Work Text:
Something bright and burning flew past.
Shu blinked, focusing her eyes after another late-night 7-11 shift to make it out. Was it somebody’s hair ribbon, loosened and lost, now fluttering in the wind? Or was it a stray robin flying south in the summer heat, darting low to better weave between those glassy skyscrapers ahead? Or was it a stray petal, falling now only months after the rest? Was it the shine of red aluminium, reaching out, waiting?
No. Where it had crash-landed beneath a streetlamp, she could see clearly that it was just the mangled remains of a plastic wrapper. Maybe some idiot somewhere had felt himself too busy to find a bin to put it in. Maybe it was one of those first-year students towering above her now in their high-rise accommodation, or some speeding driver throwing his shit out of an open window, or a child no one had taught properly what to do with things once they’d been finished.
No matter the cause, the end was the same, and the shiny wrapper spun pathetically in the small warm gusts that followed. She stepped forwards and caught it under her foot. It was fine. She’d pick it up and throw it away at home – at least she had the decency to fix other people’s mistakes.
.
In the final film club gathering of the academic year, days before the semester was well and truly over, Shu listened to Aya and Narita squabbling over what film they should end on. Really, they were arguing for the same one – American Graffiti by George Lucas – but couldn’t decide if it was too depressing or not.
“Ugh, but, you know, maybe it’s a bad note to end on.”
“Right,” Narita nodded. “We really should’ve watched it before we started university – we should have watched it a year ago!”
“Exactly! Look, these reviews are calling it ‘bittersweet’ and ‘nostalgic.’ No, we need to save this one,” Aya proposed, with a particular tone in her voice that was so ready to call the shots. Shu always found this version of her the most annoying. “Let’s watch it before we graduate!”
Outside, where Shu’s gaze had landed through the window, two pigeons were chasing each other in the sun. A third, fourth, and fifth were dawdling closer to the curb, all playing beneath the scattered shade under the trees.
“So today…” Narita started, clearly out of ideas. Shu didn’t turn her head to see where his sentence was trailing off to and could only hear some shuffling around before she felt a hand clap against her shoulder, and her head whipped around to look up. “Shu’s got the right idea! Let’s go to the park!”
Keen as ever, Aya jumped at the idea.
Before she knew it, Narita was pulling her back and Aya grabbing her bag, and the three of them had ambled out towards the green expanse lying just behind the university with every other eager student. Aya had decided to flutter away to the nearest convenience store to “pick up something” – probably alcohol – and Narita was lying on the grass.
“This weather... Summer seriously hits different after exam season,” he started, stretching his arms out. He nudged Shu with the toe of his converse. “Does it get this hot over in Europe?”
Shu chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment, slouching with her legs crossed. “It’s not so humid. It actually makes the sun nice to be in.”
“Dude, don’t. I’ll get jealous. My parents only ever took me to Kyoto. Where was it you were at?”
“A few places. Milan, Paris, Athens…”
Narita hummed. “Athens, huh. That place is full of old stuff, isn’t it?”
Shu felt a twinge of annoyance already. It must be the sun. “Yes. Like everywhere.”
Narita laughed. “Yeah, phew. You know, the second it gets hotter than this, I’m locking myself indoors.” He pulled himself up to sitting, lowering his voice as he gestured to a gaggling of girls their age nearby. “I dunno how these people do it…”
The people, Shu gather, were a group of eager sunbathers lying boldly in their short shorts and tiny tops. She kept her eyes to the ground, giving a small shake of her head. They must be young, she could imagine her mother saying. “Don’t ask me.”
Summer provided a rare chance for opportunistic students to rest and recuperate, or work, or study, or travel, or whatever else they could afford to do. It was a two-month stretch in the year without classes, though she had no doubt that their annoying little film club would still find ways to meet. She’d found out pretty early in the year that Narita only lived a few doors down from her own apartment; that had been the beginning of all this.
Together, they lay, tugging at blades of grass until Aya returned with a rustling plastic bag. Surely enough, she’d brought back cold bottles of beer, which Narita sat up to open.
