CHAPTER 7: Dancing Honks On Me
Silence had descended upon the library. The summer break had left few students remaining, and those who stayed were the quiet, studious types. That is, unless you were Honoka Kousaka and you were singing softly along to START! DASH on your headphones. Or Maki, humming along with her. Honoka smiled, taking her hand. She exaggerated her other hand gestures, closing her eyes and twisted in her seat. Maki still sang START! DASH in the shower in the mornings, moving her body to the choreography in the limited space of the stall. She was surprised to see her fist pumped up next to Honoka's, their voices in low harmony together. Honoka was beaming like a sun at her.
"You're a bad influence, you know that?" Maki was smiling too and couldn't hide it. "Making a nice girl like me break the rules of the library?"
"I just like seeing you move; I can't help it."
"I, uh…"
The girl at the next table over was glaring at Maki and Honoka and neither of them were concerned in the slightest. Honoka winked at her and the girl rolled her eyes. On closer inspection it was her lab partner. They'd said maybe… two paragraphs to each other, tops. Blonde. Grey eyes. Ugh. Maki gave the slightest nod to her and the stranger, Ro-something, nodded back.
"I'm going to get a muffin from the café."
"Get me a cranberry muffin! And carrot cake. And some tea."
With hands full Maki came back to the table. Heavy books lay in Honoka's lap that Maki did not recognize and her notebook was full of complicated equations; the numbers and symbols looking all wrong in Honoka's rounded handwriting. What was she working on? Biology homework was all cells and viruses right now. Her pocket buzzed. She ignored it. Maki's approach was slow this time, not wanting to startle Honoka again. As she came into Honoka's vision, Honoka waved and put away the notebook, taking out her biology textbook.
"Did you get my carrot cake? And a muffin?"
"Yes, yes," Maki handed over the baked goods. "How on earth do you manage you figure?"
"Oh, I still go on runs every morning. Everyone teased me so much when I gained ten pounds that one time, gotta stay in shape!" Honoka looked down at her muffin. "I feel weird bringing it up! How is your chemistry class going?"
"Honoka…" Maki didn't remember how she handled it. She did not have a lot of faith in her fifteen-year old self. "I'm sorry. We were all little brats back then. I've probably gained at least ten pounds in college, you know."
"Suffer with me!" Honoka pushed the carrot cake at her.
"Oh fine," The biology book's charts brought Honoka over to her side of the table. Bare arms against each other. Honoka's arms were surprisingly firm, as if she'd been doing labor. Maki gripped her bicep. It was definitely muscle, cool to the touch. She tried not to imagine Honoka's strained face, sweat running down her neck and into her- "Have you been working out, too?"
"A little!" Honoka grinned at her. "Rin sends me her videos sometimes and she has cool exercises to do."
"Oh, cool, tell her I said hi!"
The walk to the train station was slow and rambling that evening. Maki wanted to get some more toothpaste from the convenience store, Honoka stopped to point out the fire flies dancing in the gardens of the sleepy neighborhood. They alit as they rose up, illuminating the white petals of the flowers.
"I miss Akihabara and the States sometimes, but… I think these moments make up for it." Honoka looked straight ahead into the gathering dusk. "Want to go to the shrine? I've only been there once at the start of the semester."
"Why not?"
They walked with comments here and there. The edges of the leaves that were tinged with yellow, the raccoons that scurried up the steps ahead of them, the wind that was changing from a cloying humidity of July to the placid coolness of August. August, Honoka told Maki, was her favorite month. It made sense, Maki thought. Honoka was a Leo. (Maki was a Taurus-Aries cusp. Not that she'd look up their signs and compatibility or anything.) The stairs seemed to go on forever in the gloom of the camphor trees that curtained their path. Steps were cracked, not swept of excess leaves.
The top of the stairs brought the old shrine into view. The small sanctuary for the kami was covered in dead plants. Honoka sighed before bounding ahead to wipe it off. She mumbled what Maki assumed was a prayer as she used her shirt as a rag. They'd practiced so much at the shrine back at home. Honoka must have some kind of connection to these things by now.
