Suzuki Shigeko had never had a friend before. She would do anything to keep the ones she had.

Even do her math homework. She wished that Dad had been back from his business trip, he was good at math, it had been his favorite subject at school. He had told her so before, though she couldn't remember when. It wasn't like she and Dad spent a lot of time together. She and Dad weren't really close and had never been. Dad was busy putting food on the table, like Mom had always told her, and they couldn't be selfish and take him away from that. Mom had said so. Of course Shigeko didn't always agree, sometimes she missed Dad even though she didn't even know him that well, and surely Mom must have, too.

Mom and Dad at least had to be friends, right?

"No, no, divide for 'x'…" muttered Shigeko as she glanced up at the clock. The was an ant running across the clockface. She could still see the numbers, though. School would be starting soon and math was their first class of the day. Minori had been too busy to do her homework, most nights she was too busy, and it had fallen on Shigeko to help her out.

By doing both of their homework.

But she didn't mind. This was what friends did, they helped each other out in their times of need, and there was no greater time of need than when you were running down the clock on some of the hardest homework known to mankind. Math was impossible. It felt like just yesterday that she had learned her eleven times table and now she was trying to solve for 'x' and 'y' and then draw them on graphing paper.

Why did math need numbers and letters together!?

Letters were for English class and numbers were for math class. Mixing the two was like mixing milk and orange juice, something so wrong that it risked breaking the laws of reality. That was what it felt like, like reality was going to fall apart and she was going to wake up in another world, like one of those shows Hatori liked. The kind where the main character died and then woke up inside of a videogame world with a bunch of pretty girls trying to be his girlfriend but he couldn't pick one because of reasons. She had never understood those shows no matter how many times she and Hatori had watched them together. Minegishi had said that it was ok that she didn't get it, those shows were wish fulfillment for boys who'd never had girlfriends and didn't always remember to shower. Of course that had been mean-

And ant ran across her homework.

"Go away, go back to your hive or…or hill. Whatever ants live in. Please." Said Shigeko as she shook the ant off of her math homework. There were so many bugs everywhere these days. School, her house, even her dollhouse. Maybe that was the world's way of telling her that she was too old to be playing with dolls. She didn't really need to anymore, she had friends, or at least one friend. Minori's friends were still kind of cold to her but that was ok because Minori liked her. Even if she could be kind of mean sometimes…but that was ok. It wasn't like Minori did anything wrong or anything like that.

Anything truly wrong, anyway, since this was really getting close to cheating…

Or maybe this counted as collaboration. Like how different divisions had to collaborate on big projects to make them go faster. She remembered this one time that they had been building…or maybe Dad had told her about….but Dad never told her about his work…but surely he must have at some point. If he hadn't then how would she have known about the massive housing building project that the Japanese Divisions had been working on in time for…for what, again?

The hostile takeover?

Or some other Dad thing. She wished that Dad had spent more time teaching her about math and less time talking about his job. It wasn't like she needed to know about his job, anyway, since she was a girl. Girl's couldn't inherit anything because they went to their husband's families, Dad had said so already before. Even without a brother she was never going to be anything to Dad, anything in Dad's world, even though it seemed like it would have been kind of nice…being in charge…changing things for the better. Or at least trying too…

She felt something on her leg. An ant. She brushed it off.

A nice thought but that was all that it had been, a thought. She would never be in charge of anything, only her own household when she got older. That is if anyone wanted to be her boyfriend or her husband. She kept her head down. She could hear the boys being loud. Boys were always so loud. They were always fighting, too, even when there was nothing to fight about. And why did they have to wear so much cologne all the time? And body spray? And why did they have to make everything gross? What made them talk about gross things in the middle of class? Or the time before class started? And why did Shigeko like them to much?

It didn't matter, none of them would ever like her back, but that was ok. She had a friend now, which was more than she had ever thought that she would get in her life, and she had to be grateful for what she had.

She looked up at the clock. Minori would be there any minute. She felt the hairs on the back of her arms and neck stand up. Minori was close. She had always been able to feel when people had been close. She had always been able to see…she didn't know. That had been weird. She didn't have time to be weird. She had to get this homework done. She was nearly there, she had to just get this last part done…

She raced the clock. The clock was winning.

"Everyone, I have arrived!" said Minori as she threw the classroom door opened like she did every morning. Shigeko quickly wrote down what she thought was the answer o the last math problem and put her pencil down. Not a moment too soon, too. A shadow fell across her desk. The smell of passionfruit body wash and hairspray crawled up her nose. Her ears were filled with the jangling of way more necklaces than the uniform policy allowed.

