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The first time Kuwana visited his house, his parents were surprised. His mom had answered the door and stumbled over an aborted greeting she meant for one of his high school friends, a train wreck of something like ‘Utashima’ and annoyance at not having the prior notice to make enough food to share with a guest. She had course-corrected fast, though, when she realized she wasn’t speaking to Utashima, apologizing with wide eyes and a little redness on her cheeks. In a bit of uncharacteristic negligence as a hostess, she had left Kuwana at the door for Yatora’s dad to deal with, found her son in the hall and started the third degree.
“I didn’t know you were having a girl over! Who is she? Is she your girlfriend?”
He had barely processed the questions, looking over her shoulder. “Is that Kuwana?”
It isn’t such an event anymore, though she still has a bad habit of showing up unannounced.
“Ah, Kuwana. Yatora is in his room,” echoes from the front door. It’s the only warning he gets before the door’s wide open and she’s vaulted over some sketching he abandoned twenty minutes ago to flop down on the edge of his bed.
“Careful, I’ve been planning stuff out for like two weeks. I don’t want your feet to crinkle my sketchbook pages.”
“You’d be so lucky,” she sighs, arm thrown over her face. Voice flatter than normal, wavering just so. The way Sumida sounds before he starts bawling over his girlfriend when he’s drunk.
She hadn’t waited around at the door to chat with his mom like she does sometimes, had she?
“Hey, you okay?”
She’s wearing her favorite pair of pants, and when he dips his head to see around her shoulder, he makes out the pendant of a nice necklace her sister gave her for her birthday last year. Silver, with a tiny, real diamond in the center.
“Another disaster,” she drones, unmoving.
Shit. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.” She still won’t move her arm. He hasn’t seen her eyes at all since she arrived.
He’s learned, over the course of a nice long friendship, that he shouldn’t fill silences like these. Kuwana comes to him for that, he thinks, someone who’s finally learned to just be quiet sometimes. He sits back down with his sketchbook, figuring he’ll give her some time and wring another few coherent thoughts from his brain for the assignment. Some people are already done. Yotasuke, of course. Hacchan, Murai, Miki—
“I wanna eat. We didn’t even make it to the restaurant.”
“We can eat,” he shrugs. “My mom’s—”
“I want fast food.”
Really, she hasn’t been down there cooking for very long, and he’s skipped out before. She let Kuwana in, probably saw the way she was looking, that very specific fragility she lets out in measured intervals. She’ll understand.
“Burgers?” he offers.
A quick nod and a heavy drag of her sleeve across her face, and when he finally sees her eyes, they’re sharp and bright as always.
She pushes herself up to sit on the edge of the bed and comments on the new sketches he has hanging above his desk while he gets dressed. “That one’s the best,” she observes, and he has to twist to see which one she’s pointing to.
“The portrait?”
“No, the one to the left of it. The portrait’s fucking gay.”
“Pot calling the kettle black,” he calls over his shoulder, contemplating switching out his hoops for a moment before he trashes the idea. Kuwana won’t wait that long.
“You talk like an old person, Yaguchi.”
“Which socks should I wear? The ones with the holes in the toe or in the heel?”
“You should get new socks.”
“Eventually,” he dismisses, going for the toe. The heel will irritate him with all the walking to the burger joint.
She really does look nice. He’ll be underdressed in comparison, even if no one else will be able to tell his socks are disintegrating in his shoes.
His mom is a bit disappointed about him missing dinner, but one look at Kuwana’s face makes her fold; nobody likes seeing Kuwana feeling bad. It’s a bad omen.
The walk isn’t long, but he realizes he forgot his wallet five minutes in, so they have to double back. Kuwana has hers of course (she always pays on her first dates), but he doesn’t feel right about making her pay now, and she probably wouldn’t do it anyway. They’ve been to the place before, just a few times, but still enough to have go-to orders and a favorite booth picked out. Within twenty minutes of leaving the warmth of his house, the two of them are each a few bites into their meals and sitting under the gentle hum of the fluorescents.
