Shigeko felt like she wanted to scream from the top of her lungs.

She wouldn't, of course, since Mom wouldn't have liked that at all. Mom never approved of loud noises. She never really approved of anything, now that Shigeko thought about it. There had been a time, though, when she had been really little…when she had been so little that she could barely even remember…a time when Mom had been fun. When Mom had been her friend. She closed her eyes.

She could almost see it.

She could see a house, a big one, but a warm one. A bright one, one where they went places. An animal shelter, a park, a pool. Just her and mom and…just her and mom. They'd had fun together. Every single day had been nice and fun and just…warm. Warm and bright. She opened her eyes.

Still dark.

It was grey outside and inside, too. Her room was too big for one person even with all of her stuff in it. The dollhouse she never played with anymore, the mountain of stuffed animals, the wardrobe she had pretty much let the spiders have…it was all hers. Everything she owned both filled the room but also left it empty. Her she looked over to the left side of the room, the side where she had shoved her dollhouse.

Too empty.

She reached over to her nightstand and turned the lamp on. The room was filled with a pale yellow light. Somehow the light didn't make it any smaller, no, the light just filled the room with shadows. The shadows reminded her how big the room was. Not only that, the shadows made her feel like something was…something was missing. Wrong. The room was much too big for just her.

She wanted to scream.

"I'm losing my mind." Muttered Shigeko as she closed her book. She had no idea what it was about, it was a school book, some heavy thing that they'd been assigned to read. It was as thick as a phone book and the print was twice as small. It was about three times as boring, too. That was why she had been on the same page for she didn't even know how long. It was just that boring, that was all, she wasn't completely losing her mind.

No, she had just gone a little crazy.

Crazy enough that she spent more time thinking about a life that had never been than living the life she had now. She spent more time looking around her room and imaging that there should have been someone else there, someone else to fill the space, or at leas their stuff. She spent her whole school day imagining that she should have been somewhere else doing something much more important. She spent her time with her best friend imagining that she had other friends, many other friends, people who she wanted even more to spend time with. Even worse she spent her time, with her best friend, thinking about that best friend's boyfriend and how he was so…so…how he made her so…so…

Crazy.

Thinking about the things she had been thinking about lately was crazy. Wanting to betray her best friend was crazy. Thinking that a boy would want to do those kinds of things with her was the craziest of all. She was crazy, out of her mind, and pretty soon she would need to be taken away to one of those places with padded rooms and straightjackets. She maybe should have taken herself to one of those places. It would have been the right thing to do, then she wouldn't have the chance to do anything, not that she would do anything.

No, that would have been crazy.

So she felt like screaming. It made sense, really. People screamed when they had too many feelings inside of themselves. She had explained to someone before…probably one of her dolls. She had pretended a lot, when she was younger, that she was a mom and a big sister. That she had a little doll, smaller than her but not by much, to take care of. Someone who was her opposite, to balance her out, like how you had to add savory to something sweet otherwise you just had a big pile of sugar. She had taught her doll that, too, because he mostly just wanted to eat sugar. She wished that she had stayed that kind of crazy.

Or that she could scream.

"Shigeko! Time for dinner!" Mom could scream…or shout. Shout fit mom's call to the table better. it didn't seem very different though, sort of like the difference between soda and carbonated milk. Apples to oranges may have fit better…or maybe that was two completely different things. The difference between soda and carbonated milk, not the difference between a scream and a shout. Not that it made much of a difference.

It was mom's house and she could do whatever she wanted in it.

She could even break her own rules. Or maybe she could just make rules for Shigeko but not herself. She was an adult after all. They were so lucky. When you grew up you always knew what to do. You had all the answers. That was why adults were allowed to get married and have babies and houses and cars and jobs…and also why kids weren't allowed to do anything. If she had been older, better, or maybe just stronger than she was now she could have been the boss of herself.

But she wasn't the boss of herself. She was only thirteen.

