Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

i.

dry land

The fish rises out of the water the way it always does, black and enormous, a monument to wanting.

She knows what it is, even in the dream. Her own heart lifted out of the lake and made to stand where she can never ignore it. It hovers menacingly over her head, and then it folds in on itself, narrowing, sharpening, until there’s only a small cold weight falling out of the air and into her hands.

A dagger.

A fish with a mouth full of teeth.

It’s alive. It shivers against her palms like something dragged from the deep, bucking and twisting, straining toward the girl on the shore. Lara turns it on herself. She presses the point beneath her own jaw, where the pulse beats, and the whole blade trembles with the effort of wanting to be elsewhere. Don’t come any closer, she begs. Please. I would rather. I would rather.

Mari comes closer.

She isn’t afraid. This, in all the years of dreaming it, is the part Lara has never been able to forgive: that Mari walks forward with tears running down her eyes and her chin lifted, as if walking toward an ordinary door she’s decided to go through. Her mouth moves. The dream hands Lara a few of the words and keeps the rest. And the blade tears out of her grip with a sound like a sob, and then there’s no shore, no lake, no fish, only the long flat silence after.

Lara goes to her. She shakes her. She says her name, and says it, and says it, as if it were a rope and she could haul Mari back hand over hand. Mari’s head rolls loosely on her neck. Her eyes are open and mild and very far away.

Lara wakes with the name still in her mouth.

The dark in the apartment is a different dark. It has edges: a window, a cabinet with a corner she’s learned by bruise, the faint orange smear of a streetlamp on the curtain. Her hands are empty. She looks at them anyway, turning them over in the little light, as though the teeth might still be hiding in the lines of her palms.

Beside her, Mari is sleeping on her back with one arm flung over her head, the way she’s slept since the first night. Even in rest, she looks like she’s guarding something.

Lara doesn’t wake her. She’s become practiced at the small art of moving without waking a sleeper. She turns by degrees, a breath at a time, until she’s lying on her side with her face toward Mari’s shoulder. Then she lowers herself the last few inches and lays her head on Mari’s chest.

The T-shirt is soft with washing. Beneath it, under the weight of her cheek, is the scar, which she doesn’t look at and doesn’t need to. She knows its shape the way she knows the lake from above: a cross laid down in flesh, the print of what the blade carried out with it, and the small weight of a dead woman’s faith dragged through the only door it could find. She settles her ear a little to the left of it, flat against the ribs, and waits.

For one long moment there’s nothing, and in that nothing she’s two hundred years old and fifteen at the same time. Drowning, the whole lake standing in the room. Then it comes: a low and measured knock from somewhere behind the bone. Another. Another. It’s the quietest, most mundane thing in the world, and she holds herself so still against it that she can feel her own pulse in her throat, trying to match it. Failing at first, then gradually (almost against her will), beginning to keep time.

Here, it says. Here. Here.

She breathes out. The tightness in her legs (which she’s told no one about and has decided is only the byproduct of tiredness) loosens by a degree. Outside, a truck climbs the slope and fades. The refrigerator hums its one note. Under her head Mari’s chest rises and falls, rises and falls, carrying her up and setting her down like a boat that’s finally been brought in.

Then the rhythm changes.

A breath taken a little deeper than the last, a catch at the top of it, a hand opening against the sheet where Lara can’t see. The arm over Mari’s head shifts, and the whole ribcage tilts beneath her by the width of a finger.

Lara doesn’t move. She holds her breath.

The heartbeat goes on, slow and even, and the breathing settles back into sleep, and the arm is still. Lara counts to sixty, then to sixty again. It’s nothing. Mari dreams of her own things, and sometimes her body turns over to follow them.

Lara waits until her ear is warm. Then she lifts her head as if raising from deep water, and slides back to her own side of the bed. She turns toward the window and pulls the blanket to her chin, so that if Mari wakes, this is what she’ll find: a sleeper, curved and quiet, facing the glass.

She lies with her eyes open, listening to the breathing behind her.

***

Morning hasn’t yet arrived when Lara wakes, only the idea of it: a thin gray seam along the curtain, the streetlamp going pale, the city holding its breath before the first shutters rise. She’s slept again, somewhere toward the end, the shallow sleep of someone who spent the night vigilant. Her alarm hasn’t gone off. She isn’t sure it’ll be needed.

The place beside her is empty and still warm.

She sits up. Her feet find the floor, and her legs make their first remark of the day: a dull bright ache running from knee to heel like a wire drawn tight. She stands anyway. She lifts her arms to the ceiling and stretches, then she crosses the room in the even steps of a woman with nothing to hide.

The apartment is filled with the smell of butter and toasting bread, of something sweet and something toasted. Underneath it, from the low shelf by the window, comes a bassline.

The record player is a small suitcase of a thing; cream-colored, with a lid that never quite shuts. Mari found it on Yahoo Auctions back in spring for ten-thousand yen and drove a hard bargain over the shipping. It sits on a milk crate beside a second crate of records, perhaps twenty of them now, each wearing the price sticker from Naoto’s uncle’s shop where she’s been working since early April. She buys some from the secondhand section on every payday and no more, and she will not be hurried. This morning’s is a Vaundy pressing, its clear case gone cloudy from some stranger’s years, the needle riding a groove so warm and loose that the whole room seems to sway with it.

Mari is at the stove in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. Her hair has grown past her neck, still damp at the ends. She’s humming along with the bass, impressively in-tune for this hour of the day. Her phone is propped against the sugar jar with the sound off, a pair of hands on the screen folding something golden over, and she watches it between flips the way she once watched film of opponents.

“Mornin’,” she says, without turning. “Don’t come in yet. It’s a surprise.”

Lara sniffs the air and smiles. “It smells like a surprise.”

“Go shower. Ten minutes.”

