RECORDING

Chapter Thirty-Three

Homeward Bound

A little girl in pigtails once upon a time tapped her shoe together and said, "There's no place like home." Another girl with pigtails had no such place to call home anymore.

Ui was in her bedroom, sitting upright in bed with a leg tucked underneath her and the mighty tome Gone With the Wind in her hands. She was on page 115, and Miss Scarlett was about to confess her love to the handsome and eccentric Ashley Wilkes when the doorbell rang. The ponytailed girl ruefully marked her place and got up; she had been soaring high with Scarlett's audacity and had been eagerly anticipating this moment from the first chapter, though she was sure Ashley would turn her down.

As she headed for the door an odd feeling gripped her, sending ice chips rippling up her back. It wasn't dread, really, but it was some sort of premonition — an inkling that this unsolicited visit was not the kind the Hirasawas normally got, which was from their next door neighbor, Miz Lawn Maintenance. Miz Lawn Maintenance dropped by unannounced every month to complain about the grass on the side of their house or the trees in their back yard or the weeds (which was probably her most reasonable complaint). She one time even called the Village on them. But it had snowed last night, concealing all of their lawn's faults in a trillion winter diamonds, so Ui couldn't imagine what Miz Lawn Maintenance would be around for.

It was Azusa.

"Azusa-chan? You're back already?" It was only seven-thirty in the morning.

Then Ui took in the state Azusa was in. The guitarist's head was lowered so her black hair obscured most of her face. Her nose was flushed and swollen, as were her lips. Two fireworks of color had exploded on her cheeks. She wore a coat, no shoes, and carried a black duffel bag in her hands.

Azusa took a deep breath, and the sound of it was grating. She asked in a low voice, "May I talk to Yui-senpai?"

Ui hesitated momentarily out of curiosity and worry. Why does she have a suitcase? She knew asking this would only make Azusa angry, so Ui turned around to call for her sister…only to find her appearing from the kitchen, nibbling a granola bar.

Yui blinked. "Why's Azu-nyan here?" At her voice Azusa looked up, flashing eyes that were puffy and stretched around the lower lids, irises bright and shiny and livid, little red branches crawling across the whites. "Azu-nyan?" Yui squeaked. "What's wrong?"

Huge hot tears spilled from the pigtailed girl's stinging copper eyes, making her throbbing red face glisten.

"Everything," she croaked, then began (or rather resumed) crying in earnest. The first sob came out as a bark, something she had held in for too long. The rest of her bawling followed in hard gusts. "They threw me out. My p-p-p-parents threw me ow-how-hout…"

Azusa thought she should have known they wouldn't like this. They knew a couple whose son had killed a Shinto priest while driving drunk. They had friends whose eldest daughter sprinkled a Bundt cake with Comet, and knew of a child who, high on spray paint, had set fire to the family's cocker spaniel. But they never spoke of a family with a homosexual daughter…and that struck Azusa as meaning it was an unspeakable horror, like Nanking.

There had been the time, when Azusa was ten, when Mitsuki talked about an old classmate of hers who now taught P.E. and who had an older brother. The woman was asserting that a girl should never be had after a boy, that it should be the other way around. "You should have a girl and then a boy," she had said, "because if you do it the other way around the girl will end up…that way."

"What way?" li'l Azusa had asked, sipping Kool Aid.

Mitsuki had looked dreadfully uncomfortable, and seventeen-year-old Azusa, recalling this, realized with a pang in her heart that to her mother the word 'lesbian' was like 'beetle juice.' She had said instead, "Funny."

"Funny how? Funny as in, no arms and legs?"

Her mother had looked at her sternly. "That is not funny. That is tragic. I'm talking about funny as in…" And she had placed a hand on her hip and attempted what seventeen-year-old Azusa supposed was boy's jaunty hipless strut, but with Mitsuki's supple hips she had looked like a waddling duck, and ten-year-old Azusa had giggled; it did indeed look funny, though she still didn't get it. Mitsuki had nodded approvingly at her daughter's mirth and looked for a moment at her flat girlish chest underneath her tanktop, her gaze loving but pitiless.

Ui slumped back on her heels in shock, her scalp prickling with the confusion roiling underneath it, This explains the bag, but why would Mr. and Mrs. Nakano kick her out? She and Jun had been to Azusa's house several times, and to her the Nakanos seemed to get along like a happy family. The parents didn't contradict or embarrass Azusa in front of Ui and Jun, didn't start quarrels with her or each other, and even provided junk food for their visits when Ui knew they preferred healthier things for their daughter's diet. But there was something in Azusa with which Ui could identify, and that was that she had young lovey-dovey parents whose educational credentials weren't based on more than a GED exam.

