Day 14: "Buckets of…"
"Eeyore?" Kagome said. When Keiko didn't reply, she repeated: "Eeyore. Eeyore!"
Keiko's chin jerked off her hand, and she stammered a faint, "Huh-wha?"
Kagome giggled, trying not to compare Keiko's reaction to that of one Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth from a certain animated TV series she used to watch when she was someone else, in another time. Very much in the present, she and Keiko sat in Kagome's bedroom, Keiko in a chair and Kagome sitting on the floor at her feet. She held one of Keiko's feet in her lap, actually, gently painting her friend's toenails with a glimmering, sparkling pink. Kagome had been chattering away at Keiko the whole time, but Keiko had soon drifted off, gazing out the bedroom window and into the night beyond. A frown etched worry lines between her eyebrows—eyebrows Kagome had earlier plucked to perfection. She'd been pampering Keiko all night; the least Keiko could do was listen to Kagome talk!
"Y'know," Kagome said as she bent over Keiko's foot again. "I thought you'd be less stressed now that you've come out of the reincarnation closet, but it looks like I was wrong."
Keiko snorted. "The reincarnation closet. Wow. Of all the closets I've been in, that one's name is just…"
"Well, I don't know what else to call it!" said Kagome. "But seriously. I thought you'd have taken loads of stress off your shoulders at this point. Buckets of it, even! But you seem…"
Keiko looked out the window again. She sighed softly, hand sneaking back under her chin, eyes distant as they stared past her reflection and beyond, into places Kagome did not know how to see, herself. But she saw the tightness around Keiko's eyes, that uncharacteristic tension carving new lines around her thin mouth. Kagome didn't know what to call that look—but then, yes, she did know. It was "brooding." Not a very Keiko thing to do, brood. Sure, Keiko was many things (as anxious as a hen in a foxhouse, high-strung as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, nervous as a horse in a glue factory) but she wasn't the type to brood.
"I guess I'm just worried about disappointing people."
Kagome startled, nearly smudging enamel across the bridge of Keiko's foot. She hadn't been expecting Keiko to speak, too absorbed in studying her expression to notice her lips begin to move. Still, Keiko didn't look at her. Kagome put the lid on her bottle of polish and set it gently to the side.
"Disappointing them?" Kagome repeated. "What do you mean?"
Keiko shrugged. "I'm their guide, almost," she said, still staring out into the dark. "But what if I guide them off the path?" Her lip curled at one corner. "At least when I was in the reincarnation closet, no one could expect anything of me. I got to do my meddling in the dark. Now that I'm in the light, I feel…"
"What?" Kagome asked.
A shudder rippled through her. "I feel eyes on me," said Keiko, rubbing at her arms through the fabric of her sweatshirt. "More of them than ever before."
Kagome felt cold, too, but she tried not to shiver as well. "Oh, Eeyore," was all she said, giving her friend's ankle a comforting path. "Try not to think about it, OK? Just relax and let Spa Tigger take your worries away."
"Thanks." Keiko's grateful smile warmed Kagome right back up again. "You're kind of the best, you know that?"
"Oh. I know." Kagome flipped her hair and winked. "I'm the greatest."
Although Keiko laughed, in Kagome's eyes she still appeared to brood, and the lines around her mouth remaining deep and dark. They passed the night with primping and pampering, but when they at last lay down to sleep, Kagome stared up at the ceiling in the dark to watch the shadows play upon the ceiling of her bedroom. As she listened to Keiko's somnambulant breathing, Kagome wondered how long it would take for her secret, too, to come tumbling out of the reincarnation closet. Watching Keiko suffer made a compelling case for ripping off the band aid early, as far as Kagome was concerned. Once her canon got rolling, should she simply tell everyone about herself? Or should she keep her secret as Keiko had, waiting for everyone to figure it out around her?
Kagome wasn't sure.
All she knew is that Keiko looked stress, and Kagome was not certain she would fare as well as Keiko under the pressure of so many watching eyes.
The eyes Keiko mentioned might just belong to the readers of Lucky Child. It's meeeeetaaaaa! Bet y'all are getting sick and tired of me saying that, huh? XD
Big thanks to the readers of chapter 13, whose comments made my heart soar: C S Stars, xenocanaan, cestlavie and a guest.