Work Text:
Eli couldn't remember a time when she hadn't known that she was different from everyone else. In third grade when the whole class settled into their new seats at the beginning of the year, a girl named Mayu jabbed a chubby finger at the name tag on Eli's desk.
“Why is Eli-chan's name in kanji?” she asked. “Shouldn't it be in katakana since she's a foreigner?”
I was born in Japan, Eli wanted to say. We've been in the same class since first grade.
Instead, she burst into tears and had to step into the hall with her homeroom teacher.
That same year, they started studying English. During the most challenging questions, her best friend at the time lifted Eli's hand to volunteer an answer.
“What are you doing?” Eli asked, pulling her hand back down and fighting back her embarrassment.
“I just thought you'd know,” her friend said, blinking confusedly.
In fifth grade, she failed the first kanji test of the year. She'd been practicing for a dance recital that weekend and hadn't studied at all. When their new homeroom teacher returned the tests, Eli's didn't have a grade at the top. She knew from checking the book that half the answers were wrong, but they weren't marked.
“Oh, don't worry about it,” her teacher said. “It can't be helped, right? You don't use Japanese at home.”
Eli said nothing. She never failed another test again.
Her mother could tell when something was wrong, the way she had ever since Eli was a baby. After Eli's first day at junior high school, she greeted Eli at the door with a soft smile. Only once the door was shut behind her was Eli able to return that smile.
“Did something happen?” her mother asked.
“They told me to take out my contacts and dye my hair back.” Eli slipped out of her shoes and into her mother's waiting arms. She closed her eyes and buried her face into her mother's shoulder. “One of the girls from the other elementary school made a big deal about my bento. She said she didn't know that Americans put rice in their bentos too.”
“Maybe I should pack you a whole hamburger tomorrow.”
“Mama,” Eli whined, pulling away with a petulant frown.
“I'm only joking.” Her mother collected her into a hug again and stroked her head. “I'll call the school about your hair. It shouldn't be a problem.” She pressed a kiss to the crown of Eli's forehead. “Did anything good happen?”
“Mm. I volunteered to be class representative.”
“That's my girl.”
The best defense, Eli learned, was to be unimpeachable. If she got better grades than everyone, no one could say that foreigners were stupid. If she always stayed calm, no one could say that foreigners had a temper. If she stayed fit and thin, no one could say that foreigners were fat and lazy.
But they still did. They made jokes about big, dumb Russians and all Eli could do was hold her head high and remind herself: that's not me.
While her friends began to discover who they were, Eli continued her fight against everything that she wasn't.
She quit dance. (She couldn't be perfect, so what was the point?) She entered high school. (Not the most selective, but enough to prove everyone wrong.) Life went on as always.
Until she met Nozomi.
“You always go down the stairs so quietly. Like a ballet dancer, on your toes.”
“Elicchi, I've figured out why you eat so slowly: you take really small bites. Do you have a sensitive stomach? You lose a lot of lunch break time that way, you know.”
Eli was sometimes unsure what to do with Nozomi. Unlike her other friends, Nozomi never made foreigner jokes or pointed out the people who stopped to stare at her. Maybe Nozomi didn't notice the latter because she never seemed to be looking at anyone but Eli. When Eli caught Nozomi staring at her, it made her cheeks flush, her pulse flutter. The way she used to feel before going on stage.
“You're so cute when you smile, Elicchi.” Nozomi leaned forward on her elbows and grinned. “Feels like I've won the lottery.”
Eli was accustomed to receiving compliments about her appearance, but Nozomi's compliments were different. She got the sense that Nozomi wasn't just complimenting the idea of her (so tall, so blonde, so fair), but something else. Perhaps it made her so nervous because Nozomi seemed to know who Eli was better than she knew herself.
By the last semester of their first year at Otonokizaka, they were close enough that Nozomi came over to Eli's place to study almost every week. She liked chatting with Alisa, she said, and Eli's mother was such a good cook. She didn't mention her quiet single apartment, where the only noises were the occasional footsteps from the room above. Eli didn't mention that she hadn't brought friends home to play since elementary school.
They lay on their stomachs on Eli's bedroom floor, munching on crackers and pushing notebooks back and forth. Final exams were coming up and while Eli wasn't particularly concerned, she took it as a given that she needed to score in the top three of their class. Nozomi seemed content to brush up on her worst subjects and wing the rest.
