The girls entered the diner, grateful to be in from the cold, and looked around for a good place to sit.
"Ahmin! Let's go for this booth! It's got window seating! Woooahhh" she hopped frog-like into the booth, sitting bolt upright after a perfect slide to the window end of the seat.
"God" Ami sighed, dumping her bag in the corner of the seat opposite Minori and slumping down next to it, "You really love to crank it up at times like these, don't you?"
"Of course!" Minori exclaimed. "You gotta push through the pain, grasshopper!"
Ami rested her face on her palm and looked through the menu with a dispassionate gaze. "Sounds about as healthy as this food."
"Oh!" Minori said, diverting the attention away from her pain as she brought a finger to her chin and brought out the voice that went with her bald cap. "Arya worried 'bout the calories, sonny?"
"Shut up" Ami replied. "You know, if you wanted to chat, you didn't have to come to your workplace. There's plenty of cute cafes around our school."
"Hmmm" Miroi said, contemplating. "Well! At this point it's starting to be more effort to find a place I haven't worked at!"
Ami smiled a little at that. "You know" she said, waving her fingers around in Minori's direction, "this whole performance would be a lot more convincing if I hadn't had to practically scrape you off the classroom floor just to get you to come out with me."
"AH!" Minori exclaimed, pointing a fork at her. "Ahmin, you're one to talk, you know that?"
"What are you—"
"You're just as bad, with all the masks."
"Huhhh? What are you going on about now? I've been letting my nasty personality out all the time at school. You should be more aware of that than anyone, considering how I—"
"That's not what I'm talking about."
"Huh?!"
"Amin… you're actually, a kind person, aren't you?"
Ami said nothing.
"The nasty personality…. It's not like that's all there is, underneath it all. You're actually a kind and caring person, behind the nasty face. Ah!" she exclaimed. "That's the advantage of being a working gal! All this time, I was thinking you were some sort of witch, but!" She put up a peace sign to Ami. "It just gives you two masks instead of one!"
"AAhhhhh would you shut up already!" Ami said, swatting away her hand. "Think you're so good, figuring out these things, huh?" she rested her arms on the table and put her face down on them. "Little miss armchair psychologist."
"Ahhaha… Sorry, Ahmin," Minori said, looking down at the table. Her energetic tone faded away, bringing back her normal vocal register. "I got carried away."
"It's fine" Ami said, muffled slightly by her arms. "It's not like you're wrong or anything, it's more like…" she trailed off.
"Why'd it have to be her, right?" Minori said.
Ami looked up at that. Minori was looking in her direction with eyes full of wistful resignation. At times like this, it seemed to Ami like Minori reflected her own feelings. Like her, she had developed feelings that wouldn't be reciprocated. Not only that, but the inability of their friends to have an honest discussion with them meant that they were unable to gain any form of closure.
"See" Ami said, "that's why I get annoyed. Because you actually do see what's going on, but you choose to— "
"Because it hurts!" Minori said. "Doesn't it hurt you, Ami? To be sitting here having this conversation with me, instead of…?
"Of course it does!"
"Yeah…" Minori sighed.
Ami joined her in sighing. Between the two of them, it felt as if they exhaled enough to fill the entire room with carbon dioxide.
"I'm getting the parfait" Ami said, resolutely.
"Me too!" Minori said, leaning over to Ami. "Want me to get them to supersize it for us? I got the connections, girl!"
"Do it."
They ordered two of Minori's frightening parfait inventions. The junior waitress chatted with Minori for a minute, causing her to switch back into her energetic coach mode. She hyped up the waitress, who was new to the job and finding it difficult to interact with customers. Ami watched on with a relaxed smile on her face.
Then the waitress turned to her, noticing who she was finally, which caused Ami to flip over into model mode. She humoured the girl, who was too polite to fawn over her for very long anyway. She took her leave, allowing the two of them to go back to their normal selves, chatting calmly about the various non-Taiga-and-Ryuuji events in their lives. By the time the parfaits arrived, they had gotten into a good rhythm of conversation.
"So" Ami said, taking the arrival of the food as the sign to return to their previous topic of discussion, "how long did it take you to figure out what was going on with the two of them?"
"Oh it was so obvious!" Minori replied. "Like, seriously, they were so sosooso obvious! Even Kitamura figured it out!"
"Wow" Ami said, loading a couple of berries onto the scoop of ice cream that rested on her spoon. "Those two… seriously."
"I bet you didn't know that Taiga trashed the entire classroom and went off screaming that there was nothing going on between them."
