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Brown in some lights; red in others. Both her hair and eyes were like that; they weren’t really the same color, but they both seemed to catch the sun and transform from wood to precious stones. Like well-polished mahogany beneath warm light, or rosy rooibos tea swirling in a china cup. Everything about her was like that.
Had been like that.
The rough wooden rosary caught on the pads of Saori’s fingers as she shifted to the next decade.
“Megumi afureru sei Maria,” she mumbled into the beads. Hail Mary, brimming full with grace. At this point, her own voice sounded foreign and faraway, as if it came from somewhere outside of herself, echoing back to her from the chapel rafters above. “Shu wa anata wo erabi, shukufuku shi…”
Listlessly, her eyes flicked up to the statue at the head of the chapel. Mary’s glassy, supposedly benevolent gaze stared pitilessly out over the empty pews, her stone hands spread to appease an invisible crowd of their invisible worries, even as her foot ground down upon the carved neck of a serpent.
That would be just like her, Saori thought, the nostalgia unbidden and bitter to the taste. Though, more likely, she would pick the snake up and dispose of it safely somewhere out of sight, where it wouldn’t scare anyone and no one would take its life, either.
That was what she did whenever some student or other was shrieking over some spider or beetle they’d found tucked into a distant corner of the library.
What she had done.
“…anata no ko Iesu… mo shukufuku…”
No matter how her attention drifted, the prayer continued to dribble past her lips, requiring no more thought than drool.
“…saremashita…”
Yet now, it slowed to a trickle, more like honey than water. For a moment, Saori just stared, all other thoughts in her head arrested by the statue’s stone gaze.
Most of the school didn’t look particularly different from any other private school Saori had been in, but the chapel was old and particularly lavish. There was even a single stained-glass window on her right, always dim when they said Mass in the mornings but now vivid and brimming with color as the sunset slanted through it. Mottled colors stretched their fingers across the statue, streaking it with blue, green, and red.
Brown in some lights. Red in others.
“Can you hear me?”
Though she was the one who had spoken, the words grated on Saori’s ears like nails on a chalkboard, sending an involuntary shudder down her spine. She was hyperaware of the hoarseness of her own voice; the way it wavered on the word you, as if the air around her could sense that she was no longer speaking to the mother of God. Hadn’t been, to begin with.
She would have known. That kind of thing never passed her notice; she was ever-vigilant to others’ worries and could read the room with just a glance. That was why she was such an excellent mediator.
Had been.
“Can—” Saori tried again, but the sentence snagged in her throat and choked her into silence. Snapping her mouth shut, she waited, frozen, awash with a yearning that might have been dread.
Neither Mary nor Kotone had any answer for her. The air in the chapel remained stagnant and thick with silence.
Of course. Even if either of them were listening, there was no way they would waste their holy breath on something like her.
Saori lowered her head. They weren’t listening to begin with. She knew that. Only the deepest, most pathetic parts of her had hoped otherwise.
Why that had been a hope rather than a fear was beyond her understanding to begin with, given that, if Mary, the Mother of God, and Kotone, a saint, were truly looking down on her right now, then they were looking down on a hideous sinner who would surely be consigned to a much different afterlife than theirs.
No matter how she deluded herself, they were never going to meet again.
She’d interrupted herself in the midst of a prayer, Saori realized dully. She would have to start over if she wanted… whatever this was supposed to be accomplishing. Whatever it was that she wanted.
For her prayers to reach Mary in the heavens above, perhaps, and be ferried along to their real intended recipient. Or for Kotone’s spirit, looking just as lively as she had the day they’d parted, to plop down onto the pew beside her and apologize for making her cry.
She’d nearly decked the last person to make Saori cry, after all. Surely she knew how grievous her crime was.
“Megumi afureru,” Saori began anew, lips numb, “sei Maria, shu wo anatatachi—”
“They changed it, y’know.”
She jolted to a halt like a bicycle with something caught in its spokes. Somehow, despite having barely put any effort into her prayer, she’d been distracted enough to miss her classmate’s entrance.
