bored411: Things are definitely going to get better, but they're going to get worse before they do, unfortunately. If there was a subtitle for these first chapters, it would probably be "Kosuke Keeps Getting Clotheslined by Life." But thank you very much!
Lillyannp: Thank you very much!
It is two months after her parents have died and her world has changed forever that Kosuke realizes that she has got to do something about their food situation.
Eighty percent of the time, she, Hitsuji, and Minami are running on cereal, microwavable dinners, and a whole lot of ramen. Frozen gyoza, frozen fried chicken, frozen grilled riceballs, and even the occasional frozen spaghetti with meat sauce are not in and of themselves bad. Kosuke even liked them some time ago. But night after night of eating them, you start to notice how soggy they are, the crunchy bits that shouldn't be crunchy, the vague taste of something chemical. It's getting so bad that Hitsuji and Minami are getting dangerously close to having tantrums about it—and Minami herself seems to finally be reigning in her behavior for her older sister's sake.
Turns out, buying microwaveable food actually costs a lot more than just making it yourself. A lot, lot more. By her calculations, they'll probably be spending around ￥63,000 a month. Then throw in another couple hundred in snacks alone! Which will never do well for them in the long run, considering…everything.
So it's time.
To cook.
Hoo boy.
"Why are we going to the supermarket?" Minami asks her just about the second they walk out of the house. Hitsuji is already darting ahead, just a little too far for Kosuke's liking but maybe not that dangerous, she doesn't know. "The supermarket's where you get food."
"Yes, it is."
Kosuke makes sure the door's locked behind her and that the now-permanent sign declaring that The Lily Bowl is out of business is still upright. When she turns around, Hitsuji has stopped to fiddle with the lock on the gate of their fence, like it's the most entrancing thing he's ever seen. Minami has stopped with a look of deep concentration. Kosuke can see math equations bouncing around in her head.
"We're going to go get food?" Minami asks, just to be sure.
"Yee-up. Come on, time's a-wastin."
Minami complies, but as the three of them continue on their way, she pats Kosuke's hip to tell her, "I'm sorry for complaining about ramen last night. I didn't mean it. I like ramen."
"We all like ramen, Minami. Doesn't mean we're not all sick to death of it at this point."
"Yeah, but…" Minami huffs like she's frustrated at her own inability to speak. "I'm not always hungry, so maybe I can just not eat sometimes…"
"Minami." Kosuke almost pulls them to a stop, but Hitsuji's determination to keep charging forward keeps them walking. She keeps an eye on him while giving Minami her attention at the same time. "We're not eating ramen again and you're not going to skip meals. Come on, it's not that big of a deal."
Minami waits for a second. "…Do I have to eat it?"
"You have to try it."
"Do I have to like it?"
"No, but you have to try it."
"Okay." Minami kicks at a rock. "That's fair."
The supermarket is a good thirty-minute walk from their house, and with the summer heat, the only way to satiate Hitsuji and Minami both is a popsicle for each of them. Both of them are happy to help her find the best green onions and seaweed. They have a debate on which chicken they should get, and then when it's time to get eggs, they all have a very intense discussion on whether the chicken or the egg came first, and somehow Hitsuji wins. Even that is rendered useless when they don't even get chicken. Everything they get is just a little cheaper since it's the end of the day—an old trick Kosuke remembers her mother using quite often.
They get back home, and Kosuke gets to work. She sets out all of her ingredients. Washes her hands with hot water and soap for thirty seconds, twice. Pins her hair—which has begun to lose its dye so that some of her natural blonde is starting to peek at her scalp—back in a ponytail.
The tonkatsu would come first. She gets her three pork chops, slices them just so, seasons them with salt and pepper. Coats them with flour, dips them in eggs, covers them in panko crumbs. Next comes the deep-frying, which scares her only half to death. After the first two, she more or less just throws the last one in grenade-style, running away to avoid the splash of hot oil that follows.
She works stirring the bonito flakes in bubbling water. The recipe book that she's following to the last punctuation says 1-2 minutes, but she lets them simmer for three. Once the pork is golden-brown, she takes them out.
"Easy as pie," she says aloud, then regrets it because the last time she tried to make a pie she set the fire alarm off.
