Chapter 14: Mushrooms

It was all a blur, the bodies jostling around with foggy auras trailing behind them. For some reason, one sharp image stood out, though. A hand emerged from the mob and reached towards her, and she could see the dry wrinkles and world-worn knuckles in perfect detail.

At first she thought it was headed for her face, but it wasn't. The palm slapped against the side of her shoulder, the nails digging very lightly into her flesh. It grabbed a fistful of Sei's shirt sleeve and pulled with an intense jerk.

The woman wasn't that strong, the tug had not been that hard. It had just been so unexpected, that Sei nearly stumbled. Sei tried to adjust her eyes, to focus beyond the array of confused movement from the five or six people who surrounded them. She tried to look at the face of the woman who was in front of her.

She was a bit shocked when she saw a quick flash of pain, of uncertainty on that face. It had the effect of softening the usual stiffness. Once the woman noticed that Sei was staring directly at her, though, her face became stern again and that small crack of humanity had been shut behind an iron wall.

The woman was shouting something. Sei could barely parse the words over the sound of the people who were trying to talk over her in appeasing tones, trying to jump in and get between them. For another brief second of insanity as she stared into those furious eyes that reminded her a bit of Alice, Sei wondered if this woman was about to try to throw her off the balcony.

Instead, the lady made an apparent move to pull her through the throng of people. Her insistent tugging was futile at first, but the tenseness of her arm made Sei realize that she was using most of her strength. For some reason, this made Sei laugh out loud.

Predictably, this infuriated the woman more. She mashed the fabric of Sei's shirt between her fingers and hauled Sei toward her. This time, Sei took pity on her and followed, walking slightly slower than Alice's mother seemed to intend, as if she were a reluctant dog who hadn't yet taken well to the leash.

Alice's mother led her past the people, some of whom were reaching to separate them. Somehow, they both made it through the glass door still well-connected, but the woman could not ignore the audience around them. She called out to them over Sei's shoulder, grunting through some monologue that Sei was still unable to follow.

She was too distracted by the woman's face. The woman seemed to realize this, too, because she averted her eyes and would not look directly at Sei's intense stare. It was a stare that undressed her. Sei was smiling at her. Not insolently—genuinely. She was overcome with amusement. She was still laughing.

When Alice's mother had dragged her halfway into the restaurant—a whole entourage in tow— the adrenaline began to wear off and the rest of the world seemed to rush towards Sei and come back into focus. She could hear the words more clearly now. She had also noticed that Alice was conspicuously missing from the crowd.

"...and how did she even get in here?" Mother Arisugawa demanded, looking at the waiter with an accusatory stare, as if he personally had been the one to sneak her in, as if the restaurant were not open to the public. "Why was she allowed to just sequester my child the moment I looked away? She's a known troublemaker and I don't want her anywhere near my family!"

"Ma'am, please!" the employee cried. "Ma'am, I beg you, please let go of Ogasawara-sama!"

When he said this, her grip on Sei's shirt became noticeably looser, but she was still rushing Sei vaguely towards the front exit of the restaurant. "Ogasawara…?" Alice's mother said, then turned to look at Sei with disdain. Sei only responded with a grin and a shrug of her shoulders. "This is no member of the Ogasawara family! I know them quite well, and this intruder is not among them! This young woman is Satou Sei."

The tone she used when pronouncing her name seemed to imply that Sei was some kind of peasant. It was almost as if she had said, "This young woman is merely Satou Sei." This only served to amuse Sei more. She found it even funnier that the lady had taken pains to mention that she was close to the Ogasawara clan, as if she couldn't resist the name-drop even through her anger.

"It's true," Sei said, her voice neutral, not too loud. Even so, because it was the first time they had heard her speak since the chaos ensued, everyone seemed to immediately turn to listen to her. "My apologies for the mix-up. My name is indeed Satou Sei. A friend of mind arranged the reservation for me." She turned to the waiter. "Unfortunately, it seems that my meal has been thoroughly interrupted. My own fault, really. Would it be terribly uncouth and low class to ask if I could take it home?" She glanced at Alice's mother suddenly, quite deliberately. "The oysters looked very tempting," she said to her, "but I don't care for snails much, to be honest."

