Author’s notes: This first chapter is really nothing but an introduction, so I doubt it will do much of anything for most of you. Just be sure you come back and read the other two chapters. I think you’ll enjoy them.
It’s nothing but a hobby, though. I don’t let it distract me from my real life. I have a real life, you know. I’m not just a Reliable Source. I have friends, decent grades, and I let my eye wander around sometimes. On rare, rare occasion I even get asked out to dinner. I usually accept, have a great time, and then stop talking to them after a few months. It’s nothing personal. My eye just has a habit of sliding away from somebody almost as fast as it slides onto them. I’m sure I’ve been called an Ice Queen in low tones, behind my back. I’m okay with that: I know who said it anyway.
I guess the question I always ask myself now is why, if it’s only a hobby, I let it distract me so utterly from what was right next to me? I guess there’s no excuse for me missing it. If it was because my “hobby” was truly an obsession, then I obviously wasn’t very good at it. Otherwise…
There’s no excuse, but I think that’s okay. I was never asked for one.
And really, I guess, it didn’t take me too far off-guard when it happened.
Even though we were so close, so comfortable together, I was still just teacher to her in my mind. You invite especially close teachers to your house for dinner sometimes. You call them just to talk. That was just how we were. Close friends, but, in my mind, separated from some invisible barrier that I always just assumed was the same barrier that kept teachers from mounting students in the water closet when nobody else was around. I guess I kind of felt that with everybody. There was a wall between me and everybody else; it was the wall that strangers feel between each other. It was a mythological wall, that wall of “ice” that refused to budge, no matter how hard you pushed, but that slid aside if you opted merely to walk through, your eyes wide open.
And even though we were so close, so very comfortable together, she still felt it necessary to do it the old-fashioned way when she finally did it. She could have just come right out and asked, in the middle of school. I would have said the same thing. In spite of what I perceived to be an impregnable wall, there was still only one real answer.
But still, she did it the old-fashioned way.
But she was also in a little physical pain. Watching her sweat was fun, but I did like her, so I didn’t really want her to die. I drank another mouthful of water from the fountain, savoring the cool wetness on my lips, and then moved aside to let Aoi, who had taken the mile far too quickly for her untrained body (not that I was one to criticize), in beside me.
Her slurping was fairly well unladylike, if I do say so myself, but I also felt a twinge of regret as I watched her gulp the water down. She looked pretty pained, to be honest. I wondered if maybe I had taken it too far for just a moment—a rare instant of doubt—until she came up and grinned at me.
“You’re an evil woman,” she said to me. “You know that? If Sister Yukariko saw you right now, why, I wouldn’t be shocked to hear her damn you to hell on the spot!”
“She’s too busy working out a way to get Sister Nao sent down there under the radar,” I smirked back. She stepped out of the way and some other poor, sweating bastard gratefully lurched forward, propelling herself face-first into the cool spray. We started walking towards the locker banks, Aoi’s face shining a little strangely. Something odd popped into my head.
“You know, you could have taken a drink before I finished,” I said. “Do you just enjoy being tormented brutally?”
She shrugged nonchalantly. “Mai was waving for me from the locker banks. I had to go talk to her.”
“Is that why you freaking raced around the track like that?” I prodded. “You felt that soon, your true love would beckon to you from a steel forest of sweaty women and stinky shoes, and you knew that being early would get you a little more play?”
Aoi went red (redder), and I frowned. It wasn’t like her to respond QUITE so strongly to my teasing; but a moment later, she said, “I wanted to see how fast I could do it.”
That was more circa Aoi Senou; it felt genuine to me, and my brow unknitted itself. In my experience, if something is wrong, it doesn’t stop being wrong, genuinely, for even a second.
So I let it go.
“So what did Mai want?”
“Advice. She told me, and I quote, ‘I’m sorry to trouble you with something like this; normally I’d ask Chie, but I’d rather not have my troubles posted on the blackboards tomorrow.’”
I rolled my eyes. “Is she still mad about that?”
“A little,” Aoi said as we entered the locker banks. As soon as we entered, a sharply stale aroma filled my nostrils, and I coughed slightly. “Extra-ripe today,” I said.
“Yeah,” she shrugged. “Mile-run days are always like that.” She said it distantly with an air of routine, like a woman in a windowless nuthouse might say, Nice weather today.
