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vii.
You’ve really done it this time.
“I’m here today so you can laugh at me.”
You drop the flowers you had been clutching and they lay obediently against the smooth stone. A few petals have wrinkled under your clenched grasp, under the weight of everything you came here bearing.
It’s still fresh, from being mere days ago or from having been revisited countless times in your head since then, you don’t know. You can still hear how the door had clapped harshly against its frame somewhere behind you in the wake of your warpath as your heavy footsteps reverberated across the empty school hallway. How their gazes—her gaze—trailed after you through the window, disbelief and resentment and hurt palpable in the suffocatingly still air you rushed to break out of. You felt it. You kept walking. You dared not look back, not even once, because the moment you looked at her and saw her looking back at you, everything that had just happened would become real. And once it was real, you might have come undone, crumpling and spilling out right there onto the ground in a crime scene of your own doing.
All you could feel was how your cheek stung from her impact, and how your eyes did too, and your mind and your heart and just about everything else. It all stung until you went numb.
Those sharp words constricted your flesh, tightened with each replay:
“You’re the worst.”
As if you needed the assurance. You’re no stranger to yourself.
Which brings you back here, after you vowed never again.
“I quit the band,” you announce to the unwavering silence. A bitterness claws its way out of your throat in a strangled half-laugh, because it knows no other way to unravel. If you can’t acknowledge the bad comedy of it all, you might drown in the alternative. And the alternative, the bleak actuality of your own fatal flaws, is far more than you can wrestle with in your current state. “Nothing ever goes right for me.”
Somehow you do this every time. The first time lies before you right now, once the victim of your friendship and now the victim of your tired complaints. If she were still breathing, she would surely pity you with a smile. The thought only stokes your fire, because how could she, so young, look down upon you from up on a stage under the blinding showlights and then close the curtains right after? Why is it that you first lose yourself in everything you once cherished, and then you lose them?
Everything about you is sheathed in turbulence—the way you bite, the way you boast, the way you break. At one point, you might have believed it was everything about you except the way you love. But those days are past. Like a ritual, each one who tried got burned, yourself included.
You feel a hotness trickle down your face in a salty rivulet and then meet the earth by your feet. It seems you’ve been here enough times. A flower might bloom and then die there one day. Time and time before—in a classroom, huddled against a wall by the corner; before a tombstone, brushed with your cemetery flowers and indignation.
You can never seem to hold a good thing.
You’re starting to think that you’re not a good thing to hold.
ii.
You’re quite familiar with futile endeavors.
“Come on! They want to meet you!”
“Eh? Already? I mean, we only just—”
“Of course, Shiho, you’re officially one of us now!”
Your resistance is in vain, not that it was particularly intentional in the first place. You know you can’t fight it, not when she gets like this. You know you don’t want to, either, not really. She already has her hands on your shoulders, eagerly guiding you down the hallway towards the band room. You feel a light wave of dizziness. Probably just nerves.
It had only been a day since you met Mizuguchi Aki, and since you agreed—begrudgingly, albeit which was only superficial—to give the band a try in the same conversation, the one that has continued to ripple through your mind ever since it happened a mere twenty-or-so hours ago. It probably feels like you can’t stand properly right now because you could barely sleep last night, buried under your covers and clutching your pillow as you repeatedly revisited the way she walked up to you, the way she asked you to form a band with her a sentence before she even asked your name, the way you didn’t believe her at first and so she countered with a charming rebuttal for every doubt and fear of yours.
“Are you sure about this?” You can’t stop yourself from blurting it out right before the band room door, almost because part of you expects her to pore over it one more time and change her mind. You decide to give her one last chance, one last out for her to decide it was all a joke or a lapse in judgment, for her to say that she won’t take this seriously, that you’re too much of a pain to deal with, that she didn’t know what she was thinking, so you can turn around and walk away first before she does later.