Finally, a hand reached out and tightly grasped Arisugawa-okaa-san's fingers, ripping them away from Sei's sleeve in one sharp jerk. Sei looked over at the owner of the hand with surprise. She didn't recognize his face, but he was an older middle-aged man with a stern expression and he was standing beside the girl in the kimono. She guessed that it must have been the potential bride's father.

"That's enough, Arisugawa-san," he said, his voice gruff.

Sei had half-expected Alice's father to be the one to intervene, but when she turned towards him, he was merely staring at the two of them, still frozen in shock. Sei looked at Alice's mother one last time, offering an open, vulnerable stare, the kind that she gave when she was ready to listen to whatever someone had to say. Predictably, the woman's face twitched, almost as if Sei had just slapped her.

Still, she had no choice but to accept Sei's surrender. When the woman stepped back, Sei bowed towards the crowd in finality, both out of a sense of apology for causing the ruckus and also out of a sense of finishing some kind of performance. She figured that grabbing Alice's mother's hand and bowing together would be out of the question—she couldn't help but smile at the thought, though.

On her way back up, she glanced quickly over their heads to see if she could catch a glimpse of Alice somewhere, but there was nothing interesting to see.

Alice was gone. Sei couldn't even sense her presence anymore.

Saying nothing more—because she had grown disinterested with the situation, now that the queen's hysterics had dissipated and the princess had slipped away from her—she turned and headed towards the exit on her own. A collective murmur erupted behind her, and she wasn't sure if it was from her party or some of the other patrons.

A few waiters flanked her on her way out, offering rambling apologies, but she waved them off as she passed the host's counter. Forgetting all about her food, she stepped into the elevator and watched the doors sliding quickly shut, cutting her off from that strange world once again.

The curtains were very heavy, lined with what looked like an expensive velvet, and because of their deep red hue, they reminded Yumi a bit of the curtains on a stage. They blocked out the moonlight quite well. If Yumi hadn't been conscious of the time, she wouldn't have been able to tell if it was day or night.

The sheets on the bed matched the color of the curtains—by coincidence or deliberate design, she wasn't sure. They flowed like a red ocean over the curves of her body, though she noticed that the peaks and troughs of the waves were much more elegant and severe where the sheets wrapped around Sachiko. Her hips had always been more defined than Yumi's after all, her proportions enviable to most of the student population of Lillian.

Yumi had never envied Sachiko, though. Perhaps that was because she had never wanted to become her. She had only ever wanted to look at her, to admire her, to lose her sense of self and take in all the sights and smells of Ogasawara Sachiko. Perhaps this was why her Onee-sama had been drawn to her and had sensed her unusually pure intentions. Yumi was an appreciator of art, of walking human sculptures—and she could love them for exactly what they were, with no expectations. She had this in common with Satou Sei.

Yumi stared at her Onee-sama. Their eyes were locked. They had been sharing a gaze like this in silence for a few minutes, and neither of them had grown uncomfortable yet.

At some point during the night, all of the secrets had slipped out. Bit by bit, with little prompting, Sachiko had told her everything. With every new confidence shared, they had moved further into the bedroom. Eventually they had come to lay in the bed, to traverse the labyrinth made of those blood-red sheets together.

Yumi was wrapped like a caterpillar in a cocoon, only her head poking out from the blankets. Sachiko was a bit more relaxed, her shoulders and a single arm exposed above the sheet, her hand reaching over and caressing Yumi's face.

She slipped forward slightly. Yumi guessed her intentions and leaned in a little as well. When they kissed, it was a very light touch, very brief. It was chaste enough that it did not awaken any of Yumi's lower senses, but it did cause her heart to beat a little faster, as she was still unused to this kind of affection between them.

"I'm...relieved," Sachiko said all of a sudden, breaking the silence. She let out a sigh. "I'm relieved that even after all of this, you can accept me."

Yumi smiled at her warmly. "I am offended, Onee-sama," she said. When Sachiko cocked her head to the side, she explained, "How could Onee-sama think that I would judge her for that, even for a second?" She wriggled her arm out of her cocoon and reached up to take Sachiko's hand. She pressed it against her own cheek. "I told you before: I love you the way you are, Onee-sama. I can't pick and choose the parts of you that please me. It all pleases me."