Lara doesn’t go. She crosses the floor instead and slides her arms around Mari’s waist from behind, and rests her chin on her shoulder. Mari leans back into her without looking, the way a plant leans toward a window.

“You’re in my way,” Mari says, not meaning it.

“I’m supervising.” Lara presses her mouth to the side of Mari’s neck, just below the ear, and feels her laugh more than hears it, a small tremor running through the bone. “Good morning.”

“Mm. G'mornin'.” Mari tips her head to give her room, shamelessly.

Lara buries her face in the crook of Mari’s neck and breathes her in. There’s soap there, and clean cotton, and the faint warmth of skin that has been somewhere cold and come home.

“Did you shower?”

“Yeah. Went on a run earlier.” Mari reaches back without looking and pats her hair, twice, like Lara is a cat she’s trying to settle. “Didn’t wanna be sticky and gross at breakfast.”

Lara didn’t hear her go, but she knows the routine. Mari’s body has long since been accustomed to rise before the light, and she’s largely kept the habit. She once ran as a debt, along the same flat road to the same marked mile. Now she goes wherever her feet decide. Some days it is the harbor, and some days a long climb into the foothills, and once, memorably, a loop around the station in pursuit of a cat. She no longer logs the distance in her head and doesn’t know how far she’s gone. She comes home pink-cheeked and loose-limbed, often with something to say about the sea, or the stairs, or a very unfriendly pigeon.

It’s a plain, miraculous fact. Lara holds it gently against her mouth.

“You smell like my shampoo,” she says into Mari’s neck.

“We use the same shampoo.” Mari turns in the circle of Lara’s arms, spatula still in one hand, and Lara takes the chance to kiss her properly. Mari hums against her mouth, then leans back and points the spatula at her. “Shower. Now. Before I burn something.”

Lara nips at the tip of Mari’s nose with her teeth. “You always burn something.”

“Not anymore I don’t.” Mari pinches Lara’s nose with her free hand in retaliation. “C’mon. You got work today.”

Lara lets herself be turned and herded, a hand flat between her shoulder blades, and refuses to go quietly. She turns and her hand catches Mari’s, trailing down her wrist, over the knuckles, to the very tips of her fingers, holding on until the distance between them makes it impossible. Then the hand falls away, and the warmth where it was cools by degrees.

The hallway is short, no more than six steps, but the bassline follows her down it. At the bathroom she looks back. Mari has already returned to the stove, humming again, tending to the pan. Unaware of being watched.

Lara stands there a moment longer. Then she shuts the door softly on the sound, and the music thins to a pulse she can feel in the tile.

In the bathroom, Lara undresses and reaches for the tap. Turns it almost all the way, then back a little, then there. The pipes cough, and sputter, and the water evens into a warm, steady stream. The landlord has been going to fix it since late March, around the time Mari moved in after she graduated. Mari has threatened to call him eleven times, by Lara’s count, and each time has discovered that the trick works well enough that the call never happens.

She stands under the water with her forehead against the tile and lets it run down her back. Her legs ache less in the heat, which she’s decided not to examine.

On the shelf above the tiny tub, behind the shampoo, a jar of bath salts sits where she put it in July, on a day when her calves had felt like wet rope. She bought it at a shop near the bakery and carried it home in her work bag like contraband. It’s still unopened. She sees it every morning and hasn’t touched it once. She looks at it now through the steam, and then she turns off the water.

***

When Lara comes out, dressed for the day, the table is set for two.

There’s thick-cut milk bread from the bakery, toasted gold at the edges and cut in halves, each cradling an egg salad filling folded soft and tall, creamy with mayonnaise, the crusts trimmed away. Beside them sit two small bowls of yogurt with sliced banana and a scatter of granola, a thread of honey still sinking into the white. There’s miso soup with thin rings of leek—the odd dish out on the table. Two mugs of hot chocolate steam beside the plates. On the counter, a lunchbox sits closed. The record has reached the end of its side, and the needle ticks softly in the run-out groove.

“Sit,” Mari tells her, walking over to the player. She lifts the needle, flips the record with a practiced thumb, and sets it down again.

“Wow.” Lara takes in the morning’s offerings as she pulls out the chair and takes a seat. “This looks really nice, Mari.”

“Made you lunch, too.” Mari reaches over to the counter to fetch the lunchbox. She opens it and shows it to Lara. “Long shift. You can’t live off of whatever’s left on the trays.”

Two riceballs sit side by side, one wrapped in a stripe of nori, the other rolled in toasted sesame. Beside them are four pieces of karaage, and a little nest of broccoli glossy with sesame oil. A rolled omelet has been sliced into rounds, the nori inside it spiraling like the rings of a tree. And in the corner, with their legs curled and their little sesame-seed eyes looking up at her, sit four octopus sausages.

Lara looks at Mari wide-eyed. “Are those—”

“They were in the video,” Mari says, too quickly.

“You made me octopuses?” She presses both hands to her cheeks. “And you put little faces on them! Oh, that’s adorable! I don’t think I could eat them!”

“Well, you gotta. Ain’t no way I did all this work just for you to go hungry.” Mari sets down the lunchbox before going to sit across Lara at the table. “Try it,” she says, crossing her arms. “Honest opinion.”

“One second.” Lara is already up, phone out, and starts taking pictures of her lunch—from above, then from the side, then from the very corner.

“Lara, c’mon. Stop messin’ around and taste the food.”

“Wait, I need more pictures.” Click. Click. Click. She switches to the burst and holds the phone steady over the omelet rounds, the spirals sharp as a pressed flower. “It’s so beautiful. I’m gonna show it to Kakeru and make him so jealous.”

Mari lets her get to nine photographs. On the tenth she reaches across the table, takes Lara’s phone, and slides the lunchbox an inch closer to her chopsticks.

“Taste.”