"Shigeko! Dinner!" shouted Mom. Shigeko jumped out of bed, her book hitting the carpet with a thud and sending a spider running away for it's life. She hadn't even noticed that one down there. The house was so infested with spiders and bugs that she just didn't notice or care about them anymore.

"Coming!" shouted Shigeko as she raced out of her room. Mom didn't like needing to ask twice. Shigeko didn't like making mom ask twice, and not just because she was afraid of making mom mad. She just didn't like this feeling she had, another crazy feeling, a feeling like her time with mom was limited. She didn't know why she felt like that, like mom was going to leave, it wasn't like she had anywhere else to go. This was their only house, they weren't as wealthy as Minori's family with their summer houses and winter houses, and they didn't have a driver or even a car. No, mom was just as stuck here as Shigeko was.

She wasn't going anywhere.

Anywhere outside of the house, at least. Shigeko ran down the hallway, down the stairs, and nearly slid off of her feet as she reached the kitchen. There was food on the table, two plates, and even a glass of milk for her. The only thing missing was mom. That was weird. Normally she was eating before Shigeko even got to the table. Shigeko was a little bit lost. Was she supposed to sit down now? Or was it one of those rules for her and not for Mom…like was mom the only one allowed to eat at the table before everyone else?

Not that there had ever been an everyone else.

Dad must have eaten with them at some point, when she had been really little, since she had no clear memories of ever sitting down at the table with both of her parents. Dad, on the rare times when he was home, at his dinner in his office. Shigeko understood why he stayed in his office, his work was very important, and also she wasn't exactly good dinner company…is that why mom had decided to call her to the table but leave her all alone?

It was enough to drive her crazy.

She would never understand her parents no matter how much she tried, specifically her mom. Dad was farther away and, somehow, that made him easy to understand. Mom was always there and she seemed to always change…or maybe Shigeko wasn't putting enough effort into understanding her. Maybe she was just a terrible daughter. It would have made sense, she was already a terrible friend. Good friends didn't think the kinds of thoughts that she did about their friend's boyfriends. Good daughters didn't think that one day they were going to wake up and their moms would be gone, run off to parts unknown…

She knew where her mom was.

She could hear mom's voice coming from the hallway. For a second she thinks that mom may have been talking to herself, that she may have gone crazy too, but then she hears her dad's name. It takes her another second to remember that her dad's given name isn't Dad, or 'your father', that it was Touichirou. Or maybe that wasn't the crazy part. She had never heard, at least not in a long time, her parents call each other by their given names.

Though, somehow, that felt like the craziest thing of all.

She crept to the other side of the kitchen and stood in the doorway. This was already crazy. What was the harm in being a little crazier? What was the harm, what would hurt, if she were to stand there and just so happen to overhear what it was that was making her mom call her dad by his given name? It was her house too and it wasn't like she was forbidden from standing in the space between the kitchen and the hallway.

Or at least mom hadn't said anything to her about this.

"….really?" Shigeko strained her ears. Really? Something was really? Something was real? Well of course something was real, this was real life. As much as it felt like she was sleepwalking, sometimes, that didn't change the fact that this was real life and she was living it.

Even if it did get pretty weird sometimes.

"…if you want to…." If Dad wanted to do what? She couldn't think of anything that Dad would have wanted to do, with mom at least. Mostly he just seemed to want to work…maybe he and mom were going to work together? No, no, that was crazy. The mom's job was to take care of the house and the kids, dad had explained to her when she was little, and mom still did her job even if she did it from laying in bed locked in her room most of the time.

"….been too long, far too long….miss you…" Shigeko rubbed her ears. She wished that she had a q-tip. She must have been going deaf or something. She could have sworn that mom had just said that she missed dad. That was…well it made sense, they were married after all, and it wasn't like they would have gotten married if they hadn't liked each other…wait, no, she knew this story…

Oh!

Mom and dad had met at a train station and then they had gotten married right before she was born. They had gotten married because of her…because mom had gotten pregnant…but still! They must have loved each other, right? You had to love a boy to do that kind of stuff with him, right? Otherwise what was the point of doing it? Not just because it felt good…it did feel really good….she had heard. That was just what people said about it. Shigeko really had no idea. Dreams didn't count…and now she was thinking about her parents and…that kind of thing…

Gross.

