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The summer of 2011 ends with a vicious snap of heat, hot enough to nearly scorch the remains of the Higashikata fruit orchards down to the root. Yasuho Hirose tears up something like mourning and relief on September 3rd, when the first blast of fall whistles through the streets of Morioh, officially bringing an end to the longest summer of her life.
Autumn cools quickly and brings with it a variety of newness and novelty for Yasuho and Josuke to try on. Yasuho enters her last year at University of Morioh with a major in cartography, and starts a part time job in the library as a tutor. Josuke begins his first year at Morioh Center Community College, and gets his first haircut that he can remember. He asks Yasuho to do it, so she spends the afternoon pinching soft nearly black brown curls between her pointer finger and thumb, and cutting away at them with her tiny bang trimmers. It really does take up half the day, but Josuke admires himself in the mirror when it’s done, grinning wide and cocking his head at every angle. “ Who taught you how to do this? Whaaaaaat? No way you just figured it out on your own, you’re a pro!”
They take walks together when staying in one place feels like too much of a chore. They make their way around town, and Yasuho shows him the sights that he hasn’t yet remembered, and probably never will. They fill in the blanks together. She shows him the small church on the hill she attended briefly with her mother, back when her mom thought religion might make the divorce fracture into cleaner lines. Paisley Park leads them to what will become their favorite convenience store on a gray white overcast day made better with gas station candy. They walk the beach, taking turns at kicking a rock down the sand, a wobbling trail of impact left in its wake- kick, roll, stop. Kick, roll, stop. They pour the sand out of their shoes in the grass when they leave, a small monument to time spent as it should be, side by side.
Josuke is half gifted an apartment from Norisuke. He tries to insist on paying for all of it himself, but compromises on half when Norisuke reminds him that he knows and controls his wage. It’s a small unit on the fourth floor of a walk up building, and Yasuho half moves in right along with him. She wouldn’t claim the place as her own, but finds more of her time than not spent beneath the polka dot patterned kotatsu that lives in the apartment's main room. They sit warm beneath it, completing homework with the sliding door to the balcony half cracked open. Brittle November air tinged with salt from the coast whispers through the slit, and Yasuho counts them lucky to be too far south for Japan’s lake effect to take hold of Morioh.
It’s at this table that Yasuho cries again for the first time since that summer. She had noticed the dry spell, and briefly wondered if she had just cried herself into a deficit. Maybe people only have so many tears in them, and she had used all hers up. Or maybe this was maturity, and she was aging into stoicism.
Because her mom had asked her twice if she was really going to wear that skirt out today before leaving the house.
And her plane survey quiz grades weren’t bad , per se, but they certainly weren’t great.
And it’s late November, and it’s cold and gray no matter how many sky blue knit sweaters she pulls out of storage.
And today, as she stood at the bus stop, waiting for her ride to class, she noticed a new sticker for a local band that someone had stuck to the telephone pole. It hadn’t been there yesterday, and it suddenly occurs to her that there are people out there in the world making music, making stickers for music, leaving them on phone poles, and doing god knows what else. Telephone poles look different one day from another, and all Yasuho can do is try to not wear the same shirt to every morning lecture.
She notices her immobility in that moment, how static her life has felt since last summer, how tired she’s been. No one tells you how exhausting it is to stop running for your life.
So that night, when she chips her new manicure on the edge of Josuke’s kotatsu, it’s as if the skies open up. She likes to think she’s not a particularly vain person, but after several months of build up, it’s the perfect tipping point. Yasuho cries like she’s getting paid to do it.
Josuke Higashikata is also a crier.
It’s one of the first things she learns about him. He’ll cry over anything that will give him the opportunity to. Anger, joy, sadness all seem to be mixed within the same pot, and are all readily available to boil over at any moment. Yasuho saw him cry when he discovered that he preferred melon flavored soda to strawberry. She saw him cry that one time Daiya knit a little sweater for Iwasuke to wear. He cried when he got his first A in his Theory of Mathematics course. He cried again when he got his first F in Literature.
He steps into the main room fresh from the shower. He’s wearing a Morioh Community College tee shirt he bought himself during his first week, and his curls cling wetly to his forehead. He’s at her side in an instant, hands hovering a frame around her cheeks with intent to heal, gaze searing right through her. Two toned and deadly serious in that way he wears more and more infrequently the further away last summer becomes.
“Are you hurt? What do you need?”
Yasuho shakes her head, and her tears feel hot enough to melt steel as she holds up her right hand to show off the damage. A large chunk of peach pink polish missing from her ring finger.
Josuke’s immediacy ebbs away somewhat as he realizes what the problem is. He takes her hand and turns it over and back, palm up and palm down, assessing.
“Ohh. That’s so sad, you just painted these last night, right?”
“Yeah, I did.” Her words come out far more clogged than she wanted them to. “Just last night.”
He runs his fingers over the tendons on the back of her hand, sweeping up to and along the ridge of her knuckles. His fingertips are smooth and uncalloused the same way hers are on her right arm. Still new.
“That’s really sad, Yasu. I’m sorry.” She can only nod wetly again. It is really sad. He stands suddenly. “Sit tight, hold on-,”
He disappears back into the bathroom for all of two seconds before he’s sitting back in front of her with a small bottle of buttery yellow nail polish, almost the same color as the lipstick he sometimes wears.
“It’s the only color I’ve got, you don’t mind using mine do you?”
A part of her really honestly wants to feel embarrassed about how easily he can read her. They both know it’s not about the nail polish. It’s not even really about her mothers opinion on her skirt, or her test, or Novembers, or the sticker at the bus stop either. Right now, it’s just about a solution. Or maybe a change. Either one would do at this point, really.
Yasuho watches him, his dark angular brows pushed together in deep concentration. She looks at the dry skin that’s appeared on the flat plane of his nose bridge in the dry winter air, at the wide curve of his cupid's bow. He paints over the chip with a surgical focus that he doesn’t often use, but suits him well.
He finishes by pursing his lips together and blowing cool air on the nail to dry it quicker. It almost sounds like a whistle through his tooth gap.
They admire his handiwork in the washed out and fuzzy apartment lighting. The yellow really doesn’t match the pink, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s mismatched, but it’s smooth, and it’s fixed, and god it’s perfect .
Careful to keep the still tacky polish away from his freshly washed hair, Yasuho cradles the back of Josuke’s head, pulling him in to touch foreheads together. The space between them is minimal, still, and it stretches as the tear tracks dry little trails down Yasuho’s face. She sniffs and laughs, a little lightheaded from the weight that’s been hanging round her neck lifting so suddenly. Yoked together like this, the heft of the evening pulls along much easier.
“Thank you.”
Yasuho closes her eyes but she can feel Josuke smile, as close as they are.
“Yeah, of course. Any time, ok?” He closes the space with a minimal kiss, right at the corner of her mouth. “Any time.”
When they separate, it’s well into the faint colorless hours of night-morning. Yasuho knows she might regret it when her alarm to wake up goes off in a few hours, the starting bell for another day of more of the same, less of the past. Still, when Josuke lightly tugs on one of her braids to get her attention, she listens.
“Think you could paint mine too?”
More of the same, less of the past.
“Yeah. Of course.”