She cracks the stove up to a medium heat and only then notices Hitsuji and Minami standing in the doorway. They're staring at her silently. Minami is holding the phone and Hitsuji has a pail of water that is already dripping on the floor.
"Is everything okay?" she asks them.
Minami holds up the phone. "I know how to call the fire department if we need to."
Hitsuji holds up his pail. "I got water for the fire!"
Kosuke purses her lips and sighs through her nose, but she's not annoyed. She gets it. She's not her parents; she's not a chef. She's never done this before, and her siblings are still getting used to all these changes she's going through. This is kind of like someone who's only ever rode a bicycle deciding to drive a city bus.
"We aren't going to need either of those, but thank you," she says as she gets the pan on the heat. "And I'm very happy you know how to call the fire department, Minami. Good girl."
Hitsuji huffs unhappily and lifts up his pail. Droplets hit the floor. "I got water for the fire!"
"There's no fire. But the flowers outside are probably very thirsty."
Hitsuji takes this mission with the gusto of a hero, but Minami takes a second to very pointedly set the phone on the counter before following.
The Dashi, soy sauce, sugar, sake, and mirin all go into the pan and boil. Again, Kosuke looks at the recipe book and pauses. She's definitely going to need more than three teaspoons of soy sauce. Six tablespoons of sake seems like too much. She makes adjustments. No big deal. All good. All good.
The Tonkatsu goes into the sauce, eggs get beaten in a bowl, and they go over on top. She covers all of it to let it cook for just a minute. Again, not in the recipe, but she figures hey, why not a little bit of green onion?
She's already got rice made—thank goodness she's not so bad to screw that up—and it all goes on top. Then a little bit of Nori on top. Not in the recipe, but…
But…
Oh no.
What has she done?
Kosuke looks at the three bowls of katsudon in front of her. They look good. They smell good. But she didn't follow the recipe. They look too different from the pictures in the book. She'd made things up for no reason besides "eh, sure."
These probably taste horrible, she thinks, quickly followed by, They taste horrible. They definitely taste horrible. I can't feed these to my babies.
Wouldn't you know, right on time, Hitsuji comes padding back into the kitchen. The bottoms of his shorts are soaked and the pail he's still holding is empty. Clearly more water was involved and Kosuke is worried that the flowers have been effectively drowned.
"I'm hungry," he announces loud and clear.
Kosuke takes a glance up at the fridge, where there are still a few more frozen dinners. She looks down at the katsudon, probably disgusting but not frozen. Fridge. Katsudon. Fridge. Katsudon. Fridge? Katsudon?
She picks up the two bowls. "Go get Minami and we'll eat."
So they all sit down at the table, Kosuke sets the bowls in front of all of them, and there is silence. Just about the second his hits the table, Hitsuji has picked up his chopsticks and flips a slice of tonkatsu over.
"Tonasoo?" he asks.
"Tonkatsu," Kosuke confirms. She sets her and Minami's cups of tea and Hitsuji's water before him.
"Poark?"
"Pork."
Minami is staring at her bowl with clear apprehension, and Kosuke can't even be mad because she's doing the same thing. They're probably sharing the same thoughts: miso soup as salty as the ocean, gyoza fried to charcoal, omurice mud-brown and drowned in ketchup. Bad memories. Nightmares. Tears.
Kosuke picks up a piece of tonkatsu and pauses, because her tongue is curling in her mouth. She can already taste the overpowering salt, the bitterness, the chalkiness. She imagines biting into it and her mouth being flooded with oil. She's scared. She has made a mistake.
Be strong, she tells herself once again, and lifts it up and away from the bowl, closer to her mouth.
"Do we have more?"
Minami's voice stops her own hand. She's spoken through a mouthful and only swallows after she's done, chopsticks still in the bowl and a crumb of bread on her lip.
"What?" Kosuke asks dumbly.
"Do we have more?" Minami asks again, but then she reaches for the soy sauce and drips just a bit over her rice. She takes a bite, makes an urgent sound, and just barely manages to say "Nevermind" before she's shoving another bite into her mouth.
Hitsuji scoots his bowl forward. Every piece of tonkatsu is missing, leaving nothing but bare white rice behind. "Can I have more poark?"