Parents who gave up on their kids.

Parents who discovered an ideal lifestyle that their kids didn't fit into.

Did they kick her out because she's dating oneechan? Ui wondered. She had heard about stuff like that happening to homosexuals, and the idea of it horrified her…but didn't surprise her. Her wonder was confirmed when her sister and friend began fighting.

There was a gap between the two of them which gradually closed as Yui approached Azusa. Not knowing how else to console her girlfriend when she was in such monstrous distress, the senpai attempted to hug her, only to be roughly shoved away.

"Don't touch me!" Azusa snarled.

They recoiled from one another, Yui staring at the kouhai with shiny wounded eyes and Azusa looking away with her arms clasped protectively around her chest.

In a low, coldly furious voice, the younger girl said, "I feel dirty for having been with you. It's all your fault I'm homeless now." Her voice rose to a thick liquid dirge as she regarded Yui with miserable eyes. "I wish I'd never met you — you with all your stupid hugs and nicknames. I wish I'd never met you! If I'd never met you I wouldn't be this way! I'd be nuh-nuh-normal!"

This unleashed another round of sobbing, the kouhai's cries so passionate they were silent and so strong they bent her over with one hand on her knee and the other cupping her red, contorted face. From between her fingers glittering teardrops flew to the floor. An dfor a few moments her wet breaths were the only sounds in the sullen household.

Ui's eyes flicked to Yui, waiting for her to make a rebuttal or comeback or some sort of reply. Her sister said nothing, only stared at the floor with a concentrated expression, as if she was working out some math problem. Azusa carried on crying, and Yui made no attempt to hug her this time.

You guys were doing so well, Ui thought. For the past month the ponytailed girl had internally fought back and forth for and against this very moment, But now that she saw it unfolding before her eyes (she never thought she'd witness this moment), saw Yui's face reddening with anger (an emotion she seldom expressed), Ui knew she preferred them giggling together and fawning over one another. Sure, it made them look like
(my parents)
a couple of loons, but when this time came when one emotionally tore the other apart, there was something to be said for all that loony fawning and giggling.

Yui raised her head and noticed Ui. Her eyes were on her little sister for only the briefest of brevities before they swept back to Azusa. "Are you sure we should…in front of…?"

Azusa looked up at Ui as well, and the ponytailed girl flinched. Azusa's glare was hot enough to be radioactive.

Looking — scratch that, glaring — back at Yui, she replied, "Tell her all you want. I don't care anymore because you and me are quits." Yui's mouth fell open, and Azusa turned away from her hurt expression. "Tell her everything. Have a freakin' family. You probably will anyway." And then, feeling quite small, the kouhai added feebly, "And you'll leave them behind. You know why? Because you really are a NEET…To me, you're just some fat-headed failure."

That last line sounded and felt like a whipcrack. Yui made a quiet choking sound, a breathless sound, and Ui regarded Azusa with wide surprised eyes. Heavy silence fell, and one could almost feel the house bracing itself for an apocalyptic breakup. Had there been a studio audience this would be the part where they'd intone in low, dreadful voices, Ooooo.

Yui took a step backward, her hands clenching and unclenching in tandem with her rapid breathing. She's angry, alright, Ui thought, but she thought it was a flimsy rage thinly masking sadness. Nobody made fun of Yui's parents. Nobody. If you wanted to be written out of her good graces, you called her a failure like her parents. Yui stared impassionately at Azusa, not saying anything, and one probably would have thought she was trying to come up with a retort.

Instead she turned around and stalked out of the foyer and up the stairs, hands still gripping and releasing thin air. Ui made a step towards the stair case, remembering Yui's bitter face on a walk home from primary school after a long day of bullying (Where's your momma? I hear she's gone an' left ya! Hah! She left ya 'cause even she knows you're a moron!) when the ponytailed girl had tried to console her (in retrospect Ui thought she had been much too young to have such a bitter facial expression), but from upstairs came the hollow clatter of Yui's door slamming and, as a final punctuation to a powerfully wordless statement, the sharp snap of a lock. She wasn't speaking to anybody.

The insides of Ui's legs spun with useless energy as she tried to figure out what to do. Azusa was homeless. Yui was locked in her bedroom, probably crying. The brunette looked at Azusa, who returned her expectant stare. What are you looking at me for? she wanted to cry. I have nothing to do with this! I'm just a third-party member, a side character! Why do I have to be the one to do something?