You’re looking down at the floor, at the wall, at the window and the leaves outside brushing up against its pane, anywhere but directly in her eyes, which are now mere inches from your face. Neither of you clarify, but you can tell she knows your question isn’t just about meeting the other band members. A few seconds pass, you’re not sure how many, but in that brief pause you convince yourself of it, she didn’t mean any of it before and now she’s going to say—
“I’ve never been more sure of anything,” Aki says gently but firmly. “They’ll love you, I promise.” Whether she has a silver tongue or you’ve gone soft, you don’t know, but she always seems to say things in a way that you can’t help but believe.
You finally look over to her by your shoulder, and she smiles at you so bright you think you’d follow her anywhere. And so you do.
Their names are Tsutsui Mari and Tachibana Kaori; the small one looking inquisitively up at you and the tall one beaming exuberantly down at you, respectively. You try to remember their names from their introductions, and from Aki telling you beforehand, because she had been wanting to introduce you to the other half of the—now also your—band. You might need a few more tries, because you feel like your head hasn’t been working properly since yesterday.
Aki was right, it turns out. They’re nice, and they welcome you immediately. They ask you about your music at first, and you don’t tell them everything, but you think maybe one day you’d like to. And soon enough, the atmosphere dissolves into natural back-and-forths about anything and everything. You don’t even notice it until it bubbles out of you, foreign and pleasant all at once. You’re laughing along with them. It’s nothing like your past bands.
They haven’t decided on a band name yet, which Aki also excitedly brings up to you now that the final remaining position is filled. “Let’s think of one together,” she says.
And there it goes, that nagging expectation that it’ll be the same old song, that they’ll grow tired of you the moment the artificially pleasant facades fall, and they’ll leave you how they found you like the rest. You almost want to believe it, you want to will yourself to believe it, because it’s easier and it’s familiar that way. You’d rather take the lull of the constant rain over the fleeting awning. But on this day, that unease fades into the sunlight slanting through the window, fades into the songs you share together, fades along with the weight that lingers on your shoulder even after she eventually moves her hand away.
It’s a gentle, reassuring weight. You think, tentatively, with a quiet but unyielding hope, that you could get used to it.
iii.
You thought, how pointless, when she first suggested it during practice.
Aki was talking about something to unify the band—SS Girls, as you had decided together a while back. She said something about the band image, or morale, or something of the sort. You think such notions are trivial. You’re more concerned with playing well.
And yet, despite your flimsy internal resistance, you find yourself here, waiting after school while you check your phone every thirty seconds.
You open up the most recent message from her for what seems to be the tenth time, the one saying she’ll meet you at the front doors right after her last class ends. You check the time again. The minutes continue ticking by. Students file out in groups, in pairs, one by one. You scan the crowds as they stream out into the open with their chatter, looking for a flash of familiar blond hair. You can’t help the way you double check that you’re standing in the right place despite these being the only front doors of the institution, the same ones you’ve entered and exited through countless times. Maybe you got the time wrong. Or the place. You should go back inside and check—
“Gah!”
You suddenly stumble forward a step as you’re playfully shoved from behind. You don’t need to turn around to know.
Aki exclaims “Hey!” as you proceed to counterattack. She jumps back just in time to narrowly dodge your move, and then you both dissolve into giggles.
“I hope you weren’t waiting long,” she says, tinged with an apologetic smile. “I had to stay a bit late for something.”
“No, not at all,” you dismiss without even thinking. You look around and suddenly realize it feels emptier than your usual meetings. “Kao and Mari aren’t coming?”
“Oh, they ended up being busy today. They said they’ll find another time to come out with us,” Aki says, then brightens up immediately after. “But you know, I’m happy with it just being us.”
She’s already bounding ahead and calling back at you to hurry up when you realize you’ve been glued to the ground for who knows how long. You sputter and break into a run to catch up to her as you finally regain control of your legs and your head. You don’t know what’s wrong with you today.
The music store you frequent is a short walk from the school grounds, tucked away quietly like an oasis by a few other local shops. A chime sounds as the two of you enter the door, and you’re greeted by the rows of instruments and records and accessories. It’s familiar, perhaps more so than your own home, and after some time it’s starting to feel safe again, like you belong again.