Kosuke takes two pieces out of her own bowl and transfers them over. Hitsuji instantly takes far too big of a bite, and Kosuke looks down at her own bowl one more time. It has to be not-bad, right? Because the kids are eating it. Unless they are just pretending. No, Hitsuji is too brutally honest to pretend.
She finally takes a bite of pork, chews, and stops.
It's good.
It's actually pretty good.
Alright, Kosuke thinks as she takes another bite, smiling, Not bad. You can make this again.
The rest of the meal goes nicely. Hitsuji asks for more "poark", but with none left, Kosuke tells him to eat his rice. Hitsuji isn't happy. Minami encourages him. He likes it. Kosuke and Minami wash the dishes after. Minami almost drops a bowl, and in her hurry to catch it, Kosuke literally falls over for nothing. They both laugh about it afterward.
The three of them play games and pretend and dress-up, and then it's time to go to bed. Kosuke returns to the menial task of paperwork, and she feels good about it. At least for now, they don't have to worry about going hungry. She knows how to cook katsudon; she can figure out other dishes in the future.
She finishes the paperwork early and spends the rest of her time reading the recipe book like a novel.
Kosuke turns out to be—in Okina's own words—a flabbergastingly good cook.
After the katsudon, she makes gyoza. After that, motsunabe. After that, tonjiru.
For once, Okina comes to their house to eat dinner, and spends just about every moment leading up to it staring around narrow-eyed and slackjawed like she still can't grasp what's happening. They just watch her, smug as can be, as a steaming bowl of the soup is pushed towards her. It smells good and she still doesn't believe it. Hitsuji slurps his down like his life depends on it and she doesn't believe it.
She takes a sip, believes it, and makes it known with a soft but sincere whisper of "Oh my god."
Kosuke tries to be as humble as she can, but she can't deny that she just feels prideful for the first time in…ever. Hitsuji and Minami asking for seconds feels good. The Henkas taking her thank-you gift of kakuni and literally gasping at the sight feels good. Making takoyaki for a party at Minami's class, thinking they taste pretty alright, and Minami coming home and saying that her teacher is asking for Kosuke's recipe feels good.
But it's more than just that, because Kosuke actually really, really loves cooking.
Maybe it's just because she likes food, or maybe there's some deeper, appreciating-the-fruits-of-your-labor meaning behind it, but she just can't deny that she looks forward to doing it each and every time. Not everything she makes is perfect, of course, especially not at the beginning. There are dishes that are too salty, a bit overcooked, a bit undercooked. Even the mistakes make her happy, though, because it just tells her what to do next time.
She figures she was so bad at it before because she just didn't pay much attention. She let things simmer and forgot about them, or guesstimated instead of actually measuring. Or maybe it's like Marti used to say, that if someone doesn't want to cook something, you end up tasting it.
They have three recipe books not counting Emiko and Marti's old sweat-blood-and-tears catalog made only for them. Kosuke reads them all almost religiously and fills the white spaces with notes and suggestions. She marks out quantities and replaces them. If she's not doing this, she's reading how-to guides she finds on the dollar rack at the grocery store. There are magazines that only have a page or not even that much about cooking trends and news, and she'll stop on her grocery runs just to read them.
Now, there is a downside to this, like some kind of law of balance.
Kosuke is a good, maybe even great, cook.
She is an awful baker.
She doesn't sugarcoat it—no pun intended. Her hands poison anything sweet like a curse. The first time she makes anpan, Minami and Hitsuji take one bite apiece before all but begging not to eat more. She writes that off as a fluke at first. Afterwards, she attempts to make amanattō, dango, and higashi. The first turns out hard as rocks, the second turns out black as night, and the third end up so dry that Kosuke has to drink three cups of water after just to get her tastebuds working again. Just out of curiosity, she tries to make simple sugar cookies. She doesn't even know what happened with this one, just that they are all on the tray when they go in the oven, and all gone when she checks again.
Kosuke tries not to let it bother her. Okina and Minami try to be gently discouraging, and Hitsuji bluntly asks her to just stop. She concedes in the end, because they don't really need sweets to survive. Besides, she doesn't have nearly as much of a sweet tooth as she used to. Considering how much sugar she'd consumed in the past few years, she wouldn't be surprised if her body could go for the rest of her life without it.