“Hey!” Lara protests. “I wasn’t done documenting.”

“It’s gonna be documented in your stomach.” The corner of Mari’s mouth is losing its argument with itself. “Kakeru can be jealous later. Eat.”

“Fine.” Lara sits, lifts her chopsticks, and hovers them over the box like a surgeon deciding where to begin. She starts with the riceball with nori, putting a hand under as she picks it up with her chopsticks, and bites. The rice is warm still and lightly salted, packed firmly enough to hold and loosely enough to give, and in the middle there’s salmon, flaked and savory, with a sharpness of something pickled cutting through the richness.

Her eyes close. A small noise comes out of her.

“So?” Mari asks, gripping her own elbows. “How is it?”

“Mari.” Lara swallows and opens her eyes, wide and shining. “This is the best riceball I’ve ever eaten. And I’ve eaten, historically, a lot of riceballs.”

Mari cocks her chin at the lunchbox. “Try the chicken.”

Lara goes for the karaage, and it shatters under her teeth, ginger and soy and a little heat, hot in the middle where the sweetness collects. “It’s crispy! It’s crispy and it’s not greasy, how is it not greasy?”

“Dunno.” The color is climbing Mari’s neck, and she picks up her cocoa to hide behind it. “Just followed the recipe.”

Lara turns to the omelet next, plucking one round from its row and holding it up to the light. The nori inside is dark green against the gold, so precise it looks pressed under glass. “How did you roll this? This is art.”

“I burned the first two. And I ate them.”

Lara pops the round into her mouth, closes her eyes again, and sighs. “Oh, that’s soft. That is so soft.”

That leaves the sausages.

They sit in their corner of the box, four of them in a bunch, legs curled, sesame-seed eyes turned up in expressions of the mildest joy. Lara looks at them for a long moment. Then she picks one up gently between her chopsticks and holds it at eye level.

“I’m so sorry,” she tells it, right before she bites off the head. Mari huffs out an almost-laugh. Lara chews, solemn as a priest, then breaks into a grin so wide it nearly cracks her face. “It’s delicious. I’m a monster. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“Alright.” Mari rolls her eyes at her. “Now you’re just bein’ dramatic.”

“Thank you so much for this.” She reaches across the table and takes Mari’s wrist, stealing a quick kiss on the knuckle before she can retreat. “Seriously. I mean it. You’re the best girlfriend ever.”

Mari looks at her hand, then at Lara, and for a moment all her usual coolness slips. “Yeah?” she says. “You really like it?”

Lara smiles at her. “I love it.”

Mari ducks her head and eats a spoonful of yogurt with great concentration. “Good,” she says, to the bowl. “‘Cause I’m doin’ it again tomorrow.”

They eat their breakfast leisurely, the way people do when nothing is waiting but the day. The light outside the window goes from gray to a thin clear gold. Mari steals a banana slice from Lara’s bowl without a flicker of guilt. Lara steals one from her in return. Somewhere between the second cup of hot chocolate and the third piece of toast, Lara goes to get a napkin from the low shelf, and when she straightens, the cabinet finds her head with a crack like a dropped plate.

“Ack—!”

“That’s twelve times this week,” Mari says, mouth full.

Lara tosses Mari a scowl, freshly hurt. “You’re keeping a tally?”

“On the fridge.” Mari points with her spoon. Sure enough, attached to the refrigerator door with a FamilyMart light-up magnet, is a sheet of paper that says ‘Week 37 - Lara: 0, Cabinet: 11’. Soon to be updated to 'Lara: 0, Cabinet: 12'. 

She makes it back to her chair, sulking. “I’d like it on record that the cabinet is the aggressor.”

“Sure.” Mari swallows, getting up from her chair to stand behind Lara. She gently rubs at the spot where Lara’s head had collided with the cabinet. “Your spatial awareness sucks.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Lara picks up her phone from beside Mari’s mug and thumbs it awake. She goes to her browser to find the thing she saved. “Take a look at this before I forget.”

Mari looks over her shoulder. “What is it?”

“Found it last night.” Lara turns the phone toward her. “Don’t say anything yet.”

It is a listing. Two rooms and a kitchen that doesn’t have to share a wall with a bed. A window with a view of the hills. A building so new its photographs are still the color of paper. In the second picture there’s a bathtub, deep and white, with a ledge along one side for a person to sit and rest their feet. Lara had looked at that one for a long time.

“It’s got a real bathroom,” she says. “And look, the cabinets are pretty high up. I’ve measured. I’d be safe.”

“Lara.”

“Mm?”

“This is eleven thousand more than we pay now.”

“I know.”

“A month.”

“I know.” Lara turns around in her chair. “But we could save here and there. And I can pick up more shifts, or get a second job, and—”

“Your hours are already long,” Mari points out, her eyebrows furrowed.

“They’re fine.”

“Okay, but eleven thousand’s a lot.” She’s quiet for a while, thinking. Finally, she says, “If I drop the gym membership, we clear it.”

“No.”

It comes out before Lara has decided to speak. Mari’s eyebrows rise.

“I mean.” She smooths a hand down Mari’s arm. “You just started boxing again, and you said you like it there. We’ll find the money somewhere else, okay? Keep the gym.”

Mari studies her for longer than the sentence needs. Then she shrugs, which from her is a kind of tenderness.

“Okay,” she says. “We’ll figure it out.”

Lara smiles up at her, takes her hand and kisses the back of it. The ache in her calves hums faintly, a cord stretched across the whole of the morning.

They clear the dishes together afterwards. At the door, Lara slips her feet into her clogs and takes up her bag, and Mari comes behind her with the lunchbox, now wrapped in a blue cloth. The loose neck of the T-shirt slides sideways off one shoulder and Lara sees it—the top arm of the cross, a pale ridge curving over the hollow of her collarbone, standing out against her tan skin.