“They changed the words, remember? In that one conference or whatever,” Shimizu was saying now, tapping her fingers restlessly against the doorframe between every drawled handful of syllables. “Not that I… I mean…”
She hesitated, uncharacteristically reticent, then forged ahead with a bluntness that was far too familiar.
“It’s bullshit either way. Let’s be real. But if you’re gonna waste your time, don’t you wanna say the right version?”
Already, Saori’s teeth were gritted against a flood of rude remarks. Yes, obviously she remembered that the words had been changed. No, she didn’t feel like relearning the “correct version” just to satisfy an eavesdropping classmate. And Shimizu was welcome to waste her own time however she pleased, but she should keep her nose the hell out of Saori’s business.
Sometimes, for just a moment, if she drew up Kotone’s snarling face from her memory, she could almost hear her own anger in Kotone’s voice, purified from the ramblings of a pathetic fool to the righteous fury of an angel.
But, despite everything, Saori still knew Kotone, and she knew that it was exactly in Kotone’s nature to smile and cheerfully thank a classmate for their correction, even if her pride was bruised.
Had been in her nature.
When she finally pried her jaw open, her voice came out cold and stiff as a corpse. “Thank you for telling me.” She rolled the bead between her fingers restlessly, waiting for the other girl to leave. “…Shimizu-san,” she tacked on after a moment, because Miss “I hate formalities, just call me Ayame” Shimizu didn’t seem to have taken the hint.
Even at that, Shimizu only huffed. “Jeez, I was just sayin’.”
Saori didn’t justify that with a response, and merely bowed her head again, as if she were piously locked in fervent prayer, rather than averting her eyes from the space where she feared Kotone’s spirit to reside.
That didn’t stop Shimizu from ambling further into the chapel, her school loafers thumping softly against the old, threadbare carpet. “There’s still a couple hours until curfew,” she said as she approached, speaking slowly as if she were feeling her way through the conversation in the dark. “And all the teachers are distracted ‘cause of the new semester.”
Saori knew. And, if not for the ripped piece of newspaper currently crumpled into her pocket, the implications would have both frightened and intrigued her. Now, though, she couldn’t even bother to dredge up a glance in Shimizu’s direction.
Regardless, Shimizu boldly continued, leaning against the edge of Saori’s pew with faux nonchalance. “If you’re interested, me and some other girls from 3-E are gonna sneak out to the edge of campus and share some contraband. Reina got her hands on some magazines and some foreign CDs—”
“Thank you for the invitation.” The polite words dripped out of her mouth automatically and without meaning. “I’m partway through a rosary right now, so please go on ahead without me.”
Maybe, if she kept a lid on her temper, the ghost of Kotone in her peripherals would grace her with a smile.
Shimizu shuffled her feet. “Come on. Do you really believe in this stuff? Don’t tell me the nuns got to you already.”
With dead eyes, Saori looked up through her eyelashes, taking in the elaborate carvings on the wooden altar; the myriad of beautiful colors that the stained glass window cast upon it; the beautifully-sculpted statue with her promises of salvation and her unthinking condemnation of evil.
“Not really,” she said without inflection.
“…Okay.” At last, Shimizu sounded uncomfortable. “Well…” She trailed off, stuffing her hands into her pockets.
Saori sighed sharply through her nose, shooting Shimizu a sidelong glance to glean why she was still there. For her part, Shimizu dithered for a minute at the end of the pew, looking like she wasn’t quite sure of that herself.
Finally, she gathered herself. “Look, I… heard that you had a friend die or something.”
Of course she had. Rumors would never stop dictating Saori’s life. The rosary’s chain bit into the meat of Saori’s palm as she clenched her fists.
Kotone’s obituary was burning a hole in her pocket, and her disappointed gaze pierced the veil to judge Saori even from the afterlife.
Brown in some lights. Red in others.
“So, like… I dunno.” Shimizu kept talking, oblivious to or uncaring of Saori’s thoughts. “Come hang with us. Talk boys with Yumi and Hana-chan. I’ll bum you a smoke. It’s even legal for you, ain’t it?”