Relinquishing control of a film club meeting meant they could do what they always did, which was chat. Narita and Aya could chat for what would likely be recorded by scientists of the distant future as eons, and Shu imagined their annoying voices would travel in subtle waves into oblivion for millions of years to come. Hers, less so. Most of their time sitting she spent tuning in and out, bathing in the warmth of the sun, gazing down to where her fingers wrapped around the neck of the bottle.
Another opening came into view, tapping one funnel neck to her own. “Earth to Shu,” Aya sung. “I wanna talk about plans for the summer, so pay attention. Are you guys doing anything nice for the break?”
“Me and my old man are going down to Okinawa for a week, but other than that…” Narita started, trailing off. “Other than that, I’ve decided. I’m dating again.”
Aya gasped, Shu rolled her eyes.
“You mean you’re getting back on a dating app?” Shu asked.
“No!” Narita spluttered, raising his hands. “This time will be different. I’m going to ask girls out face-to-face.”
“Okay…” Aya nodded slowly. “Where?”
Narita shrugged. “Same places everyone does…” He paused, thinking. “The bar, the club, the…”
“App?” Shu supplied.
Aya laughed. Narita sighed. “Yeah, count yourself lucky, Aya. You don’t know how bad it is out here.”
Aya smiled, half-heartedly perhaps. Shu didn’t care. She pretended not to notice. Aya’s thumbnail, where the nail polish was already chipping, was prodding at the lip of her beer bottle.
“Are you guys doing anything for summer?”
“Me and Mitsuki? Oh, you know,” she started. “She’d got a ton of part-time shifts and stuff, and things might come up last minute, like gigs she has to help out at, and they have a new hire at the store, and… You know, with her work schedule, sometimes it can be hard to book in advance.”
“Right,” Narita nodded sagely, like he could understand such a shitty excuse with some sort of divine insight from their high school days.
Shu wondered how much he understood. Shu wondered how much she understood herself. Aya’s deadbeat girlfriend, Mitsuki, worked in a music shop and spent all day arranging CDs and pouring drinks. She didn’t produce her own music or run an Instagram page – at least none Shu could find with a quick Google search – and seemed to just appear unexpectedly every time Aya drank too much or stayed out too late, no matter what time it was. How hard can it really be to call out of that?
“You guys gotta do something cute though. Like a couple’s trip to Universal or a summer pop-up event. Or another music festival!”
Aya smiled, brushing off the suggestions with a laugh. “We’ll see... What about you Shu?”
This one she could answer quickly. “Studying, working, gym.”
“Creature of habit,” Narita rolled his eyes.
“Studying for next year?”
“No, it’s a summer course.”
“Ah,” Aya jumped, eyes brightening. “You’re doing one too? Let’s compare our schedule! I’m taking the Global Studies course in English.”
Shu had nothing to say. Aya looked at her, expectantly, but already she could see where this was going.
She had settled easily on a summer of a few extra shifts at work a week, and an optional summer course one of her professors had recommended her for to congratulate consistent high grades. It was a summer programme in Global Studies, taught entirely in English. It was a light course for international students from abroad, and for budding internationalists at home, praying for a career that could even tease the possibility of leaving Japan.
And how long had it been since she last flexed that muscle?
It must have been years. There was another version of herself that no longer existed. A Shu who travelled the world, a Shu who ran athletics in the youth Olympian sphere, doing the right things and saying them too. A Shu who was a core part of their sprint team and took the lead in their national relay team too. There was a Shu who was fluent in English, who interviewed in English, who tested in English – a Shu long gone from public consciousness, and who would never come back.
Her knee echoed the sentiment, that throbbing pain pulsating as if only to remind her it had happened.
“We’re taking the same course.”
Aya jumped in surprise. “What!? But it’s in English? Shu, you never told me you were secretly a genius!”
Narita laughed. “See, I told you! This girl is full of surprises.”
Shu felt her mouth going dry. Was it anxiety or pressure? And she didn’t have to explain herself to anyone – she held onto that tightly. “I used to. I wanted to practice,” she offered noncommittally.
“Well… okay!” she smiled. “I’m looking forwards to a summer together, and we can all meet up often too! Ugh, I bet you don’t even need to look at the subtitles when we watch American films.”
Of course she did. Her English was currently in the process of devolving into an eroded mess of missing articles and unmatched tenses, but Aya didn’t need to know that.