Although, you’re not certain what exactly you’re looking for this time. You came here under the guise of Aki wanting to do some shopping for the band, but you might have gone anywhere with her regardless if it was about the prosperity of the band or not. You wade through the space, perusing the walls and stands and shelves, on one side keeping a peripheral awareness for potential upgrades for your instrument, and on the other side an awareness for the figure currently on the other side of the store that your gaze subconsciously trails after.
You’re absentmindedly pretending to flip through some books—beginner sheet music for violin, you finally glance down and notice—when you hear her call out with a wave, “Shiho, come look at these!”
When you cross the store, you find Aki focused on a display by the wall, where guitar and bass straps of all different patterns and colors hang from the rack. She’s holding one of them, adorned intricately with black rose-patterned stitching. She hands it to you as she grabs another identical one off the display, last of the only two of this design.
“Let’s get these! We can match,” she declares gleefully.
But you realize Mari and Kaori wouldn’t be able to because of their instruments. You’re not sure when it started becoming more common that “we” wasn’t synonymous with the SS Girls, but referred to only you and Aki. You expect to feel disappointment at the fact that the rest of the band wouldn’t be able to partake, but instead you feel a soft thrill run up your spine. It’s something inconsequential in the big picture, yet it bears much gravity in your chest right now.
You don’t know if she picked that one because she specifically remembered that you like floral patterns. You think you would’ve agreed just as readily if she was holding any other one.
iv.
You used to think you didn’t like the summer.
The sweltering heat that seems to arrive earlier each year. The cicadas and their obnoxious singsong. The days of nothingness that drone on. No longer having the direction of a star to reach for, summer became nothing but a liminality between one term and the next.
You wonder when that changed.
This particular midsummer day demands respite, and you manage to find it inside a small corner store.
Aki’s peering into the chest freezer tucked away by one wall, looking back and forth between the options wrapped up in colorful packages. The fan on the ceiling emits a low and constant whir, although not nearly enough. You watch Aki have a brief debate with herself before she slides open the freezer top and picks up a vanilla ice cream cone, while you absentmindedly reach for one beside hers. You walk over to pay at the counter, and only then do you pay attention to what you grabbed—a mint chocolate popsicle, it seems. You’re not sure what’s quelled your typically insatiable appetite today. It must be the weather.
“Hah… it’s so hot,” you groan for what feels like the hundredth time as you two exit the brief solace of the convenience store. “Why did you choose today of all days?”
There was no agenda, truthfully. It’s been approximately a week since your school break started and you were both getting exhausted staying indoors with a cyclical routine of household chores and summer homework, and so when Aki texted asking if you were free after studying today, you were out the door faster than you’ve ever been before. You tried to make plans in your group chat with the other band members to meet up and practice sometime, although Aki seemed more keen on taking a trip to the beach or a festival or something of that sort, and so any notion of band practice quickly derailed. You imagine it for a moment—her skin against crystal water, her face illuminated under fireworks—and you think you’d like that. But you also don’t mind this.
“What, I need a reason?” Aki responds. “It’s just been a while since we’ve met up. I wanted to see you.”
Your face heats up from her blunt honesty. You’re still not used to it. Instinctively, you turn away to start fiddling with the packaging of your frozen dessert, as if you’d burn up from being enveloped in her clueless candidness for too long.
“Q-Quit being dramatic, it’s only been a week,” you mumble, unsuccessfully grasping at the spiked plastic edges. God, this wrapper’s being really stubborn.
“A whole week! I’ve been so lonely,” Aki declares with an exaggerated sigh, as if momentarily regaining her sense of time again. Her expression then shifts into a genuine smile. “Maybe I’m getting too used to seeing you everyday.”
You finally manage to rip the wrapper open, desperately trying to conceal the confetti floating all up inside you. But Aki’s already distracted by something else, munching on her cone. Something really is wrong with you.