It takes her a while before she's brave enough to try one of her parents' recipes.
She settles on the lemon-pepper chicken Marti was most known for. It's not Japanese, but everyone had loved it. Still, trying to match her stepfather's old carving techniques, reading his faded handwriting, hearing his voice in her head…It feels weird.
Kosuke doesn't tell Hitsuji or Minami beforehand, and she kind of regrets it. Hitsuji becomes ecstatic at once—the lemon-pepper chicken was the only thing remotely acidic that he liked—and chomps down at once. Minami sees what it is and doesn't speak a word for the rest of the meal. Afterwards, she tells Kosuke that it was really good and goes to her and Hitsuji's room.
Whether or not it tastes the way Marti used to make it, Kosuke doesn't know. She likes to think so, but at the same time, her stepfather was just so much of a master at what he did that she doesn't like to compare it.
She fishes out her mother's old recipe for strawberry shortcake and tries to make it the next day while the children are at school. She follows everything to the last word, to the very last stroke of her mother's pen. She's focusing so hard that she doesn't hear a would-be customer knocking on the door until they've been doing so for five minutes.
In the end, the shortcake is lumpy, the cream is like goo, and even the strawberries are ruined by sugar gritting in her teeth like sand with every bite.
It upsets her this time, because she wanted to do it like Emiko. If Marti were here, he'd be happy with her imitation of his dish. Even if it didn't taste just the same, he would have liked it and gave her a hug and a "Great job!"
But if Emiko saw this? Baking was her mother's highest passion apart from her husband and family. She started it when she wasn't even a teenager and perfected it more and more every day for years on end. If she saw her daughter absolutely failing at each and every tiniest attempt at it—after "calling in lazy" for just about every physical education class, hearing her and her boyfriend fight time and again about her failing to show up to his soccer games because she slept five hours in, never taking anything besides sleep seriously—Kosuke can't even imagine what she'd say.
At first, Kosuke figures that she'd settle for a passive-aggressive "At least you tried".
Later, as she dumps the failed shortcake into the garbage, she realizes that no, Emiko would have been so, so happy that she was trying. She'd probably offer to help her try again, and if that failed, too, she would promise that they'd figure it out.
Kosuke can't even explain her thought process after this. First, she gets angry at herself for giving her mother so little credit. Then she feels safe with the reminder that Emiko loved her, she loved her so much, and that she just wanted to know she'd be alright on her own. Then she feels hollow when she realizes that Emiko probably died worried that Kosuke wouldn't be.
When Hitsuji asks her why she looks so sad when she picks him up, she just tells him that she tried to make a cake and it failed. He again asks her to just stop, and she agrees. She doesn't tell him that that failed cake was the reason that she was late, because she couldn't go outside until she's stopped crying and her face wasn't flushed, because…
Well, that just sounded stupid, didn't it?
It's almost four months after her parents had died, two months since Kohta left, and a few weeks after she'd started cooking that Okina drops a bombshell on her.
"Dad's promotion is making us move to Wakayama. It's…eight hours away."
Seneca was about two hours away from Karuizawa, in Ina. With her father's higher pay, Okina can easily afford to fly or take a train to and from Seneca and her new home on the holidays and occasionally the weekends. On the holidays, the Henkas like to go on vacation. On the weekends, taking those extra hours just to see Kosuke, between all the studying and seeing her family—it would all be too complicated.
They will be leaving in a week.
Kosuke's best and only friend is leaving in a week.
"Kosuke, I'm sorry," Okina all but begs her, even though Kosuke hasn't said a word yet. "I'm so, so sorry. We tried to figure it out, but there just isn't…There's nothing we can do!"
"It's
It's not fine.
fine, Okina. This is just something you have to do. You don't have any control over this."
Okina nods like she knows that, but there are still deep, despaired creases in the delicate features of her face. It's the weekend, and Okina has already taken the many bus transfers to make it to Karuizawa to see her. The Henkas are watching over Minami and Hitsuji while the two of them spend the day together. It's the first time since her parents have died that the two of them have hung out one-on-one, and the only time the Henkas have ever offered to watch the children. Those should have been red flags.