"…later this week…alright….love you too…" That wasn't gross! That was like the sorbet that people served at fancy dinners to wash away one flavor so you could taste the next. Wow…she had never heard her mom say anything like that to dad. Never in her entire life. if she was going crazy then she didn't mind, not if it meant that her parents cared about each other like normal parents did. Of course they must have cared about each other at least a little bit. They'd had her after all. People didn't just have babies for no reason.

Wow. Her parents loved each other.

"…to go. Shigeko's here." Shigeko had been too busy being happy for her parents to notice that their conversation was over. She only had a few seconds between mom saying goodbye to dad and hanging up the phone to make it back to the table. Of course she couldn't move that fast. She didn't really get good grades in gym. No, she barely even made it out of the doorway before she heard mom clearing her throat.

In an angry way, not in the normal throat clearing way.

"Shigeko?" asked mom.

"Yes?" asked Shigeko as she turned around slowly. Mom was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. She was tapping one foot, too, which meant that she was really mad. Shigeko didn't know why. She had just been caught eavesdropping, it wasn't like she had been drinking or smoking or anything like that.

"Were you brought up to lurk in doorways?" asked mom

"I don't know what you mean." Said Shigeko. She had heard of people bringing their kids up to work on farms and fishing boats and stuff like that but she had never heard of anyone bringing their kids up to be doorway lurkers. She hadn't even known that doorway lurking was a job or a way of life.

"Shigeko." Sighed mom, uncrossing her arms and running a hand through her hair.

"You shouldn't lurk in doorways, it's rude." Said Mom. Shigeko nodded.

"Sorry mom, I didn't know. You…you never told me not to do that, before." Said Shigeko

"I never told you not to eavesdrop before, either, but here we are." Said Mom

"Oh…sorry. I just wanted to know what you were talking to Dad about." Said Shigeko

"And that's your business why?" asked Mom. Shigeko had to think about that. She wanted to tell mom that it was her business because Dad was her family and her family was her business but she knew that mom wouldn't have liked that…but then what would mom have liked? She didn't know…she barely knew her own mom…well she did know one thing about her mom…

Mom didn't like it when she asked questions.

"I knew that if I asked you then you'd have gotten mad at me." said Shigeko

"Gotten mad at you? I don't know where you come up with these ideas." Said Mom

"You got mad at me last time I asked questions." Said Shigeko. Mom didn't say anything for a while. It felt like she had been put on paused, like the whole world had been put on pause, but of course she knew that it wasn't true. Time was still moving. If it hadn't been then the second hand on the wall clock, the one with the cobwebs, wouldn't have been spinning.

"I got mad at you because you bombarded me with personal questions the minute you walked through the door." Said Mom

"Oh." Said Shigeko. Well that made sense. Maybe she wasn't going crazy…about mom. She was still crazy for how she felt about Minori's boyfriend. She was still crazy for wanting what she wanted, or wanting what she thought she wanted, or wanting to want what she wanted.

"Yes, oh. Now go and eat your dinner. I didn't slave over a hot stove all day only to have it go to waste." Said mom

"You didn't." said Shigeko as she walked over to the table. She knew, well she could imagine, how hard it was to cook for someone. She had never made dinner before but she knew how much work it could be. She didn't have to ask mom how much work it was. She didn't have to ask…well there were a lot of things she had to ask mom. She wanted to ask her exactly when Dad was coming back, she wanted to ask mom if she really meant it when she said she loved dad, she wanted to ask mom what it felt like to be in love with someone. She wanted to ask mom if she had been in love with Dad before they had been married. She wanted to ask mom if you had to be in love with someone to do…all of the things…with them.

Not that she would ever ask her mom about that.