Lara’s smile doesn’t move. It holds the way a hand holds a stone, hard and unthinking. Her stomach drops through the floor.

Mari follows her line of sight and catches it immediately. She’s always been quick, even in rest. She pulls and sets the collar back over her shoulder. “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she says.

“I know,” says Lara.

Mari lingers with the lunchbox between them and puts one hand on the hook where the keys hang. Her key is the one with the teal rubber cap, and from its ring dangles a paper crane, badly folded, its wings slightly uneven. Mari has refused to replace it for months.

“Hey. So…” She looks at the key and not at Lara. “Autumn Higan’s comin’ up. We don’t observe, but we still go to the cemetery just to clean up the graves. And, well…” Mari pauses. “I’ve been thinkin’. I… wanna take you to see Mom.”

Mari has never said it aloud before.

Lara has known the woman only through photographs: the one on the shelf at the Ōtsu house, and the one Mari keeps in her wallet and never opens in front of anyone. Lara has looked at them often enough to know them like the lines of her own palm. The same steady brows. The same tilt of the eyes, as though every face she turned to were one she had already decided to trust. When they were sixteen, Lara had laughed and said that Mari had her mother’s whole face, and Mari had gone red and hunched her shoulders and said nothing.

It’s truer now. Eighteen has only sharpened it. It sits in the line of Mari’s jaw as she stands there with her eyes on the key, and in the hush when she’s working up to something. Lara looks at her and sees someone else looking back, from the other side of dark waters.

She can’t say why it makes her stomach turn. But her gaze slides, of its own accord, to the place where the collar was and the pale ridge beneath it, and then away.

“Okay.”

Mari’s face opens like a door. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” The word is out before the question has finished arriving. “I mean... it’s about time, isn’t it?”

“Yeah… yeah, it is.” Mari nods, her lips pressed into a thin line. “'Bout time.”

She sets the lunchbox in Lara’s hands and closes the last of the distance, close enough that Lara can count her eyelashes. “Don’t hit your head again.”

“I won’t.” Lara bends to press a kiss to Mari’s forehead, and then, because she can’t help it, another to her cheek.

She steps out onto the landing. Behind her the door stays open for a long moment, a bar of light across the hallway, and then it closes, the lock turning. Down the stairs the city is only beginning: a shutter rattling up, a bicycle bell, a smell of rain still deciding whether to come.

She walks with the lunchbox held against her chest, and lets her smile come down like a veil unpinned.

Somewhere in this country is a stone with a name on it, and under the stone is a woman whose cross went into the dark through her daughter’s back. Lara is to stand before it and say, Hello. Thank you. I am the one—

—she hasn’t yet found the second sentence. She isn’t sure there’s one.

By the time she reaches the corner, her legs are speaking again. She keeps walking.

***

The bakery keeps older hours than the city. When Lara turns into the lane behind it, the ovens have been lit for an hour, and the back door stands propped on a bucket, breathing out warmth and the smell of scorched sugar into the dawn. She stops there for a moment, as she does every morning, with the lunchbox still in her hand. It’s the closest thing she has to a threshold ritual.

Inside, the kitchen is all steel and fluorescent light, resonant with the long patient sound of machines. Chef is already at the bench with his sleeves rolled past the elbow, forearms white to the wrist, leaning over a slab of dough as if over a sleeping animal. He’s a broad, silent man with a face like a fortress wall.

“You’re late,” he says.

“I’m four minutes early.”

“You’re four minutes late for early.” He tips his chin toward the walk-in. “Butter’s out. Don’t let it go greasy.”

This is how he says good morning. She’s learned to get used to it.

Lara changes into her work clothes, ties her apron, and goes to work.

It’s the one thing in her life that’s never lied to her. Sugar is sugar. Eggs are cold, or they’re ruined. She weighs the butter and the sugar and beats them together until the color pales and the whole mass lightens like cream going to cloud, then folds in the flour by hand, in long slow strokes from the bottom of the bowl, because a machine can’t feel when to stop. The batter falls from the spatula in a glossy ribbon. Her hands know the weight of the bowl better than her own name. Somewhere in the second sponge the day’s noise falls away, the lists and the dreams and the dull pain in her calves, and what’s left is only temperature, and timing, and the way the crumb gives under her fingertip when she tests it. It’s a kind of prayer. She’s never said so to anyone, and no one has needed her to.

By seven, the first cakes come out of the ovens and rest on the racks, golden and domed, perfuming the whole kitchen with vanilla and browned butter. The shutters rattle up. The bell on the door begins to ring.

By nine, her legs have begun the early stages of throwing a tantrum.

It starts as it always does: static behind the knees, a rubber band pulled slowly taut. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other. She leans against the bench and lets the tile bear a little more of her, and she stays like that a moment longer than the work requires. The pain is an old acquaintance. It’s walked beside her for as long as she’s had these legs, so familiar she’s stopped thinking of it as something that happens to her and begun to think of it as a kind of weather. But the weather is changing. She feels it as sailors feel a coming storm in the shape of the air.

“Shiomi-san?”

She straightens too fast. Her fellow baker, Adachi, stands at her elbow with an empty tray; a young woman with an ombre ponytail, a pencil behind her ear, and a way of watching that’s much quieter than her chatter. “You okay?”

Lara nods, forcing a smile. “Yes.”

“Are you sure?” Adachi does not look convinced. “You’re standin’ like a flamingo. You’ve been doin’ it all week.”

“I was just stretching.” Lara lifts the next tray with both hands, and walks it toward the front with her spine very straight and her stride very even. She doesn’t limp because she’s never limped in her life. It’s a skill she acquired slowly and at some cost, and she has no intention of surrendering it to anyone.

Behind her, she can feel Adachi’s eyes follow her all the way to the door.

