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“Y’know, it’s kind of crazy I’ve never been to your house before,” Kumiko says, setting the euphonium back into its case, a thing Reina’s parents own for reasons she can only begin to grasp at.
“Yours is more convenient.”
“I don’t know if it is.”
“Well, now you’ve seen it. There’s no mystery anymore.” Reina clicks the case shut, slots the euphonium back into the shelf of instruments. Kumiko tries to picture little Reina doing the same thing, probably with the same amount of precision, the same attention to detail and to doing it right.
“I’ve always wondered,” Kumiko says, and Reina turns around.
“What?”
“Why the trumpet?”
“Why the euphonium?” Reina counters.
“Well, Asuka-senpai suckered me back into it when I started at Kitauji. And before that it was basically just the last thing left.” Kumiko looks right at her, challenges her, levels that gaze. She can do that now. She can look at the sun without being blinded.
Hooray, she supposes, for character development – though she’d be lying if she said she didn’t miss the thrill of the beginning just a little bit.
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I’m very good at the trumpet.” Reina hasn’t put it away. It’s silver, it matches the home euphonium, and Kumiko wonders if everything in the Kousakas’ household is silver, and what that means for a girl always striving for gold.
(The things you start to wonder, when you are of a certain age, when you read into everything.)
“That’s it? There’s got to be more, Reina.”
“It’s loud. Bold. You wouldn’t expect such a loud sound from something that small, but you can’t forget it once you’ve heard it.”
“And it’s a little flashy, too,” Kumiko adds, because she cannot give this moment the weight it deserves, because she must always undercut these things with something snide, and she hates herself for it.
“Maybe it is.” There’s Reina, saving it from jokes. “There are worse things to be than flashy.”
“Like indecisive?”
“I didn’t say that.”
She will, though, in as many words. Kumiko knows it. An inevitability, a conversation that they both can’t help but bring up over and over again. A scab that begs to be picked.
“Plus it’s easier to carry up mountains,” Kumiko says. “You can carry it with you wherever you go.”
“Maybe so.” Reina smiles, small, and it is like the sun indeed, it is like something going supernova.
***
Reina clears their teacups.
“Kumiko-chan is sweet.”
“Oh, Mom. I didn't see you there.” Reina doesn’t know why the stakes feel so high here.
“Why haven’t you brought her here before?”
“She lives in a different part of town.”
“It’s nice to put a face to the name, is all.” Reina’s mother takes the teacups, starts to rinse them. They’re too delicate to put in the dishwasher. “Wasn’t she at your old middle school, too?”
“We didn’t know each other very well then.”
“And now…?”
“She’s my closest friend,” Reina says, honestly.
“I’m glad.”
Reina takes a deep breath. She thinks about asking who her mom stayed in touch with, in high school. If any of them are still in her life or if they’ve been reduced to LinkedIn connections, strangers at reunions, the occasional three notes of a song that throw you back into memories.
But she does not want to have an answer to that. She’d much prefer to keep it ambiguous for as long as she can. This way she can pretend.
***
It’s not what she was picturing, when she imagined Reina alone. This old-money new house, these white walls. Kumiko pictured wood paneling, dark lighting, something a little less clinical. Something more adorned. But Reina’s mother is sweet, and a great cook, and Reina’s setup does smack of Reina – record players, CDs even though they’re getting phased out in favor of streaming services. A trumpet.
Reina comes back upstairs and Kumiko does her best to pretend she wasn’t snooping.
“How far away is the festival from here?” she asks.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Ah, just curious, I guess.”
“We can go if you’d like.” But there’s something in how she says it.
Kumiko thinks, in that moment, of asking her up the mountain. Making it a tradition, making it a hat-trick, all three years ending with them there. But she can’t get the words out; she can’t outright ask, that would ruin the whole thing.
She can’t say it. That’s what it’s always been.
“I, uh, guess I just need some air,” Kumiko says instead, because at least that’s not a lie (she thinks about Mayu, and she doesn’t feel bad at all about pushing her away, even though she almost wants to feel bad, she’s heard the underclassmen call her Mama-senpai and has felt strange about it because she could never in a hundred million years be that) and Reina’s house is stuffy.