The summer heat is powerful. They're both in shorts and T-shirts. The dye in Kosuke's hair has faded even more, and both she and Okina have their hair tied back. Okina's hair is long enough to be in a ponytail but short enough that it's just a tuft.
Kosuke feels young, for some reason. She feels thirteen years old. That was when her hair was still blonde and her care-about-nothing attitude was just beginning to set in. Okina's hair had been the color of honey, Kosuke's closer to platinum, and more than once they'd been assumed as sisters. After she dyed her hair, that never happened again.
God, how long had they known each other? Since they were eight, right? Ten years. She's spent ten. years. with Okina. Twenty birthdays. Ten Christmases. Ten Halloweens. Countless ballet performances. Every homework assignment and class project.
As always, Kosuke struggles to process everything right away. As soon as the words left Okina's mouth, she felt her stomach drop. They had stopped walking. She isn't crying yet, though. Not yet.
Okina takes a deep breath. Somewhere out in the forest, a bird chips, very loud in the otherwise silence. "I'll call and text you whenever I can. Cross my heart, hope to die, I will. I could maybe even get you guys tickets so you could come visit us sometime! That would be good, wouldn't it?"
She's smiling, and it's so hopeful Kosuke can only nod, smile back, and say "Yeah", because that does not sound good at all. Hitsuji on an airplane? Leaving them with the Henkas while the two of them hang out? All six of them in the same house, two of them children, one of them a studying college student? Not happening.
They finally keep walking down the trail after that. It's getting hotter and Kosuke regrets not bringing any water along for this trip. The back of her neck is starting to feel sticky.
"This is so weird," Okina says after a while.
"What is?"
"Everything! I'm moving away from the only place I've ever lived. I'm not going to see you as often anymore. You and Kohta aren't together anymore, and y—" Okina freezes for just a moment. Her face is blue with horror. "I can't believe what I'm saying. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
"It's fine. I know what you mean." Kosuke takes a deep, warm breath of her own. "God, I can't believe it's only been four months. I don't even remember what our classrooms looked like. I don't even remember who our class president was!"
"It was Suzu." Okina's voice has lost confidence when she adds, "It was Suzu, right?"
"I don't know! I hardly even remember what Candy Juice tastes like anymore. I hardly recognize my bedroom; I hardly recognize myself. Look at me, Okina!" Kosuke reaches over and shakes her best friend's shoulders. "I haven't slept in for months! Months! Who am I?!"
"That's what the rest of us have been thinking. Not to be mean, or anything, you're just really—different now, I guess. You know, the other day, Jet actually came by my house to pick up a book he lent me before school ended, and I gave him one of those gyoza you made me. You know what he did when I said you made them?"
"Laughed?"
"Honked."
Kosuke can't help but chuckle a little. Even though she isn't proud of how she was before—and that is putting it likely, she often cringes just thinking about it—she can admit to the humor of it. If dainty, polite Okina decided to join a grunge band and ditch ballet for professional wrestling, she'd be in everyone else's shoes.
Hey, you remember that lazy girl who was in our class? Yeah, the one who ate ten bags of gummy bears in one sitting that one time? She's basically raising two kids now. Hilarious, right?
For just a second, Kosuke considers asking about Kohta. Not because Okina would have kept up with him, but if she'd talked to Jet, maybe he had. The thought goes as soon as it comes, because she can't worry about Kohta anymore. She does still care about him, she supposes, and she certainly doesn't want anything to happen to him. Still, hearing that he's doing great would somehow be just as bad as hearing that he was doing poorly, so she decides not to bring him up.
On top of that, Kohta isn't important right now, Okina is. She only has one week left; Kosuke has to just sweep everything under the rug right now.
"Yeah, well," Kosuke finally replies, "Jet himself could tell me he won the Nobel Prize and I'd have a good honk myself."
Okina giggles in agreement. "He's not exactly one to be judging, is he?"
"What was that question he asked in history that one time?" Kosuke snaps her fingers together, but it's not helping at all. "We were looking at those old photographs, and he said something really bad."
"He asked if the world was actually black-and-white back then."
"Yes. I can't believe he asked that with a straight face."
"Didn't the teacher send him to the office because she thought he was joking?"
