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The more time Ei spent with Yae, the less she remembered of herself, either because Yae literally made her amnesic, or Ei’s ignorance was made starker in the light of Yae’s omnipotence. Both Ei and Yae were high schoolers, affectionate with each other in a barely mutual manner, which meant that their dynamic was ripe for afterschool homoeroticism. But Ei had never engaged in anything of the sort. Her father was overseas; her mother was too busy self-immolating on the corporate ladder to fully acknowledge that Makoto, Ei’s twin, had passed away last spring; the maids did all the chores in a Sisyphean attempt to prevent the large homestead from falling to dust.
Left to her own devices, Ei largely spent her time studying and contemplating non-existence. So the weighty responsibility of Ei’s after-school recreation fell to Yae.
“Ei, how would you like to hang out with me after school?” Yae asked one afternoon.
“I don’t know,” replied Ei flatly.
“What do you mean, ‘I don’t know’?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“You’ve never hung out after school? Why, it’s written in the sacred laws of yuri that high school girls must window shop, visit an arcade, and share a parfait…preferably holding hands…”
“Slow down,” said Ei, who didn’t know what yuri was. “What was the first thing you said?”
Ei felt Yae’s arms tighten around her waist.
“Fufu…I have no choice,” Yae whispered. “I’ll have to show you.”
And that was how Yae inducted Ei into the art of homoeroticism.
As they walked to the train station hand in hand, Ei thought this was the first time she’d had an actual friend. Before Makoto had passed away, everything had been Makoto. She had questions: did window shopping mean shopping for windows? Would having fun with another person disrespect Makoto’s memory? She thought she'd never get close with anyone again after it happened. Yet the seasons persisted in their relentless cycle. And things subtly changed.
“What do the shops have?” Ei asked aloud.
“Well, there’s not a lot that students like us can afford. But you’d be surprised. There’s free amnesia, for example.”
“What?”
“I mean, you get so excited, you forget the time — look!” Yae released Ei’s hand and rushed to a nearby store with a keyring stand outside, where multiple chibi soft toys dangled from their heads like execution victims. “Isn’t that cute!”
She pointed out a pair of chibi keyrings that bore a superficial resemblance to them; one had pink hair and animal ears, and the other had a tuft of purple hair, but one had a bandaged eye and the other barely had any head at all.
“I can’t see what’s so exciting about it.”
“Affection is expressed through gifts, Ei…hasn’t anyone taught you that? Let me buy these for us.” Yae reached for her purse.
“I don’t want anyone spending money on me,” said Ei stiffly. This wasn’t a sentiment born from generosity, but privilege, having never wanted for material possessions in her entire life.
“Let's forget about this then,” said Yae, sighing theatrically. “To the arcade, instead.”
“What’s an arcade?”
Yae chose to ignore ignorance.
Inside the arcade was a sensory assault of flashing lights and cacophonous sounds. Uniformed students clustered around various game machines, absorbed in fierce contests of ego. The blaring music camouflaged Yae and Ei’s entrance.
They attempted basketball, but Ei seemed to lack depth perception. They tried air hockey, but Yae won every match. At the claw machines, where identical figurines sat imprisoned with countless duplicates, they failed to win a single time. Cursing the cruelty of randomness, Ei thought she must be making a rather poor impression on Yae.
Yae was especially interested in the guns – bulky contraptions of metal and plastic, tethered to their stations with tough ropes as if the proprietors wanted to prevent someone running off with one and threatening the premises. Above them was an imposing loading screen on which CGI-generated mutant enemies approached menacingly. Yae lifted a gun and passed it to Ei, their fingertips brushing; Ei felt a strange current through Yae’s touch, as if power were being channelled back to her from some unknown source.
But the game’s premise bewildered Ei.
“Video games don’t make sense," she said, staring at the horde of digital creatures. “Why are we killing them? What did they ever do to us?”
“You don’t understand metaphor, do you?” said Yae, taking up another gun.
Yae pressed the 'START' button.
In her peripheral vision, Ei observed Yae’s face refresh fifty times in succession, finally settling into an expression of grave seriousness.
“Quiet.”
Yae threw one arm over Ei’s shoulder and pressed her hand over Ei’s mouth in a vicelike grip. Ei nearly bit her in shock.
“What’s going on—?”
Without speaking, Yae dragged Ei down onto the floor.
The arcade had gone quiet. The uniformed students had vanished. Had they moved elsewhere? No — even the music had ceased, even though she had not noticed it fading. It was as if her perception had gradually receded, and only now was she registering the contrast.
Then came gunshots. Something in the back corner opened fire. Two bullets —
"Yae!"
"Stay there! Do not move."
Ei saw shadows too numerous to count and creatures descending from a chasm in the sky – and she would have described them more precisely but words failed her, caught between fragments of shrapnel and personhood fluttering across the battlefield. An echoing command rattled the air, ‘Two o’clock, 100 metres!’ followed by a curtain of fire and the rending of flesh and sky.