“And just to set the record straight,” I continued, “I did not write that Yuuichi hadn’t been staring at Mai’s tits as intently as he usually did on the blackboard. That was Mikoto.”
“Who you told.”
Are you mad at me?
“Who I told. But it was still not me.”
“Fair point,” she said, her voice a little quieter. She looked away, and I frowned. As soon as we got to our lockers, I put my hand on her shoulder, still damp.
“Are you pissed at me too?” I asked, a little knot in my stomach. “I apologized to her, but if it…”
“No,” Aoi shrugged with her other shoulder, so that my hand stayed in place. “It’s nothing like that.”
“Are you feeling alright?” I swear, my eyebrows were going to have a crease between them before I hit twenty.
“I’m fine.” She looked up and smiled at me as we sat down on the benches. “Just…thinking.”
“About what?”
“Nothing important. Don’t worry about it.”
I sighed. Had some boy shot her down? She had said a few days ago that she was thinking about confessing to somebody—she wouldn’t tell me who; so close to the act, this was probably wise because, like it or not, I do run my mouth sometimes when I don’t intend to—that I knew. Had he shot her down? If he had, so help me god, he would fucking burn in this school.
“Really,” her smile was a little bigger this time, and in spite of myself, I smiled back at her. “I’m fine.”
I let my breath out, a little relieved, and opened my locker.
In fairness, I’m bisexual, not a lesbian. I still look at boys. In my mother’s eyes, this was probably worse. At least as a lesbian I was a sinner. Bisexual, I was “looking at the true path and taking a shit on it.” She said this the day that I moved out to be a reporter and live somewhere where she wasn’t; I had told her I was bisexual two years before that.
The way I crushed on Aoi wasn’t particularly novel in Japan: Instead of acting on it, or at least thinking about it (I never really knew it was there until…until I eventually needed it), I ignored it and decided to protect the living shit out of Aoi. I loved her, and pretended that I loved her like a sister. That way, it wasn’t really a lie, so it didn’t trigger that little bullshit-detector I had lurking in me, somewhere between my stomach and the base of my spine.
It wasn’t usually my bullshit detector that was off. Most of the time, it was my head, glossing over the obvious that would lie in the details, hidden safely away from me. A glance; a single word; any of these things I might gloss over by mistake, and then a nice fat pile of horse crap might go undetected forever.
Or maybe not.
I chanced a glance at Aoi, and saw that she looked just as surprised as I did. She was in the middle of turning from looking at me to looking at the letter that I extracted from my locker, and after she got a good look, she glanced back at me, and something about her told me she was almost…hurt. I didn’t even stop to think about why; at the moment, it didn’t matter to me.
I’m sorry, I wanted to say, this isn’t my fault.
Instead, I opened it. It was written in a boy’s messy characters.
Meet me by the fountain after school, it said. Please do not be late, for the sake of my heart.
I wanted to roll my eyes and gag. I also wanted to tear the boy’s throat out, whoever it was. That one flash of hurt in Aoi’s eyes had latched onto my heart somewhere, dragging it down into my thigh.
I wouldn’t do either. But I was certainly not going to accept his feelings right now. It seemed a little bit unfair somewhere in the back of my head, but the back of my head was going to have to stuff it.
Anger wasn’t my style, though. I didn’t really like confrontation, for all my tough thoughts. So rather than professing, loudly, my undying hatred for the author of this card, I read it aloud to Aoi with a huge grin on my face, and we both laughed at the last part—it was positively atrocious. The hurt was gone from her eyes, and I smiled, laid my hand on her shoulder, about to suggest that we both go get lunch and forget about the whole thing.
“Let’s go together, okay?”
I blinked. “You…what?”
“Let’s go together. You’re planning on turning him down, are you?”
“Unless it’s a supermodel or Shibutani Subaru, yes, you bet I am.”
“Then let’s go together.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“He can think we’re together or something. I don’t know. It’ll let him down easier.”
Aoi, you stupid bastard, I thought without knowing why. Stop being so nice to people.
Stop being so unfailingly…kind.
I agreed anyway, and, it being the last class of the day as it was, we set out for the fountain, still in our sweaty, gritty clothes. For effect and all. Everybody knew lesbians were the only females that sweated or held hands for more than a few seconds at a time, so we held hands the entire way there.
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