"Yeah, and honestly, why didn't he go with that? He spent two weeks after trying to defend himself. 'It's a legitimate question!'"
"Oh, that has nothing on that time he tried to sass the teacher and crashed and burned."
Kosuke puts on her most haughty boy voice she can. "'Ummm, teach? It's Australia, not Austria.'"
By the time she's done, Okina is slapping at her arm to get her to stop, she's laughing so hard. Any chances they had of seeing wildlife are dashed, but they don't care at all. They're having fun, and Kosuke hasn't had fun in a while, bittersweet or otherwise.
Okina finally stops herself with a long sigh and a tear at the corner of her eye. "Oh, boy. I don't know if he'll make it through college."
"He's in college?"
The blunt, disbelieving way Kosuke says it makes Okina bark out a laugh once again. By this point, the end of the trail is not too far away. They'll either be heading home or continuing with their venture after this.
When Okina's face finally goes lax again, she says, "I really wish you could've gone to Seneca, Kosuke. You would like it—now, I mean."
Kosuke waves her off. She doesn't like to talk about college, not so much because it was a lost dream so much as the knowledge that she won't get a degree for a well-paying job bothers her. She'd actually wanted not to go to college before, and now that wish had come bitterly true.
"Don't. There's no way I could go there now, not with Minami and Hitsuji."
"I know, but still. Seneca even had a culinary class you could have been in."
That does sound very nice to Kosuke, yet another reason to stop talking about college. "Well, there's nothing I can really do about it now. Maybe when they're old enough, I can try somewhere."
Okina nods, still unhappy. She probably knows as well as Kosuke that that's a long, long ways away. If Kosuke is lucky, she can maybe get to college when she hits her late twenties—not horrifying in and of itself, but for someone who wanted to go when they were eighteen, a problem.
"Hey." Okina taps the side of her fist against Kosuke's arm. "You're strong, you know that?"
Kosuke gives her the best side-glare she can muster. "Okina, all I do is carry the groceries. I understand I couldn't lift an encyclopedia just a while ago, but I'd feel a lot better if you didn't freak out about it so much—"
"No, that's not what I mean. I mean you're strong in the other way."
"Oh. Uh…Thank you?"
"Not a compliment. I just mean I know you're going to be okay. I was worried about you for a long time, and I guess I still am, but not as much."
Kosuke tries to take it as humbly as she can. She's happy that someone has confidence that she'll survive, but no so much when that someone is about to permanently separate herself from her life. Reassurance doesn't feel so good when it comes with a goodbye.
"Thanks. You're right. I'll be fine."
Okina grins warmly and pulls her in for a side-hug. Kosuke has to force down whatever bitterness is brewing inside her. She can't spend their last week together spending even more time drowning in her sorrows.
Minami and Hitsuji take the news better than they would have months ago. Before, Okina and the children may not have been as close as family, but she was someone they had both known for their whole lives. She'd always been nothing but kind to them, an older kid who was friendly without being related to them. She'd held both of them too many times to count.
Since Emiko and Marti had died, though, Okina has become synonymous with grief. Even putting aside those first few weeks of mourning, she only comes on the weekends now, not to hang out with their older sister and crack jokes and have fun, but to ask how they are and what need to be done.
With summer vacation looming close, Okina can't skip her last few weeks of class to stick around. She returns that same weekend, and while she's gone and the children are at school, Kosuke helps the Henkas pack away their things. It's always bittersweet, a mix of appreciated hard work and reminiscing the past.
Kosuke is helping with Okina's closet when she finds "Panjaboo", the stuffed monkey-like thing Okina had made in arts and crafts. It's just purple cloth stuffed with cotton with mismatched buttons for eyes. Kosuke always thought it was cute, Okina always thought it was creepy. Kosuke is happy to see him again, and with him being lost to the closet's abyss for so many years, Okina's mother tells her to keep it.
She does. She keeps it on her windowsill. On top of that, while they're rummaging through the garage, they find Okina's old bicycle. It's a faded red with a basket on the front, not like her new one, bright pink and sleek. Okina is the one who tells her to keep it, since Kosuke's legs are her only mode of transportation.