She didn't have to have a sixth sense to know that Minori was there.

"Suzuki, do you have the homework?" asked Minori as she slammed both hands on Shigeko's desk. Her rings scraped the wood. Her nails clicked against the desk. Minori was impossible to ignore, not that Shigeko knew what possessed her to think about ignoring her friend…even though she could be kind of…a lot, sometimes…

Maybe she just felt like a lot because Shigeko was used to nothing.

"Well?" asked Minori. Shigeko looked up from what she had been doing and nodded, passing her notebook to Minori. Done…well, mostly. She had just been guessing towards the end but, really, with how bad she was at math a guess was probably better than whatever she had come up with.

"Oh my God, thank you. You have no idea how busy I was last night. We went to that new karaoke place, the one downtown by the movie theater, and it was so fun. I mean it's nothing close to the ones downtown but my stupid dad is having me followed again. You're so lucky, Suzuki, your dad doesn't give a fuck what you do." Said Minori

"He kind of cares…" said Shigeko. Dad must have cared about her a little bit at least. She had the feeling…she remembered a time when he had been so mad at her that he had stopped caring about her but that had just been something…something else.

"Well, yeah, I guess. I can't believe you aren't allowed to go out." Said Minori

"My Mom doesn't like it when I leave the castle, I mean the house! The house." Said Shigeko

"She sounds like a total bitch. I can't believe she'd be so unreasonable." Said Minori

"Um…yeah, my Mom can kind of be…that word." Said Shigeko. She knew that she wasn't supposed to talk about her mom that way, it was wrong to talk about anyone that way let alone her own mother, but it was just kind of…kind of true, maybe, and anyway even if it wasn't it wasn't like she could disagree with Minori. Friends didn't disagree with one another, that was just how friendship worked.

"Parents are the worst. It'll be better when we're done with school and in university. Then we can just party all night and during the day you can go to class for both of us. That'll free me up to find some guys for us and get us invited to all the best parties and stuff. It'll be great." Said Minori

"Uh…sure…sure." Said Shigeko. It did sound nice, leaving the castle and hanging out with Minori, even parties sounded fun even though she had never been to one before. The thought of having to do both of their work in university, though, wasn't really something to look forward to. Wasn't university even harder than high school? And wasn't high school even harder than middle school? Middle school was already the hardest thing she had ever had to do in her life…

If she could barely solve for 'x' and then use that number to find 'y' how in the h-word was she ever going to be able to do both her and Minori's school work when they got to university?

"So…where's the rest of it?" asked Minori as she turned the sheet of paper over.

"What do you mean?" asked Shigeko

"This isn't nearly enough work for all of these problems. What, did you skip steps? Come on, nobody's that good." said Minori

"I'm not sure how well I did, I'm not that good at math, but I didn't skip any steps. Or at least I mean I didn't skip any steps on purpose." Said Shigeko

"Did you even try? It looks like you just wrote whatever you felt like down and called it a day. What, you don't want me to pass? You know if you fail I fail, right?" asked Minori

"I know, I know, but the thing is I'm just not very good at math. My Dad is good at math but I didn't get any of those genes from him." Said Shigeko. She had no idea, sometimes, how she could have possibly been Dad's daughter. She knew that when he had been a kid math had been his most favorite thing in the world. To her it was an endless source of headaches.

"You sure you didn't just get dropped on your head as a baby or something?" asked Minori rolling her eyes.

"I wouldn't…know…" said Shigeko. She got a feeling when Minori had said that, a bad one. Something about a room, a bathroom she didn't recognize and…and a loud cracking sound…then fear. She had been so scared and so angry and then…and then….

And ant ran across her desk. She pulled her arms away quickly.

"You might have been, that's why you're so weird sometimes. What even was that just now?" asked Minori

"What do you mean?" asked Shigeko

"That look you just got. That better not have been at me." said Minori

"No, no, of course not! I would never give you a look. It was just…a memory. Like a memory from a dream. That's all." Said Shigeko describing it as best as she could. Sometimes it felt like she had spent her whole life dreaming, like she had dreamt her whole life away. Sometimes, even, when she got up she looked up at the ceiling and thought that this wasn't her life.

But it was, of course, and she should have been grateful. It had never been this good before.