Because it's your household and your life, a UFO voice in her mind told her softly, and Ui would suppose maybe that voice was the adult counterpart of herself, the grownup in her placing a strong hand over her unsteady one and guiding it, just like her first grade teacher did in penmanship classes. You're the main character in your life, and now you have to take a stand, Ui. And once you take a stand you have to accept the consequences. It might hurt. It might hurt badly. Be the one who keeps pushing forward, no matter how badly it hurts.

Ui didn't know if this was useful or not, but she decided for now she would get out, get some air, let her brain breathe, not be stared at by people who wanted her to make a big decision. She grabbed her coat from the closet, pulled on winter boots over her socks.

"Where are you going?" Azusa asked, and there was a snappish fury lingering in her voice which Ui didn't care for.

"Out." The ponytailed girl turned to face her friend and, feeling like her inner adult voice personified, ordered, "You are going to stay here."

"Why do I have to?"

Don't you think you've yelled enough for one day? Ui thought wearily. But she had to push forward, no matter how much this hurt. "Do you have anywhere else to go?" she inquired, not unkindly.

Azusa flinched, and then her face seemed to lower to reluctant submission.

"Try to make up with oneechan. At least apologize for calling her a fat-headed failure. That was really mean."

Ui left the house and immediately almost took a spill on the slick front stoop. She made a mental note to scatter salt on it, wishing Yui could think to take care of some of these things. If it took two people to run a household, her sister didn't make the best hubby.

Sakura township lay still in a milky winter morning. November 28, 2009. Those Christmas products that the Ginza market had had on the shelves since the first of the month would probably be starting to sell now. The snow plows last night had done no more then cut ruts into the street and knock over some mailboxes. Ui hesitated at the driveway's end, gratefully noting that her mailbox was still intact, hesitated again…and then headed east toward the Kizuna-Suishou intersection. Crossing Suishou and then hanging a right on Miyazaki Lane would bring her to the park where Obaachan used to turn her, Yui, and Nodoka loose for a few hours. Sometimes the grownup chaperone had been Manabe Sonomi, Nodoka's mother, until a "friendly neighbor" reported to Obaachan that her smoking was terrifying the playground kids.

There was someone who lived near that park.

Ui pulled out her cell phone and speed-dialed this someone. She headed toward Suishou Boulevard as she talked, walking alongside the curb.

"Hi, Jun-chan, sorry to bother you…Can you meet me at the park…?"

Jun was already at the park when Ui arrived. She stood beside a snow-covered bench, hands in her pockets, staring at the paper-blank sky. She was the only person there at that park, nothing more than a grey shadowy sentinel watching the land.

Ui slid through the snow as she made her way uphill. The sounds were huge in the winter silence, and Jun spun around.

The bassist's mouth fell open. "H-HI," she greeted, her face red from more than just the cold. Calling someone to the park — there had to be something romantic behind that, right? Rebounding lest she should sound like an idiot, Jun asked smartly, "So what did you call me over here for at eight A.M.?"

Ui apologized for the inconvenience, and Jun insisted it was okay, because she was already up anyway, had even had her coffee. Then, Ui dropped the bomb: "Azusa-vhan's been kicked out of her house."

Jun's jaw dropped and her eyes widened.

"She told them about her and oneechan, and they forced her to leave," the ponytailed girl went on. She paused, recalling the duffel bag in guitarist's hands, and then the fact that she hadn't been wearing shoes. They must have been merciful to let her pack her things, she thought, but then they shoved her right out the door. She pictured Azusa, glassy-eyed with disbelief, pawing around her bedroom in search of things to take out into the world with her. An idea was rising up like an elevator in her mind, and she looked at Jun.

"We need to convince Mr. and Mrs. Nakano to take her back."

The bassist hesitated, and then nodded. She was smiling.

They set off immediately for what was previously known as "Azusa-chan's house" with Ui in the lead, wishing she had a car to take them over the great distance. At the same time she did't mind the walking, felt like she had things under control with her legs moving. She had a plan. She had a plan. She had something that would resolve this problem that had placed itself on her knees, something that felt stony-solid, like a full stomach.

Maybe the plan was shoddy. But this was a chance Ui had to take. Nobody thought their efforts were good enough, did they? But sometimes they just were.

Oneechan…Ui thought of Yui's stricken face when Azusa had called her a fat-headed failure. She hoped Azusa was following her order and trying to make up with Yui.