"Eh?"
Minori started laughing. "But then… she started adding in all this stuff about how Ryuuji wasn't a delinquent and if anyone kept saying he was she'd kill them! What a riot, huh?"
"Seriously" Ami sighed, digging into the parfait dish, "Those two really are obvious, huh?"
"I suppose so… I don't know what we were expecting, all of this time, hmm?
"Doesn't make it any easier to swallow now though, does it?"
"Guess not." Minori sighed. "But… you know something?"
"Hmmm?"
"I really am happy for them!" she tried her best to push herself to get into the spirit that she normally had, but her efforts came out completely flat. It made her feel self-conscious, and she looked at Ami with a kind of desperation, as if she were silently pleading with Ami not to call her out on it.
"It's ok." Ami said gently, letting the mask drop and looking at her with a surprising amount of kindness. "I know that you are actually happy for them, underneath all of this."
That's how it had been between the two of them since the night of the ski trip. When Ami had returned and gone over to Minori, they had ended up talking for hours. It was tense at first, and it times it veered close to devolving back into a violent screaming session, but in the end they had worked out a lot of things between them.
Ami had told Minori about how she'd been watching Taiga since the beach house, when she figured out that Taiga had feelings for Ryuuji. She'd told her about the struggle of having to keep her own feelings aside, because she knew that the two of them were meant to be together. How angry it had made her when Taiga kept trying to push Ryuuji and Minori together, and Minori wouldn't even acknowledge any of it.
"I just wanted somebody to see me" she had said back then. "To just have one person who understood what I was feeling."
Minori had felt sad at that, and had felt genuinely bad for her. In turn, she'd told Ami about how she'd witnessed Taiga come crying out of her apartment after Ryuuji, and how that was the reason she'd turned him down.
I was actually going to stop off at Taiga's before the party" Minori had said. "I was going to confront her about it properly, make her tell me the truth about what she really felt for Ryuuji.
"What were you going to do after that?" Ami had replied.
"I really wasn't sure. But I thought I at least have to have the conversation with her."
"But… when I saw her in the snow, on her knees, screaming up to the sky with no shoes or socks or jacket, tears streaming down her face, I knew…. that was the shot she had taken, and she wasn't going to take another one. Maybe I should have just gone up to her then and there, confronted her about it. maybe then it would have been easier to deal with. I mean I had my answer. But… I just couldn't handle that. I felt like I had seen something that I shouldn't have, something she never would have wanted anybody to see. So, I did the only thing I could think of to protect her, I shot him down."
They had talked for a long time after that, and somewhere in the midst of all of that conversation, they realised that they had finally begun to understand one another.
"It's all been so dramatic…. All of this time." Ami said. "It's like there's always been something new, some ridiculous scheme, some… outrageous drama…" she let the sentence hang in the air, waiting for a response from Minori. She thought that if she gave her a good set-up, then perhaps the energetic girl could bounce back into one of her famous personas and perk herself up a little.
"This is where you're supposed to do one of your outdated voices and talk about how good it is to have drama in your youth. Aren't y—"
Minori had taken to leaning her face on her arms, resting on the dining table, and was looking out the window.
"I really don't feel that way, though." Minori said listlessly. "I kinda just… want everything to settle down."
"Wow…" Ami said, "it's worse than I thought."
Minori shifted her head back and looked up at her. "Ahmin… I feel tired around you."
"Thanks." A frown appeared on Ami's face. "Just so you know, talking to you makes me feel like I'm on my period."
Minori laughed. "No, no…. I mean…. Hmmm, how to explain."
Ami slid out of the booth. "While you figure it out, I'll get the drinks."
She came back with two sodas, and Minori was already looking in her direction as she sat back down.
"I guess, it's like…" Minori started as Ami took a sip of her drink. "When I'm hanging out with you, I don't feel like I have to be 'on'. I don't even really feel like I can be on. it's weird, isn't it? and then, because I'm not on, suddenly, I start to realise how tired I've been all this time."
Ami smirked at her. "That just means you're running yourself into the ground."
"Heh… I guess so."
"Sorry" Ami said. "That was shitty."
"No, no, it's ok… I, I kind of am."
"It's not really that true all the time, is it?" Ami asked, putting down her drink and looking straight at Minori.
"Hmm?"
"Well, it's not like being the energetic girl is always draining for you, is it? You seem to enjoy yourself a lot of the time, from what I've seen."
"You think so?" Minori said, looking up at her.
