Let tears gather in your eyes.
She took a deep breath, the cherry blossoms still in full bloom. Most of them, anyhow, she thought. There were still those who had begun to wilt, dropping from the branches of their trees, littering the long path that would lead her to her new school, the first day of term, the first day of high school, a month since her junior high graduation. Her heart wavered, her breath catching in her throat, and it felt like drowning, drowning on a clear day in April, an uncommon chill settling in her bones, that memory of Saito laying prone on the ground, the pool of blood underneath his head, one arm stretched out on the cold tiles of the corridor—and Toga Himiko, crouched before him, the clear plastic straw in the gore of the wound, her eyes rolled back, lips lifted in a disgusting, quivering smile.
She shuddered, gulping down a fresh breath, the chill that ran through her so cold that she began to sweat. Nothing would happen like that again, would it? No, of course not, she answered herself, shaking her head, picking her pace up, hurrying along the sidewalk amidst the falling blossoms. She was in high school now, and it had been a month since her middle school graduation, since Toga's disappearance. Saito was probably still in the hospital, and there was no chance that Toga would be there, not after everything that had happened, and yet still she had visions of the girl turning to greet her as she pulled open the door of the classroom, her eyes rolled back, that same disgusting, quivering smile.
In such visions, it was always the middle school she had left behind that they were in, as if high school was something so vast, so new, that her imagination could not conjure it up. In such visions, the Toga she had known for the three years of junior high was now replaced wholly by that other girl she had witnessed in the final moments after their graduation ceremony, the knife lying abandoned beside her, the blade glistening in the fading light.
'Hey, Miki, do you have someone you like?'
She heard Toga's words the morning of their graduation, the two of them walking to school side by side as they had every day for almost three years.
She had shrugged, her heart startled into an uncomfortable quickening, not willing to go first for fear of revealing something of herself, something that might be used against her, yet when she had turned to Toga, when she had seen the blush on her cheeks, she had realised the question had not really been about her, that it had simply been an excuse for Toga to give voice to the fact that she had someone she liked.
In that moment, Toga's eyes had glistened, almost as if she were about to cry.
She adjusted the strap of her bag, swinging it around behind her so it no longer hit her in the side as her pace increased. It was easier to remember Toga as she was in that moment, the girl she had thought her to be, yet every time she recalled something of the last three years, the memory of that moment in the school corridor surfaced, Toga hunched over, the straw to her lips, the plastic dyed red with blood.
They said that sometimes girls like Toga hurt people in order to receive the death sentence, that sometimes when you were so hurt yourself, you tried to force others to take responsibility for that pain.
She shook her head as if there was replying to someone, as if the conversation was taking place with another. Toga hadn't been like that though, the look on her face was… she was more alive in that moment than at any point during the three years of junior high.
The Toga Himiko she had thought she had known had died in that moment.
She sniffed, drawing fresh air into her nostrils. Just a summer cold, she told herself, quickly wiping her eyes with the back of her hand to hide the fact that tears were clouding her vision. Just a summer cold, it wasn't as if she was scared; it wasn't as if the horror of those moments in the school corridor had made her interactions with everyone around her so tenuous, so hollow.
During the single month between the end of middle school and the start of high school, she had found herself haunted by the terror that, in the right circumstances, everyone around her might prove to be the same as Toga. In her chest, she harboured a fear that everyone she knew carried with them some indescribable shard of pain in their heart that, if pushed, would drive them to slough off the acceptable shapes they all assumed for the good of others and reveal themselves to be animals in a woodland in which girls such as her stood no chance.
'Do you have someone you like?'
Six words. How could she have known what would happen after that? She didn't understand her own feelings, how could she have been expected to understand the feelings of someone else?
In the distance, the shape of her new high school rose up, red brick and iron gates, a chance to put pain behind her, to start again; a chance to go forward, to forget, to pretend that the past never happened.
Around her, she became conscious of others, a stream moving forward, familiar faces from middle school dressed now in new uniforms, their expressions identical, each one consumed by the same thoughts, the desire to pretend that the past was a foreign country.
Her knuckles were white, she realised, looking down at the hand that grasped the strap of her bag, and in the warmth of April, the petals of cherry blossom above and beneath her, she realised she was shaking.