“You guys can practice together,” Narita offered. “But… I think you’ve got pretty different interests.”
“Hmm,” Aya laughed. “Shu, what kind of music do you listen to?”
“Actually yeah,” Narita piled in, as he is so wont to do. “You know, I always see you with your headphones, but I have no idea what you listen to.”
“Nothing.”
Narita raised his eyebrow. “Nothing?”
“Rain sounds.”
Aya shook her head. “Whether that’s true or you’re lying, I don’t care. By the end of this summer, I’ll make sure you’ve heard everything!”
.
After three Fridays of American movies, and a lot of one-way texts from Aya with YouTube links, their summer course was in full swing. Aya could just about keep up, and Shu needed to look up every technical phrase, like diplomacy, or hegemony.
It was a short course on war and digital surveillance, journeying through global politics and news headlines they were barely old enough to remember. For somebody studying computer engineering, like Shu, it was an interesting enough ethics course. For somebody studying English language and culture, like Aya, perhaps it was a little less engaging on that level, but she seemed ready to show up every day.
Aya had never struck Shu as the studious type, but what she lacked in technique she made up for in passion, asking the professor all types of questions, starting seminars from new angles, and somehow tapping into references from Green Day’s American Idiot to Rise Against’s State of the Union. It was how her brain worked, and the other students loved it, so she was popular enough in class to make conversation with anyone.
No, Shu could appreciate her own failure to truly grasp Aya, or maybe this was a side of herself she’d kept hidden. She didn’t know what Aya looked like sitting at home typing out her homework, or how she practiced her pronunciation, or anything, and she didn’t want to know. Watching films with and drinking next to her was enough to get a taste, she didn’t need to go out of her way fill in the rest of the blanks.
And summer was melting into hot delirium. They sat towards the back of the seminar room, where the air conditioning landed first, and the light stayed away. Their professor was relaxed, and the international students brought with them an air of ease, interest, and a lightness in conversation that Shu had no interest in keeping up with. In the long breaks between the morning and afternoon session, where she’d duck out to go to the gym for a session with her trainer, Aya stuck around and socialised, showed them the city, brought them to her favourite places.
It was great because it was easy.
If every day was like this, Shu figured she’d find Aya a lot less annoying. She’d made a great tour guide if she ever wanted to be one, she thought dimly as Aya vetoed one student’s suggestion to go to the most stale crepe shop Tokyo had ever seen.
Shu had a sneaking suspicion that she’d be great at anything she tried, though; Aya was one of those frustrating types who just got things. She had to be. She had an apartment with a working A/C unit, a girlfriend who seemed to exist in some distant capacity, and her white clothes never faded into grey. No, she was fine on pretty much every front.
And the summer heat continued to swell, throbbing across the city in the cloudless sky.
Shu remembered something her mother said to her, back when she was running for the national team in Seoul. She must have been no older than 14. The heat makes people crazy. It brings something out in all of us, and people act in mysterious ways.
She remembered it so well because she’d gone on to win that race for her team in the final sprint: it was a happy memory fuelled by a limitless summer. She remembered the red gleam of the baton resting in her hands, and the cheers of the crowd circled around the arena.
The tinny store radio blared out warnings that it was only going to get hotter, and that train services would be slowing down to avoid heavy delays and disruptions. Meanwhile, one of the fridges had well and truly given up, and she had spent the morning trying to cram all the ice cream into one unit so the cold drinks could have the other.
Everywhere it was the same line: this summer was on track to being the hottest summer ever recorded in Tokyo. That’s climate change for you, she supposed. Her parents both sent frequent reminders – drink water, stay cool, keep working hard, and wear lots of sun cream.
Her classmates were heeding the same warnings, wearing less and showing more. The guys had swapped out fashionable clothes to thin, linen ones, and the women wore shorter skirts and cropped shirts, slowly revealing the skin they’d kept hidden all through winter. Shu, always the odd one out, stayed true to a uniform of sports shirts and jogging bottoms, and that was fine by her.
And in that opening of bodies and skin, she was careful to keep her head down too. Rather, it was fine if she looked, but not if she was seen looking. If that meant ignoring Aya turning around, asking if she could see the indentation line across the backs of her thighs from where she was sitting, so be it.
