Grace
"Kaiou-san ignored me today."
She tightened her fingers about the fence, feeling the wire dig into her palms as she held onto it, staring out at the clear, bright early March morning beyond, the chill of winter still in the air despite the arrival of spring.
"Kaiou-san ignored you again today," he corrected, a step or two away from her, leaning back against the fence, the diagonal pattern leaving an imprint on his crisp white school shirt and the pale flesh beneath.
In one hand, he balanced his bento box, lacquered chopsticks poised in the other over the plum his mother had set at the heart of a small expanse of white rice.
She shot him a sour look, and then rattled the fence in frustration, causing his arm to falter, the chopsticks clattering against the wood of the box's side, his balance thrown.
"You don't know what it's like!" she wailed with misery.
Angrily, he regained his composure, clearly relieved not to have spilt the content of his lunch across the school roof.
"No, I do," he answered sharply. "I'm a guy, remember? I know exactly what it is you see in Kaiou Michiru, I just don't get why you're so obsessed with another girl."
With annoyance, she rattled the fence again.
"Because I like girls!"
Each word punctuated a shake of the wire, the vision beyond unchanging, yet the metal digging harder and harder into her palms, her fingers. He turned to glower at her, putting aside the prospect of actually eating his lunch for the moment.
"You've said that before, but I still don't get what you mean."
She looked at him in confusion.
"I like girls," she said again. "Just like you like girls."
With a blush, he turned away, finally seizing the plum despite promising himself he was done with it.
"That doesn't make much sense."
Hanging from the fence, she threw her head back, her dark hair falling away from her forehead.
"Ughhhh!" she cried loudly. "You've seen Kaiou-san. Of course, it makes sense! She's like the most beautiful person alive!"
"But she's always got that other girl hanging around her, the one with the short hair," he observed, looking down at his lunch, doubtful as to whether the time had come to properly resuming eating.
As if in answer, the fence rattled once more.
"I know, right? That's why I thought I stood a chance."
He stared hard, the absent plum, the rice in disarray, the cherry tomatoes, the lettuce, et al.
"No one stands a chance with that girl hanging around."
His face formed in a frown, and as she glanced over at him, she could tell he was thinking about the situation, and she could sense that he was nourishing a tiny kernel of resentment, his own unspoken feelings about Kaiou-san just below the surface.
With a stab, the skin of a cherry tomato broke.
"You should set your sights lower. Our form teacher is more your speed."
Her face rippled with unhappiness.
"That old woman is not my type," she answered bitterly. "She has none of the grace of Kaiou-san, the elegance, the beauty."
She sighed loudly.
They had known each other, the two of them, since middle school. They weren't friends exactly, but they had been in the same clubs previously, and here, at Mugen Academy, they found themselves once more aligned. A mutual alliance, she called it.
Their new form teacher, Hoshino Hanako, was a different matter, however; unlike Kaiou-san, a year above them, she was not graceful, was not elegant, was not beautiful. She worried about growing up to become a woman like her, a woman destined for spinsterhood, a woman who clearly had never known the touch of another, not for the want of trying.
There was something desperate about their form teacher, something anxious, something nervous. She resented it, clearly able to sense it, like a shark turning towards blood in the water.
Her hands tightened further in the gaps of the fence. She wanted so much more, she wanted Kaiou Michiru to know who she was, to say her name; she wanted to see her face when she slept, she wanted to know what she looked like when she awoke. G-d, she wanted to know gross things, like the smell of her hair, how regularly she cut her toenails. She wanted to know everything about her.
Slowly, she released her grip on the fence.
She didn't know anything, and she never would. Kaiou-san was an actual goddess, and she was just a bit-part, a supporting character, a girl who liked girls, destined to remain unfulfilled; a future form teacher in training.
Life was cruel.
She turned to see a cherry tomato between his lips, a guilty expression on his face. How ugly boys were.
"My day will come," she said with defiance, straightening up, her arms falling to her side.
Even if she didn't believe it, even if she knew that girls like Kaiou-san were unobtainable, it was wrong to show weakness in the face of the enemy.
He looked like he wanted to say something, but the cherry tomato was rolling around inside his ugly mouth, between his ugly lips.
"My day will come," she said again with a nod of her head.