“Do you wanna talk about it?” he asks, wiping ketchup from the corner of his mouth.
“Ketchup is so gross,” she complains. “I’ll never understand why you like it.”
“It’s authentic,” he shrugs. “American. Do you wanna talk about it?”
She takes another bite instead of answering, which he had anticipated. Asking Kuwana a direct question is a bit of a gamble when she gets like this.
The silence doesn’t stretch too long, though. “I mean, obviously I just struck out again.”
“Well, yeah. But you usually just ask me to send you fancams when that happens, you don’t show up unannounced at my house and demand I buy you dinner—”
“I wasn’t demanding , it was a request .”
“Okay,” he laughs, unable to hold it back completely, “so why the request this time?”
She levels her gaze at him over the top of her burger, held just a few centimeters from her mouth. “It just was shittier this time.”
A year or so ago, he would’ve struggled to find something to say, tried to fix the issue before he could even pry it out of her. Now, he knows her rhythms well enough to sit across the table and let her eat.
She swallows a bite a bit too soon and says, “Like, it was going well at first. We messaged for a couple days, and she seemed really nice. And she wasn’t an asshole about the whole artist thing, cause you know how they are sometimes, like, don’t think of it as a real job…”
“I mean, I spend most of my time with artists,” he answers, a little abashed. “But I know some people can be like that, definitely.”
She glares at him without any real malice, just says, “Yeah, they can. But she wasn’t, you know? And I had planned out this whole thing. We were gonna get something to eat and then go see her favorite movie cause there’s a theater showing it as a special event right now, even though it’s been out for over a decade.” Her voice gets a little thick at the end, frustration bubbling over when she admits, “I made a little koi fish cause she mentioned having a pond at her childhood home… it didn’t take that long to make, but…”
“But it still sucks if you can’t give it to her,” he finishes with a sigh. “I’m sorry, Maki.”
“Not your fault,” she intones, just the same as always. “I just—” and here her shoulders slump, her whole body sighing when she says it, “I’m getting discouraged.”
“I know you don’t want to, but maybe give it a rest for a bit? Just delete the app, see who crosses your path for a month or so—”
She cuts him off with a weird strangled noise from somewhere in the back of her throat and rushes to redirect, “When did you get your most recent piercing?”
“Oh,” he starts, his fingers immediately finding the stud of his tragus. “This is old. Got it before we met.”
“Yeah,” she nods, “when was that?”
“I don’t know, like a year beforehand? It wasn’t the most professional place. I probably should have been a little older, to be honest.”
He takes the opportunity to polish off another third of his burger while she cocks her head to get a better view of it and then assesses, “Looks good. You should do another, though.”
“Yeah? What do you suggest?”
For a moment, he thinks she’s about to reach across the table and grab his head with her lightly greasy fingers, maneuver him around so she can really get an idea. He thinks, just because she might have been crying in his room earlier, he might let her get away with it with just the barest amount of resistance. But she doesn’t. Just sets her burger down and leans in over the table, genuinely smiles for a moment as if she can’t remember what had made her so upset to begin with, and asks, “What’s the inside one called?”
“The one I have?”
“No, the inside one.”
He feels the judgmental pull of his eyebrows before he can prevent it, and he watches the aggravated smile tear across her face as she defends, “I don’t know what they’re called!”
“There are like a million ‘inside ones.’”
“Okay, well, the—you know what, I’ll pull up a picture.”
She spends enough time looking that he finishes his meal and leans back in the hard plastic booth, thinking a bit too pointedly about the chronic ache in his back from all the time he spends hunched over his sketchbook drafting assignments. When she’s ready to reconvene, he finds out she intended for him to get a little stud through the flat plane of the inner shell of his ear, something even he hadn’t realized was an option.
“That’d hurt like hell, Kuwana.”
