Music Lover's Alert: "Call Your Girlfriend" by Robyn

Chapter 25 Close Call

Yugi Moto lay on his stomach on the double bed in his dorm room talking to Tea Gardner on his cell-phone. After eloping with Ishizu and showing their marriage license to the student housing staff, they had been assigned a special dorm room with only one bed which they were expected to share. Ishizu and Yugi had not consummated their marriage yet, but sometimes Yugi woke up to find Ishizu's strong arms fully encircling his petite body. On mornings when he had to be somewhere, he found it quite inconvenient when he had to wiggle out of her grasp.

"I kind-of dated a guy for a while, but it all fell apart when I found out about the you-know-what and realized how much I love you. So…" Tea said hesitantly, "Are you seeing anyone?"

Yugi stared at Ishizu's numerous pairs of shoes, which were lined up neatly by the door. He never truly appreciated how many pairs of shoes a woman could own until he started living with one. His grandfather certainly never kept that many shoes around the house. "Sort-of—Tea, how many pairs of shoes do you have?" Yugi said hastily.

"Come on, Yugi! Don't change the subject. What's she like? Is it serious?" Tea insisted.

"She has fourteen pairs of shoes," Yugi said thoughtfully.

Tea laughed a little. "Well, she's obviously not a dancer. I can't even count the shoes I have. So, is it serious? Do you think it will last?"

"Um… I don't know if it will last. She's nice, but I miss you, Tea. It's just not the same," Yugi replied.

"Oh Yugi!" Tea cried, "You always know how to make me feel special. So, what's her name?"

"Ishizu," Yugi stated without enthusiasm.

"Ishizu? Is that spelled the same as the Ishizu we know? Is that a common name in Egypt?" Tea wondered.

"Um… yeah."

"Yugi, you're acting weird. It's like you don't want to talk to me or something. What's wrong?"

"Ishizu's brother Marik died in the… you know." Yugi said, almost choking on his words.

"Wait, so you are dating Ishizu Ishtar! Yugi, why didn't you tell me?" Tea said, insecurity edging in her voice.

"It's not Ishtar anymore, Tea." Yugi said softly.

Tea was quiet for a few moments, then asked, "So, her husband died, too?"

"I'm… I'm her husband now—but it's not like that. It's complicated," Yugi tried to explain.

"What do you mean, Yugi? How can you get married and have it be 'not like that?'" Tea said, sounding upset.

Yugi opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say another word, Ishizu stormed into the room. She snatched the phone out of Yugi's hand and tore out the battery. She set the battery down on a small table beside the bed and handed the empty phone back to Yugi. Yugi stared up at his wife, speechless as she crossed her arms and glared down at him with hot blue flames in her eyes.

"Yugi, what cell-phone company do we use?" Ishizu said impatiently.

"Is this a trick question? Everyone knows that there is only one cell-phone company that services international calls: Global Communications."

Ishizu's voice grew more heated, and her eyes smoldered with dismal intent, "First of all, international calls don't exist anymore. Japan is just a territory now, not a nation. Do you realize who runs Global Communications?"

Yugi cautiously lifted himself off his stomach and retreated from her slowly until he had his back pressed against the pillows. "Um… Bakura, right?" he said in a small voice.

"That's right, and do you realize what that means?" Ishizu said. If she wasn't consciously controlling the volume of her voice, it would have been a yell, but instead it sounded more like a crazed whisper.

Yugi drew his knees into his chest and hugged them. "No, what does it mean?"

"You can't tell anyone about the millennium items, not even your best friends, over the phone. Bakura is listening to everything you say."

"How did you know that I was about to tell her?" Yugi asked suspiciously.

Ishizu loosened the white scarf that covered her neck and hair, and then let it fall to the floor. There at her throat gleamed the gold eye of the millennium necklace. "I've taken to wearing it constantly. Sometimes it shows me things I don't want to see, but to protect the other millennium items I must wear it. My students ask why I suddenly started wearing the headscarf all the time. So I tell them that I converted to Islam. They applauded me for that." Ishizu took a deep breath. "Yugi, do you realize how hard this is for me?"

"Being Muslim?" Yugi asked.

"No, explaining to my friends why you're not Muslim, too. I just wish you would support me a little more," she said, her voice cracking a little.

Yugi stared at her for a moment, shocked at her display of vulnerability. She hadn't been this upset since the day her brother died. "I'll do what I can to help, but you know that I plan on going back to Japan when this is all over, right? Tea is waiting for me."

Ishizu turned and walked over to a large steel bookshelf which housed all of the textbooks she had read as an undergraduate plus some that she had read for fun. She thumbed through them until she came to one called, "Social Psychology." She pulled it off the shelf and opened the index. After locating what she was seeking, she flipped to the proper page and placed the book in front of Yugi. Yugi released his knees and picked up the book.

There, right before his eyes, was a graph that made him feel queasy. On the vertical axis was "marital satisfaction." One the horizontal axis was "time in years." Two lines flowed across the graph. One was labeled "marriages for love" while the other was labeled "arranged marriages." The line for love initially started higher than the arranged line and sloped upwards slightly. Marital satisfaction for couples who married for love peaked at year three, and then took a plunge. At year five, it intersected the other line and continued to drop over time. However, the line for marital satisfaction in arranged marriages rose steadily over time. By year fifteen, marital satisfaction for couples in arranged marriages soared high above marital satisfaction for couples who had married for love.

Yugi looked up at Ishizu with tears in his purple eyes. "It can't be! My Tea… How could I ever stop loving my Tea?"

Ishizu climbed into bed with Yugi and held him in her arms. "You might never stop loving Tea for all I know. The millennium necklace does not show me everything. Keep in mind that this data is based on averages, and there are exceptions to the rule. All I want you to do is to give this marriage a real chance, not some half-hearted try. If you still feel this strongly about her after you graduate, then by all means go back to her. Just don't expect her to wait in the meantime. You can't tell her about the millennium items anyway, so just tell her that you're married and leave it at that."

"I already did tell her, right before you took the battery out of my phone."

"Good."

Yugi leaned into his wife's lean and firm body, pressing his spiky red-tipped black hair under her chin. As an archaeologist, Ishizu had a little more muscle than Tea from lifting heavy pieces of equipment. "Ishizu, do you have anything else in that book to make this easier?"

"Maybe." Ishizu reached her arm under Yugi's and flipped to the beginning of the book, then turned the pages forward one-by-one, scanning them briefly as she went. After skipping a few basic concepts, she came to a section on cognitive dissonance and stopped. She drew her hand back to Yugi's waist and gave him a little squeeze as he started to read.

Works Cited:

An exploratory study of love and liking and type of marriages. Gupta, Usha; Singh, Pushpa. Indian Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol 19(2), Jul 1982, 92-97.