“All right.”
“You really look great like that.” Kumiko fills the dead space with compliments, things she means. “The braid, it’s nice.”
“Thank you.” Reina picks up a bag from her bed (so simple, so straightforward, so unlike the girl herself) and waits. “You don’t look bad yourself.”
“Ah, this?” Kumiko twirls her ponytail around her fingers, and her curls are thick enough to tangle, the dress is long and something she has never worn before tonight, “I just threw it together.”
“You still get caught up in those old habits, then,” Reina says, half-under her breath.
“You’ll never stop being cryptic, will you, Reina?”
“More like I won’t stop until you accept a compliment. You’re doing a good job as president.”
“Midori-chan said the same thing last week. You and all my friends. It’s like you’re conspiring against me.”
“There are worse plots to be implicated in.”
Kumiko sticks her tongue out. “I’m trying to learn that.”
“That decision on the auditions. That was clever, and it’s going to keep the band on their toes. You wouldn’t have done that our first year.”
“Ugh, I hope it doesn’t come back to bite me.” Mayu’s face flashes through her head, again. God. Is she going to ever get that out?
“I’m not worried.”
“Of course you’re not. You don’t have any competition.”
“The two of us are going to play it together at Nationals.” Reina looks right at her. “I know it. And I’m very rarely wrong.”
Except when it comes to Taki-sensei, Kumiko thinks.
“I’d love that, Reina,” and it’s the kind of thing you say when you run into someone and they ask to hang out, it’s a platitude, it doesn’t encompass all of this, the love in the sentence, “a-and I guess we’ll at least know about the Kyoto competition pretty soon.”
“That we will.”
Reina stands up. And Kumiko, who falls into habits consistently enough, follows her.
***
You know this part. If you’ve followed the story close enough.
But Reina still feels like she’s laid herself bare, she feels like there is very little left of her to hide at this point. She’s said the quiet part out loud, or rather, Kumiko said it and she confirmed it.
(In several years, this will be how Reina comes out to her mother. But that isn’t part of this story, right now.)
“I think it’s this way,” Kumiko says, nudges them both to a fork in the road. The Maps app on Reina’s phone is only helpful to a point - the dot is too big and never knows what to make of Kyoto’s winding streets. Reina suspects that it will be more helpful in New York City, which, from what she has seen online and on television, is lots of straight lines, a gridwork city where the non-conformity comes from the people within and not the city planning.
“I’ve never actually been,” Reina says, the revelation surprising her just as much as it surprises Kumiko.
“Really? Not even before we were in high school?”
***
“I never had reason to. I wasn’t particularly interested in any of my peers in middle school or elementary school. Our first year, we hiked up the mountain-” as if she even has to say it, as if Kumiko hasn’t turned that memory around so many times that it’s not even a memory so much as a part of her, a limb, and remembering it is like remembering how to breathe or how to walk, “-and last year all I did was buy candy apples and then go back up the mountain, alone.”
They do not talk about Shuichi, in that moment. They could. Kumiko doesn’t hate him (she never really did); they actually had a decently civil conversation last week! They are friends, and nothing more, and that is easy.
She'd like to keep it like that, for now.
***
“I used to go with my sister,” Kumiko says, after she’s thought about it for a moment, and Reina knows this because she knows her. She sometimes wonders (perhaps vainly) if she knows Kumiko better than Kumiko knows herself, but that’s presumptuous to say, even she knows that. “When I was a little kid.”
“That’s nice.”
“Your parents really never took you?”
“Usually when we go out for things it’s more classy.” It sounds prim and proper and terribly uptight, even to Reina’s own ears, but she doesn’t really push against her own words. Might as well stand by them, since they’re true.
“I can just picture little Reina in a black dress and Mary Janes at a fancy restaurant.”
“Never say that to my mother, she’ll show you my baby photos.”
“Well, there’s my excuse to go back to your house.”
“Ugh.” Reina rolls her eyes, does not put all that much into it, would not fight it if Kumiko did come back to her house, if she sat on her family’s old couch. Something about this girl makes her so willing to lay herself bare. It’s been over two years (and it feels like nearly a decade) and yet she still feels like there’s more of Kumiko for her to know, and less of herself left to give to Kumiko than she thought.