Sachiko's eyes had a shine to them and they looked like a pair of watery mirrors for a moment, but the drops did not spill over. When Yumi looked carefully, she could see the hazy image of her own reflection.

"I'm not going to lie. It was shocking at first to hear what you told me, but I am still your imouto," Yumi whispered, "and...other things as well."

Her Onee-sama's expression grew thoughtful in response. "We could never be...anything other than what we are, could we?" she said.

In any other context, what she said would have been confusing, but Yumi immediately understood. "Yes," she agreed, "our relationship is not like the one I have with Sei-sama. But then again, my relationship with Sei could never be what I have with you, either. They are both so different."

It was only the look of curiosity and mild surprise on Sachiko's face that made Yumi realize that she had dropped Sei's honorific momentarily. After a few seconds, though, Sachiko's expression changed to one of wistfulness. "I know that. I don't want us to be the same. I just want…."

"I care very much for you, Onee-sama," Yumi said, "but, no, we can't have that. It's just not the way things are."

She found it ironic that she was lying in bed with Sachiko—albeit fully clothed—telling her in not so many words that they could never have a sexual relationship. Their connection had always bordered on the romantic, ever since they first met, but reaching into the realm of physical intimacy and lust was another matter entirely. She had never lusted after Sachiko. It took lusting after someone else for her to realize that fully.

Sachiko nodded in complete acceptance. There was a bittersweet smile on her face, but Yumi could still notice some relief underneath. It is what it is, her expression seemed to say—and "what it is" was not at all objectionable.

"Speaking of which," Sachiko murmured all of a sudden, pulling her hand away from Yumi and stretching her arms over her head in an oddly unladylike way. It was like she was squeezing the last bits of pent-up energy from her bones. "I wonder if everything went well for Sei-sama."

"I hope so," Yumi whispered, becoming a bit pensive as well. She looked over towards the window, as if to catch a glimpse of the outside world again, but then she remembered the curtains. "Thank you for helping her. That was very kind of you, Onee-sama."

Sachiko smiled broadly. "Of course," she said, as if she were surprised that Yumi even mentioned it. "She would have done the same for me, don't you think?" She paused, bringing her hand to her chin. "You know, Yumi, sometimes I feel that our culture has the wrong idea about human connections."

Yumi looked at her curiously. It was rare for Sachiko to launch into some kind of philosophical mood, so she couldn't help but lean in with a bit of interest. "What do you mean?"

"Well, we view relationships as things that happen between two people at a time. It's like a box with two people inside, or two people sitting in a courtyard surrounded by brick walls. And then when you want to visit a connection with another person, you leave that courtyard and go to another one with someone else inside."

Yumi tilted her head and smiled, only half-understanding. "So should there be more than two people in a single courtyard?" Yumi asked.

"Ah, you see, it's not that there should be—it's that there already are! The walls are made of fake rubber bricks, you see. Actually, there are no courtyards. We're all sitting in one gigantic, spreading garden. All of our relationships affect each other. For example, if it weren't for your connection with me, you would have never gotten to know Sei-sama—or, at least, it would have been very unlikely."

"...and if it weren't for my getting together with Sei-sama, then you and I wouldn't have become closer," Yumi said, nodding slowly. Her smile widened. "And if it weren't for your help and a small push from me, Sei-sama may have given up on Alice."

"Exactly," Sachiko said to her, quite pleased. "We live in a village, and no one is ever on his own. It's easy to forget that. I forget that a lot." She gave Yumi an enigmatic smile. "But you're always there to remind me."

Not long after that, Yumi found her way through the sheets and closed the distance between them. She pressed her face to Sachiko's chest and was welcomed by the roaring sound of her Onee-sama's beating heart.

The glow from the lantern lights looked different this time, more organic, like the light from some bioluminescent beast floating around in an ocean. If only she could ease her way through like such a creature, seamlessly melting into the air and swimming the short distance across the garden to that heavy door.