"Like when you're carrying on in the classroom or hyping up your team. Or like, just before, with that waitress. You made her really happy, and you put her at ease. She walked away smiling. And… you seemed to be smiling, too, as you watched her.
"Yeah, that's true!" Minori said. "I do enjoy that!" She grinned, clenching her fist. "And I like going all out in my jobs, too!"
"Maybe you like making other people feel good." Ami said as she went back to her parfait. "Maybe… you just shouldn't use it to push down your true feelings." She pointed her spoon at Minori. "Maybe that's what'x making you exhausted."
Minori spread her arms out across the table, gripping the underside of the edges with her fingertips. "Ahhhhhh, such tasty counsel" she said in a gravelly voice that she couldn't quite achieve. "I can feel my power returning to me."
Ami started chuckling, almost choking on her parfait. "W-W-What is that voice?" she laughed, a hand clutching her side. "It's crackling like a boy going through puberty!"
"Ohho-ho!" Minori said, rubbing a hand on her chin. "I just picked up an interesting Ahmin fact!"
"Eh?"
"Welllllll…. It's a doozy, Amin! Are you sure you're able to handle it?"
"Spit it out already, gorilla girl."
"Heh heh heh… Ahmin. You have many adult faces. Like the one you're pulling now. So scary! The scorn of a thousand mothers! Or… the compassionate Ami… a beacon of understanding and sympathy for the lost youth of today!"
"Ughhhh" Ami groaned, through a mouthful of ice cream. "Will you get to the point?"
"The point is" Minori said, pulling her spoon out of its dish, "That they're all very mature, grown-up faces."
"But?"
"BUT" she pointed the spoon at her, wagging it like a finger. "When you laugh for real, you really realllllllly look like a kid."
All of the irritation went out of Ami's face in that moment. She stared at Minori with her mouth open slightly, showing her an expression that even Minori had never seen. It wasn't an expression of a child, or of an adult, or of any type of person in particular.
It was just the expression of someone who had realised that they that they had been seen for who they really were.
It was the same expression she had when Ryuuji had handed her those packages of pork. When he'd said. You're such a child, aren't you.
It was the realisation that someone saw her for who she really was again. It had happened again. It wasn't just a one-off fluke. It had happened again, and therefore it could keep happening.
And it was also the realisation that she had a friend with whom she could truly be herself.
"Minori…"
Minori was smiling at her openly. "I'm glad, you know that?"
"Glad?"
"That you came here, to our school."
"Really?" Ami said.
"Really!"
"Hm" she said, her eyes trailing downwards, thinking of the last few weeks. "Actually… I had been thinking about just leaving this school, not all that long ago."
"WHAT!" Minori exclaimed, banging her hands on the table and startling the diners. "What are you talking about?!"
An older waitress came over to their table. She leant in towards Minori. "Um… Kushieda? If you're going to come here on your days off, could you not scare away our customers?"
"Eep! Sorry about that!" She slunk back in the booth. The waitress walked away.
"But seriously…" Minori said quietly, leaning in towards Ami, "why would you be thinking that?!"
"I…" Ami's voice trailed off, and her eyes looked down. "I just made such a mess of things… you know? I saw Taiga hurting, and I thought I'd do something about it. But then… if I hadn't done anything, what difference would it have made, anyway? I just made a mess out of everything and pissed everyone off for nothing."
"Ahmin! That's ridiculous!"
"Is it? Seriously…"
"You slapped me in the face as hard as you could" Minori said, with a gravity that implied the act had much greater significance than it did.
"…"
"And then Taiga ran off into the snow."
"So what?"
"SO he ran off after her and now they're together!" she jabbed a finger towards Ami's face, almost touching her nose. "So don't say you didn't do anything! It's because of you that they're together now!"
"Ehhhh?" Ami said, pulling back and leaning into the booth. "That's not exactly the kind of things I wanted to do, you know." She sighed. "Getting into fistfights and sending Taiga running off down a cliff isn't exactly what I meant by trying to fix things."
"Ho ho! But that's not the point…" Minori said mysteriously, returning to her usual theatrics. Ami brought back her trademark disdainful frown.
"Then what is?"
"Elementary, Dear Ahmin! You see, it's not that you were trying to do anything in particular that you ended up setting off a chain off events that led to our dear Tai-Tak confessing their love in a moonlit hospital room!"
"Pretty sure the blizzard was blocking out all the scenery."
"Rather, it was" Minori continued, ignoring her friend as she put a finger up into the air, holding it there for a moment before bringing it down again to point straight at Ami, "because you! Ahmin! Are so deeply integrated with all of us, that any actions you take will have a serious effect on the group!"