“Hey, there it is.” Kumiko points forward, and Reina pockets her phone just in time for Kumiko to take her hand and pull her forward.
What a reversal, she thinks. What a thing.
***
“You just have to get it right from the beginning,” Kumiko says, in front of a row of water guns and pedestals with stuffed dogs on top, and hunches all the way over. These things aren’t made for tall people - officially, they’re made for children, but even her peers would have an easier time with this. “Then you keep your hand steady and stay like that for the rest of the time. Basically, uh, the whole thing’s decided in the first three seconds.”
“I see.”
“You could try it.”
“Sure.” Reina sets down a single bill. Kumiko closes one eye and tries to picture the narrow gunstream of water, going right at the target. “Just once.”
“I could see you getting addicted,” Kumiko teases, just as the starting bell sounds. She presses hard on the trigger. She does not dare look anywhere else but at the target and wonders if this is what it feels like to be Reina, to want just one thing, to have the girl next to her disappear in its favor.
The victory bell rings. Kumiko stands back and looks up–
“Kumiko!” Reina grabs her hand, lifts it in the air. Her cheeks are red from the unexpectedly cold May air and the thrill of the game and Kumiko pretends that it’s because of her. “You won.”
“I won,” she repeats, breathy, and then she takes Reina’s other hand, she clutches her, she wants to kiss her and as a compromise she will just pull her close and breathe her in, heady and brilliant. “I won!”
“Congratulations,” the girl manning the booth - an old Kitauji upperclassman, Kumiko thinks, someone who wasn’t in the band and who she never knew as a result - hands over a plastic bag, tied at the top with a bread-bag twist wire, with a skinny goldfish swimming around.
“Thank you,” she says, and means it, and saunters away with Reina and the fish in tow and walks forward until she crashes right into Haruka Ogasawara.
“Haruka-senpai!”
“Oumae-san?”
“I almost didn’t recognize you!” Kumiko feels very much like a grown-up in this moment, even with a goldfish clutched in her hand and her high school best friend clutched in her other. “Oh, wow! How are you?”
“I’m good.”
“Kaori-senpai,” Reina says to Kaori, and it’s clear that neither of them know what to do or say to each other.
“Where’s Asuka-senpai?” Kumiko asks, and claps a hand over her mouth as soon as she’s said it. Haruka and Kaori glance at each other and smile.
“We do have lives outside of her, you know,” Haruka says, more wit in her voice than Kumiko remembers, the beginnings of a smirk dancing around the corners of her mouth.
“Asuka and I aren’t very close anymore,” Kaori explains, and Kumiko could never miss the way she’s looped her arm around Haruka’s, entwined it really, so that it would be hard to break them apart, so that it would take concerted effort from them both. “She ended up going to a college that has a different break structure, so she wouldn’t have been able to take time off to come home anyway, but Haruka-chan did.” Kaori looks at her. Kumiko thinks about Yuuko. Kaori-senpai’s an angel! She’s not wrong.
(Though Kumiko isn’t particularly interested)
“So, are you two enjoying the festival?” Kaori asks. She still has that mole under her left eye – of course she does, Kumiko thinks a second later, it isn’t like moles go away on their own and Kaori isn’t the type to get it lasered off – and she’s wearing a simple necklace.
“Ah, we actually just got here.” Kumiko hefts her goldfish bag, for some reason. “We’re probably going home soon.”
“Well, it was nice to run into you.”
“Are Natsuki-senpai and Yuuko-senpai here too?” Kumiko looks over her old upperclassmens’ shoulders, as if she might see a familiar ribbon, a flash of an English band slogan, through the whole crowd.
“I don’t know, sorry.” Kaori ducks her head a little.
“All right.”
“How are you, Kousaka-san?” Kaori looks at Reina, and Kumiko thinks about the angel thing again. Benediction, forgiveness. The band’s Madonna. Kumiko does not feel threatened by this the same way she is by Mayu. She doesn't really know why. Maybe because Kaori is older. Maybe for no reason at all.