“You’re such a baby. It’d look cool forever. Straight line across your ear, like an arrow. You’d pull people left and right, wouldn’t be able to keep them away—”
“Not really a priority for me right now,” he jokes, but he realizes after that he should have just stayed away from the topic entirely.
Kuwana had been skeptical when he first told her about Yakumo. He remembers the odd look she got on her face, the unexpectedly tense atmosphere.
“I don’t know, I just always thought it’d be Takahashi. Or Hashida. Or like, that girl in the leather jacket. Forgot her name.”
He understands now that it was just another harsh friction point of her failing the oil painting exam, the knowledge that Yatora’s world was so many people wider than she had last seen it like grit in her teeth. But it just took time. After hearing a little more about Yakumo, about his art, about the things he tells Yatora and the places he takes him, she started to smile at the stories and casually imply he should introduce the two of them.
“I thought you didn’t care about meeting him.”
“At first I didn’t, but he needs a friend’s seal of approval, obviously.”
Of course, even though she’s generally fine with hearing about Yakumo, now probably isn’t the time.
“What’ve you been working on lately?” he asks, reaching across the table to steal a little food, but she moves her basket fast enough to narrowly escape.
“Just random shit,” she shrugs. “I’m interested in sculpting Golden Age actresses—”
“Gay.”
“Yeah, I’m trying,” she whines. “Anyway, I don’t know. I’ve just been planning to work on that for a while. Mostly I’m just making little things.”
“I still use that ashtray.”
“‘Still,’” she mocks, “as if it hasn’t only been, what, half a year since I made it for you? You better still use it.”
He grabs her plastic basket and the shitty, thin paper napkin she has tucked under the heel of her hand, already going a little translucent in the center from use. “Come on, the lights are giving me a headache.”
“Recluse,” she accuses, following behind him and pulling her coat back on nonetheless.
The sun set while they were eating, and the air has a new chill to it. They walk quietly along the street for a few moments, occasionally widening their eyes at the little wisps of breath they can catch sight of in the dark. Once Yatora can’t see the burger joint in his periphery anymore, he says, “I’m thinking of visiting Ooba-sensei again soon. You wanna come?”
“Hmm,” she grumbles. “I’m not really much of a painter anymore.”
“I don’t think she’d care about that, Maki. She’s the one that gave you the go-ahead, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Think about it. I’m gonna go this weekend I think.” The evening settles around them again, and, “My feet are cold.”
“Cause of your stupid holey socks.”
“Yeah.”
She inhales deeply, drawing in all the night air until Yatora imagines the cold starts to burn her lungs. It’s a foggy little cloud when she exhales, gone in seconds. “I wanna keep walking around a little.”
“Alright,” he shrugs. “I need to get back to drafting sometime tonight, though.”
“Not much fun tonight, Yaguchi.”
He pulls his coat a little tighter around himself against the wind. “Sorry. You put me on the spot.”
“She got a text from her ex while we were on the train and got off at the next stop to go meet up with her.”
Goddamn. “Hold on, I think I need a smoke.”
It makes her laugh, but that’s only because she was already closed off. She told him about the crumbling away of her date at its very foundations like it was a weather report. Like the sculpted koi (Yatora’s sure it’s detailed, beautiful, obsessively thought through, because it’s Kuwana) wouldn’t have weighed ten tons in his pocket had he been in her shoes. Like that girl who thinks of art as a good enough life leaving without a second thought didn’t even hurt. Of course it hurt. Of course she’s laughing.
“Don’t,” she shoves his hand away from his pocket a bit harshly. “I don’t want my clothes to smell like cigarettes.”
“So she explained to you that she was leaving to go hang out with her ex?”
She shrugs. “I saw the text over her shoulder.”
“She didn’t explain?”
“Just got off.” Her shoulders sink when she sighs, easing into the upset.