When the Nakano house loomed into view Ui realized she just might be okay with her sister and Azusa together, in a final analysis. And in a nitroblast of realization she thought she figured out what about them dating really bothered her underneath the stealing-oneehan-away-from-me bit. They had reminded Ui of her parents, how young and stupidly in love they were. They had discovered something new, something original, and this whole time Ui had groundlessly feared that they would leave her behind, the very same way her mother and father had.

But nothing could be farther from the truth, she thought. Because when she thought about it neither Yui nor Azusa had turned their backs on her. Love was a thing to be between two people, but family anfriendship could have so many more links than that.

Besides, it made that big house a lot less lonely. With more people living in it, it felt a lot more like a home.

At the driveway Jun abruptly began snickering, and Ui swiveled her head this way and that in confusion. Then she noticed the Nakano mailbox, which the snow plow had shoved over like a playground bully and now canted steeply backward and to the right. The flag had been ripped clean from the box and now lay, a red L, in the snow.

At the front door Ui jabbed her gloved finger in the doorbell, a brief two-note chime. A moment or two later there were muted faraway staircase footsteps and a silhouette wavered behind the window. Then the old wooden door snored open.

It was Mitsuki, who still looked as flatly angry as she had when her carpet-munching daughter had come home for the last time.

You think you can trust someone, Ui tought. Really, what Mr. and Mrs. Nakano had done to Azusa was the reverse of what Taiki and Tsubasa had done to her and Yui. You can't just abandon your family.

"Ohayogozaimasu, Nakano-san," she greeted, bowing. Jun also bowed, though not quite as deeply as Ui, and she regarded Mitsuki with baleful eyes, chewing her lower lip.

Mitsuki didn't return their greeting.

"Uh…" Ui found her coldness a little disheartening. Nakano Mitsuki had always been a lively woman. But then she did lose a kid today…voluntarily. "A-Azusa-chan's at my house, and—"

At her daughter's name Mitsuki was turned off completely. The front door came swinging back toward Ui. Jun shot her arm out and not only stopped it but gently forced it back open.

Mitsuki faced Jun now, returning her baleful stare. In an angry little voce she said, "It is rude to show up adults like this. What would your mother say?" The last line was probably like some joke to her; Jun's mother was dead.

"It's rude to shut the door on people who aren't salesmen, politicians, or Jehovah's Witnesses. What would your mother say?" On 'your' Jun's body punched forward and her eyes flashed wide and challenging.

The temperature of Mitsuki's glare and voice climbed, reaching a roaring boil. "I suggest you stay out of this. Both of you." She glanced at Ui, and her face seemed to cool with some sort of recognition. "You're not in this — this is just Azusa and that whore of hers." The word 'whore' was drawn out to sound like horrr. "I won't have a daughter who lets some horrr sit on her face. That's not a good woman's place in the world."

Watch it, lady, Jun thought, eyes flashing again. Women who live in glass whorehouses shouldn't throw stones.

Ui looked up, shooting Mitsuki a glower that could rival Azusa's radioactive one. Call Yui a whore, will ya? Well… "Oh, now I am in this." Rather than step forward the ponytailed girl stepped back. But this was in no way a retreat, oh no. Her blazing brown eyes were like sharp focused points on Mitsuki's, and after a second the woman dropped her gaze. Ui had used up her adult quotient for the day; she had now reverted to a little kid who could come up with comebacks no more clever than idiot and meanie. "If my sister is sitting on Azusa-chan's face — which I doubt she is — then there's worse things to end up as." She turned to walk away, but Mitsuki wasn't done yet.

"And just what is that supposed to mean?" she brayed after Ui, and Jun jumped in.

"It means at least she's not some cougar-hag fucknugget who makes eight hundred yen an hour working at Subway because of a drunken weekend in high school she spent sitting on a kouhai's face." The bassist whirled around to follow Ui down the driveway. As she left both her hands came up to sling Mitsuki a double-eagle. She couldn't help it any better than she could help the enjoyment she derived from what she just said. She had hated Azusa's mother for all the dumb little chauvinist sex jokes she made, and she liked her even less for making a joke out of her deceased mother. What would my mother say? She'd be proud of me, you dumb skank!

Now at the end of the driveway Jun saw the slanted mailbox and her mother inspired another idea in her. Before she had drowned in that immense lake in Central Park over where the Hoshi Bridge crossed Jun's mother was known in the Suzuki family as a stinker and the Upsetter, a woman whose first bout of cervical cancer landed her jobless for years. During those years she drove around Sakura township and all the surrounding suburbs in search of garage sales, Goodwill's, and Salvation Army's. She would buy records and books from these places which she would auction on eBay. Often Jun, aged seven, would come with her, helping her to load the car's trunk with crates of records, cracking travelling salesmen jokes with her on the road, getting Wendy's when noon rolled around, and being her daughter.