The outer edge of the cage was stopping her, though. She stared up at the criss-crossing bars, wondering how slippery she would need to be to slide through that iron barrier. She stood very close to the gate, her eyes wandering along every aspect of the courtyard and garden inside, looking for some kind of solution, some tool that would help her solve this problem that had nagged her since she reached the house. To be truthful, it had actually troubled her from the very beginning, from the moment she had first set foot on this curb weeks before.

She continued to look, not entirely aimlessly, but open to any possibility. Near the foot of an overly-ornate bird bath, a patch of mushrooms caught Sei's eye. The glow from the lamps made them light up in a strange way, as if they had their own source of pulsing electricity. When she looked closely, she saw that they had a blueish tint to them, and she recognized their shape immediately.

She laughed to herself, quite freely, not even trying for a second to suppress the noise. She laughed because she found it so amusing that in this perfectly-designed, meticulously-manicured garden, a symbol of magic had still survived against the iron lady's will. Had Sei been on the other side of the gate, she may have been tempted eat them. She vaguely remembered that Eriko had once accused her of doing exactly that before attending a graduation ceremony years ago—but she hadn't; Sei was well aware that she was quite insane without any extra help.

Just then, a car slid by on the road behind her, and Sei looked over her shoulder in response. She didn't care if they found her. She wasn't even sure if they were home or not. She only wondered if Alice was with them, so that she could pull her aside and finish what they had started.

But the car continued speeding by, a cabin filled with people that Sei didn't recognize. She sighed.

When she turned back around, she was surprised to see that the front door to the house was open. At first, she had completely missed the sound of the light footfalls that now reached her ears. Her mouth dropped open in surprise and she pulled back a little as she saw the familiar figured approaching her in the dim light. She recognized the face immediately this time, with no delay.

"Ka...Kawakami?" Sei blurted out, genuinely taken off guard. "What are you doing here?"

For once, the girl did not seem pleased to see her. Her lips were pressed tightly together, as if she wanted to say something—perhaps loudly—but was holding back. After a moment, she bowed slightly. "Good evening, Senpai," she said. "I saw you from the upstairs window. You wouldn't go away, so after awhile I came down." She stopped right across from Sei, less than a meter from her, the iron bars of the gate separating them.

Sei looked at her for a long moment, studying her face. It seemed to hold many unspoken things. "I keeping forgetting that you're Arisugawa's cousin," Sei said.

"That's right," Kawakami replied immediately. "We're actually rather close. I'm over here fairly often."

"I've never seen you here."

"You never come in," she said, again responding rather quickly. "You usually just steal Alice away."

Alice.

"You know about…?"

"Everybody knows about that kid. She can't hide it even if she tries. Even when she wears a suit, it looks like she's in a dress. I don't know how she does it," Kawakami said. She smiled vaguely, then a frown slowly formed. "If I had known that you would have liked her so much, though, I would never have introduced you."

Sei let out a sigh. "Look, Kawakami, you and I—"

"Not because of that," Kawakami interrupted her. "I tried with you, and it didn't work. That's fine. There are no hard feelings." She waved her hand dismissively, and Sei was quite surprised. "It's because of her. You've turned her life upside down, do you know that? She hasn't been the same since she met you, and now you've even caused a rift between her and her family."

Sei felt her own face twitch. A heat rose up from her chest and into her throat. She shook her head slowly, but she knew that to a certain extent it was true. Sei left emotional destruction in her wake everywhere she went, and she wasn't sure how to stop—or even whether she wanted to—or even whether she should stop.

Kawakami shook her head as well. "No," she said, seemingly correcting herself. "It wasn't all you. It's unfair to say that. You were more like the catalyst, but the mixture was already all there. Eventually, there would have been some blow up with or without you. You've only uncovered what Alice was hiding from her parents—you only gave her a reason to open it all up."

Sei set her eyes unwaveringly on Kawakami's face. Against her conscious will, Sei felt her body loosen, open up. She felt the last bits of hesitation, the last vestiges of her walls come down. "I…," Sei began. She swallowed. "I love—"

"I know," Kawakami said. She was smiling now. It was a look that was more warm and sympathetic than Sei thought she deserved—but she accepted the charity nonetheless.

She stared at Kawakami. Sei didn't want anything. She looked at her only to study the lines of her face, with no desires, no agenda, no need to convince her of anything.