In fact, with Aya, she was particularly careful.
Without Narita’s input, there was no mention of this illusive girlfriend, so Shu held the line. She didn’t want to see inches more of Aya’s legs, or the gap between them, or the even more notable lack of red splodges all over them than ever before. She could have sworn they were there last year, when classes began, and Narita had introduced them as summer was waving one last farewell. They must have been there then.
No, if no one was going to remind her of one annoying girl’s even more annoying girlfriend, she would do it herself.
There too hid a silence around her own stunted love life.
Aya wouldn’t ask, their classmates weren’t interested, and Narita was busy with his own lousy attempts. At the gym, she could feign loud music in her headphones. At the store, she could smooth questions down with her handy customer-service script. The truth of her empty sex-life flew under the radar, right behind the truth of her sexuality. She could keep her head down and fade into the crowd of white-collar workers, gossiping high-school girls, and phone-addicted loners.
No one needed to know. It was a beautiful, comfortable silence, and no one was going to arrest her just for stealing glances. They couldn’t. And Aya didn’t need to know either.
Shu basked in the freedom; she could be anyone. She could be absolutely no one.
As she watched the sweat roll down the small of Aya’s back on one particularly hot Thursday, she felt a kick of pressure.
She texted Narita. This is a summer of hell.
Class that hard? LOL. Just got dumped btw.
.
August was decidedly going to be difficult, and the university officials knew how to capitalise.
Temperatures rose, and the meteorology map was showing more red patches and yellow triangles across the southeast region than she’d ever seen. Tokyo was well and truly the epicentre of this heatwave, and businesses were letting staff work from home, tourists had been warned against spending too much time outside, and everyone was boasting on Instagram about how expensive their electrolyte drink of choice was.
Within the university walls, they’d cranked up the air conditioning, and students – regardless of what they were doing over the break – were invited to come in and take advantage of the facilities. Annoying, but there were no complaints from Shu. Everything at home was hot and broken, or shit, so it was here or the gym, or work. With enough effort, she could find a way to bounce between the three of them.
Supposedly, she’d learnt via text, the music shop was also keeping cool. If not, the vinyl would melt, explained Aya in their group chat. Narita gave the messages a thumbs up and promised to come. Shu ignored them both. Even where it was cool and calm inside, outside was hot and humid, and she wasn’t travelling anywhere she didn’t need to go. The two minute walk from the train station to the classroom was torture enough, more so if she saw Aya on the way.
Aya, who was also struggling with the heat, but could come up with a million excuses to not stay home for no particular reason. Aya, who would still meet people on campus without classes scheduled. Aya, who was always on her phone, messaging no one.
Aya, who was slim, but her thighs always touched, and whenever she came in from the heat, she’d always sit with her legs pulled apart at a slight angle to separate the skin. It was how her bones were angled, Shu guessed, before feeling a sneaking sickness in response to even dedicating energy to the thought. The fact that she’d spent enough time watching Aya and thinking about Aya to recognise the build of her skeleton was strange enough, but there were ramifications to keeping an eye out for spreading legs that she was not ready to face.
She closed her eyes. These can’t be normal thoughts. The heat makes people crazy. It probably makes them sick too.
Last time Shu had watched Aya a little too closely, she could make out the bra strap peeking out beneath the cuff of her t-shirt sleeve and could see that the red strap matched the small peak of her laced underwear that glared through her white skirt.
That was why she couldn’t look: because Aya was a perverted psychopath who wore sexy underwear to class, probably for the benefit of her equally psychopathic girlfriend at home. This was why she needed to go to the gym and get the nervous energy out. Nothing helped more than leg day. Her grey duffle bag almost cried up to her from the floor, begging for her touch.
“I don’t know how you can go to the gym in this heat,” Aya started. Class had just finished, and Shu had spent the last 5 minutes of discussion punishing herself for thinking about Aya’s naked body against somebody else’s. That’s just great.
“…It’s just habit.”
“It’s weird, is what it is. Do you like pain?” she laughed.
