Chapter Text
If you had a choice, you'd be at home on a Sunday night, quietly rotting in bed. Maybe scrolling through your phone. Watching a show you didn’t have to pay attention to. Attempting homework and failing. Something safe. Something still.
What you wouldn’t be doing? Grocery shopping in bunny slippers at 11 p.m. under fluorescent lights so aggressive they felt like a personal attack.
But here you were. Dragging your feet across the corner store linoleum, clutching a half-crumpled list of items your mom swore she didn’t need until twenty minutes ago.
“Just eggs,” she’d said.
Then, surprise! She threw in bread, milk, and oh, a box of tampons if they were on sale.
And you, poor, too-nice-for-your-own-good you, had nodded and left the house in a hoodie and pyjama bottoms, grabbing the first pair of shoes you could find. Which, unfortunately, turned out to be fluffy pink bunny slippers with little ears and plastic eyes that stared at you in judgment every time you looked down.
You were finally wrapping up, balancing a precarious stack of groceries in your arms, when someone tapped your shoulder.
“Excuse me?”
You stiffened. Turned around.
There was a boy standing behind you, just slightly taller, with hair that curled a little at the ends and freckles scattered across his cheeks like someone had gone wild with a paintbrush. He looked your age, taller, but had the nervous energy of someone who wasn’t used to talking to strangers.
“Hi, sorry,” he smiled, a little sheepish. “I think you, uh… dropped something?”
You followed his gaze to the pink object in his hand.
It took a second for your brain to connect the dots. And then, of course, it did.
Tampons.
You stared at the box. Then at him. Then back at the box.
Your mouth opened slightly in horror. You didn’t even feel it slip out of the basket. But there it was. In his hand. Bright pink. Impossible to ignore.
“Oh,” you croaked, and immediately wanted to vanish. “Thanks.”
You snatched it quickly, cheeks going nuclear. And just when you thought this couldn’t possibly get any worse, a voice – flat, bored, a little cutting – called out from behind a nearby shelf
“Yamaguchi! You done or what?”
The boy in front of you perked up immediately. Which meant he wasn’t alone. Which meant you had seconds before someone else showed up and saw you standing here, red-faced, holding a box of tampons like it was a weapon.
You panicked, snatched the box out of his hands and shoved it down the front of your coat, just as another figure rounded the corner.
This one was taller. Noticeably. Blonde hair. Thin-rimmed glasses. Sharp jaw. His expression was unimpressed in the most exhausting way possible, like everything around him was an inconvenience he couldn’t be bothered to care about.
He glanced at you. Then dropped to your coat. To the very obvious rectangular lump beneath the zipper.
His eyebrow lifted.
“Are you shoplifting or what?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Mm,” he hummed. Not believing you. Not not believing you. Just dismissing you entirely.
He looked at the freckled boy and jerked his head toward the exit, “let’s leave already.”
He turned, already beginning to walk like he hadn’t just accused a stranger of stealing sanitary products and then dipped. You stared after him, flabbergasted. Was that it? Was he serious?
Just before the blonde reached the door however, he glanced back one last time and said, with no change in tone whatsoever, “nice shoes.”
You looked down, and there they were. Two pink bunnies. Mocking you. The ears on the left one had gone slightly lopsided. You opened your mouth, some kind of weak protest halfway formed, but he was already walking away.
You looked back at freckle boy, who was clearly trying not to grimace. He shot you a quick, apologetic glance, and mouthed a ‘sorry’, giving you a small wave before jogging after his friend.
You stood there, frozen in the aftermath, the overhead lights buzzing quietly above your head. Once you were sure they were gone, you unzipped your coat and pulled out the box of tampons like it was a live grenade. You stared at it, dead-eyed.
“If I wasn’t such a reasonable person,” you muttered, “I’d set you on fire.”
You stuffed it into your shopping bag, sighed deeply, and walked toward the exit.
Outside, the air was cold and vaguely damp. The kind of weather that felt like a personal insult. You looked up at the neon sign above the store and sighed again, dragging a hand down your face.
“We’ve only been in this town for a week,” you mumbled to no one in particular, “and I can already never come back here again.”