“I’m well.”
“Who’s the band president this year?”
“Kumiko.” Reina pushes her forward a little.
“Reina’s the drum major,” Kumiko hastens to add, “I’m almost, ah, kind of-” and she comes close to saying a figurehead but decides against it at the last second, maybe her friends are right and she’s actually good at this, “-well, she’s been really amazing at it too.”
“Oh, that’s great.” Kaori doesn’t ask who the vice president is, and Kumiko appreciates this, even though it’s probably just because Kaori does not care that much.
“It was lovely to run into you two. We’ve got to catch our trains back to university-” we, that we, Kumiko envies it, “-but it was great seeing you around. We’ll try to make it to the Kyoto competition.”
“We’ll look for you there,” Kumiko says. The pair waves, walks away. Kumiko watches.
Haruka’s back is straighter, her laugh is louder and lighter, and Kumiko never knew Kaori well enough to tell any differences but she’s sure that if she looked close enough there would be more than she could count. She wants this to be true, at least.
She thinks about the pamphlet lying crumpled in her school bag at home. University students, girls in long skirts carrying thick books.
She wonders if it could do that for her, too, and hopes that it could.
“That’s nice,” Reina says, once they’re out of earshot.
“Do you think you’ll come back after you graduate?” A loaded question, and she’s handing Reina the gun. Kumiko wonders briefly if she is a masochist.
“I doubt it. It’ll be difficult, especially if I end up in America.”
“Right, of course.”
***
Reina understands, on a logical level, that Kumiko going to musical college was always a pipe dream, a difficult hope, because how to drag somebody across an ocean without them resenting you just a little? It’s probably for the best.
It frustrates her, though, because it means she can’t write her present off entirely anymore, she still has something tethering her here, and she is not somebody who has ever sought out a tether of any sort. She is meant to go exactly where she pleases, once she collects her diploma. She is meant to be done with high school once she is done with high school.
“You sound like your mind’s pretty made up about America.”
“Julliard is a good school.”
“Have you ever been?”
“No.”
“Of course.” Kumiko puts her finger to her chin, thinks about it a little. “They probably have festivals there, too, though. Maybe not like this, but, y’know, people gathering.”
“I do think those are consistent everywhere.”
“I’m just trying to make plans, Reina!”
“For over a year in the future.”
“Ah, now the one who’s had her sights set on professional musicianship since before she could walk is going to talk about making plans?” A clunky insult, thrown weakly, but it lands where it’s meant to.
“Once I actually know where I’m going, I’ll find it.” And she means it.
***
“Do you remember when we kept that stray dog in the school our first year?”
They are sitting on a bench, at approximately midnight, and Kumiko has her goldfish bag next to her and she and Reina are trying out names like they are parents, like they aren’t high schoolers naming a thing that will probably die in a few months.
“I try not to.” The dog ran away within a week, and Kumiko never saw it again. She’d like to imagine somebody found it but she thinks it’s more likely that it was hit by a car.
“You could name it after that.”
“Nope.”
“Something after the competition piece, then?” Reina lifts up the bag, and her face warps in the reflection. Kumiko looks at her through it.
“Feels like bad luck.”
“Hmm.”
“Besides, I mean, it’s a fish. I don’t think they really need names, do they?”
“I suppose not.” Reina sets the bag down and looks up at the stars and stays quiet, for a moment.
Kumiko wonders, surprised, if she is less sentimental than Reina. After all, she hadn’t been the one to drop the bombshell tonight, hadn’t been the one to say openly that they could lose each other, because god knows she’s thought about that for months and months, she’s thought about that more or less since Reina started to matter to her.
“I meant it,” she says, “what I said earlier. We’re- what we have together is special. I don’t think there’s a world where we lose that.” If we try, she doesn’t say, if we both do what we can, if you don’t love New York too much, if I don’t forget you.
Reina’s face breaks into relief. Kumiko thinks that if their relationship was easier, she could just hug her, but that’s not who she is, not who they are. That’s an easy thing, that’s a friendly thing - Hazuki and them - that’s not what it is with Reina.