At her break, she sits on an upturned crate in the lane, in the narrow slice of light between two buildings, and opens the blue cloth on her knees.

Summer hasn’t left. It’s September, and the calendar says autumn, but the heat sits in the lane like a guest who hasn’t noticed the party is over. The brick at her back is warm through her shirt. Somewhere in the distance, one late cicada keeps up its thin, stubborn shriek, a little hoarser than in August like it knows its time is nearly up. From the gutter by the bin comes the other sound of the month, the first crickets, ticking quietly in the shade. Beside the back step, where the concrete has cracked, a clump of red spider lilies has shot up overnight, leafless and bright as struck matches. They always come when it’s close to the equinox, whether anyone has asked for them or not.

The lunchbox is still a landscape in miniature, though one rice ball has been bitten off at the top corner. The remaining sausages are still curled and grinning, the omelet rounds in their neat gold row. She eats the second onigiri slowly, the sesame one (it hides mentaiko and mayo in its heart). She saves the broccoli for last, because she’s been told to eat it, and because there’s a note on the lid that says:

eat the broccoli.

Lara laughs out loud, alone in the alley, so suddenly that a pigeon lifts from the bin and goes complaining over the roofs.

Her phone is in her apron. She photographs the empty box for the record and sends it with no caption at all.

The reply comes before she’s finished her drink.

clean plate club
proud of you

And then, a few seconds later:

did your head stop hurting?

She holds the phone against her chest and closes her eyes.

Not even a little, she types, with a cabinet emoji and a small face crying. The answer is a string of laughing faces.

sucks to be you
come home and i’ll rub your head again

She’s still smiling when she takes the note out again and smooths it flat against her knee. The handwriting leans hard to the right, as though even in ink Mari is bracing for a hit. She tucks the paper into her apron pocket, where it will go through the wash and come out soft as cloth, and she’ll find it again next week and not throw it away.

Lara can smell rain in the air. Above the rooftops, the strip of sky has gone the color of dishwater, and the humid air has gone still. The cicada has stopped. It’s the long gray season that comes after summer’s last heat, the one the city calls the autumn rain, when the front settles over the coast and a week of showers can arrive in an afternoon. She’s learned to read it in the backs of her knees. The ache has been climbing since breakfast, steady as a barometer, and now it sharpens, a sharp thin pressure running down both shins, as if the sky were leaning on her.

Through the propped-open door comes Chef’s voice, flat as a tray. “Break ended two minutes ago.”

“Coming.”

She collects her lunchbox and stands, the crate letting her go with a creak. The pain runs down both legs. She waits it out with one hand against the warm wall, counting under her breath, and by the time she turns toward the door, nobody can tell she’s hurting. Or at least, Lara hopes so.

The first drops reach the lane as she steps inside. They fall heavy on the steel awning, one and then ten and then all of them, and a long soft roar spreads across the roofs of the city. The heat breaks all at once, as if a hand had lifted it, and a cool breath comes down the lane smelling of wet concrete and crushed grass. Behind her, the red lilies bow under the water and stay lit. Her legs feel every drop.

She redoes the knot of her apron and goes back to the cakes.

***

The café is where it always is, on the ground floor of the old building, with its windows fogged from inside and its string lights burning bright against the dark. Lara has come to know the place the way one knows a shoreline. The bell over the door. The corner table, which belongs to them by long custom. The waiter who no longer asks what Shiki wants, because Shiki always wants the same thing and always pretends to be undecided.

The rain that broke over the city this afternoon has thinned to a drizzle. Mari was waiting at the mouth of the lane when Lara’s shift ended, her record store lanyard still around her neck and a clear plastic umbrella held out like an offering. The head rub, Mari informed her, was postponed until after dinner. They walked the whole way under it with their shoulders pressed together, stepping around puddles that the streetlamps had turned into small gold mirrors. Every step made Lara’s legs throb with soreness.

In the entryway they shake out the umbrella and slot it into the stand beside a dozen others, and the bell announces them.

They’re all there already. Shiki looks up first, and her whole face lights up.

“You’re late.”

“Sorry,” Lara says. “Shift went long.”

Mari pulls out a chair for Lara to sit before seating herself next to her. Shiki slides Lara’s usual drink order (hot chocolate with whipped cream and honeycomb toffee crumble) across the table to her. Naoto lifts two fingers in his small grave salute. Under the table Mari’s knee settles against hers and stays, warm through the denim, and Lara leans on it a little, as though it were only the tilt of the chair.

The talk has already started, the way it always has, in the middle.

“...and it’s four hundred drugs,” Shiki is saying. She has a textbook the size of a paving stone open beside her plate, bristling with colored tabs, and a highlighter uncapped in one fist. “Four hundred. And I gotta know what each one does, and what it don’t do, and which ones you absolutely cannot give with which other ones, or somebody’s granny turns purple. The exam’s Friday.”

“You’ll be fine,” says Kakeru.

“Don’t you ‘you’ll be fine’ me. You ain’t got a Friday.”

“Hey, I got a Friday. I got a Friday shift and a Friday night class.” Kakeru holds up two fingers. He wears a delivery company’s cap pushed back on his head, and his collar is rumpled, and under the cheer there’s a gray tiredness around his eyes that Lara has noticed more and more lately. “Eight to four at the warehouse, then straight on to Intro to Casework till nine. Last week my professor asked us to describe a time we felt powerless, and I said, ‘Right now, sir. This here lecture.’“

“What’d he say?”

“Gave me a B.”

“Awful generous, if you ask me,” says Naoto. He’s slumped in the corner seat with his croissant untouched and a sketchbook face-down beside his elbow. He has ink on his thumb, and his dark hair is flattened on one side, as if he’s been sleeping on a desk. “My editor’s been tryin’ to pick a fight with me.”

“Which editor?” asks Mari.

“Which one d’you reckon?”