Jun was remembering one sale where everything was ridiculously priced — one hundred yen for a paperback book when ten to twenty-five yen was more reasonable — and it was obvious that the clowns running this sale didn't really want to sell these things. Jun had suspected the books were trolled out for bragging: Look at all these books I've got. I sure read a lot of books.

"Got any records?" Mrs. Suzuki asked while her daughter scowled at the books.

"Sure do," the old man nodded. "Got the Buzzcocks Singles Going Steady. Got AC/DC Ballbreaker, Elton John Greatest Hits, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana Nevermind, and Bob Marley and the Wailers."

All quality eBay material, if you knew how to play the game. "Sold," Mrs. Suzuki smiled, producing her wallet from her back pocket. Her chemo-pump whirred in the fanny-pack underneath her flannel shirt, her chemo shirt. "How much?"

"Five hundred yen," he replied breezily.

Her magenta eyes flashed up from her wallet, her brown eyebrows descending. "Each?"

"Ah-yup. We don't got no records out here for sale, they's in my basement. But you can have your pick of 'em for five hundred yen each." He said this as if he was offeringone helluva deal, but Mrs. Suzuki wasn't going for it; her wallet closed and disappeared back into her pocket. He lifted his chin — chins, actually — at Jun turning a battered copy of The Giver in her hands. "Hey, ya little hussy, bring that book here."

Mrs. Suzuki shook her head. "Don't tell my kid what to do." She took Jun's hand in her thin little paw and lead her down the driveway where her car was parked. Over her shoulder she called, "Go fuck yourself, pops."

All of the four-letter words Jun knew she learned from the Upsetter.

"WHAT? WHAT WAS THAT?" the man bellowed from his lawn chair. "HEY! C'MERE! C'MERE!"

Jun remembered thinking, What, you really think she's going to turn around and head back up the driveway so you can have it out with her? She had barked laughter and her mother shushed her as she hurried into the car.

What she really remembered as she stared at the slanted mailbox was the old guy's garage sale notice n the street corner as her mom drove away. Mrs. Suzuki had stolen it, considered it revenge for the old fuck's rudeness. This was the woman who in her girlhood had hidden in bushes and pegged passing cars with rotten eggs and squishy tomatoes. She was a block away from the guy's house, ranting about what an asshole and a jerk he was (Mrs. Suzuki was a bit of a jerk herself, but she was an awesome jerk), when she spied his sign. She fell silent and abruptly swung her car to the curb.

"Mom, what are you going to do?" Jun asked, somewhat warily. Her mother's last bout of Upsetting had earned her a twenty-five hundred yen ticket taped to her windshield. Twenty-five hundred yen…It would take fifty of that old guy's records to pay that sumbitch off.

"Wait here a second," she ordered in a low, excited voice. She darted out of the car and dashed up to the sign on the street corner. She yanked the thing up out of the ground — it had black soil clinging to the end of its post —and brought it over to her stalling car where she placed it in the trunk. She had looked like an activist with the picket sign slung over her shoulder. When she got back in the car she was grinning like a girl who had gotten off a great gasser…and Jun supposed she had done just that, never mind that at the time she was pushing forty,

Jun stared at the mailbox, eyes stinging. I miss you, Mom. And, her body excited from getting off her own great gasser, she trudged through the blackened snow-mounds made by the plow and wrapped her arms around the box's post. She straightened her back with a groan, and the mailbox crunched out of the ground with clods of frozen dirt stuck to its base. She hefted it over her shoulder, heard things clattering inside — oh good, we'll bring Azusa-chan her mail —and hurried ahead of Ui, ordering in a low, excited voice, "C'mon, let's go."

"Ju-un!"

Mo-om! It was creepy. How often had Jun used that exact tone of voice scolding her mother for her kicks?

"You can't take their mailbox!" Ui hissed, catching up with her friend.

"They can't evict their daughter," the bass player retorted. The mail shuffled back and forth in the box with every step. She threw her head back over her shoulder and triumphantly yelled an Upsetterism oft-used by her late mother: "See ya, fuckers! You're sluts and you deserve each other!"

"Yui-senpai ~ I have Milk Duds ~"

No dice. Even with her favorite candy (the most disgusting brand) as bait the elder girl still refused to open the door.