Ami sat there, stunned into silence. She had been watching the girl across from her, waiting for some sort of joke that would be meant to cheer her up. But instead, Minori had sucker punched her with a heartfelt truth. She had been preparing some wisecrack to throw back at her, tossing up in her mind whether to jab at her or just walk out of the diner altogether. But instead, she felt herself being stabbed in the heart with an onslaught of emotions that she wasn't prepared to deal with.
"So" Minori said, as she bowed her head forward to obscure her face, "don't go saying things about how you should just leave us." Her voice sounded serious, like it was on the verge of cracking. Ami felt tears welling up in her eyes.
"I… I won't" she said, looking across at Minori. The red-headed girl pulled her face up to look back at her, and Ami could see that she too had tears starting to form in her eyes. "I'm sorry."
"Wow…" she said, scratching the back of her head. "I never thought I'd live to see myself on the receiving end of an Ahmin apology."
"Dummy" Ami said, watching the melted remains of the parfait swirl around as she stirred it with the spoon. "Even a rotten princess like me would be moved after hearing all of that." She stopped stirring and looked back up at Minori. "Ah… don't get used to it though, gorilla girl."
"True… but still… hmm" Minori placed a finger on her chin, looking up thoughtfully. "I do like rotten princess as a nickname for you, but it doesn't flow that well, does it?"
"What are you—"
"Ah! What if we shorten it? PrinRot! That's perfect!"
"Bff" Ami started laughing, beginning as a chuckle and then leaning back into the booth with a hand on her side. "What's with you and all these shortened names?!"
"Pretty sweet, huh?"
"PrinRot, Tai-Tak?" Ami's laughter subsided, and she sighed as she wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. "You really are a gorilla girl, aren't you?" She leaned back, stretching an arm out across the booth. "Shortening all your words to make your backwards crawl through the evolutionary chain easier!"
Minori flicked her spoon at Ami, sending droplets of melted ice cream onto her hand.
"Hey, watch it! You're going to stain my clothes!"
"Oh? I thought it was normal for gorillas to throw food?"
"That's chimps, you moron. And they don't throw food, they throw their poop!"
"Ah!" Minori exclaimed, slamming her left fist into her right palm. "In that case—"
"STOP!" Ami had reached both arms out, palms outstretched. "Whatever horrendous jokes you were planning, know when to call it quits! I have to live my life, you know? There's a limit to how much I can be scarred by your lunacy and still…" her voice trailed off as she realised how quiet the rest of the diner had gotten. She looked around, noticing that everyone had started paying attention to their table. Beads of sweat started appeared on her forehead.
"Fu fu fu" Minori chuckled, holding a hand up to her lips. "Ahmin has become the dangerous member of this table now. Urk! I can see my manager looking over with a dangerous glare."
"Erp!" Ami suddenly longed for her bucket hat and sunglasses. "Should we… head out?"
"Good idea!"
The two of them got up, paid their bill, and exited the diner (much to the relief of the staff and patrons). They walked back in the same direction for a while, their breath visible in the cold winter night.
"I guess… everything's going to change, huh?" Minori said, looking up at the clear sky.
"I guess so" Ami replied, putting her hands into her coat pockets as she walked alongside her. "But… I think… a lot of that change will be a good thing."
Minori looked back down at Ami, a gentle smile coming over her face. "Yeah… I think you're right." They walked silently for a while after that, both reflecting on everything that had happened that day. They came to the crossroads where they went their separate ways, to their own homes, and they both stopped and looked up at each other.
"What do you think… we should do, about…?" Minori asked.
"I don't think there's anything we can do, honestly" Ami replied. "Just… trust that they'll come to us when they're ready to."
Minori chuckled. "Yeah." She didn't really like that answer, and judging by the look on her friend's face, Ami wasn't such a big fan of it either, despite it being her idea. Still, she was about as correct as anyone could be in a situation like this. There really wasn't much they could do, other than wait for Taiga and Ryuuji to figure it out. She wanted to trust that, but at times it felt more like hoping than trusting.
Still, maybe hope was a kind of trust, after all.
"Well, I'm off this way" Ami said, sticking a thumb in the direction of her home. "Thanks for the chat. I'll see you tomorrow."
"Thank you too, Ami" Minori said. "Really."
They both smiled, and turned and went their separate ways, to their own homes, both able to walk home feeling a little less alone than they had before they had left school for the day.