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"What's up?"
Momo scraped down the pan again, shoving off the caked crumbs. She moved faster and faster until it was less effective than it could have been. It was not about cleaning, but something ethereal—the frantic motion came closer to catching it the less useful it was.
Elbows pressed against the counter, Jirou leaned back until she could catch her eye, suspended partway over the place the dish rack usually sat. "Scared?"
No, that was not the whole. Maybe she was afraid to bear every piece of her thought, but she would give anything to take that chance. That was the life she had chosen—running the streets in a world of flashing moments where one wrong step spelled death—it was solidly outside of her comfort zone. Despite her aptitude for books, her perfect affiliation with a quiet room and a tea cup and endless hours of analysis—she had chosen a life which she knew would always stretch her beyond.
"Has that ever stopped me?" she muttered, slamming off the water faucet. With one hand she gathered up the soggy crumbs from the sink bottom and marched across the kitchen, throwing them forcefully into the open trash can.
Jirou set her palms on the counter, pushed up until she was sitting on its edge. "Tell me then. What is stopping you?"
That was the trouble. There was no way to communicate—here in the place she had always wanted to be, Momo felt her inaptitude. She had always excelled at academics. It was not her fault she was always the top of her class, that she had learned to measure an average effort by the voice of perfection. But now that she was in the habit, now that she was moving into a world of application—of split second decisions—where boldness and speed could beat out a methodical thought process—she did not know how to take it. Midoriya, Bakugou, Todoroki—they were all a world ahead of her, and she hated that it bothered her.
Was that it? Momo bit her lip. "The words—they don't match the shape of what I feel."
Jirou's heels slammed onto the kitchen tile and she dashed across the kitchen, grabbed Momo's arm and kept going.
"What are you—
"Come," she said, reaching back to snag the scraping tool from Momo's other hand. She pulled her across the room to the shoe rack, let go and bent down to put on her boots.
Momo found herself doing the same.
They slipped out the door, over the porch, across the grass just starting to dampen in the night. Jirou ran on ahead, glancing over her shoulder every so often to be sure she was followed. There was no need—she had already set her hook secure. Momo could only be dragged along in her wake.
On the other end of campus was a gym used mainly by the general education students. They entered through a side door, snuck along a half lit hall adorned by unmarked doors. Near the end, Jirou turned to face one, slipping the flat plastic dish tool in the crack between the handle and the wall. When she pulled, it slid open.
"We have permission to be here," she assured, "but I didn't want to run upstairs and grab my ID card."
Momo nodded and decided not to question it. If she found out that this was illicit she would have to leave. She did not want that.
The room was dark, darker when the door shut behind them. The latch clicked, echoed in the amorphous space. Momo hesitated, waiting for her to lead on, but Jirou stood as if she were the one waiting.
"What is this?" Momo whispered, and the sound bounced until it fell like leaves sweeping down the pavement.
Jirou shrugged, the gesture barely perceptible in the half light. "A room for some sport— racquetball? That's not what I use it for though. Sing."
After too long, the command separated itself from the rest of the words, rising like a cloud of cream in a warm drink. "What song?"
"No. You can't think. The song will come when you open your mouth." Jirou breathed in as if she were about to continue her thought, but instead she shouted—a tuned shout—rising sharply from one pitch to a second. The echo held out the lower note, played the sound into harmony. Her boots scuffed as she shifted into a wider stance and shouted again—longer, with a few more notes. Some dim part of Momo's brain recognized the intervals—fourths, fifths—there was some kind of progression to them—a connection that she could have remembered if she was back in her room at home, able to access her books.
Somehow she knew that Jirou was not thinking like that.
"Curfew is in an hour," Jirou said, speaking over the echo that still sounded. "I'll be back in forty-five minutes."
"I don't know how to do this," Momo protested.
Jirou unlatched the door, paused for a moment to look back, head framed by the light of the hall. "You'll catch it," she said, and the sliver of light slipped closed behind her.
Once the echo fell away, the silence was suffocating—pierced marginally by the muffled sound of another group of students playing some sport in a gym nearby. They would hear if she shouted—the sound must carry both ways—so Momo held out a single note, soft and sweet as she had been taught in a distant childhood choir caught only in memory now. It did not stay soft—now that her eyes had adjusted she could tell that there was nothing in the room—only the six hard surfaces of a cube—and her voice bounced, built on itself, until it was a trumpet playing alone in an orchestra—solemn and enough.
She slid her voice upwards, and the two pitches clashed dissonantly—she stopped instantly. The sound was wrong. Wrong like her reaction—since when did she care about perfection? It was only the world that had ground that into her.
Momo closed her eyes and the room looked almost the same. The sound she made next—it was not a song—it was not music more than the frantic way she had half-done the dishes was cleaning—it was a grasp at something impossible to catch. The frustration that defied words which ebbed and flowed between the seams of her perfect life swelled up and came out in a noise, in a shout, in a song, and the room caught the ends of it and sent them tumbling back to meet each other in a dissonant dance. She did not know what she was doing, and it did not matter. Precision would have killed the energy that made this space full.
When the noise died, she could not hear the students playing in the adjacent room, and a sudden fear gripped her. Had they heard all that? Had they stopped to wonder—to taunt? Suddenly she couldn't bear it—running back to the door, she found that the handle turned from the inside.
That night she checked her phone before bed. She always did—sometimes the other students brought up a grievance on the group chat, and it was easier to nip that in the bud—or at least, to have a night's rest to consider their complaint. There was another message—an attachment. Untitled 23, an audio file, from Jirou. There was no explanation, but Momo knew.
Slipping under the covers, she slid one earbud in and turned the volume down to the lowest setting. Music was bigger when you were alone in the dark.
It almost sounded like her own voice. There were places where she could recognize it—the parts where the melody lost itself in unruly cacophony, where she reached for a note and her voice cracked. But between those points was a gap, pointed like the exit lights in a long tunnel, and the arrow was focused on the thing she could not express.