Azusa sighed. Her parents kicking her out felt like an eraser-swipe across a chalkboard, obliterating the life she had lead up until that point save for the dusty ghostly erasier-memories. Already that steamy not-so-innocent make out session from earlier felt like it had been lived in another girl's life. Azusa seemed to live another seventeen years in the course of one morning and she was exhausted, she had had enough for one day (or ten), and for now she only wanted to curl up and let the world roll along without her. She could catch up later.

But there was Yui to deal with, and Yui was important — even through the chalky cloud kicked up from this morning Azusa felt that. If her life from before getting kicked out had been swept from her mind it was time, then, to scrawl a new life on the board. And right now her mind was writing on the freshly clean blackboard: You barged into her house unannounced and subjected her to some of the worst insults she's probably ever heard. It's a blue-eyed miracle you weren't kicked out of here either. So don't knock it. She turned her crimson eyes upward, needing sleep. Why must I be such a diva when I'm mad?

"Yui-senpai, I wasn't in my right mind when I said all of those things." Azusa tried not to let her exhaustion come through in her voice — if she did she worried Yui might misinterpret it as carelessness.

The kouhai heard a thin scrape, a papery flap, and looked down to see Yui had shoved a widthwise-folded paper through the crack under the door. Azusa hesitated, her body seeming to stammer, and then stooped to unfold the missive. She was half expecting it to say FUCK YOU, but instead it read: Did your parents say to you what you said to me?

Were they in their right minds when they threw me out? Azusa wondered, pressing the note to her lips pensively.

"Yui-senpai, let's actually talk, huh?"

No response.

Azusa sighed and rolled her eyes. "Come on, Yui," she groaned, and her tiredness came through. Her forehead touched the door. "I know you were an easy target as a kid because you had no parents to rectify these situations, but — but — Christ, Yui, everyone's an easy target in primary school. I was an easy target in school…just like you, but for different reasons. You get older and when you look back on this hazing as a grownup, it dulls in your perspective. If it hadn't dulled in mine I would not have said what I said."

Silence.

"I had my parents, yes, but they never were there for me when I was getting bullied. They were too busy drinking martinis with a Friday night movie or watching shows about all the great restaurants in Tokyo." She opened her eyes and patted er hand roughly against the door for emphasis. "I'm less than five feet tall, okay? Kids called me short-stack, chibisuke, and they picked me up against my will because when you're little it's hard to defend yourself against people who are bigger than you, you know? I had a guy in middle school grab me by my ankles and swing me in circles until he threw me in the grass." She remembered scraping and cutting her face as she skidded. She remembered seeing the world tilt one way and then the other as she tried to stand up. She remembered sinking back to her knees and puking.

Still no response from Yui.

"In kindergarten my parents got my hair cut short for picture day and everybody in my class laughed and said I looked like a boy. A teacher actually called me 'young man' in the hallway." Which was an accident, but that still made her angry. More childhood memories belched up in her mind like gas rising from a mineshaft. Her blood boiled and her voice rose impassionately. "In first grade a kid threatened to cut my head off. He only had a butter knife, sure, but I didn't know any better. I told the teacher and he got suspended. I ran into him in middle school. He cornered me by my locker with a Buck knife held to my throat. He told me if I kept crying he would cut my head off for real." She remembered how impossibly ice-cold the blade had felt on her neck. She remembered her mind shrieking again and again, Caught! I'm caught! Caught! Caught! Caught!

"In third grade a guy named Jarell Shanks broke my arm. He called me midget, shoved me down, and pulled my right arm until the back of my hand touched my neck. Some teachers watched. Do you understand? Some teachers watched. I screamed for better than three minutes until a teacher finally came over. By then Jarell-san had run far away." And didn't get in any trouble, she thought bitterly. She remembered the sound of her arm breaking — like snapping a thick branch off a tree. She remembered the pain rolling down it, gray and huge. She remembered how distant her shrieks sounded for those brutal three minutes. She remembered color washing out of the world, which she had felt like she was floating in.

No response.

Azusa was about to move on to her first year in middle school when Nelson Guhrs tried to tell everyone that she sucked her daddy's cock when the door cracked open. The hallway's light fell within the darkened bedroom, upon Yui's listless brown eyes and tear-wet cheeks.

"And now your parents have kicked you out," she said. There was dullness in her voice, as flat as a dead line on a heart rate monitor, which Azusa didn't like.

The pigtailed girl nodded, saying nothing.

Fresh globular tears spilled over Yui's swollen eyelids and rolled down her cheeks. Azusa felt tempted to wipe them off. "Ui's sort of mad at our parents, did you know that?" Yui was now whispering. "She feels like they've given up on us." She drew in a thick grating breath, fighting back a runner of snot that wanted to ooze out of her nose. "What if parents aren't real? What if we're all alone and…and there is nothing else?"