If she asked her mom about that, if she even got one of the words out, then she would die. She would die right there at the table and her ghost would go straight to the afterlife. She couldn't just go and ask her mom about stuff like that. She wished…she wished that she had someone in her life that she could talk to about those kinds of things…but she didn't. Well, Minori knew a lot about those kinds of things, but it was Minori's boyfriend that she couldn't stop thinking about! He was the one who was driving her crazy!

He was the one that she might have been in love with.

"You're not eating. Something wrong with your dinner?" asked mom

"N-No! It's great!" said Shigeko as she picked up another piece of tempura with her chopsticks. It tasted weird, different, but she wasn't going to tell mom that. She wasn't going to be ungrateful…and also that wasn't even what was on her mind, anyway.

"Then why are you staring at your food like you think it's going to run away?" asked mom

"I'm not staring at it, I mean I am, but I'm just…thinking." Said Shigeko

"Shigeko, it's tempura. There's nothing to contemplate." Said Mom

"I'm not contemplating my dinner, I'm just thinking about…something with my friend, that's all." Said Shigeko. She wouldn't talk about this with mom, she couldn't, even though that was what moms were for. She remembered being younger, not by much, and wanting her mom really bad…because mom hadn't told her about something important…well, it must have not been very important if she couldn't remember what it was. Just that it had been something scary and embarrassing…

Kind of like what she was feeling now but worse.

So if she'd felt something worse then maybe it was ok to ask mom about this? Moms were supposed to help their daughters with stuff like this so…so yeah? So this was ok. So asking mom about…well, not all of it. Not that. Not all of the things, just if she was in love or not, that was all. She would just ask mom how she was supposed to tell if she was in love. If she wasn't in love with him then it wouldn't be anything worth further thought and if she was then she would just have had to ask mom how to fall out of love. There must have been a way to fall out of love and if there wasn't she would invent one.

Then, maybe, she wouldn't be crazy anymore.

"That girl you've been running up the phone bill for?" asked mom

"Yes, Minori…um…actually her boyfriend." Said Shigeko. She watched mom, waited for some indication of how she felt. She didn't seem to be feeling anything at all. She was just sipping her tea like normal…wait…she put her teacup down!

To get more pickled vegetables. Also in a very normal way.

"Minori has a boyfriend." Said Shigeko

"Good for her." said Mom

"Yeah, I'm happy for her too but…but also I feel kind of weird." Said Shigeko

"You want a boyfriend too?" asked Mom. Shigeko wanted to jump up and out of her seat. How could mom have just come out and said it like that!?

"Yes! I mean…I mean I would like one…one like him. Someone nice him who dresses well and smells good and is just so…so nice all the time. Even when he doesn't have to be." Said Shigeko. Her voice got soft at the end, so soft that she wasn't even sure if mom had heard her. If she had then she wasn't showing it. She was just eating dinner like normal.

"And that's…that's it." Said Shigeko

"That's all there is?" asked Mom, finally making eye contact with Shigeko. She felt like mom was looking right through her, her eyes were that piercing. She had heard of piercing blue eyes before but never piercing brown eyes.

"I think so, I mean I don't think so, I mean…I don't know what I mean." said Shigeko, tripping over her words like they were running the obstacle course in gym class. She had no idea how she was supposed to talk to her mom about these kinds of things. This sort of thing always looked so easy in shows but this wasn't a tv show, this was real life, and real life was way too complicated and high stakes and scary! She reached over for her drink. It was milk.

What else would it have been?

She put her glass down. Mom put her cup of tea down at the same time. She had asked, or maybe it had been someone else, how Shigeko could have stood to drink as much milk as she did. She didn't have an answer for that besides that she liked it. She wished that everything in life, in her life, had such a simple answer. Then maybe she would have known what to do.

Or at least had an idea of what to do. Someone at that table should have known what to do.

"I think what you mean is 'you want him to be your boyfriend'." Said Mom. She was still looking right at Shigeko and she had a look that Shigeko had never seen on her before and had used a tone that Shigeko had never heard her use before and-and-and-and-

"What?!" asked Shigeko. That time she did scream, she didn't just want to scream she really did it, even though there wasn't any screaming in the house. She couldn't help it. She would have thought that Mom of all people could have understood that.