The Henkas leave the next Sunday, and all the Nakaharas turn out for the affair. Hitsuji is running around the empty house, Minami watches the boxes go to and fro with interest, the Henkas are bidding their goodbyes to old friends, and Kosuke's just standing around, doing whatever. Okina sticks with her as much as she can before she's pulled away for conversation.
Finally, it's getting late, and it's time for them to go. The moving trucks drive away with little fanfare. Final farewells are given. Mai tells Minami to be a good girl, Akinari tells Hitsuji to take care of his sisters, and both of them tell Kosuke to stay strong and call them if she ever needs them. Mai kisses her forehead and Akinari shakes her hand.
Okina hugs her tight enough to hurt, and Kosuke does the same. Much like she had done with Kohta, it's only then that she finally realizes the full weight of what's happening. She struggles to imagine life without Okina; she can but does not want to imagine a life with one more empty space. She already had three blank spots now, all recent and all painful.
This is another ending to another chapter, but it doesn't feel like the start of a new one. There will be no more no-lights days, no more after-school homework sessions, no more talking about their crushes and complaining about ballet practice. It is over and there will be no replacements, no epilogues.
She feels like she's about to cry, but only by the dry burn that takes up her face and throat. When Okina pulls back, Kosuke knows she sees it, because she spots it in her face, too. The bobbing throat and tight mouth.
"You'll be okay?" Okina asks her. She's not confident anymore.
"Yeah. Don't worry."
They hug one more time, the Henkas climb into their car, and they're gone.
They return home for supper. When Kosuke suggests they heat up some frozen dinners, neither Hitsuji nor Minami contests it.
Despite the promises, it doesn't take long for them to fall apart.
For a while, they text and call every day, every few hours. A girl in Okina's class twists her ankle during rehearsal. A picture Minami colored in class is now hanging up in the school hallway. Okina's final tests before summer vacation are killing her. Kosuke gloats about not having to do tests at all. Okina finally works up the nerve to talk to the guy she's been crushing on. Kosuke congratulates her on the new spine. Sometimes Minami and Hitsuji chime in with hello's.
Sometimes texts aren't answered right away and calls go to voicemail. It's an inevitability; there's no way they're both going to be available 24/7, especially not in their positions. Kosuke doesn't talk to Okina for a good three days so she can study.
Summer vacation comes. The children are let out of school, and Okina goes home to Wakayama. They make up for their lost time over the phone, but Okina and her parents travel all the way to Kagoshima to visit her grandparents. Kosuke spends her time watching over her siblings, taking them to the park most days, a children's fair at the local library, and for one "big thing", a movie at the theater.
Sometimes texts and calls are missed and not made up for. Rather, new conversations replace old ones and they go on without a mention of it. Good wishes, apologies, how-are-you, tell-them-I-said-hello. Chit chat and small talk.
Then there are days where they don't talk at all for no particular reason.
Days go to weeks. Once or twice they take a few minutes to talk.
And fewer and fewer they get, tapering off like a brush running out of paint.
It's no one's entire fault.
Okina stops making calls and trying to take them.
Kosuke stops sending texts and trying to answer them.
No reason, no bad blood. This is just the way life works. It doesn't matter how sad or unfair it sound from the outside; friends leave and move on with their lives. Ten years' worth of memories become just that, things that have come and gone, details blurring more and more with each passing day.
Kosuke takes it because it's not like she has any other option. She has to move on. She has to be strong and keep going.
Even as she thinks it to herself, she doesn't know whether it sounds too poignant or pretentious or not, but the simple fact of the matter is that she isn't the same person anymore. She is hardly the person that Okina had befriended for ten years. Listing every difference between the Kosuke of the present and the Kosuke that had offered to swap clothes with the girl on the field trip would produce a doorstopper of a list.
Maybe that's why she takes it better than she would before. Kosuke's perfectly capable of taking care of herself and her siblings now. She doesn't need to lean on someone as a crutch. She can do everything herself.
Does she want to? No.
Does she have to? Yes.
She's not happy and she doesn't even try to force a smile, but she welcomes the unwelcome loneliness, guilt and regret and all.
Of course, it's probably just easier because loss has become a familiar face to her.
Whatever.
She'll be fine.
She'll be fine.
She'll be fine.