In a flash of déjà-vu, she remembered the first night she’d ever met Aya, drunk and only getting drunker. Back then, Shu was still figuring out her own schedule, and had somehow found a friend in Narita, who was easy-going and didn’t pry too much. Aya was different – of course she was different – and could hardly remember meeting her the day after. Aya had laughed over the table, a few beers too deep in, and said she thought Narita was creepy and unlikable when they’d first met.
Right, it was all coming back to her now. The first night she met Aya was the first night she met Mitsuki, who’d she had taken to be her roommate or something like that. Mitsuki with a guitar strapped to her back and nails painted black, and no muscle whatsoever. She’d seen Aya standing with her whole body pressed into Mitsuki’s, while she awkwardly handed over Aya’s jacket.
What had Mitsuki thought of her then?
“Yes,” she ‘joked’ back. “Why don’t you try?”
“Me in the gym? No way, I don’t wanna get—” Aya quickly cut herself off. “Not that you’re... anything, I just, you know, I don’t want to be buff.”
Shu raised an eyebrow, ignoring whatever Aya was about to say. “I’m clearly not buff.”
Aya hummed, looking at Shu’s arms, her chest, like she was a market fish lying in ice. “I think you’re more muscular than you think. You know, it’s actually really common for American guys to have body dysphoria about how big their arms are.”
There was nothing for Shu to say back to that, so she ignored her to check the train routes on her phone instead. Dully, she remembered that she did in fact know what Mitsuki thought of her back then – she thought Shu was Narita’s new girlfriend of the week. Just the thought pissed her off even more.
Aya thought for a moment “I used to… go on the treadmill.”
“You did?” Shu asked, half-heartedly. She’d decided she didn’t care at all and wanted to take out that annoyance on Aya for not somehow mindreading what Mitsuki would think and having Narita tell her all this over drinks.
“In high school when I first started talking to…” she started, reshuffling her thoughts. “When I wanted to impress someone, I used to do it a couple times a week. Nothing serious. I didn’t like it.”
“…But you still did it.”
“Well, yeah,” Aya replied, a distant look clouding across her face. She started poking the nails of her fingers with her thumb, as if there was something in there she’d pick out. “It was more like… I was doing the thing I thought I had to do. Not the thing I wanted to.”
She nodded, slowly. She licked the bottom of her lip. Every part of her was begging to let out some noncommittal ‘Okay,’ which she knew wasn’t right. This might have been the closest thing to personal information that Aya had divulged to her without Narita present and she had nothing meaningful to respond with. She kept her gaze on her phone, pretending to move around on the map “… There’s lots of different things to do at the gym. You just need to find the right thing for you.”
“You’d have to show me,” she smiled. “I don’t think I have any friends who go to the gym as much as you.”
Shu hummed, and they breathed in sync for a moment. Or maybe they didn’t breathe at all. She kept her gaze fixed on her phone, tracking the crack that split through her screen protector, while Aya stood up. She could not look at the pale expanse that stretched out beneath her jean shorts.
While Aya started to pack away her things, some of their classmates had already come over, begging her to take them to some ice cream café they’d seen on Instagram. Aya smiled, same as always, and turned to Shu. “You’re coming tomorrow, right?”
Right, yes. She’d invited Shu and Narita, and some of their other friends from high school to something happening at the bar. She had no idea what. Quietly, she nodded. “Yeah.”
“Great! See you then.” Aya threw her bag over her shoulder, turning with her small posse to leave.
Shu reached down, massaging the dull pain in her knee, and moved to stand. Aya was gone, and she mouthed to no one, “Bye.”
She thought again about that baton, hopeful, glimmering in the light, red and hot in the sun, smooth to the touch. She thought about her hand waiting behind her, in perfect form for a perfect landing. Communication without words. There was no need to look back. There was no need to check. It was all sound and touch, instinctive and reactive. Quick, not gentle. Purposeful, intentional, powerful.
It was the long break between the morning seminar and the afternoon lecture, and the sun was beating down against the pavement. Like snow, the white pavement was too bright to look at, and they’d found some shaded corner outside near a vending machine to rest.
Aya sat on the curb, legs apart as she ran her handheld fan over them, a cool can of something held up to her forehead. “It’s too hot,” she sighed.
Shu hummed in agreement, hands shoved deep in her pockets.