She seemed to understand everything else just fine.

"No shouting in the house." Said Mom

"What?" asked Shigeko, trying her best to stay calm. She knew that her mom couldn't have known…but then again this was what moms did, right? They had been through all of this before and that left them with all kinds of wisdom and stuff like that? She hadn't ever given much thought to her mom as a kid, her mom being her age, her mom having the same problems she did…aside from that day when she freaked out of course…and she just…there were so many questions…

Questions she knew better than to ask right now.

"You heard me, it sounds like you have feelings for this boy as well." Said Mom

"Mom! You can't just say things like that out loud." Said Shigeko

"Who's listening?" asked Mom. Shigeko shook her head.

"Nobody." Said Shigeko. She knew that nobody was around, ever, even if she did always have this weird feeling like she was being watched. Even now she could feel someone's eyes on her, it was almost like they were pressed right up against her, even though she knew that right now it was just her and mom.

"Exactly, so why are you so jumpy all of a sudden?" asked Mom

"Because…I don't know. It's embarrassing." Said Shigeko

"Daughter, please. There's nothing to get embarrassed about. Everyone goes through this whether they like it or not." Said Mom. Shigeko watched her. That was…someone had called her Daughter before, but it wasn't Mom. This wasn't something from a dream. Dad had taken a very long time to learn her name. Dad was the one who called her Daughter…not Mom…

Never mom.

"Mom?" asked Shigeko

"Yes?" asked Mom. Her head was tilted to the side and her eyes were wide and…and mom never really looked at her like that. That was…she didn't know who had done that but it wasn't Mom…

"Why did you call me 'daughter'?" asked Shigeko

"Because that's who you are, my daughter." Said Mom

"But you don't call me that, Dad calls me that. Well I mean he used to call me that before he knew my name." said Shigeko. Mom laughed and rolled her eyes.

"Really Shigeko, you're just making things up now. Your father always knew your name. After all, he was the one who chose it." Said Mom

"But….no. He said that he didn't name me…I remember that…" said Shigeko. She knew that Dad hadn't named her. If he had named her then it would have been something he liked, like Mukai. He liked that name a lot and…and she knew from where but also…also she just…

She knew that dad hadn't been the one to name her. She wasn't completely crazy.

"What, you think that you named yourself?" asked Mom

"No…I was a baby. I didn't even know what a name was. I just meant that Dad told me, a long time ago, that he wasn't the one who named me." said Shigeko

"Then it must have been me, I don't know, this was over a decade ago." Said Mom with a wave of her hand. Shigeko didn't think that ten years ago was that long…but then again she had a hard time remembering even a few years ago.

"Ok….I get it. You don't remember that far back." Said Shigeko

"There's not much worth remembering." Said Mom

"Yeah, I guess so. I mean I don't remember but…I was a kid back then." Said Shigeko. She knew that mom had a point but…but it was still hard. The way mom was talking it was sort of like she would never get an answer to her questions. She could feel the same sort of fear, of worry, coming up. Worry that her questions would never get answered…and she had so many questions. She could feel them coming up, one after another and another, but she knew better than to blurt them all out.

It hadn't gone well last time.

"That doesn't mean that anything worth remembering happened." Said Mom

"Mom…that's kind of mean." Said Shigeko

"Sometimes the truth can be painful. There's no point in running from it, though, unless you want to run from it your whole life." said Mom

"That makes sense, I guess." said Shigeko

"You can only run so fast and so far from the truth, eventually you're going to have to see it whether you like it or not." Said Mom

"So the truth hurts but it's ok because it's supposed to hurt?" asked Shigeko, scratching her head. She didn't think that the truth needed to hurt. She didn't think that anything needed to hurt. Wasn't pain the body's way of telling you that you were doing something wrong?

