roids was simpler for people who weren't medical professionals. It's slang. They're the same word.
If only I could have had those words seep down into my throat and fall from my tongue—but that would be rude, to launch into an explanation and make Osaka feel stupid.
"Would it be under 'h' or 'r' in the dictionary?" Osaka asked.
"…I don't know," I said, although I suspected that it would be 'h'.
We sat in silence for a few moments, or at least as much silence as could be gathered from the waves sounding in their cacophony of foam and clear water. Sunlight glinted off the mounds of shells lying in piles in front of us. If I squinted, I could see their colors, the pale oranges and deep blues and subtle browns and lazy purples, all arranged against slivers of calcium carbonate.
"I've always wanted to go to the ocean and ride a dolphin," Osaka said.
"…That sounds nice," I said, and it was true. It did sound like a good idea, to swim out into the sea until one's arms and legs ached in a pleasant sort of way, to taste the salt of the waves, to feel the seaweed taunting one's toes. And then a dolphin would appear, gray skin glinting wetly in the light of the moon, almost soft in its movements despite its large size.
I would swing myself up onto its back, as gently as I possibly could, and then wrap my hands around its fin. We would go swimming off into the night, the dolphin and I, feeling the cool air around us as we went faster and faster still—
"Look at you two space cadets," Yomi's voice, teasing yet confused, entered my ears with a jolt. "What are you two thinking about?"
"We were thinking about 'rhoids," Osaka said, sounding as if she had just woken up from a particularly pleasant dream.
The rest of the afternoon was spent swimming.
I didn't mind swimming as much as I disliked other sports, I thought as I floated on my back, feeling the waves roll underneath me. It was only bad when I was made to enter a relay race or a competition because the coach thought I would win. And I usually did win.
But swimming like this, free of cholrine-flavored water and those plastic knob-ropes that separated lanes, was much more peaceful. The ocean had always seemed pleasant to me on family vacations, and I was glad to know that fact hadn't changed.
I turned over with a splash, and then started to comb through the water with my arms, and kick with my feet. The sun warmed my back, and I could taste salt on my tongue. Water lapped around me like it was saying hello.
And then a hand wrapped around my ankle, slimy and cold, and yanked downward.
I let myself leave the water and be pulled backwards into the chilly air. Whoever had gotten hold of me wasn't very strong, since I hadn't gone underwater.
I felt sand brush against my toes. The hand vanished from my ankle.
I turned around to see Tomo pop her head out from underwater, looking abashed.
"Did you see that crab?" she asked me. "It was gigantic! I seriously thought it was going to eat me. Did it grab you too?"
"Crabs don't have hands," I said evenly, and splashed her in the face.
Tomo gaped at me in astonishment—I wondered with a pang of unease if she had expected me to hit her as revenge—but then a smirk burst open on her face, and she splashed me back.
A stray bead of water must have struck Yomi, who was swimming nearby, for a wall of water came from her direction and made Tomo sputter.
This dissolved into an all-out fight; eventually, Osaka and Chiyo-chan teamed up against the three of us. They were declared the winners, and I was never sure of how they did this, exactly.
Still, the water fight made me realize how much fun I could have with the four of them, and it made me realize, too, that I had forgotten the scent and the sight of the underside of the ocean.
At one point, I had swum up behind Yomi in an attempt to splash her. Upon ducking underwater, so that she wouldn't see me, I had seen an expanse of thin gray sand spread out below me in an everlasting landscape. Particles of glittering sand swirled around like clouds, and a velvety green haze overshadowed it all. It was calm, and filled me with a sensation of peace that I had not felt in a very long time.
It was not that being underwater simply felt wet. No, it was like I was cocooned in smooth, sun-shot layers of heavy cloth, except I could always move forward, always continue on my way into deeper and still deeper calm.
I still remembered that moment later, even after we had all scrambled out of the sea and wrapped ourselves in our towels, after we had showered and gotten dressed in clean clothes, after Nyamo-sensei had taken over making dinner from Yukari-sensei, who had burned herself in an attempt to cook some stir-fry.
"Thank you—I still don't see why I couldn't have helped," Yukari-sensei grumbled as Nyamo-sensei set a bowl of steaming ramen noodles, chicken, and vegetables in front of her.
"Because then you would have ended up trying to flip the noodles in the air, and they would have landed on your head," Nyamo-sensei said with such conviction that I wondered if that had, indeed, happened.
"A noodle hat," Osaka said, beaming as she neatly snapped her chopsticks apart. "Thank you, Nyamo-sensei."
I murmured my own thanks, and began to eat my own ramen, hoping to hear what a noodle hat would look like.
"I wonder what how a noodle hat would taste," Tomo mused as she slurped down her bowlful of ramen.