“I’m sorry.” He can’t imagine it, the dumb moment of realization, watching a girl tuck her phone back into her bag and ride in silence to the next stop just so she can get off early. Before they’ve even made it to the restaurant. Little clay koi still weighing down one side of his coat. “That sucks. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s so hard,” she admits, her voice a little thick. “It’s been a long time since I cared about someone that way, and I want to. But they keep going like this.”
He can’t even help her out of the maze; Yakumo found Yatora when he wasn’t even looking. The annoyance had already turned to friendship, had simmered at a comfortable level for however many late nights at the atelier and more than a few borrowed cigarettes. He had stumbled into it blind.
“Whatever, actually,” she laughs, dragging the back of her hand across her cheek. “Whatever. I’ll delete the app. You didn’t use an app.”
“You don’t have to delete it,” he reasons. “A lot of people meet good—”
“No, I’ve made up my mind. I’m deleting it.” Her hand is in her coat pocket already, and he can tell how cold she is by how long it takes her to manipulate her fingers into the correct sequence to uninstall. “I’m gonna put the fish in a show. What should I call it?”
“‘Shitty Date #4.’”
“Is it the fourth?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t been keeping track. How many fancams have I sent you?”
“I don’t know,” she shakes her head, her breath rising like mist in an old ink landscape.
She doesn’t hunch over herself the way she did when they first met. He doesn’t know why that is; maybe the haircut, maybe the sculpting. She stands taller (as tall as she can stand at 161 centimeters) and looks down at the world from the tops of buildings and doesn’t wait for permission to come over.
“I’m cold, and I’m not gonna finish my assignment in time if I don’t put paint on canvas tomorrow morning.”
“What a sad existence,” she drones, but there’s a smile on her face. “I can’t keep a genius painter from his work, I guess.”
“Next time you’re around TUA, text me and let me know. I’ll probably be staring at the wall and will appreciate the company.”
“Uh-huh,” she nods, “I’ll bring some decorations for your studio.”
“Can’t decorate. It isn’t just mine.”
“Uh-huh, whatever,” she smiles. “I’ll text you when I cave and redownload the app.”
“There’s no shame in it,” he calls to her from where she retreats in the direction of her family’s apartment. “Want me to walk you home?”
“I appreciate the gesture, but I can’t think of anything more embarrassing.”
He understands; her parents seemed to think the same as his mom did at first, though they’re admittedly more overbearing about things like that.
Walking home alone, he still watches his breath against the navy blue of the sky. Wispy, painterly, a little like ghostly white koi.
The show will be good. He’ll be the first through the gallery doors.
~
The room they gave her is bigger than he expected (though he thinks she’d have no trouble filling something twice its size). Still, this is good. If it were any bigger, he wouldn’t be able to breathe.
When Kuwana first told him she was leaving the oil painting course for sculpting, he was surprised. She was the genius, a sort of culmination of generations of brushes in hands. But she’s brave too, the exact type of bold someone has to be to make good art, and she knew what she was doing.
Obviously, it was the right choice.
It’s easy to find “Shitty Date #4” among the veritable sea of little clay fish. The room is swimming in white and orange, gold and black and red, but one of them is a little bigger than the others, displayed at the very top of one of the columns of clear plastic shelves holding the thirty or so fish scattered around the room. It isn’t supposed to be the focal piece of the show, but he spends the most time with it, arms folded over his chest, admiring it up in its position of honor. Much better than sitting on the shelf of some girl who would leave Kuwana on the train without a goodbye.
“What do you think? Honestly.”
He hadn’t even seen her come up beside him, so he startles, very nearly brushing the edge of the sturdy plastic bookcase. Nothing would have happened, but she might have chewed him out anyway. “It’s good.”
“Just good?” she elbows him, nearly sending him into the set-up herself. “Have you seen the rest? You’ve just been standing in the corner.”
“I mean, I saw the big one when I walked in.”