Maki had never been religious. She didn't know what to feel about this, expect a pang of sadness for the what appeared to be abandoned shrine. Beer cans were piled up on the torii- the wooden red gate of the shrine. With a sigh herself she gathered the cans into her plastic bag from the convenience store, (putting the toothpaste in her backpack.) An old broom rested against the sanctuary and Honoka made short work of the cluttered stairs. They worked in the twilight, until they could no longer see. The stars were out now, the Milky Way glistening over their heads.
Honoka was panting when they sat down on the stairs under the torii. "I feel like Nozomi."
"I never realized how hard she worked." Another guilty stab of not answering her emails from Nozomi. Between those and the emails from her parents, she simply wasn't checking her emails at times.
"We all worked hard." Honoka's eyes were on the stars. Maki never could get over how clear, how bright the stars were in the countryside. Virgo and Scorpio were never visible at home. Honoka never said anything, but Maki often noticed her looking to the sky as well. Did she feel just as awed as Maki, when she stared into space, watch the heavens curve around the planet? She took Honoka's hand and Honoka met her with a gentle squeeze. They locked eyes. The blue fire was burning again. Honoka's face was entirely too close, her other arm sliding around Maki's neck, her expression intense. She opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again.
"Maki…" Honoka looked down. "There's… some things I should tell you."
Maki nodded, unable to form actual words.
"I…"
The younger girl looked at her expectantly, daring to hope, daring to dream-
"I… Actually, I…" Honoka was flustered, losing the passionate expression now. "Some things happened and I…."
This did not sound like a love confession. Maki's heart sank. "If it's too much, you can tell me when you're ready."
"…O…okay. Thanks for being so understanding, Maki. There's a meteor tonight, you know."
"Oh?" Maki hadn't heard anything from her star-gazing blogs.
"In about a few minutes," Honoka pointed at Libra. "Right over there."
They waited. What was Honoka trying to tell her? Was she okay? Did she like someone else? Did her parents decided she was getting married? Was Maki annoying her?
Maki realized she was holding her breath when a deep diagonal strike hit the sky. A white burning flame streaked across the stars. A cosmic gash. It ran from the high-hung moon down to the deep forest by the school, wide and explosive. Something shook the ground and a flare of light burst, illuminating far-away objects. They both let out a sigh when it crashed.
It was close. Far too close.
"Honoka…"
Honoka did not respond for a few minutes. She stared on ahead, at the crash site. When she spoke, it was not the question Maki was expecting.
"Did I do the right thing?"
"What do you mean?"
"Disbanding u's. Going to the states. Being selfish. Or maybe not selfish enough. I don't know."
"I… I don't think any of us can ever know that, Honoka. It was a lovely dream. Sometimes I wish I had never woken up, but at the end of the day, that is what it was. I would have had to stop eventually. I don't know about the others- Rin was always going to do well in sports, Kotori was inevitably going to be a fashion designer, if a now a llama wool one. Maybe we could have gone major, but who knows how we'd look back on it now?"
The older girl's fist was clenched, to Maki's surprise. "I know… I just…"
Maki put her arm around her. "You don't have anything to blame yourself for, okay? Things happened the way they happen. There's no changing it."
Another unconvincing smile from Honoka. "Thanks, Maki."
"Did you want to stay an idol, after all?"
"Sometimes, yeah. I wish everyone stayed close and happy and we could all sing together," Her eyes were getting shiny. "It's silly. You must think I'm still the same old Honoka from back then, huh?"
"You," Maki kissed the top of her head, "Are saying what we all think. Some of us just aren't ready to admit it," They looked at each other in the darkness. Maki wiped away the tears off Honoka's face. "I really do admire you, Honoka."
Honoka started crying in earnest now. "Maki…"
They stayed like that, in each other's arms, as the sirens sang down the streets towards to meteor, evaluating the damage.