Kumiko is loath to think that it could ever be like that with Reina. She doesn’t want to live in a world where it is.
“Ah,” Kumiko says.
“What?”
“My leg fell asleep.”
***
Reina wishes she could watch the fish, could care about it, but she doesn’t. She’s watching Kumiko and she’s not watching anything else. They are walking along the riverbank again, and she can hear cicadas screaming somewhere in the distance. She is only looking at Kumiko.
This is how she’s always been. This does not change.
“Can you hold this for a second?” Kumiko hands Reina the fish bag, sweating onto her hand, and yanks out her hairtie, a thin yellow thing that does not look unlike the twine holding the fish. “I was getting a headache.”
“Mm.”
“Feels much better now.” Kumiko snaps the tie onto her wrist. She looks like herself again, younger, bangs nearly reaching her cheeks, untamed curls covering her ears, and Reina is selfishly relieved. She was getting worried, considering this world where Kumiko was more mature than her.
She wonders if there's something to that. She wonders if they are even capable of growing up together. She wants to change, she wants to see Kumiko change too, just at a pace she understands. Probably this is not fair of her, but she has never claimed to be good, only consistent.
***
It’s so late. Kumiko wishes she could say she’ll regret it in the morning – she knows already that she’s going to wake up with a headache, with aching bones, with a phantom hangover, but that’s a problem for herself in the future.
Future Kumiko, she thinks wryly to herself, is going to be fucked.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been out this late,” Reina says, and breaks Kumiko out of her reverie in the process. They’re walking down a street that Kumiko does not recognize; she feels safe anyway.
“Really?”
“What, do you think I go on late-night excursions around the city all the time? For the most part when I’m not with you I’m practicing.”
“I know, I guess I just…” Kumiko doesn’t know what. She imagines that in New York Reina will be out this late often. Busking with her friends, playing well-paid gigs at high-end cafés with ex-teen starlets with jazzy altos, bumping shoulders with a million different kinds of people.
“It’s nice out here, though.” And it is - it’s breezy, unseasonably cold, but clear and lacking in allergies, the sky is the most beautiful shade of dark purple, it is one or two in the morning and most of the town lights are off.
They could be, for all anyone knows, the only two people left in the world.
“Maybe we could sneak in a couple more of these before we graduate,” Kumiko offers. She chances a look at Reina and feels like she is being punched in the heart, somewhat – she’s lit so starkly against the one lamp on this whole street. Her skirt is billowing around her waist. One section of her hair is sticking up from the back. Her eyes are purple, they’re blue, they’re Reina’s and it’s been so long but Kumiko is still-
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
Kumiko wonders what it feels like to have an uncomplicated crush. She envies Hazuki, Yuuko, little Kaho, even Shuichi. To just want someone without it being tangled in all this mess. Without getting everything yanked out of you.
“Maybe after auditions?”
“I’ll hold you to it.”
“I know you will, Reina.”
And she takes charge, like a president should, and she takes Reina’s hand again, and she hopes they stay here forever.
***
Reina gets home later than she has ever gotten home. Her mom is almost frustratingly excited about this – she knows full well that both of her parents want her to go out more, want her to have fun before she throws herself so completely into her career.
“You know, next time you and Kumiko-chan go out, I can drive you back if-”
“I’m going to bed!” Reina yells down the stairs, and falls asleep more or less instantly.
***
Kumiko never comes up with a name for those fish. She thinks about Mizore with her pufferfish, last year, the handful of times she walked past the science lab and saw her with her face pressed to the glass, a curtain of blue obscuring her face.
She’d never asked about any of it. If Mizore and Nozomi had something going on - and she knows they did, she had eyes - and didn’t want to bring her into it, she was more than happy to remain on the outside, to keep it away.
Kumiko much prefers her cactus anyway. It doesn’t take a lot of care, and she can keep an eye on it, and it’s sharper than it looks, and she likes the consistency, waking up to it each day, knowing it will be there.
She goes to bed in her festival dress, does not bother to put on socks, feels the papery summer bedsheets on her feet and falls asleep and dreams of Reina, and fish, and holding onto something.