"Crunchy," Osaka said, starting in on her noodles in small bites. "The noodles would dry up, right? Because all of 'em would stick to the person's head."
"They wouldn't brush the noodles off?" Tomo almost choked as she swallowed the last few bites of her meal.
"Naw," Osaka said. "They'd stick right on, and the person wouldn't be able to get 'em off."
Chiyo-chan swallowed a bite of her own meal, then said, "Noodles can clump together a lot. Whenever I make udon for some breakfast, they stick together when I first start to cook them. It's because of the starch."
"Say that again," Tomo said, leaning forward in surprise.
Chiyo-chan blinked, then said, "Noodles can—"
"No," Tomo said, waving her hands in impatience. "I mean, you make breakfast?"
"Yes," Chiyo-chan said, sounding slightly confused. "I do. For myself, and my parents."
"Wow," Tomo said, impressed. "And all I can do is burn toast. You're like a tiny perfect human being."
Chiyo-chan frowned, annoyed. "I'm not tiny. I'm just younger than you."
"Tomo," Yomi interjected, as she finished chewing a bite of food, "can you not call the friend who invited you to her beach house tiny?"
"Okay, okay, stop pestering me," Tomo said, folding her arms. She glanced over at Yukari-sensei and Nyamo-sensei, both of whom were finishing their dinners. "Has Yukari-senei ever had noodles fall on her head?"
"No," Yukari-sensei said, then immediately picked up her bowl, tipped it towards her mouth, and slurped down chicken and noodles.
"Yes," Nyamo-sensei interjected. "There was that one time were you tried to hit me with the pan and forgot you were cooking."
Yukari-sensei coughed, having eaten too many noodles, and then managed to say, "I didn't forget."
"The noodles flew out of the pan and landed on Yukari's face and hair," Nyamo-sensei continued, amused. "And she had been cooking for a while, so the noodles were still hot."
"Were you burned by the noodles, Yukari-sensei?" Chiyo-chan asked, her forehead scrunched in worry.
Yukari-sensei crossed her arms, a replica of Tomo for a moment, then muttered, "I tossed them at Nyamo before they could burn me."
Tomo laughed hysterically, as if the best comedian in the world had spoken.
"I wonder if we should have a food fight after dinner," Osaka said, but the only answer she received was Tomo laughing.
Yomi sighed. "We get that you think that what Yukari-sensei said was funny, Tomo."
Tomo grinned. "Good, I wasn't sure. Now, seeing as it's nighttime—you all know what that means, right?"
"Ghost stories?" Osaka asked hopefully.
"No," Tomo said, then reconsidered. "Well, yeah, those too, but I was actually thinking of fireworks!"
"Oh," Osaka said. "They're not too bad either. Loud, though."
"I'm way ahead of you, Tomo," Yukari-sensei said. "I brought them with me."
"I knew there was a reason why you're my favorite teacher," Tomo said, jumping to her feet.
Yukari-sensei smiled, joy smoothing her previous annoyance. She glanced towards Nyamo-sensei, a triumphant expression crossing her face. "Why didn't we bring out the fireworks earlier?"
"I hadn't finished telling them about your little cooking fiasco," Nyamo-sensei said, picking up her bowl and chopsticks, and standing up from her seat.
"It wasn't a fiasco," Yukari-sensei said, frowning.
Nymao-sensei began to walk over towards the sink and didn't answer, although I thought I saw the shadow of a smile perch on her lips.
"I can go get the matches!" Tomo said, bouncing up out of her chair. She turned to Chiyo-chan. "Where are the matches?"
"I have them," Yukari-sensei said.
"Then let's light up some rockets!" Tomo cheered, and promptly ran out the door.
"Do you need help cleaning up, Nyamo-sensei?" Chiyo-chan asked as the sound of rapid footsteps on sand trailed away into silence.
"I can help clean," Osaka offered.
"Me too," Yomi said, picking up some empty bowls.
"And me," I said, making my way over to the sink, Chiyo-chan following me
"Thank you," Nyamo-sensei said; she glanced over and smiled at me as I drew closer. I smiled back.
Yomi brought the bowls over to us, and proceeded to wash them; Chiyo-chan helped her. I rinsed the bowls off, and Nyamo-sensei dried them with an extra towel.
"Wow, look at them all flock to you," I heard Yukari-sensei say to Nyamo-sensei. "Like baby birds."
Osaka, who was gathering cups, glanced at Yukari-sensei. "We could wear bowls for hats after we dry them," she suggested. "They won't be noodles, but it could still be fun."
"I guess it could be," Yukari-sensei agreed. "But you know what's better?"
"What?" Osaka said, her eyes widening in expectation.