A shiver crested up Azusa's neck, making her hairs jump up at attention. Yui's facial expression hardly changed as she studied the younger girl thoughtfully; a few more tears fell.

Three days after nine-year-old Azusa was discharged from the hospital her father approached her while she was attempting to do homework left-handed (while in the throes of agony on the blacktop she had screamed, "JARELL-SAN, YOU JERK, YOU BROKE MY FROCKING ARM!" and nobody had done anything to punish him — nobody seemed to know that it was he who broke her arm) and said, "You might not want to be such a loser, if you get what I'm saying. Losers send out a certain vibe that bullies can pick up on. If you hadn't sent out those vibes your arm wouldn't be broken." He shrugged. "No offense."

No offense. One of Azusa's all-time least favorite sayings. Assholes said 'no offense' to excuse them being assholes.

In her first year in middle school she had used some money she had saved up to buy a bra, even though she had had no breasts (they wouldn't swell into being until her third year). She bought it because you had to take off your clothes in front of other girls in P.E., and she didn't want to be the only girl in the locker room without one. One day her mother had asked her, "Azusa, if you didn't have feet would you wear shoes?"

Baffled and envisioning herself walking on stumps like a pirate with two wooden legs, Azusa said no. She had walked right into Mitsuki's ruse.

"Then why do you wear a bra?"

Azusa had stared at her mother, wide-eyed and stricken, her cheeks flaming, before she retreated back to her bedroom. The bullying hurt, yes, but even more than that what hurt was her parents' and teachers' refusal to see it. When a kid is having a tough time contending with difficulties that are really real, she could turn to her "best friend" the cop or the teacher, and the grownup looks the other way and she is alone.

"There is nothing else," Azusa whispered, and burst into fresh tears.

Yui and Azusa seemed to make up around then — no kiss or anything, it was sort of intuitively and almost telepathically decided. After that the kouhai rolled into her girlfriend's bed for a long hard sleep. When she woke up to find the window black with night she was thrown into temporary and headachey confusion. You could get a hangover from drinking; you could also get one from crying.

She reeled out into the hallway, and her eyes were stabbed with dazzling light. Squinting and blinking, she found the stairs, which provided some (literally) dim relief. Her center of gravity felt like it had elevated up to her pounding head. Balance all messed up. Homeless. The seventeen-year-old hobo.

At the bottom of the stairs she heard noises from the kitchen: silverware panging roundly on dishes and the faraway drone of voices, a blurring of vowel sounds. Her stomach growled sharply under her ribs as she made tracks for the kitchen; she hadn't eaten so much as a nibble all day.

She found the Hirasawa sisters eating frozen yogurt and blackberries at the table. It was 19:09, dinner was past, and now was time for dessert. An odd feeling of comfort and familiarity stole over Azusa as she stood in the doorway and watched them eat. It was more like coming in to family members eating dessert than her girlfriend and friend. They had been family today, she thought. They had fought and said vicious things (Azusa mostly) but at the end of the day they could make up, and she bet all her heart that if she were to walk in right now they would invite her to join them for dessert.

It just pained her so much that she would have to leave them so soon.

Azusa slunk in and Ui looked up.

"Azusa-chan! Do you want berries and yogurt?"

Yui looked at her expectantly over her shoulder.

The pigtailed girl shook her head. "I can't stay long."

"Long? I don't know about that," Ui smiled. "Forever seems pretty long, but that's only one girl's opinion."

Azusa blinked her eyes thickly. Her crying-hangover made her thinking slow. Yui got it before she did, which was a blue-moon rarity. The brunette whipped her head back around and whispered, "Do you mean…?"

Ui set down her spoon and interlaced her fingers below her chin, looking less like the girl she was and more like an adult making an important decision. "I'm not going to force you to live here or keep you hostage. But I'd like for you to stay with us."

Azusa lifted her head from the wall she was leaning against, and Yui's eyes doubled in size.

"Here?" The pigtailed girl's voice was high with surprise. "You want me to stay here with you guys? But…but…" What an offer! The enormity of it frightened her more then it endeared her. Living in someone's house?

Ui itched the cup of her right ear. "You're the main character in your life, and now you have to take a stand, Azusa-chan. This will affect you, mainly, so consider that."