"You're so weird sometimes, Suzuki, you know that?" said Minori before she sat down in her own desk. Shigeko wished that Minori had left her with something else, anything else, even one of the mean things she said about other people. Something to chase these thoughts out of her head.

She was weird.

She had never been much of anything. She had always been less than a mob character, not even a part of the background, a part of the atmosphere. Air, something that was always there but invisible. She didn't know if she wanted to be visible now that she was weird. She had always known that she was different. It felt like everyone else, for her entire life, had been reading from a different script than she had been. Or maybe she had never been given any script to read from in the first place. Everyone else knew what to say and do and feel and be. They'd all had practice. She hadn't. It had always just been her and Mom and sometimes Dad. Maybe if she'd had a little brother or sister, or a big brother or sister, or even just a cousin who came to visit every so often.

But it had always just been her.

Her and her dolls. Shigeko wasn't a little kid, she knew that her dolls didn't come to life at night or anything like that, they were just plastic. They didn't have thoughts or feelings. Any love that she gave them went nowhere and any love that she felt she got from them was just imaginary. Still, sometimes it felt real, real and weird. Like memories from dreams. Like she had actually been their friend…but that was just her being weird too. She didn't have friends or a little brother. Well, she had a friend now.

And she had to work on being better.

She took better notes in class. As soon as the teacher collected the homework she got her notebook out and took the best notes that she had ever taken in her life…or at least it felt like these were the best notes that she had ever taken in her life. She mostly just copied what the teacher wrote on the board. He talked too fast for her to be able to write down every single thing that he said. That was how notetaking went, right?

She couldn't remember.

Sometimes it felt like she had been sleepwalking through her life. Every school day felt like the very first. Not the first day of the school year but the first time she had ever set foot in a school, a real school. First grade. The first time she'd ever had her own desk and real classes. Kindergarten and preschool didn't count. Those were mostly just playtime. She didn't know how she could have made it all the way to middle school without this feeling, she didn't know, normal? Boring? Not new. That was a better word for it.

Not new.

Everything felt new, like a pair of shoes she hadn't broken in yet. That didn't make any sense. It was cold out, she had been in school for a while now…when had the school year started? When she had been little the school year had started in August but that had been an international school. This school year had started in March, right? Or maybe…maybe she was just being weird, like Minori said. Or maybe she had actually been dropped on her head as a baby. That would have made sense. How could she not have remembered when the school year started?

She was so weird sometimes.

Weird and maybe kind of dumb. No matter what she wrote down on the page in front of her it all looked like nonsense. Like when a little kid scribbled on paper and said that it was words…red hair and a big scar…and ant on her arm. She flicked it away. She was so tired of all of these bugs. She was just tired in general. Sometimes it felt like she never slept, got any sleep, even though she always went to bed at her usual bedtime. She was so weird. Everything felt weird.

Which meant that she was the weirdest person of all, since the world was just as normal as it had always been, of course.

She turned to a new page in her notebook. Classwork time. She had to make sure that she did well on this. She could see Minori out of the corner of her eye. She was doing something on her phone, probably something important. Shigeko needed to get this done for the both of them…even though it wasn't fair. Why did she have to do this if she was worse at math than Minori was. She felt like…a part of her felt like she should have said something…but of course she wasn't going to. That wasn't what a good friend did. She needed friends. She had been without friends for so long. She needed friends like she needed to watch Frozen at least once a day. She wasn't going to mess this up.

Her friendship or this classwork.

"Suzuki, Asagiri, come up to my desk please." Said the teacher. Minori rolled her eyes and stood up, her chair scratched the floor loudly.

"Coming." Said Shigeko as she got up. She may have moved too quickly. Her chair made a terrible scratching sound as she got up.

"With some decorum, Miss Suzuki." Said the teacher. Shigeko stopped in her tracks. Miss Suzuki…it rang through her mind…but a different voice. A voice, a feeling, and a….color? Purple. Bright and warm and kind of prickly, like dragging your feet across a wool carpet, but still nice and familiar…

"Today, Miss Suzuki." Said the teacher. The feeling changed. Instead of feeling purple, if a color could even have a feeling, it felt…green? But not green like nature. Green like baby throw up. Green like when you forgot leftovers in the fridge for a long time. Green like when you forgot milk under your bed for a very long time. Green like…gross but also kind of like she had been…lied to? Betrayed? Something bad…something so bad…

"Suzuki!" shouted the teacher

"Coming!" said Shigeko before she got up and practically ran to the teacher's desk. People were looking at her, now, and she didn't like it. She hadn't liked being less than a mob character but now she felt like she should have. It had been better than being weird.