“The one who wants you to kill the cat?”

“The cat. Ain’t. Dyin’.” Naoto sits up. For him, it is practically a shout. “It’s a story about a man, a cat, and a lighthouse. Ain’t nobody dies. That’s the whole premise. He keeps hollerin’ the third act needs ‘stakes,’ and I keep tellin’ him the stakes are that the man is lonely, and he says, ‘Sure, but what if the cat was sick?’ What about I make you sick? Man’s gratin’ on my ever-lovin' last nerve.”

“Damn,” says Shiki.

“I told him I’m fixin’ to resign from my own manga.”

“You can’t resign from your own manga.”

“Watch me.”

Lara laughs, with the rest of them, and curls her hands around the hot chocolate. Honeycomb crumble dissolves on her tongue, burnt-sweet and brittle, and the warmth of the cup travels up through her fingers.

Mari is leaning back in her chair with one arm hooked over its back and her knee still pressed to Lara’s. She doesn’t remember exactly when, but Mari has since stopped being a guest. She plucks the highlighter out of Shiki’s hand and uncaps and recaps it as she thinks. She takes the textbook and flips it round and reads a line of dense print with a frown, and says, “Okay, quiz time. What’s the one that turns your pee orange?” and Shiki shrieks “Rifampin!” and Mari says, “Nailed it. You’ll crush Friday,” and hands it back.

Lara watches her.

She remembers this very table, and a girl who sat with her fork pushing an egg across a plate, answered every question in the shortest words she could find and had locked herself into a bathroom in a panic. That girl is nowhere to be found now.

The friends have taken her in so completely that Lara can no longer find the boundary. There’s no place where one thing stops and the other begins. Shiki always saves her a seat at the table. Kakeru leaves her the last of the sauce. Naoto, who gives nothing away, put a record store job in Mari’s hands when she first came to the city—courtesy of being the owner’s nephew. They talk to her as if she’d always been here. As if the room had been waiting a long time, and had simply gone on setting a place.

It’s the best thing Lara has ever seen.

The conversation eventually drifts to something else.

“Now, let the record show,” Kakeru is saying, “I ain’t started whatever last Friday night was.”

“You started it,” says Naoto. “You were the host and everythin’.”

“I invited two friends to play one game.”

“At eleven p.m.”

“It was a horror game, you’re supposed to play it at night for the ambiance, y’know?” Kakeru spreads his hands. “I was lookin’ to be scared together, but what I did not account for—” Kakeru points at Mari and Naoto, “—was that these two jackasses were made of stone.”

“It ain’t even that scary,” Mari says, shrugging.

“True.” Naoto nods. “Ain’t like a bunch of pixels is gonna come through the screen and hurt you.”

Kakeru’s jaw drops. “Seriously? Y’all haven’t seen ‘The Ring’?”

“Sadako ain’t real, love.” Shiki steals a fry from Kakeru’s plate. “She can’t hurt you.”

“Yeah, and even if she’s real, just hang your TV up on the wall,” Mari supplies. “If she gotta crawl out of a well first, she ain’t gonna get back up from that tumble.”

“You reckon we could find that tape at a thrift store somewhere?” Naoto asks. “Kinda wanna see if I’d get cursed for real.”

Mari snaps her fingers and points at Naoto. “I’d take you up on that.”

“Also, hear me out,” Naoto says, and sets down his fork slowly. “Sadako’s kinda... you know…”

He lets it hang there.

It takes the table a moment. Shiki gets there first. Her face goes perfectly still, then her mouth falls open. Mari is next, her eyes going wide like a couple of saucers. Kakeru takes longest, frowning, working it through, until the answer arrives all at once and his whole body recoils from it.

“Oh, what the hell, Naoto?!”

“Hey, HEY, I said HEAR ME OUT—”

“Oh, Lord,” Shiki says, pressing a hand to her chest and lifting her eyes to the ceiling. “Forgive this child, for he hath strayed from the good path—”

“You ain’t hearin’ yourself?” Kakeru has half risen from his chair. “Sadako? Really? The hell’s wrong with you?”

“Pretty sure askin’ me that is discrimination—”

“Wait.” Mari’s face takes on a slow, terrible look of dawning. “Ain’t Sadako an actual kid? Like, she died young, didn’t she? She was what, twelve or somethin’?”

The table turns back to Naoto as one. For a moment nobody speaks.

Then it erupts.

Kakeru: “WHAT THE HELL, NAOTO?!”

Shiki: “You gotta pick a minor?! I mean, I know she’s a ghost, but damn, twelve?! After they raised the age of consent?!”

Kakeru: “Brother, Kayako’s right there!”

“Aw, fuck off, Mari’s messin’ with y’all!” Naoto throws up both hands. “Sadako died when she was nineteen! That’s right, she’s a grown ghost! She’s as legal as you and me!”     

“Naoto, baby.” Shiki is wiping her eyes, shaking her head. “I love you. But you gotta pack it up.”

“Look, I’m more likely to get in bed with her dad, but I’m just sayin’, gun to my head—”

“Ain’t nobody at this damn table’s puttin’ a gun to your head!” Kakeru looks like he’s having the worst migraine of his life. “I swear, if you don’t stop talkin’ right now—”

“Wow.” Naoto leans back, folds his arms, and gazes at the middle distance with the injured calm of a martyr. “They’re tryin’ to silence me. A grim day for gay dyslexics everywhere.”

“This ain’t about you bein’ gay and dyslexic!”

Shiki has slid halfway down her chair. Mari’s laugh has gone silent, which is how Lara knows it’s bad, her shoulders going and her face pressed into the crook of her elbow, one hand slapping the table in helpless rhythm. Even Kakeru is losing the fight, his mouth twitching, putting in visible effort to keep himself together.

Lara laughs too.