“No.” Not for another couple of months. But soon. In her memory, Kotone winked at her devilishly; from heaven, Kotone shook her head.
“Well, we ain’t snitches, so don’t worry about that.” Shimizu scratched the nape of her neck with freshly-painted nails. “Trust me, it’ll help you relax—”
“No.” The word squirmed its way between Saori’s clenched teeth. “Thank you.”
All she saw was red.
Shimizu took a slow breath in and then puffed it back out as if she were taking a drag. “Well… alright.” She turned and made her way back down the aisle. “If you change your mind, we’ll be over by the fence. You know where.” Despite everything, she still seemed determined to sway her—to invite the poor, pitiful bitch with the dead friend as if she could in any way comprehend how much Kotone had meant to her. “If you change your mind, we have plenty of stuff to go around—”
“It’ll all be for nothing.”
Saori hadn’t meant to speak—certainly hadn’t meant to speak her mind—but once she heard Shimizu pause in the doorway, the rest of her thoughts gushed out like blood from a gaping wound; messy and grotesque and impossible to stem, even as Kotone’s disapproval crushed her bone by bone.
“It doesn’t matter if you make friends or get happy or break the rules or fall in love. Everything just comes falling back down and you’ll be even more miserable than before. If you accept it now, you might not waste your time hoping for something better that’s never going to come.”
Or something that does come, but leaves just as quickly, making you wish you had never met her in the first place.
(Even if she could never really wish that.)
Closing her mouth with a clack, Saori gripped the rosary for dear life, head bowed low over it. It was uncomfortably warm and slightly damp, now, where it had been trapped between her palms. For a long moment, the silence finally felt comfortable, as if a great tension had been released and she could finally breathe freely. Even Kotone’s hatred couldn’t reach her.
“Shit, Hasegawa,” Shimizu said at length, sounding like she wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or impressed, or maybe just tired. “If you’re not gonna have a smoke, at least get laid.”
Saori didn’t bother to watch as she left. If Shimizu wanted to discard her perfectly well-intentioned advice and go smoke and talk boys with her idiot friends, that was her own prerogative.
Even if she did pause at the door and toss, “Offer’s open if you wanna lose the attitude,” over her shoulder before vanishing into the hall.
Sparkling red and brown eyes and a cheeky, easygoing grin danced along the insides of her eyelids as she blinked. Well, the offer’s open if you change your mind…
“Shut up,” Saori said dully, and she squeezed her eyes shut until the red and brown was swallowed by black, then white.
Once more, from the beginning, with the same bead still gingerly pressed between her forefinger and thumb. “Megumi afureru sei Maria, shu wa anatatachi…”
By the time the prayer ended, Shimizu and her ridiculous offer and her useless kindness still had yet to vacate Saori’s otherwise empty head. Neither had Kotone’s spirit abandoned her position as sentry at the altar before her.
Bristling, she moved on to the next bead and recited another prayer. Then another, and another. For fear of catching sight of the statue again—or finding that someone else had taken its place—she kept her eyes firmly on the ground.
Come on. Do you really believe this stuff?
If you’re gonna waste your time, don’t you wanna say the right version?
I heard that you had a friend die or something.
At least get laid.
Just as her own voice didn’t belong to her as she recited her prayers, so too did it come from some outside source as it hissed mockingly into her ear—
If you’ll be by my side, then I’ll do it.
For a moment, her brain was consumed by static. When she came back to herself, she was on her feet, and her rosary was laying in a heap on the ground five feet ahead.
“Can you hear me?” she asked again, her voice high-pitched and hysterical. It reverberated through the empty chapel as if she’d screamed it over the mountains, taunting her with each minute echo as if to emphasize the silence that ensued.
And silence did ensue, of course. But, then, Kotone’s silence always spoke volumes.
Mechanically, Saori sidled out of the pew and retrieved the rosary. It had gained a few new scuffs, but was otherwise intact. It was hard to say exactly where she had left off with the Ave Marias, given how little she had been paying attention, so she would just begin again from the top of the decade.