"Wearing a book that you need to bring to class as a hat, so you won't forget it," Yukari-sensei said, her words slathered with sarcasm.
"I get it," Osaka said. "Like a sailboat hat made of paper."
"Somewhat," Yukari-sensei said. "Hey, Nyamo, can you hurry up with those dishes? How long does it take to wash bowls anyway?"
"Longer if you talk," Nyamo-sensei said as Chiyo-chan passed me a sudsy bowl to rise. "Maybe you should go look for Tomo and make sure she doesn't set anything on fire."
"Don't worry, I left the matches in my car," Yukari-sensei said, and I felt Chiyo-chan stiffen beside me. I gave her a sympathetic look, and saw that her fingers had tightened around the rim of a bowl she was scrubbing.
"Did you leave the matches beside the fireworks?" Nyamo-sensei asked, dread filling her voice at the same temperature and speed that snow would fill an empty bucket during a blizzard.
"Yes," Yukari-sensei said. "Is that a problem—? Oh."
"Really, Yukari," Nyamo-sensei said, half-tossing the towel she was using against the countertop in frustration. "I mean, use your brain. It's filled with English, so why don't you—"
"Okay, okay," Yukari-sensei snapped, heading over to the door and slipping on her shoes. "I'll go out and make sure Tomo hasn't caused any explosions while you continue your little cozy cleaning-up thing." She shut the door behind her with an annoyed thwap.
"I think I might head outside too," Yomi said, popping the small bubble of silence the room had been enfolded in for a moment. "Just…just to…"
"We'll be out in five minutes or so," Nyamo-sensei said.
"Okay," Yomi said, sounding relieved. I heard the sounds of her putting her shoes on behind us, and then the sound of the door swinging open and closed.
"Sometimes Yukari just…" Nyamo-sensei muttered beside me, and then she caught herself, aware that Chiyo-chan seemed worried. "It's okay, Chiyo-chan, she's just in a bit of a mood. It'll blow over once she gets started on the fireworks."
"I hope her mood doesn't decide to rise into the sky and explode," Osaka said, placing her stack of cups down by Chiyo-chan, who startled at the clatter. "That won't look good at all."
"No, it won't," Nyamo-sensei agreed, and then glanced over at me, looking as if she wanted to change the subject away from Yukari-sensei and her mood. "Sakaki-san, you swam well out there today. Have you ever been in any competitions?"
I almost dropped the bowl I was rising; for a second, all I could do was watch the water from the faucet curve around the lip of the bowl in a clear, effortless dance. It was so simple, I thought, to keep moving forward. And yet at the same time, if gravity was reversed, it would be impossible; the only action I would be able to do then was move backward.
"Um," I said, shaking myself out of that train of thought, and readjusting my grip on the bowl. Water splashed over my fingers. "I, uh, no. I haven't. Been in any. My middle school didn't have much of a team."
"I see," Nyamo-sensei said, giving me an encouraging smile, and I wondered for a heart-stopping second if she knew. She was smart, she had to have picked up on something.
"Well," she continued, as I handed my bowl to her to dry it. "if you ever wanted to join the team at school, I'm the coach, so I could give you some tips about competitions, but I doubt you'd need any advice about swimming."
"Thank you," I said, and then, feeling my stomach curdle in self-hatred as the words dropped out of my mouth, I added, "I'd like to join. It sounds fun. I'll think about it."
"Good," Nyamo-sensei said, smiling once more. "There's another student in your year, Kagura-san, who was planning to join. She's in my homeroom—" a note of pride clearly rang out in her words, "—so you may might not have met her, but she also enjoys athletics."
Enjoys athletics. I hoped that this Kagura-san wasn't one of those girls who dedicated their lives to sports. That hope was soon overtaken by the need to stop vomit from spewing out of my throat and onto the bowl I had just cleaned. Thankfully, I was able to keep everything down.
"Sakaki-san?" Osaka's voice wafted into my ears, and I glanced around to see that she hadn't left our little washing-up group, but instead was standing next to Chiyo-chan.
"Yes?" I made myself ask.
I wanted to wash my mouth, rinse it out with seawater. Maybe the bitter, cold taste of it would get rid of the residue of half-digested food that seemed to have crawled up my throat and laid itself down to rest on my tongue.
"You know how in dreams you can sometimes control what you do?" Osaka asked.
"Yes," I said.
"What do you think would happen if you summoned a hawk and an eggplant before New Year's? Would you still get good luck?" Osaka asked.
"You'd also need Mount Fuji," I said. "Either way, I could see how you might have more good luck then you would generally have."
"Yeah," Osaka said, satisfied. "That sounds right. Maybe tobacco or a fan would help too."
The door creaked open behind the four of us, and I turned around to see Tomo in the doorway, grinning as if she had just won the hardest argument she had ever been in.