So she found it a bit jarring when Kawakami abruptly looked away, to the side of the gate. The girl's hand reached for a small console that Sei hadn't noticed before. She slapped some button that Sei could barely make out in the darkness.

The gates suddenly began to creak open.

Sei gave Kawakami a surprised glance, one filled with questions. The girl seemed uninterested in answering, though. Kawakami stepped back to allow the gates to open fully, and when there was no longer a barrier separating them—or separating Sei from the garden—she turned quickly and started making her way back towards the door.

"They're not home yet," she said, not bothering to look over her shoulder at Sei. "They stopped by our grandfather's house on the way back. They're looking for Kintarou, and I told them he wasn't here; they're not sure where he went. I think they don't realize that he never existed in the first place. You can go up to Alice's room. She might be startled to see you, but at least you'll be able to finish what you started." She stopped in her tracks, right in front of the threshold to the house. "Satou-san?"

Sei had begun to follow her, her legs moving on their own, even in the midst of her astonishment. When she heard her name, she looked up to find Kawakami's back facing her. She paused at the bottom of the steps that led up to the house. "Yes?" she murmured.

"I'm not doing this for you," Kawakami said. "I'm only doing this because you are Yumi-san's friend. It's a gift for her through you, you might say. In fact, you can forget that I did this. Imagine instead that it was Yumi-san who opened that gate and led you through this door."

Once they had stepped inside and the oddly cool air of the house hit them, Kawakami slipped off her shoes and floated off into a hallway, disappearing without another word. Blinking a few times to make sure that she was fully awake and in the usual mundane reality, Sei wondered for a moment if she indeed had eaten those mushroom and had simply forgotten.

She decided to accept it all anyway, even if it might have been an elaborate hallucination. She was grateful for it nonetheless. She closed the front door behind her and pulled off her shoes, not bothering to put on the house slippers before she jogged through the living room and found the stairs.

The steps squeaked as she ascended. She felt her feet fall with deliberate effort every time. At the end of the long staircase, at the very top and towards the left, she could see the outline of a plain white door. Coming out through the cracks at every edge was a brilliant yellow light. She could almost feel it hitting her like a wave of heat.

When she reached the landing, she didn't hesitate. She grasped the doorknob tightly in her hand and pulled it open. A bath of warm light flowed out towards her. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust.

And there, like she had been casually drinking tea all night, oblivious to the conflicts of the outside world, sat Alice. She was at the low table and she looked up at Sei in shock, the teacup immediately shaking in her hand. Droplets spilled onto the book that was spread out in front of her. She dropped the cup onto the table.

There was more than surprise on her face, though. There was an edge of embarrassment as well. Sei looked up and saw that the girl's clothes were strewn about the room. Her suit jacket was crumpled near the door, with her dress shirt and vest in a heap close by. Her trousers looked like they had been tossed angrily at the wall, and they were presently hanging in a mess along the top of a small bookshelf.

The girl was quite naked. From her perspective, Sei could not see the rest of Alice below the line of the low table, but something told her that the girl had freed herself down to nothing.

Sei nodded, as a polite acknowledgement of the intrusion, but she nonetheless let herself in without invitation and gently closed the door after herself. She walked over to the low table and sat down. She briefly remembered with amusement how they had sat in these exact positions, the tray of tea between them, when they had met for the second time.

She hadn't known it at the time, but it was precisely in the midst of those awkward moments that she had decided that she liked Alice. She remembered them almost as vividly as their more pleasant moments, almost as vividly as that first kiss.

The shock hadn't worn off from Alice's face. Nonetheless, Sei couldn't wait any longer. She leaned in towards her, and for reasons that remained a mystery to Sei, Alice didn't have the good sense to lean away. Sei stopped just short of contact, their faces centimeters apart, their breaths mingling.

She purposefully had not looked down at first, but now she felt the desire tugging at her. She gave Alice a questioning stare and was a bit surprised when Alice nodded.

Sei looked. She tried to glance as briefly as she could at Alice's lower half, not wanting to stretch the discomfort longer than necessary, but she found that her eyes did linger for a few seconds longer than she had intended. She still wasn't quite sure what to make of it, what to call the shapes and lines of skin that she saw beneath her, but she found it all very beautiful.