"Yes, sometimes things need to be painful so we can work past them. If you're content with your life then you can never grow past your ways." Said Mom

"But what if I don't want to grow past…past my ways? Doesn't pain mean that you're doing something wrong?" asked Shigeko. She may have pushed it too far then, much too far, because now mom was giving her a look that she had never gotten before. It was like she was mad. If she'd had an aura it would have been bright yellow…not that auras were real or anything like that, because they weren't, just something that she had dreamed up. Something painful that she had dreamed up. Why did dreams have to be painful? She liked the world she dreamed about, the world where she had friends and a family that wasn't just her and mom, and if she could have she would have stayed dreaming in that world forever…it was waking up that was the painful part.

So maybe she should have just stayed asleep forever…but not like she was dead because then she would have been a spirit and spirits were more miserable than any living person she had ever met in her life.

"You need to be a better person, better than the person you are. You could have been great, Shigeko, but instead you've just let yourself become…this." Said Mom with that same look on her face, that look that Shigeko didn't like, that look that she had never seen before…

And never wanted to see again.

"Why are you mad at me?" asked Shigeko

"I'm not angry with you." said Mom quickly

"But you seem angry." Said Shigeko

"There's nothing to be angry about. You don't DO anything." Said Mom. Shigeko nodded. She really didn't do anything. She really wasn't much of anything. She was just…Shigeko. She was just herself and…and it wasn't like she was anything or anyone. She was just a Mob character…

No she wasn't.

She had a friend, now, a best friend and that made her a side character. She would never be a main character but that was alright. She was still there in someone's story. Two someone's…not that she cared about Minori's boyfriend….not that she would ever betray her. She would never, ever, do that to her best friend. She wasn't that kind of person. She didn't want to be that kind of person. She was…she was who she was now.

Even if it kind of hurt sometimes, being who she was now.

"I do things, I mean not things that make you angry but I do things. In my life I mean. I'm someone." Said Shigeko

"Are you?" asked Mom, smiling in a way that didn't look like any kind of a smile at all…a smile that didn't fit mom at all…that didn't fit anything that was happening.

"I do! I go to school and have friends and-" said Shigeko

"And you're contemplating stealing that friend's boyfriend." Said Mom

"No I'm not! I don't want to-" said Shigeko quickly and loudly. She had no idea where mom had ever gotten the idea that she would ever think about-that she would ever want-that she would ever WANT to want-

"You certainly do think about it often for someone who would never even dream of going through with it." Said Mom

"I…have no idea how you…how you even thought about knowing about-" said Shigeko. She felt like she was tripping over her words. She felt like she was stumbling and tripping and twisting and dancing to a world that was running in so many different directions that she had no idea how to keep up with!

"You're the one who brought it up, Shigeko, or did you forget that too?" asked Mom, rolling her eyes again. She wondered when Mom had taken up eye rolling. She had forgotten. She had forgotten so many things. She had forgotten so many things that she couldn't even remember what it was that she had forgotten.

"You're right…I forgot." Said Shigeko

"Honestly Shigeko, I don't know what's wrong with you. I don't know why you would even think about betraying someone you care about like that. Why you think you can get away with anything just because you're you." said Mom as she got up from the table.

"I-I don't think-" said Shigeko

"That's right, you don't. I'm going to bed, you clear the table when you're done." Said Mom as she left the table. The light seemed to get dimmer as she left. Shigeko had no idea what had just happened. Did mom…was she mad or was she…Shigeko didn't even know what else she could have been. She didn't know what she was supposed to be or do or…or anything.

She didn't like this.

In her dreams she was never this uncertain. She was overwhelmed and scared and things like that but she always knew who she was. What she was. She was Shigeko. Suzuki Shigeko. She knew who she was in real life, too, still Suzuki Shigeko but…but a different version of herself. A worse version of herself. Maybe she needed to grow like mom had said. Maybe she wasn't the side character she thought she was. Maybe she was still a mob character. Maybe she wanted to be more than what she was…if that was even what she was right now…she didn't know.

The only thing she knew, the only thing she was certain of, was that she wanted to scream…but she didn't.