“Why don’t you wear shorts? I don’t know how you can be out here in all that.”
“Don’t want to,” she muttered back. She felt sick. In the blinding heat, she kept her eyes down on the beaten toes of her trainers.
Perfect synchronisation between athletes required a few things. Trust. Knowledge. Skill. Patience. At the highest level, two athletes don’t even need to see each other. They can hear the other’s footfall, and trust that they will be where they need to be. They could speak without words. Sometimes they preferred it.
Shu closed her eyes, defeated. “We have a while before we have to go back in. Why don’t we find somewhere cooler to sit?”
Aya nodded. There weren’t many places they couldn’t go on campus, but it was them against the entire student body in the hunt for a quiet room. They didn’t want to be caught up in gaggles of prospective students either, and definitely didn’t want to sit in the bright LED library lights.
Various classrooms, lecture halls, and storage cupboards had been taken up by groups of students and friends alike, and professors had holed themselves up in their cool offices. It seemed as though everyone was keen to avoid rising electricity bills, and the paltry excuses of aging air conditioning units which championed them so. If anything, it was essentially government mandated to be on campus, and Shu and Aya ducked between rooms trying to find anywhere with even a modicum of peace from the crowd.
Somehow, after ten minutes of winding around the busy hallways, they’d silently agreed on the one place they knew would be empty: the disused classroom that their film club had repurposed. Far away from the lecture halls and libraries, it was at the end of a few long hallways, and was technically part of the dwindling History department.
She held the door for Aya. They were welcomed by the cool air of an empty room, preserved only by blackout curtains and broken overhead lights. Finally, they were in the cool and in the quiet. Feeling selfish, she locked it behind her, barring any eager students from following, and spun to rest against its sleek plastic finish.
“Ugh,” Aya moaned. “This heat.”
Shu hummed. From where she was, feeling the sweaty shape of her body osmose into the door, she watched Aya move into the room, made up of rows of empty desk, her body slow and unsteady.
In the darkness, her eyes adjusted. She could see where Aya’s shirt was sticking to her back, and where the sweaty tip of her ponytail was hitting the back of her neck. She could make out the pale outlines of Aya’s arms, reaching forwards to the nearest desk, holding herself steady as she moved her weight onto the long desk.
“It's cool…” she heard Aya mutter to herself, and suddenly she was lying down, looking up to the ceiling.
Her hair splayed above her head, and her eyes – or what Shu could see of them – looked like they were closing. Her legs bent away from each other, one dropping over the side, hanging down to the floor.
These moments that would usually call for a pang of annoyance now conjured a twang of sickness instead. She wanted to be angry because Aya was… what? Lying down? Cooling off? Displaying symptoms of obvious heat exhaustion? Christ, she even annoyed herself sometimes.
Shu watched in the darkness as Aya’s chest rose and fell, before sliding down to the floor. She needed something hard against her back, something steady under her feet.
Lying there for a moment longer, Aya tilted her head, peering through her eyelids. Her lips parted, like she was trying to formulate some sort of acute thought before giving up. Shu wondered what she could see, what she looked like from over there. “…Are you still hot?” Aya whispered.
In the cool air, the beads of sweat rolling down the backs of her legs felt heavier. Her knee ached.
“Yes.”
Aya slowly let her eyes gaze. From Shu’s face to where her legs were bent before her, or thereabouts. She closed them again, curling her fingers around the sides of the table, as if to hold herself in place.
“Let’s just wait in here…”
She thought about that baton again, pressing into her hand years ago. Why did the heat feel so much worse now? Maybe it was this city, these towers, these trains, these people. The stiff Tokyo summer that forced everything to a standstill, and no fan, no ice, no breeze could lift that sick weight.
“Can you pass me my water?”
Shu could see where, close by, Aya had abandoned her bag. She took a moment before pushing herself up, her knee radiating with a gentle warning. It seemed like mind and body truly were connected. She stepped forwards and bent slowly to lift the long metal bottle from Aya’s bag, twisting off the top as she stepped closer.
Aya pushed herself up just enough to be angled upright, reaching for it. Shu found herself holding on, still, as Aya sipped, sighed, and went back down. Putting the cap back on, she held it at her side.