She turned her gaze back up towards Alice. "You can look at me, too," Sei whispered. "Right now, if you want. I can show you all of me. I don't care."

Alice didn't answer. Her previously blank stare of astonishment cracked open. The tears flowed immediately, without warning, the first of the sobs racked her body. She pushed her face against Sei's chest and cried.

Sei pressed her mouth to the side of Alice's cheek. "I know you're only eighteen," she said, "so you can't legally marry without permission yet, but you'll be twenty soon enough—in what, a year and half? Two years? That's a sensible engagement period, don't you think?" Sei was smiling, because she was very conscious of her own insanity, because she knew that the length of engagement was just about the only sensible thing in the whole ordeal.

The rest of what she was asking was unreasonable. She was pushing Alice much too hard, much too quickly into a path of growth. She was only just a girl, after all, a bud that had some time left before she was ready to blossom fully.

But Sei couldn't help but wonder if the girl would ever grow at all under her present circumstances. Better to push too hard, than to never break out of the ground at all.

"I'm not trying to play with your feelings, Alice," Sei said. "I'll keep my word. I mean everything I've said. If you simply must get married, then you will marry me. No one else suits you, and I can't watch you marry someone who'll push you back into your shell, someone who will give you an excuse to be something you're not, someone who won't challenge you to follow the life that's unfolding inside of you. She would make it way too easy for you."

Alice grabbed two handfuls of Sei's shirt and squeezed hard. Sei could feel the tension building and releasing in Alice's body with every breath, like some conflicted cycle that was nonetheless quite predictable.

She brought her hand to Alice's chin and tipped her head up until they faced each other. Streams of tears lined the girl's cheeks, but her body had stopped trembling the moment they met eyes. Sei tried her best to transfer something—strength, perhaps—through her gaze, but she knew that the courage to act was solely on Alice's shoulders now. There was nothing she could do for her anymore.

Sei offered Alice a light kiss on the mouth, which the girl did not resist. Then she stood from the table and wandered towards the door. Before she left, she turned her head slightly and called out to her, "You don't have to answer me right this instant, Alice—but I won't take 'maybe' for an answer."

She stepped out and shut the door behind her. The hallway where she stood was now shrouded in darkness, except for the small bit of radiating light that peaked through the cracks of the shell of Alice's room.

When Sei walked down the staircase, she was a little bit taken off guard—but not entirely surprised—to find that Mr. and Mrs. Arisugawa were at the foyer. They stared at her, similarly thrown off at the unexpected visitor, and they didn't respond at first when Sei had the audacity to wave at them and smile.

"Pardon for the intrusion," Sei called to them in a sing-songy voice. She didn't avoid them. She fearlessly made her way to the foyer, intending to put her shoes back on. She had nothing to hide anymore.

Alice's mother gave a delayed reaction. Like Sei had suspected all along, she was growing weary of this particular performance as well. Either way, she stepped forward and looked directly at Sei's face. "How dare you come here." Even while Sei was stepping down towards the shoe rack, obviously intending to leave, Arisugawa pointed towards the door. "Get out of my house this instant before I call the—"

"Oh, let it go already, Chikko," a clear voice rang out from behind the ornery woman. Sei would have snickered at the silly nickname if it wasn't for the fact that the interruption had given her pause.

She looked over and saw that Alice's father had put his arm out and was pushing the woman away from Sei.

"That kid of ours has never—never—attracted a girl on his own. Isn't that why we were so worried in the first place? Now I find out that he's been having a secret affair, and not only is she a beautiful girl from Lillian of all places, but she's his own tutor? I honestly can't see why you have any objection. Let the kid find his own way, Chieko. I would say Satou-kun is more than a worthy suitor."

Arisugawa Chieko's body tensed one last time, as if she were about to jump forward, but then—rather suddenly—the energy seemed to leak from her bones and she slumped forward weakly. She looked up at Sei for the first time with a softened expression. It was a plea, a show of helplessness, of confusion. The creases that always lined her eyes and mouth were still there, but they were no longer tightened with suspicion. For whatever reason, a sliver of the mask had fallen.

