12.
The doorbell rang that morning before the hospital had opened. I was in my school uniform, getting ready for school. I ran to the front door and opened it.
A girl about my age with beautiful but painfully short caramel-colored hair was standing there, a dying, blood-soaked man in a business suit on her back. I saw a trail of blood behind them - she'd dragged him all the way here.
"Please…" she gasped. "Please… my brother Sora… he's been hit by a car…"
"Dad!" I yelled, running into the depths of the house for him. "Dad, someone's dying out here!"
Dad run into the front entryway, and swore. "Get him inside!" he snapped. "I'll take him!"
My Dad got Sora onto a hospital bed, hooked him up to machines, tried to fix as much as he could. Then, as the heart rate monitor went haywire, my father ran into his office. I knew what that meant.
He was going to try calling Karakura City. Sora needed major surgery to survive - he needed to be cut open and physically healed by hand by surgeons.
I held up a clipboard, trying matter of factly to get the distracted, crying, distraught girl's information. "Excuse me," I said, trying to distract her from the bleeping heart rate monitor and the shouting down the hall. She turned back to me, confused. "Focus," I said. "Your name?"
"Inoue Orihime," she said tearfully.
"Who can we call for you?"
"No one… no one… it's just me and my brother…" And here she started sobbing again. I looked at her pityingly.
Just then, the heart rate flatlined. She looked up and gasped. My Dad ran swearing into the hospital room, just as the blaring of paramedic sirens sounded outside the hospital. Somehow, miraculously, Karakura City had sent help - the presence of the little girl could have had something to do with that.
I watched the crying girl run after the paramedics who were wheeling her dead brother into the van. "Onii-chan! Onii-chan! Please don't leave me alone!" she screamed in tears, running after him.
Please don't leave me alone.
No. No. Blood. Screaming. Fuck.
I stumbled into the back of our house, horrible, vicious images tumbling through my mind. My mother's dead face. The smell and feel of mud and blood. Sheets of grey rain. A lavender handkerchief. Being yanked screaming into a white van. The ghost girl being swallowed by the river.
I curled up in the hospital bathroom, kicking and screaming, crying my eyes out. I couldn't stay here. I had to leave. I had to leave.
I stood shakily, dizzy. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stumbled my way past my sisters, who cried and ran for me. I ran blindly out the back door, shutting it behind me, their cries falling away as I ran somewhere - anywhere - else.
I was homeless on the streets in the darker parts of Tokyo for a period of a few months. I didn't go home once.
I drifted off, wandering the streets, carrying my knife, unsteady and unstable. I saw my reflection in puddles in shop mirrors. I'd grown tall and thin, very thin, pale, with long, shaggy, unkempt hair and dead eyes.
I slept behind garbage cans, stole food, but usually didn't eat much. I considered suicide occasionally, idly, the way one might the weather. I got into fights sometimes - almost always because of my "Yankee" female gang girl hair color, and sometimes in a sexual way. Especially with my knife? I never lost a fight. I became vicious and sarcastic in addition to being cold.
After the first few fights, my anger drained out of me, and then that was all that was left of me. Viciousness, sarcasm, and cold.
I would beat the shit out of whole gangs of men, slamming a particularly sexually aggressive man up against a wall, putting my huge-ass knife to his throat. "You want to mess with me, you fuckwad?" I growled. "Huh?!"
I got a reputation even around the streets for being "crazy" - a "nutcase."
The worst part, though, was the way ordinary people looked at me. Either they would glare at me in cold fear, even ordering me away from them, or they would avoid my eyes entirely. It made me feel like an alien. Absurdly, the worst part was feeling alone.
People texted me a lot at first, demanding to know where I was, and then begging me to help them find me. Tatsuki, Mizuho, and Keigo were obviously especially distraught, in retrospect. Even my father tried contacting me. I hid from all passing policemen. I answered no phone calls. I didn't want to be found. After a while, my phone ran out of battery and the texts and calls stopped.
For some reason, one moment comes to mind. I was sitting in a back alley, leaning up against a wall, knife in one hand, staring with a distant kind of interest at the dead cell phone in the other hand. I looked up - and saw a ghost standing there.
The grin that stretched across my thin face was alien and maybe a little hysterical. I knew how I looked - dirty and bloody, long unkempt hair. "Hey," I said. "How you doin?" I laughed because I didn't know what else to do.
The ghost of the man, kind of a stick in the mud with really tight pulled-up pants and a button-up shirt, stared around himself for the human I must be talking to. "Are you crazy, young girl?" he asked.
Maybe I could just relate to him. I felt like a ghost.
"I don't know," I said quietly. "Maybe I am." I smiled again. What else was there to say?
The ironic part? I'd gotten what I always wanted. I was a master of fighting, and by now I could see all ghosts perfectly. When I finally didn't care whether or not I made a mistake - that was when I stopped making mistakes.
There was something philosophical in that, but I was too tired to figure out what it was.
Eventually it all came to a head. I went without eating for too many days. I realized this was when the world started spinning - and then I woke up to find my face had eaten concrete.
I lay there for a while, pondering life, the universe, and everything. Maybe I should go back. Part of me balked against the idea… but why?
I realized I'd forgotten why I left. Some catharsis had come into play, some spell of dark fury and grief had been lifted from me, somewhere along the way, while I wasn't looking.
Maybe all this was just what I'd needed to do all along. I got the feeling Mom would have understood that - if she wasn't too angry with me, that was.
I put those days behind me, in a moment of great realization. They were in the past.
Slowly, I stood up, and started for home. It was strange - still standing after all this time. I walked through the front door, like a patient - I felt a bit like a patient.
My family gasped and called my name and gathered in the front entry - and they just stared at me. Like I was a stranger.
They didn't know me. I didn't know myself. I was broken, defeated, and I didn't know who I was anymore. I was back home, and just maybe healing.
The question became… Between my fucked up self and my fucked up family, what did I, what did we, do now? Were things too ruined to be fixed?