They told her it had been one spring of many, that death wasn’t permanent. What if reality wasn’t this, and they were only counting down to an undiscovered zero, and immortality was a vice? She was particulate matter within the expanding cosmos, fragmenting against negative pressure. She opened her hands. Open, close, open, close. Her mouth, in the same rhythm. Open, close. Open, close. Open when I feed you. From a dread-locked portal, blood gushed into her mouth, ran down her chin, stained her blouse — which, looking down, she perceived only as a pixellated abstraction. She glimpsed half of herself lying at a distance.
This is the end, she thought.
Half of her was already severed.
if you don’t die with me Makoto know that I love you
.
.
.
Ei found herself back where she was, trembling violently. The gun slipped from her grasp. Yae noticed it falling, caught it deftly, stacked it upon its holder.
The other students had reappeared.
“It worked, I see,” said Yae, looking blasély at the screen.
“What was that?”
“My strategy for a high score. Look at that!”
On the screen was their score. They ranked third from the top.
“You did well, Ei! We make good partners.”
“…it was my first time,” said Ei, still shaking. She looked down at her fingers where the gun had been.
“It wasn’t your first time,” muttered Yae.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry,” Yae yawned, draping her arm over Ei’s shoulder. That’s enough for one day, isn’t it? I promised to take you to my favourite café…”
Leaving the arcade, they stepped out into the dimming afternoon glow. Yae's arm was propping up Ei, because she felt faint. They traversed shadowy alleyways forsaken by the sun, into the heart of the city until they reached a small entranceway marked ‘Café’, with stairs extending upwards towards a diffuse unknown.
The carpeted walls seemed to collapse in on them as they climbed the narrow stairwell. Ei accidentally looked under Yae’s skirt and averted her eyes, but not before noticing that Yae’s underskirt looked pixellated, like the objects on the arcade screen.
“Almost there…” Yae called, distracting Ei enough to forget the anomaly.
They finally reached a small landing, with a door leading to a third-floor café with wide windows, a spacious glow and obscenely pink decor. Yae took a window seat and motioned for Ei to sit opposite. She leaned across to draw the filmy curtains closed, her sakura-scented hair brushing Ei’s face.
Their mechanically polite waitress delivered a strawberry parfait. It was a dizzying affair, with chopped strawberries atop crumbed strawberry shortcake interleaved with strawberry ice-cream drenched in strawberry coulis topped with whipped cream and a cherry. Yae popped the cherry between her lips and held it there teasingly, then took the ornate handle of the spoon and scrambled the parfait’s contents so thoroughly that its essence would have died instantly had it been alive.
“Open up!” Yae commanded.
Ei opened her mouth and closed her eyes.
Strawberry heightens taste while kissing, but I can taste blood…
Out of Ei’s mouth dripped strawberry juice. She couldn’t contain it; it stained her uniform and the tablecloth like blood on white sheets.
Ah, thought Yae, what a cute face…
She raised her own napkin and dabbed Ei’s face, down to her chest where the juice had fallen. Ei was overcome by a sense of déjà vu, as if someone had performed this exact gesture in some distant parallelism, but it dissolved in the fringes of her memory.
“So,” said Yae. “Was it like that with you two?”
“‘Two’?” Ei echoed. “It’s only ever been me.”
Relief washed over Yae.
It had worked.
“I meant ’t-o-o’, not ’t-w-o’,” Yae lied. “’You’ is singular.”
Except Japanese possessed neither the homophone, nor the spelling, nor the grammatical structure of English that would allow for such confusion, so there was no way that Ei could have mistaken what Yae said. Luckily, it wasn’t in Ei’s nature to pry.
“I’ll tell you someday,” said Yae. “In many more years…yes, I’ll tell you then.”
Yae kept the last part unspoken. She knew she was lying, because she would never tell Ei the truth. Affection wasn't expressed through gifts, it was through guilt. She clasped Ei’s hand in her own, and the picture had all the hallmarks of a confession. But Ei didn’t know what a confession was, so she had no framework to parse it as such.
“You’re confusing me, Yae,” Ei said with a wan smile. “And I’m not sure I like that.”
“You said that last time, too.”
"What do you mean?"
“Nothing."
Ei glanced at the window, and momentarily saw two girls reflected: not her and Yae, but herself and…herself?
She rubbed her eyes. When she looked again, she saw only her own reflection and the vehicles on the street below.
“Did I have a twin?” Ei asked suddenly.
Yae’s spoon halted halfway to her mouth.
“No,” she said with unnatural calm. “Why would you?”
Later, Yae bid her goodbye at the station, waving energetically.
Unlocking the front door, Ei felt a profound disquiet, as if half her corridor could disappear at any moment.
Yae made sure she had a place to sleep tonight that wasn’t Ei’s thighs, because now wasn’t the time. Until then, she had a lot more saving to do.