"Do you...really intend to do this, Satou?" she asked, her voice a bit hoarse. She locked her gaze with Sei's. "Are you serious about this?"

"Yes," Sei replied immediately. She did not look away. "I love her."

Arisugawa Chieko winced. It was obviously not the answer that she had wanted, but she seemed to have no way of resisting Sei's troublesome sincerity. She merely nodded slowly, in something that appeared like grudging acceptance, though not quite agreement.

"I'm...not against it," Alice's father said.

Sei looked back and forth between the two of them, quite stunned. She managed to offer a humble bow before grabbing her shoes and practically sprinting to the door. The walls of the house felt confining in that moment. She felt like a wild beast in a cage. She wanted to run around outside through a field somewhere.

When the gush of fresh spring air hit her as she opened the door, she felt grateful for even the small bugs that zipped around her when she stepped into the moonlight. She walked across the garden, crunching the grass beneath her feet. She paused for a second near the bird bath, near the family of glowing mushrooms, but soon enough she felt that familiar wild energy flowing through her again and she rushed towards the entrance.

She was pleased to find that the gate was still open, that there was no barrier when she skipped across the last patch of grass and jumped triumphantly into the outside world.

Alice sat still, very still. She strained to hear the last vibrations of that young woman's footsteps, of the front door to the house slamming closed with her particular brand of energy. Alice was tempted to look out the window and see if she could catch one last glimpse of that woman, but she found that her legs wouldn't move.

So instead, she sat, her eyes staring straight at her teacup, her vision un-focusing and refocusing. When she looked closely, she could still see a few translucent particles in the bottom of the cup. For the first time in a long time, she had taken her tea with some sugar.

The room felt oddly cool, and her drink was now quite tepid, but for some reason she felt a pulsing warmth burning softly in her chest. It grew and shrank with her breath, like she was stoking a fire inside of her.

She loves me.

Alice had barely heard the murmurs floating up from down the stairs. At first, she had been afraid, had felt her body lock up when she realized that Sei had been caught. Then she had heard the the gist of the conversation as subtle whispers against the walls of her room. She had suffered through most of it, both embarrassed at the whole evening's ordeal and still quite angry at Sei's audacity—but then….

She lifted her hand with some effort. She dipped her finger in her tea and watched the ripples, as if she were looking to decipher her future in a bowl of water. Even if she had wanted to know, though, she could see nothing.

Just hours before, she had been presented with a very predictable vision of what her life could be like ten or twenty years down the line. It wasn't an intolerable vision. It was only as intolerable as the clothes that she had ripped off her body and thrown around the room the moment she had had the chance. But as much as she hated them, she hated to look at her own body more, so soon enough she knew that she would be putting them back on.

In some ways, it helped to be able to look away from herself sometimes, to cover her real self up. The distraction was soothing in certain respects. It was a distraction that no one in her life resisted, either; it was a cocoon of safety that everyone seemed to encourage her to crawl into.

Except for Satou Sei.

There was this presumptuous person who had come out of nowhere and mercilessly pointed to everything that Alice used to distract herself. She would not permit Alice to hide. Sei would permit almost anything from anyone, it seemed—except for that. It was the most frustrating thing about her, too: When Sei would look at her, Alice felt like the woman was seeing through hundreds of layers of baggage, like every part of Alice except her very core had become invisible. None of the usual costumes had worked on Sei; she had laughed when Alice tried to play Kintarou, had immediately pointed to it with no ounce of discretion.

She could strip Alice of her defenses with just a glance, and Alice had shuddered nakedly against that stare more than once. She had felt it the first night they met. Sei could see even the person beneath the name Alice. This was what scared Alice the most. But Sei wanted nothing else from her.

And so she couldn't shake that bittersweet tightening in her chest when Sei's words had reached her. They echoed in her head.

"I love her."

Sei's confident voice had radiated through the house like a tiny spark of light. Alice knew the full gravity of what that had meant. Sei loved the real her. While the words had filled her chest with emotion, not all of it was pleasant. A deep discomfort had come over her. Sei's words weren't just a declaration of love; they may as well have been a challenge. Alice wasn't sure if she could live up to it.