It’s hard to miss, one of the twin stars of the show. Right in the middle of the room, a good twenty centimeters taller than Kuwana herself, is a ghostly white and shimmering orange koi arrested in its swimming gracefully up to the ceiling, its scales a fortune’s worth of cigarettes.
“And the ashtrays?”
“With the little fish printed on them?”
“What else? Ooba-sensei helped me set up last night and called it ‘obsessive.’”
“They’re impressive. I still like mine the best, I think. But you’re getting stronger.”
“‘Stronger,’” she mocks. “That’s so Murai.”
Despite himself, he feels the tips of his ears going warm. “Whatever.”
He hasn’t seen her grin so wide since before that night, shitty date number whatever it actually was. It’s the way she smiles when she’s eating a good meal or watching a new music video over his shoulder, feeling like herself.
After another moment spent looking up at the original fish, she asks, “What do you think of the painting?” If he isn’t mistaken, she sounds a little unsure, just the slightest crack in her typically impenetrable armor.
“I haven’t looked at it closely yet.” That other half of the show, the companion to the massive sculpture, and—
“How much did you spend on all those cigarettes?”
“It’s just the surface layer with the scales, the core is styrofoam and—”
“ Still ,” he laughs. “If you were buying half a million packs, you should have given me one.”
“Nah, you should quit, Yaguchi.”
He avoids asking about the painting until they can get a good look at it, but before they’ve made it over Kuwana gets whisked away by one of her current sculpture teachers, and then it’s just him. Yatora, standing off to the side and a meter or so back, allowing room for other students and parents and professors, whoever else wants to see it for what it is on the surface and not what he knows it actually is.
It’s a big canvas for someone who hasn’t been painting seriously for a while. An ambitious and detailed aerial view of a koi pond (maybe the koi pond, the way she imagines it), a little dreamy and insubstantial, the style of hers he’s always liked best. He steps closer and looks at the water, a little grayish with charcoal dust, and he remembers the way she’d always leave prep school looking like she’d worked a shift in a coal mine. In this painting, it looks like it’s floating on the surface of the water, choking the rest of it out (subtle blues and sun reflected off scales).
Slowly, it comes to him. Ooba-sensei was right, it’s nearly obsessive. “Is it…?”
“Ash.”
“Jesus, Kuwana.”
“Just had to do some networking. You know how it is.”
Barely, but he doesn’t address it. “So, cigarette ash in the koi pond. I imagine that’s not good for the fish.”
She hums low under her breath, presses her lips together and narrows her eyes like she’s really considering it. “I’m really not mad at her anymore,” she admits. “The symbol’s just too good to pass up. Got an entire installation from it.”
“You’ve still got it, by the way,” he says, gesturing to the painting. “Sculpture’s better for you, but you could be an oil painter any day, you could just wake up and decide.”
She doesn’t say anything to that, which is fine. She knows he’s biased anyway.
“I also liked the charcoal drawings,” he adds.
“Those were messy,” she nods. “But fun, and easier than painting all the clay fish.”
“I can’t even imagine —”
“You could do it,” she dismisses, so sure. “Anyway, I think I want to eat after this. So if you go home before I’m done here, I’ll be a little mad.”
“Have Yotasuke or Hashida come yet?”
“Hashida will be here in another half hour. Takahashi doesn’t come to my stuff.”
“Burgers this time?”
“I wouldn’t say no,” she nods.
Yatora won’t either. He mills around for a while longer, makes small talk when he has to and then leans into the pieces, pretending to inspect every stroke, ridge, and smudge so he’ll be left alone.
The symbol is good, and Kuwana is good. And the things she touches become something good, bright and shining scales and the ashy film overtop that makes Yatora feel like he can look at them.
He knows she doesn’t feel that way yet. It’s okay. For now, she’ll stay up late watching music videos and go on bad dates and sculpt and barge into Yatora’s home to eat, and then one day she’ll wake up and realize it’s true.