The two of you stroll along aimlessly, side by side, flanked by a covered walkway on one side and shaded by trees on the other. You talk as you walk about this and that, and you find your gaze drifting over to your right even during the occasional comfortable silences when your mouths are full. This has been happening all too frequently these days, and you’re becoming keenly aware of each instance that lies seemingly out of your conscious control.
You do it again as you fall into a steady rhythm, matching your paces. She’s holding a bite of ice cream in one cheek, face rosy from the heat, collar slightly crumpled, a few strands of hair out of place, fair skin glistening from the beaming afternoon sun. It’s mundane—you know she’s merely existing in your proximity. Yet somehow, you find that rare and extraordinary. And what’s more so is that she’s completely unaware of it, oblivious to how enchanting all of her is. Up close, you feel like she’s enough to melt your everwinters, she’s enough to make you sing the ballads you used to despise for the rest of your days, she’s…
Beautiful.
You’ve known it since the first time you looked at her. It’s unfathomable how anyone wouldn’t. But the thought grows inescapable with each stolen glance; it thunders in your ears, glows luminescent in your veins, renders you so speechless you feel like you’ve been possessed. You don’t know what she saw in you that day, or every day after that. And each time your heart leaps at her infectious smile, at her saccharine words, at her casual touches, you think that might be the moment she finally leaves.
But while she’s still here with you, you might be content looking at her until the stellar explosions come and the world flickers out like candlelight, if she’d give you forevermore by her side.
You suddenly feel incredibly warm, but not from above or outside, and this time it doesn’t light your skin up in glaring white hot rays. Instead it seeps out from the inside, liquid gold from your very center, until it settles in all your gaps and crevices, coats your blood and bones. It makes you grow dizzy with vertigo. You decide it’s not an uncomfortable feeling.
Then Aki looks over at you, and you quickly turn away before your eyes have a chance to meet, opting to finally take a bite of your popsicle as if you just remembered you’re holding it. You close your eyes and will yourself to focus on the mint chocolate flavor like it’s the only thing on your mind.
Oh no. Were you staring too long? Were you too obvious? Did she notice?
Suddenly she leans her face over to you.
“Wha—”
With your heart suspended midair in your chest cavity and possibly on the verge of implosion, you watch, wide-eyed, as she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and moves to…
Steal a bite of your popsicle.
You let her. You have no choice. You may as well be frozen right now.
“Sweet.” She licks a smear left on the side of her mouth as she leans back and grins. “Aw man, I should’ve gotten your flavor instead!”
You don’t even notice when your popsicle drips down your hand and onto the pavement.
v.
You’re at your first high school festival.
The summer break you recently returned from is already dispersing into the cool blue air as you wander between the bustling stalls, eyeing every new attraction that had been set up in the usually barren front lot of the school. You and Aki walk side by side, Mari and Kaori doing the same a little ways to your right.
You’re close enough to not get swept away by the throngs of excitable students streaming through the school grounds. Close enough that your shoulders and hands brush every once in a while, or perhaps slightly more frequently than that. Call them intentional accidents. You wish, in some deep hidden division of your soul, that you could get just a little closer still, but you don’t push your luck.
Your group is pulled in by a food stall here, a games stall there, until you’ve circled nearly the entire festival over and back and your feet are growing sore. Somehow Mari still has enough energy and stomach to want to check out the sweets they’re selling some distance away, and so Kaori doesn’t hesitate to follow after her, promising they’d find and meet back up with you soon. You and Aki wave goodbye to them as they melt into silhouettes among all the others.
Once again it was down to the two of you. This seems to occur quite a lot nowadays.
You look over at your best friend, who’s already looking in the direction of one of the only booths you hadn’t visited yet.
“The photo booth?” you ask, noticing the sign on the front of the analog box and a curtain drawn over its entrance.
“We need to! We haven’t taken any photos yet.”
“But we did on our phones earlier.”
“Yeah, with the others. I want some with just us.”
Us.