She laughs because they’re laughing, and the sound of it is the best thing in the room. But she’s half a beat behind, as she always seems to be at this part of the conversation, like someone listening to a joke in a language she’s still learning, catching every third word and following the rest by the shape of their faces. She leans forward. She opens her mouth.

“Wait, I don’t—”

Naoto says something that makes Kakeru’s wail roll over the top of it, and Shiki is shrieking, the question dissolves unasked into the noise. Lara closes her mouth. She smiles instead, and reaches for her drink, and turns the cup a quarter-turn on its saucer.

Next to her, Mari is still laughing, her eyes squeezed shut, her shoulders shaking, her whole body surrendered to it. Lara watches her for a long moment, with the warm noise of the café going on around her.

Lara knows the list by heart. She’s been keeping it without meaning to. Since March, Mari has eaten whatever she wants. She’s let her hair grow past her collar, and she tugs at it when she’s thinking, a gesture Lara had never seen before the summer. She runs, still, but she runs where her feet decide, along the harbor or up into the hills. In June she climbed Mount Rokko in a group of nine and ate her lunch at the summit, sent a photograph of the whole city laid out below her. A leather jacket and a pair of boots that were bought for no reason at all, for no purpose except that she liked them. She goes to live shows with the people from the record store and comes home with a wristband and ringing ears and nothing to explain. She cooks. She collects CDs and records. She talks to people and lets people talk to her. She has friends that play games with her until four in the morning. She stood in a women’s kickboxing workshop in July, with an enthusiastic Shiki on one side and a very reluctant Lara on the other, and halfway through the second drill her face changed, and Lara saw it: something old and radiant, rising in her like a fish to the surface. And in August, with her bag over one shoulder, she walked into the gym that had left its door open for her, and signed up as a paying member—a beginner. Starting again, from square one.

She is, Lara thinks, building a whole life here. In daylight, with her own hands.

She’d cheered for this girl at every tournament; her phone screen be damned. She’d sent exclamation marks across prefectures, never once asking the question that mattered until Mari broke down on her (now their) kitchen floor that one fateful winter day. And now Mari is here, laughing with her whole body, undeniably happier than Lara has ever seen her be, and she’s been seated in the front row of it like an honored guest.

She doesn’t feel she’s earned the seat.

“Okay, anyway,” Shiki says after the laughter has died down. “The Kyoto Protocol at Pangea, Saturday night. I’m checkin’ again, who’s in?”

“Ooh! Are we gonna take your old man’s Kombi to Osaka?” Kakeru asks, hopeful.

“Hell yeah. I got my driver’s license and the Kombi’s mine.” Shiki tosses her hair over her shoulder with a flick of her wrist. “Mama’s gonna take good care of you.”

Kakeru bats his eyelashes at Shiki. “Can Mama make room for me?”

“Sure thing, baby boy.” Shiki winks at him before she turns to Naoto. “Naoto?”

Naoto shrugs. “KyoPro’s a little too try-hard-edgy for me but sure, I’m down.”

“Mari, you should bring people from the shop,” Shiki says. “Bring the whole shop. Seriously, the more the merrier. I want it to be loud.”

“Well, Iroha said she wanted to go,” says Mari, counting on her fingers. “And Utage, and Yuno, and Tooru, too, but I’m not sure about Seiji. I’ll ask if he’s up for it.”

“Seiji ain’t gonna say yes,” Naoto says. “He’s a jazz snob.”

“But Utage’s goin’, so he’ll probably go.”

Naoto considers this and tips his head, conceding. Shiki beams. Lara is the last to laugh, a moment late, and no one seems to notice.

“Lara,” Shiki says, turning in her chair. “You in?”

“Hm?”

“The show.” Shiki’s voice softens. “I know it’s loud, and I know you don’t really like goin’ to these things but I just figured I’d ask.”

It’s a kindness, and Lara knows it. She remembers the last show, a cramped room in Nada with the bass coming up through the floor and into her teeth, and how she stood at the very back near the exit with her hands over her ears. They had all noticed. No one had said a word.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’ll go.”

Shiki blinks. “Really?”

“Mari’s going anyway.” She turns to look at her girlfriend. “I might as well.”

Beside her, Mari’s face lights up like a window thrown open on a room full of sun. “You’re comin’?”

“Yeah. If you’re going, I’m going.”

“But are you sure, though? It’ll be loud like last time.”

“I’ll be fine,” Lara says. “As long as you’re there.”

“We’re getting you some good earplugs, then.”

Mari’s face is bright under the lights, and it’s a terrible thing to be looked at like that. It’s a terrible, wonderful thing, and Lara has no place to put it. Her chest has gone tight and dangerous, and she needs, quite suddenly, to do something.

So she leans over and kisses Mari on the cheek.

It’s quick and a little clumsy, her mouth landing just beside the corner of Mari’s mouth, and she pulls back at once, as if she’s just touched a stove. Mari freezes. The red begins at her collar and climbs steadily over her neck and her ears and all the way to her face.

“Lara—!”

“What?” Lara says innocently.

“Oh, c’mon!” Kakeru looks—and sounds—like he’s about to throw himself out the window. “Get a room, y’all!”

“There’s a hotel two streets over,” says Naoto.

“Hey, don’t give ‘em any ideas.”

“You’re the one who told ‘em to get a room.”

“They have a room,” says Shiki. “They have a whole apartment. And Lord knows what they do there.”

Mari has put her face in both hands. Her ears are the color of raw salmon. Under the table, her foot finds Lara’s and presses down, hard, in what is either revenge or a thank-you, and Lara decides, for the sake of peace, that it’s both.

“You’ve been quiet today, though,” Shiki says, tipping her head and studying Lara with her usual lightness and her slightly-too-patient eyes. “Everythin’ okay?”

“Just tired.” The smile comes easily. “It’s been a long week.”