Or being in trouble.

"Is there any particular reason my education is being interrupted?" asked Minori as she clicked her nails. The teacher didn't even look at her, no, he was staring at Shigeko now. His eyebrows were furled and his face was red.

She should have walked faster or maybe ran slower.

"Miss Suzuki, Miss Asagiri, how do you two explain this?" asked the teacher as he held up both of their homework papers. Minori rolled her eyes. Shigeko didn't know what she was rolling her eyes about. This was bad, Minori had copied everything, even the parts she had crossed out.

"I…um…." Said Shigeko

"That's our homework. What about it?" asked Minori

"Can you girls please explain to me how these two sheets came to be exactly the same?" asked the teacher. Shigeko didn't know what to say, but that was why Minori was a good friend, she always had something to say.

"I don't like what you're implying. An Asagiri would never cheat! Never in a hundred years! Never in a thousand years! Never in a million years! Never in a-" said Minori

"Miss Suzuki?" asked the teacher, his eyes digging into hers like the ants that infested their classroom dug into the walls.

"Um…" said Shigeko. She had no idea how she was supposed to respond. The right thing to do would have been to tell the truth, of course, but if she told the truth then she and Minori would get in trouble. She had never been in trouble at school before, never in her entire life, and she had no idea how Mom would have reacted. She probably would have been mad, maybe even punished her, though she had never been punished before. She had never done anything this wrong before. Usually when she did something wrong Mom just stopped talking to her for a very long time.

That might have been even worse, maybe, than being punished.

"Well I certainly didn't cheat and I don't like you implying that I did. If my father heard these wild accusations he would-" said Minori

"Miss Suzuki? Do you have anything to say in your defense?" asked the teacher. Shigeko didn't know what she was supposed to do. Say the same thing that Minori did? That she didn't know what happened and that her dad would be super mad if he heard about these accusations…she didn't know if she could lie like that. Dad would have probably been more mad at her than her teacher if he knew what she was being accused of.

Did these even count as accusations if they were true?

She had cheated, she had done something wrong, and when you did something wrong then you got punished. She had done wrong and now she was going to have to deal with it. She had to talk, to tell the truth, and to beg for mercy…but then Minori would get in trouble. If she got in trouble then she wouldn't be able to go out and spend time with her friends. If she missed out on time with her friends then she would have lost some of her popularity. If she lost some of her popularity then she'd have been really upset. If she got really upset then Shigeko…she knew exactly who Minori was going to blame…and if Shigeko got blamed then she would go back to the way things had been before.

She would have been friendless. Again. She didn't know what she would have done if she had to go back to the way that things had been before.

"I…um….I did something bad. I mean I cheated, I'm a cheater. I cheated off of Minori. I copied her homework and I'm sorry." Said Shigeko quietly.

"See? What did I say? I told you that an Asagiri would never cheat. You just wait until my father hears about this. He'll-" said Minori. The teacher raised his hand up. Shigeko flinched even though she knew that, after she thought about it for more than a second, that when a person raised their hand like that it meant 'shut up' and not 'I'm going to hit you really hard because I think that you're a cheater and you need to be punished'.

"That will be all, Miss Asagiri, please return to your seat." Said the teacher as he waved his hand. Minori smiled at Shigeko as she walked away and squeezed her hand. That meant that she had done something right, right? That she had done the right thing and saved her friend…

So this was ok, right?

"What's going to happen to me?" asked Shigeko quietly. She knew what happened when you did something wrong. You got punished. You got detention, or you had to write lines, or you got thrown into a hole and you had to stay there until you starved, or you-

"You've left me no choice, Miss Suzuki, I'm going to have to call your mother." Said the teacher. Shigeko nodded and went back to her desk. She kind of wished that she was being thrown in the hole instead of this. Mom was going to be so mad at her and then she would tell Dad and Dad…nothing good ever came from Dad being mad at her. She was going to get punished…she was going to get hit…

Something landed on her desk.

It was a piece of paper. She looked around. Minori was signaling her with her eyes. Shigeko looked down and unfolded the note. Inside there was a smiley face and the word 'thanks'. She felt better…she had to feel better….

She had managed to keep her friend. It didn't matter that she was getting punished. She didn't care what happened to her so long as she managed to keep on being friends with Minori.