Once again, the word lodges itself between your ears, makes a nest there, decorates it with flowers and shiny things. If you don’t rein it in, these frivolous feelings inside you just might grow wings and take flight.
The inside of the booth looks cramped, with a narrow seat on one side and a camera on the other. It’s just enough for two people to fit snugly. Aki pulls back the curtain and slides in. You follow closely after her, closing the curtain after you settle in.
You’re acutely aware of how tight the space is.
“How should we pose?”
She thinks for a second, then holds up two fingers in a peace sign as she looks into the lens with a grin, and you mirror her. She throws an arm around your shoulder. You break into a smile. You’re sticking your tongues out at each other, making silly faces, laughing to each other as the camera snaps again and again.
The world continues moving outside, but the commotion never breaks through the walls around you. Everything’s suspended except you and her. You’re not sure if Mari and Kaori are looking for you by now. You don’t pay it any mind.
Then, without warning, Aki wraps her arms tight around you, leaning her weight onto you from the side as her cheek presses up against yours, donning that brilliant smile of hers that you think could rival any World Wonder. And you know right then, you lied to yourself before when you acted as if whatever’s been blooming inside you hadn’t already soared far past its fledgling state. You lied to yourself every time prior when you brushed off growing inklings of this thing that wasn’t going away. Because now you’re trying to quiet the pounding of your heart rattling between your ribcage, you’re trying to calm the mind racing between your skull, you’re trying to quell the warmth lighting up your skin, you’re trying to tame the butterflies that erupt in your stomach, and it almost feels… it almost feels like…
The camera flashes white one last time. Aki leaps up to go check the photos.
vi.
You feel her waiting beside you with bated breath, one of her hands tightly clutching your arm.
You’re standing among the other bands who are waiting for the announcement of the stage band contest winners, the air buzzing with anxiously anticipatory energy behind the stage curtains. Mari and Kaori are somewhere back in the classroom, likely waiting for your news with a similar impatience and eagerness. Your heart drums in your chest along with the others around you, but not for their reasons.
“Congratulations to the first place winner…” the announcer’s voice sounds, somewhere blurrily far in the distance despite being a mere few feet away.
It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t your best performance by a long shot. You made several mistakes, perhaps imperceptible to any regular listener but loud to your trained ear. You’re getting sloppy lately. If Kyou, who you could never seem to beat even back then, could see you now—if the past you, who could accept no self-worth except in superiority to everyone else, could see you now, what would she say?
“In second place…”
But strangely, you’re having fun. The most fun you’ve had in a long time, you’ll admit. You didn’t know this kind of performance was possible. The collection of first place trophies and awards displayed in your room have been collecting dust lately. You might put them away one of these days.
“And last but not least, in third place…”
You barely register the final announcement, or the small crowd around you beginning to dissipate, any of it. You only snap out of your haze when to your dismay, the warmth by your side suddenly disappears, and you hear Aki squeal as she rushes up to receive a piece of paper bordered in intricate gold patterning.
You only briefly make out the words “3rd Place” followed by “SS Girls” before the award paper falls away as Aki lunges forward to wrap you in a hug.
“Shiho, we did it!”
You don’t even notice where the award lands. You couldn’t care less.
It hits you then, but not hard and fast and violent, not like everything else you’re accustomed to feeling, not like your numerous fiery affairs with victory and defeat. This hits you warm and soft and reassuring, like her outstretched arms leading into her tight embrace and her hair all golden falling beside your face tickling your cheeks and her smile into your shoulder how you can feel it even though you can’t see it because it washes over you like sunshine how bright and pretty she is because of how unabashedly happy she is right now and so you can’t help but be too and how you want it to be that way all the time just you two and her, her, her.
The words “3rd Place” completely evaporate from your mind, and for once you let it.
I see.
You thought, when the time came, it would feel frightening, to anchor these untitled alien emotions that had previously floated persistently in your periphery. That perhaps your world would shake and your ground would be displaced and everything you knew about yourself would be uprooted. But no, you realize right now, it’s very much the opposite—when it arrives, it arrives like a soft exhale, like you’ve always known it, like you’re coming home to it. It’s not merely something you do, but something you are. You couldn’t conceive of yourself without this simple truth.