A future with Satou Sei was a huge unknown, a blank slate in her mind. This was not only because Sei was unpredictable, but because Sei demanded that Alice explore parts of herself that were still a complete mystery to her. It was something that was simultaneously terrifying and seductive, and she didn't know yet if she wanted to take those kinds of risks. When she had spent time with Sei, she had thought that she was getting to know some strange woman with a foreign-looking face, but in reality Sei had been pushing her to get to know her own self the whole time. No one had ever done that for her before.

Alice let out a breath. She sat, still paralyzed for the most part. She knew what she should do by sensible standards, and she knew what she wanted to do by her own irrational instinct, but she still could not piece together what she was going to do. Even as she heard the faint thumping of footsteps in the back of her mind, she did not move, did not let go of the rushing train of thoughts.

A cool breeze of air hit her body. She was getting used to the exposure by now, though, so she didn't shiver from it. Instead, she merely looked up.

Her mother had appeared in the doorway. Her posture looked as if she had been about to step into the room, but something had stopped her dead in her tracks. Her usually stern and scrutinizing face was instead colored with shock, and her eyes seemed to scan across every article of clothing strewn about—and then finally, across Alice herself.

Her mother's eyes widened with realization. "Kin...Kintarou? Are you…not dressed?" She took a step back, but did not retreat much more, as if she were torn between shielding her eyes from the scene or interrogating further. Her glance briefly shot towards the stairs, as if she were looking for some figure that was no longer there, then her attention quickly came back into the room. The usual stern gaze had returned. "What on Earth was that girl doing to you in here, Kintarou? Did she—?" her mother began, an icy voice emerging from somewhere deep in her chest.

But Alice interrupted her. "Yes, Mother, she did." The words seemed to leave her mouth of their own accord. The tone was what made it worse, though. She had said it so insolently—with the same quality as one of Sei's little smirks—that she almost regretted it immediately. It made her want to cover her mouth and apologize, but for some reason, she found that she couldn't.

Alice's mother stared at her. "You get dressed this instant. This instant! And I never want to see that girl—"

"I can't get dressed, Mom," Alice said. She felt a strange energy growing inside her. It was an energy that felt very familiar, like it had always been there, but something had snapped and allowed it to flow freely all of a sudden.

She looked at her mother's shocked face.

"I can't get dressed because you took my clothes," she explained. The more her mouth ran on its own, the more outrageous the things that seemed to spill out of her. For once, she surrendered and let herself speak. "Please give them back."

Her mother stood in the doorway. Alice found it almost comical how her mother's eyes blinked in rapid succession, like she was a robot who had been fed an unfamiliar command and was thrown into an infinite loop. "Kintarou-kun?" she said, as if she were unsure who she was speaking to. "Kintarou, what in the hell has gotten into you?"

But it wasn't about what had gotten into her. It wasn't about anything that had been added to her at all—rather, something that had been there before had very abruptly gone missing. Alice could feel the emptiness of it very clearly now, and it seemed that her mother could as well.

Alice didn't say anything about it, though. She merely stared at her mother's face, at the edges of uncertainty that had begun to creep in. It was an expression that she had previously only seen her showing her father. It was the look of someone who had nothing left to hold onto, but was nonetheless grasping desperately, blindly, in an effort to preserve some semblance of control.

Then Alice thought that maybe she had seen that face directed at her many times before, that maybe she had just been too terrified to notice the emptiness behind the threats. More than anything, her mother looked exhausted, and Alice suddenly realized what she could do to relieve her, to finally give her some rest after all this time.

She sat up straight. Her spine ached a little from the sudden alignment. It was only then that it struck her how much she had been slouching lately. "If you want me to get dressed," she said, "then give me my clothes." Her voice came out louder, more demanding somehow. She gestured towards the suit that had been thrown around in pieces throughout the room. "I'd rather be naked than wear that. So I'll be naked until you give me back my clothes." She dropped her hands onto the table with a thud and felt the cool moisture of the spilled tea that still hadn't yet dried. She looked her mother directly in the eyes.

Her mother had stepped back, hanging onto the door frame with one hand, a look of complete astonishment on her face. She said nothing, only stared at Alice as if it were the first time she had ever seen her.

And maybe it was.