The chapel was still empty, so she decided to pick a pew closer to the back this time. Even after she’d knelt and wrapped the rosary back around her hand, though, the prayers were frozen halfway down her tongue, unable to emerge. Shimizu’s aggravating voice was swirling around her head in dizzying spirals, but her own voice now joined in, overlapping and drowning out her classmate’s inane ramblings.
If you’ll be by my side, then I’ll do it.
And, in response—
Don’t worry. I’ll be with you.
Saori’s whole body was cold. She would be in hot water if she was caught with any illicit electronics in a holy place, but she moved as if on autopilot, wedging a hand between her blazer and the waistband of her skirt to pull out the cell squirreled away there.
There was only one audio file on the phone, titled 17SEP2009. She didn’t even have to look at the screen to navigate to it; the motions had become rote.
“This is Saori Hasegawa of Class 2-C.” The old Saori’s voice came through tinny and dusted with static, wobbling through the crappy cell phone speaker. “There’s something I’d like to say.”
By now, the recording had almost ceased to register in her brain as words with meanings. It was just a mindless buzz; a voice that she could scarcely call her own anymore, echoing faintly back through the PA system, interspersed with the faint sounds of Ekoda’s shouts from just beyond the door.
There was only one thing she cared about, and, as it drew nearer, Saori’s body tensed, her clammy fingers gripping the phone tightly enough to make the plastic casing creak.
The PA turned off; the door swung open and closed with a click; Ekoda’s voice raised from the buzzing of a distant gnat to the shriek of a banshee; Ms. Ounishi’s low, calm voice eclipsed Saori’s attempts to explain.
Then—
“It was my idea.”
Saori’s eyes closed. She didn’t close them consciously; they just slid shut all on their own.
It was always easy to envision Kotone in her greatest moment of valor. After all, in Saori’s eyes, she was always equally gallant, whether she was scarfing down sweets with reckless abandon or staring down the teachers with a determined glower. There was always a rosy glow in her cheeks and always a flare of life in her amber eyes.
And, as Ms. Ounishi’s disapproving voice crackled through the speaker, Saori could perfectly see the way Kotone’s chin lifted and her shoulders straightened as her lips formed the words—
“Was there any other way?”
As always, the recording ended abruptly before Ms. Toriumi could finish ushering Ekoda out of the room, leaving Saori’s ears ringing and her chest empty in its wake.
She remembered the rest, anyway. Being let off without even a warning. Shuffling awkwardly through the halls and, for once, feeling emboldened enough to ignore the whispers that followed her. Walking out the front door with her head held as high as it ever had been.
Kotone’s arm around her, guiding her when her knees felt weak, and her soothing voice tickling the shell of her ear as she reassured her that she didn’t need to worry. That everything was going to be okay now. That, after all, she’d be with her.
That, no matter how people reacted to Saori’s announcement, she would always have a friend by her side to help her weather the storm.
“You’re a liar,” Saori told the Kotone on the recording; the Kotone who was alive and well in her memory, still guarding the door to the PA Room to this day, even as her body gathered dust somewhere six feet under. The Kotone who had never actually died, but had simply abandoned her.
That was easier to wrap her head around. If Kotone was sitting with her real friends somewhere, snickering about how naive Saori had been to think that they would meet again as equals, that they could ever be more than friends, that everything she’d said had meant something more—
That was easier than her being bones.
Saori thumbed the next wooden bead into her hand, the rosary clinking like a low-quality windchime. Its dangling crucifix thumped against the kneeler before her.
The obituary in the newspaper had said she passed peacefully in her sleep. Saori wondered if she looked the same dead in the casket as she had dozing on the train, her head lolling onto Saori’s shoulder; if her hair was done up with those pins she seemed to love, given that she wore them in the same configuration every day; if whoever had been in charge of the funeral had known that Kotone didn’t like to wear white.
Saori stared dully down at the image of Christ hanging between her palms.
Her ridiculous unrequited feelings would never stop getting the best of her, would they? No matter how dire the consequences may be.
Maybe she needed a smoke after all.
“Ave Maria, megumi ni michita kata,” Saori said, and she pressed her thumbs into the wooden beads until the ache was almost acute enough to drown out the agony.