"Yukari-sensei says to get out there and help her set up the fireworks, or she'll set all of them off herself," she said. "Yomi was smart for once, and came out first. I expected more from you, Chiyo-chan—aren't you supposed to be some kind of genius?"
"Yukari's serious about those fireworks," Nyamo-sensei said, setting down the final cup she had to dry. "We'd better get out there—I don't want her to have all the fun."
I crouched beside the water, feeling the chill of the nighttime air rising off the waves; it crawled through my shirt and nestled against my skin. I shivered, tensing at the sound of exploding rockets and Tomo's shouts of joy behind me.
The reflections of the light of the fireworks seemed to pool and seep into one another as the dark waves rocked back and forth. I watched as blue mixed with green, yellow flickered against orange, red overshadowed white and tinted it pink. And above all, the smoke from the lights remained—faint, wraithlike, hinting at their former power; they swirled over the water in a sickening dance of gray against navy blue.
As the fireworks continued to rise with a shriek and explode with a bang, I caught glimpses of my face among all the fragmented particles of light. It was a serious face, a face with pale shadows underneath the eyes, and a set jaw that never trembled in the presence of others. I stared at it and wondered how it could be my own.
Osaka plopped herself down into the sand beside me. "Looking for dolphins?" she asked.
"No," I said, feeling a prick of shame; I had forgotten that dolphins might be out here tonight. "Myself."
"Oh." Osaka pondered this for a moment, then said, "I tried to look for myself when staring into a puddle once. It didn't work. But the thing is, you've gotta look for yourself in places other people aren't around. Other people will think stuff about you that won't be true, but you can't believe them if they say it to you, 'cause then you'll believe in false stuff about yourself, and that won't help you."
I traced patterns in the sand with a fingertip, feeling the rough grains slide away from me, even as they seemed to be solidified in one great mass of ground. "But what if they go on thinking it, and you aren't able to do anything about it?"
I waited for the fear to creep up my spine, for the eyes to turn to me and not let me go, for the paralysis to steal into my heart and make me give up trying to do anything.
And there was a chill that settled in my stomach, or a sensation that someone glanced in my direction for a moment longer than necessary, or a feeling that my heart slowed for a moment, but then it was gone.
It was gone, and I could breathe again. For whatever reason, it had been just a bit worse than when I had spoken with Chiyo-chan earlier, but perhaps because it was so dark out. The sea reflected the stars, to be sure, but that light was so small, it was soon overtaken by the navy-black shade of the sky.
"Then," Osaka said, and I realized with a shudder that she was still there, that she hadn't left, that she was frowning in serious consideration of my question. "Then, you just gotta ignore them. They don't care about you, really. They just think of—of a false you. You need to find the people who care about the actual you, instead."
I stared out at the water for a moment, hearing the soft crash of the waves as they enveloped their siblings, over and over and over. I could smell the fireworks, a sharp, bitter scent, almost a campfire scent, but darker and drier.
I would not cry. I was not going to cry over the possibility that Osaka could have noticed much more than she let on, and had wanted to offer me help. Me, off all people, with a stone face and bruised fists and—and—
In the end, I didn't say anything, just nodded once. The two of us sat there in silence, watching the ocean for the shadows of dolphins, listening to the small explosions behind us, until all the fireworks were used up, and it was time to leave the beach and enter the house for sleep.
I stared up at the celling, feeling small and far away as I laid on my sleeping mat. Waves spluttered in a far-away mixture of water and air and seam foam. Tomo snored beside me, a repetitive wheeze that effortlessly swept its way into my ear.
I had to fall asleep. My muscles ached, pleasant and draining, and my head felt empty. Or perhaps it was full of the events of a good day instead—perhaps that was why it was like I could feel my neurons slow in their rapid communications, like I could feel the intricate gray cells aching with a need for rest.
The moonlight passed through the windows as if glass was an object that didn't exist. Pale white-gray light spread over the shapes of my sleeping friends, rising with their slow-moving chests, and following the movement of an arm or a leg in the midst of sleep.
This trip had been the right choice. I could feel a strengthen connection with the others sleeping beside me, an invisible grasp expressed in teasing and jokes, smiles and conversations, confessions of weakness and administrations of advice.
I shut my eyes. I inhaled. I exhaled.
I relaxed against the soft fabric of the mat. I thought to myself that it would be okay now, that I would be able to relax not only in a wooden house at night, but also in a cement school in the day.
I had become tied to the six people who were drowning in dreams beside me, and I didn't want to ever have them unravel away from me, becoming statues that I no longer recognized.
I was going to stay with them. I was going to be their friend.
I was going to trust, to try to trust, that they would do the same to me.