“I feel dizzy… It’s cool in here, but I still feel hot.”
“…I think you have heatstroke.”
Lying still, Aya kept her eyes closed, probably fighting off the nausea. Shu let her gaze trail from her eyes to her lips, then lower, to her neck, her chest, stomach, waist, hips, then lower still. Her skirt had ridden up just enough to show a peak of her underneath beneath, some sort of white lace situation. She didn’t know. She wasn’t looking.
This was sick and this was stupid.
“I think I’m just tired.”
Shu tried to breathe quietly. “You’re not sleeping well?”
Aya smiled. “I don’t know.”
Yes, that was the most annoying thing about Aya: that she had her own world going on, and Shu was just somewhere on the periphery. Was this the moment where she was supposed to ask, ‘Have you and your girlfriend broken up?’ or, ‘Hey, I’ve noticed you haven’t had a hickey in months, why?’, or ‘You keep touching me, do you want me to touch you too?’
There was a part of her that knew, too, that Aya didn’t have any answers either. Or maybe she did. She wouldn’t ask; it was probably just painful to talk about. If Aya was the person Shu thought she was, so able and eager to talk for days at a time, then it must be something she’s avoiding.
Standing straight, she looked down at Aya. Who would have thought? She has a quiet streak in her personality too, she noted, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth. Everything about Aya, then, was unreadable, wordless, unfixed to any language or code. Where Japanese failed, English could only do worse. She wondered if there was some secret combination in some other tongue that could better describe this feeling, this space, this girl.
The waves in Aya's ponytail were matted with sweat, and it was already coming loose. Her hand drifted up to lift her shirt, and the widening gap between her legs teased the fabric of her skirt higher. Her face was going red – it must be the sun.
There was no thought acceptable, and the empty space in the room felt stiff, thick, heavy with something more sinister than the heat.
She wanted to upset a lot of people and hurt others, apparently. She wanted to ruin something and throw it away carelessly, childishly in the wake of somebody else’s mess. She wanted to reach out to something that was never going to be offered to her again. She was sick, most likely. She was sick because of the beating sun.
Holding her breath, her hand floated over Aya’s neck, her chest, over where her own fingers were nervously revealing her midriff, to the bottom of her frilled skirt that had ridden up. There, she grabbed the thin fabric, held it still for one nauseating moment, and pulled it down firmly.
Aya’s breath held steady, watching Shu through her eyelashes as turned away before the fabric had landed. She didn’t say anything – couldn’t say anything. Shu understood. Better yet, she didn’t even care.
“Yeah. Let’s just wait in here,” she echoed.
.
Two days had passed. Mornings were for extended, painful gym sessions, and evenings were for stacking shelves and coordinating with the repair guys – both convenient excuses to avoid seeing anyone or replying to anything. It wasn’t like everyone wasn’t used to her brief silences.
The heat was still unruly, and her air conditioning was still broken. Even in the middle of the night, she could feel it still. In only a vest and a pair of boxers, Shu lay on top of her futon staring at her phone as the clock struck one.
They must all be stupid.
The screen lit up with a new text. It was Aya sending a link to a YouTube video: Flavour Of The Weak by American Hi-Fi. She couldn’t care. She was the stupidest one of all of them: too emotional and too loud; too flustered and self-assured at the same time; too sexy and too annoying; too eager and too curious; and was that even her real hair colour?
Swiping away the notification, she turned her attention back to Aya’s newest Instagram post, where she could zoom in to trace the wire frame of her bra underneath her tight white button up. Skin perfect, blemishes concealed, and all mistakes smoothed over in Meitu.
But Shu knew better. Aya’s eyes weren’t that evenly sized, and her teeth weren’t that white, and that wire was way more visible in real life. She knew this because she took the picture last Thursday while Narita was waiting for his newest Tinder match to show up on the other side of the road, and Aya was hurrying them both because she was supposedly meeting Mitsuki later on for some sort of shop-bar-anniversary dinner, and her personal trainer was asking her if they could move that week’s session to the Tuesday.
It was all fake, of course it was. She had no idea who this girl was other than a frustrating red stain leaking through her weeks.
Yes, they were all stupid, and she was the biggest idiot of all.