“Elicchi, your handwriting is so clean.” Nozomi lifted one of Eli's notebooks to marvel at it up close. “Maybe you should have joined the calligraphy club. That kind of elegant atmosphere would suit you.”
Eli imagined herself in a crisp hakama, calligraphy brush in hand. She could almost hear the disbelieving whispers from an imaginary crowd—“a hakama! I wonder if she put it on by herself?”
“I'm not really that..” Eli trailed off.
“Really?” Nozomi twirled her pen, glancing at her friend out of the corner of her eye. “I think you're pretty amazing.”
Eli crumpled a snack wrapper in her fist.
“I'm not. I'm really nothing special. I don't even..” She faltered, then added softly, “There's nothing really good about me. I don't even have a good reason for the things that I do, I just do them.”
Nozomi reached over and plucked the wrapper from Eli's hand. She then laced their fingers together and squeezed gently.
“You don't have to think about any special reason,” she said. “Just do what you want to do. Even if you were a completely different person tomorrow, I'd still like you.”
Eli knit her brows together and frowned.
“Why? What would there be to like?”
Nozomi released Eli's hand and smiled.
“It's not how you look or what you do. There's something else deep inside you that I love. It's a spiritual connection. Can you feel it, Elicchi?”
Eli felt her face turning pink and averted her eyes.
“C-Come on, Nozomi, don't say embarrassing things like that.”
Nozomi shrugged and picked up her pen again, tapping it idly against her smile-dimpled chin.
“I'm not embarrassed. Not when I'm with you.”
From a third party perspective, very little changed after their first year together. Eli continued to score at the top of their class and lead in all things, from student council to sports festival preparations. To spend more time with her best friend, Nozomi began to take part as well. No one found this strange.
Quietly, in ways that nobody else could see, Eli found herself beginning to shift.
Once they were alone in her room, Eli fell into the habit of letting her hair down and changing into casual clothes immediately, when before she would have waited for Nozomi to go home first. Nozomi began to pack a change of clothes in her school bag so that they could dress down together. Sometimes, if she were planning to stay the night, Nozomi let her hair down too. The two of them alone formed a protected atmosphere where Eli didn't have to keep looking over her shoulder. Even her tone of voice changed.
“I just can't get a good grip on it,” Eli sighed, pulling a loose t-shirt over her head. “Why would enrollment numbers have decreased so dramatically after our year? Nothing has changed, so it doesn't make sense.”
Nozomi took a seat on the edge of Eli's bed and gestured her over. Eli settled down between Nozomi's knees, her back against her bed frame.
“Perhaps it's because nothing has changed?” Nozomi suggested. She swept Eli's shoulders free of hair and began to gently massage them.
“But it's not like other schools in the area have changed much either. Well, with the exception of UTX, but their students come from a different income bracket anyway.” Eli sighed and tilted her head into Nozomi's lap. “That feels really nice. Thank you.”
“Mm.” Nozomi continued rubbing her thumbs into Eli's upper back. “It's possible that because we've already found so much to love in our school, we're inclined to view the lack of glamor more favorably. But by that same token, people who choose a school based on surface-value judgements are more likely to be disappointed when it doesn't perfectly match the image in their minds. Just like meeting new people, it's important to reflect on one's own biases when choosing between several options.”
Eli craned her neck to look up at Nozomi with wide eyes, mouth slightly open.
“хорошó скáзано..” she murmured. If only she could put Nozomi's words directly into the school's advertising copy.
“Hm?” Nozomi blinked.
“Oh.” Eli caught herself and laughed. “It's Russian for 'well said.'”
“Can you say it again?”
Eli repeated herself, more deliberately this time.
“Harasho sukazana..?” Nozomi stumbled over the unfamiliar sounds. Eli couldn't help but giggle.
“Not bad.” She reached up and placed a hand over Nozomi's. “If you ever meet my grandmother, you can try to impress her with your Russian.”
Nozomi responded with a smirk.
“You'll have to let me hear it more so I can practice, then.”
Eli smiled and closed her eyes, pressing her cheek against Nozomi's leg. It wasn't worth mentioning that she had never spoken Russian with anyone outside her family before. Not least because Nozomi didn't need to be told.
“Alright. But only because you asked so nicely.”