"What about you, though? Won't I impose?" What about Azusa the seventeen-year-old hobo, stuffing her clothes with crumpled newspaper in the winter, riding the freight trains from town to town and never continuing in one stay, the hobo who felt herself becoming more and more a woman each time she plunged her callused hand into the trash and withdrew a half-eaten Big Mac or a bucket of KFC bones with perfectly good skin and meat still clinging to them? Huh? The little hobette who would probably die of hypothermia or syphilis or rabies — what about her?

Did Azusa really have a choice between that and the lap of luxury?

"It would be no imposition," Ui assured, waving a hand dismissively. "I could ask my parents for a 'raise.'"

"And that's okay?"

"Mm-hmm." Ui had learned from an early age, rather guiltily, that her parents were easy to milk, financially. She flipped her palm out and upward, her fingers pointed toward Yui. "You'll bunk with oneechan." She shuddered to think of some of the noises she might hear some nights if they were getting along particularly well, but her adult voice muttered, Suck it up and invest in some ear plugs. Heavy-duty ones. "You'll go to school with us, come home with us, take your meals with us, and so on so forth."

Azusa glanced at her uncertainly, turning her head aside and peering at Ui from the corners of her eyes. "Are you sure? Aren't you in love with Y—"

"Shh!" A little red about the cheeks, Ui leaned forward with her finger against her lips. Then, easing back with a softer facial expression, she explained, "I don't think it's like that for me anymore." I won't have a daughter who lets some whore sit on her face. That's not a good woman's place in the world. That was what Mrs. Nakano told Ui. The last twelve or so hours found the ponytailed girl pondering over how yesterday she had tripped and took her accidental seat upon some guy's face. What was his name? She heard Ritsu say it. Hitoshi? Kiyoshi? It was something-shi. She had sat on his face yesterday, took her bad woman's place in the world, and worst of all shown herself to him as being immodest.

Did he think she was a whore? Did he think she was the kind of girl who regularly sat on any flighty guy's face? For some puzzling reason — one that set off an urgent churning in her gut — she wanted to go to him and make it clear she was no that kind of girl.

…and get his name. What was it? Takashi? Hideshi?

"Ui, you're in love with someone?" Yui squealed, clapping her hands to her cheeks.

Her little sister's frame did a snap-jerk, as though jolting awake from sleep. A red fire of a blush flashed hot in her face and her collarbones. Her brown eyes sank bashfully and she squeaked, "It's a secret, oneechan. Major secret, you know?" She caught Azusa smirking at her, and her humiliation heat rose higher and her gaze sank lower.

Seriously. Was it Arashi? Tadashi?

"So…" Her eyes found their way back up to Azusa. "Will you stay?"

"Oh, please say yes, Azu-nyan!" Yui begged shrilly, clasping her hands together. "It'll be great! We'll sleep in bed together and we'll—"

"Fine. Alright. I'll stay. Keep your shirt on." When we're in bed tonight keep it on please.

What followed was something like the end of Homeward Bound II, when Chance learned Delilah could stay with his family. Yui didn't just stand up from the table, no. She flew up with a joyous oath exploding from her lips which startled both Ui and Azusa. "YES!" she crowed. Her feet barely touched the floor as she ran over to her girlfriend, who had that same exasperated thought everytime Yui approached her: Oh boy. I'm about to get hugged, aren't I?

And she did. Yui actually lifted her off the floor — all one hundred pounds of her — spun her around once, and landed her on her little socked feet. Her hands were still on the kouhai's waist when she kissed her, and Azusa remembered what a good kisser Yui was in an instant. The sounds she made, how good she was at swirling her tongue around Azusa's, how busy her hands were. But this wasn't a kiss like that. This kiss was rough, hard, and happy, and it ended with a loud smack. What followed was the classic Yui full-body hug where she nuzzled one of Azusa's chubby cheeks with almost furious glee. One of the kouhai's eyes was squinched shut where her girlfriend was nuzzling, but from the other eye she saw Ui sitting alone at the table across the room.

Azusa lifted her hand off Yui's shoulder and flashed her friend the peace sign. This was her way of silently conveying thanks, and she hoped Ui understood that.

She seemed to. Smiling, she nodded and flashed peace back.

And that is the story of how one stray kitty found a home.

A/N

My father said once that swearing is the language of the ignorant. While I agree on that, I believe swearing is okay if you can do it cleverly. I'm a fairly creative swearer (as is my mother, hell I learned all my creative swears from her, such as fuck-a-duck and Bumblefuck, Egypt), so I made Jun a creative swearer as well.

From here we're all caught up, so updates will come at a slower rate, and I got another fic to get to work on. From here we'll dive into Mugi and Sawako's trip to Switzerland to meet Mugi's mom, Veronique Hohnstedt.