You think you know now, that this is why the battlefields are littered with flowers after the bloodshed, why the poets never cease in their pursuit of alchemizing something so intangible and so divine into prose. This is what all the songs you listened to attempted to capture, over and over, in countless different tongues and tunes. Really, you think you’ve known since back then, since that first moment she spoke to you. Every day since has merely been steadfast solidification, wave after wave, to this thing you finally dare put a name to.
So this is it.
This is what they call love.
You taste the word on the tip of your tongue, lightly, one time. Again, a bit more certain. You cradle it carefully between your teeth. You follow it with her name, and it feels as natural as she does in your arms right now.
I… love Aki.
You want to whisper it into her ear, craft it to her in a letter, sing it to her in a song, but at this moment you settle with immortalizing it inside your head. It’s enough for now.
I love Aki.
i.
Nothing ever goes right for you.
You’re huddled by a corner of the band room with your head buried in your hands when she first finds you. You don’t know how long you’ve already been here when she walks in, but your legs are numb and so is your face as she rudely opens the door and invites herself into your private appointment with misery. Great, you can’t even feel sorry for yourself in peace.
She interrupts your broken chain of sniffles and hiccups and asks if you’re crying.
You muse that she looks vaguely familiar when you look up and your eyes meet; you can’t quite place her name, but you’ve seen her around school. For some reason, among the hundreds of nondescript peers you pass by everyday, you remember her face. She’s in the same year as you, from another band, you recognize.
With your eyes still red and your cheeks streaked with tear stains, you protest that you absolutely weren’t crying.
What’s so criminal about looking toward the pedestal that had been ripped out from under you all those years ago? You just want to be better, you want those who stand beside you to be better, because you weren’t. You weren’t better when she was bathed with stage lights and accolades. When she was told through applause and acclamation that she belonged in the world you were gated from, over and over again. When she left that world with the wish to see you performing the same guitar you picked up just to show her how much better you were. And now you can’t, ever again. There’s no longer a best to be better than. What a parting gift.
The girl in front of you still isn’t leaving. When she opens her mouth again, words strung together in patterns foreign to you tumble out.
She wants you to form a band with her.
You bury your face back in your arms. Tell her you want to play seriously, but that everyone thinks it’s a pain you do.
She takes a seat beside you. Asks your name.
You say it’s Shiho.
You hear her repeat it once, as if trying it out to see how your existence would fit in her vocabulary, how your presence could mold in her life, and you think to yourself, this is it. This is the part of the script where she runs because they always do, because no one ever tolerates you past skin-deep.
You’re starting to believe their reasons are etched in stone, the ones that came before her and the ones before them too. You know the part of you that bleeds dark and thick and ugly, the part you’ve lived with all your life. Your hypocrisies, your shortcomings, your storms and their casualties. You’re starting to believe that they were right each time they walked away, that perhaps Izumi Shiho is simply too hazardous a case to get close to, too abrasively encased in high fences and warning signs and caution tape. Like barbed wire coiled within you, twisted and razor-sharp on all edges, spilling out of your throat and your hands with everything you speak to, everything you touch. Forget gold, you turn them all into bygones and tragedies. Everything you cross paths with is a perpendicular line. You can’t seem to love something that doesn’t hurt you back, so how could anyone ever—
She says she likes that about you.
What?
Your world halts its spin, and you look over at her. This time you really, really look at her.
She might be the first to dare say such a thing. And all of a sudden, you know you’re doomed.
Because she feels like the first rays of summer and smiles like it too. She talks like she could bring an orchestra to its knees. She looks like she could be all your brightest, briefest, best days. And you might be okay leaving every piece of yourself in this moment, rendering the rest of your life purely decorative. You might be okay betting all of yourself on her sweet words and building a home to live in them forever, if she’d let you.
“I’m not… against it.”