They leave when the plates are cleared and the night has gone deep and properly dark. Shiki hugs them both at the door, Naoto makes his two-fingered salute, and Kakeru shouts something that’s swallowed by the bell. Then there’s only the street, shining and empty after the rain, a few early leaves plastered flat against the pavement, and Lara’s hand finding Mari’s without a word. The drizzle has stopped. The umbrella stays furled under Mari’s arm.

The slope is steeper going up, and the wet stones make it worse. Lara takes it the way she’s learned to, with her weight set a little forward and her free hand brushing the wall. No one watching would call it anything but a stroll.

Mari slows by half a step. She doesn’t look down, or comment, or reach for her. She simply matches her pace to Lara’s, as though she’d always intended to walk this slowly. They pass the shrine tucked between two buildings. They pass the rival bakery, and Lara aims her ritual scowl at its window, and Mari laughs.

“Oh, hey,” Mari says, somewhere past the second corner, swinging their joined hands once. “Coach says we start sparring tomorrow.”

Lara feels the world narrow in an instant.

“It’s gonna be light. Nobody’s tryin’ to hurt anybody.” Mari ducks her head, and the corner of her mouth lifts, almost boyishly. “But, yeah. Finally. I’ve been waiting like a month.”

“That’s wonderful,” says Lara.

“Yeah. I mean… I dunno how I’m gonna do ‘cause I haven’t sparred in a while,” Mari admits. “But it’s a beginner’s class, so I get to be bad at it like everyone else. Never thought I’d be happy about suckin’ at somethin’, but I am.”

She hears her own voice say the next thing. You must be so excited. She sees Mari glow in the low light, a girl telling someone good news, and there’s happiness in it. There is, Lara is almost sure, no part of her that wants it taken back.

But the cold has come in under the joy again, like a seam of water under a door. It runs down the length of her from throat to heel.

They climb the rest of the slope without speaking. At the top, where the streets flatten and their building comes into view with every window dark but the stairwell’s, Lara realizes she’s been counting her steps.

The next evening the apartment is quiet, the way it is when the light goes early and the heater hasn’t yet caught. A pot of pumpkin curry mutters on the back burner, orange as a lantern, filling the room with the smell of cumin and sweet squash. Lara stands at the counter with a wooden spoon in one hand and her phone propped against the flour jar, and she isn’t watching the pot.

There’s nothing new in her inbox.

She drags her finger down the screen. The page shivers, reloads, and nothing new.

She stirs the curry. She counts to thirty. She drags her finger down the screen again.

The waitlist had been the easy part, in the end. In March, the school had written to say a place had opened and was hers, conditional on proof of funds: a bank statement showing the first year’s tuition, or a guarantor willing to sign for it. She’d read the letter on her bed. She has a GED, an hourly wage and a lease the size of a shoebox. She has no parents to sign anything, no savings that would cover a tenth of the figure, no account of the right kind. The form had a line for Guarantor Name, and she’d looked at it for a so long she might have burned a hole in the paper. She’d written to the school asking whether anything could be done. The reply was polite, and kind, and final. The place went to the next name on the list.

She’d told Mari that it was a paperwork problem. Which was, strictly, true.

If Mari knew the truth, she would’ve emptied her pockets onto the table without a word. Lara couldn’t let her. It would’ve felt like taking food from a child.

But the weather changed when Chef had come to her bench one morning in July with his forearms white to the wrist and an envelope in his hand. He set it down beside the dough, and walked away. It held a letter on the bakery’s paper, in a hand like a row of fence posts. The Confectionery Association gave scholarships each year to a young baker from each region in the nation, with a full tuition and a place at a school of their choice. A candidate had to be nominated by a working chef. He’d written four paragraphs. She read them standing in the walk-in with the cold coming off the shelves and had to put her hand over her mouth.

“Don’t make me regret the postage,” he’d said, at the end of the shift, not looking at her.

The results will be posted any day now. She’s checked her emails this morning, at the bus stop, at her break, and in the quiet corner by the walk-in, with the phone cupped in both hands. She drags her thumb down the screen. The page shivers.

No new messages.

“It’s not gonna change,” she says aloud, to the curry.

She drags her thumb down the screen.

At a quarter to nine, a key scrapes in the lock.

“I’m home—” Mari kicks the door shut behind her, shoulders her bag to the floor, and turns; her hair stuck in damp whorls to her forehead, her whole body loose with fatigue. “Okay, so, my sparrin’ partner hits like a mosquito, but he’s so fast, I couldn’t find him, I kept swingin’ at air, and then—”

Lara has already flipped the phone face-down on the counter, a guilty reflex. She turns, spoon in hand, a smile on its way up.

It stops where it is.

There’s blood on Mari’s mouth.

An unmistakable bead of red at the corner of her lower lip, where it’s split, and a thread of it run down into the crease of her chin. Blood, the one that comes with the sport she’s loved since she was small. And Lara, standing with a wooden spoon dripping onto the floor, feels as though someone has lowered the apartment into water.

“I got tagged,” Mari says cheerfully, touching two fingers to the cut. “It’s nothin’, though, don’t—”

“Sit.”

Lara hears herself say it. Her voice is perfectly steady.

She turns off the burner and takes the small white box from the cupboard above the fridge. She wastes no time sitting Mari on the edge of the bed, and kneels in front of her with gauze and antiseptic and a damp cloth. She tips Mari’s chin up to the light with two fingers. Her hands don’t tremble. They know the way, from a hundred small bakery accidents, burns and nicks and the tender cuts of a kitchen.

“It ain’t even that deep,” Mari says, through the cloth. “I’ve had way worse—ow—”

“Shh, don’t talk too much.”

“It’s fine, I just—ow, okay, that stings—”

“Hold still.” Lara dabs at the corner of her mouth. The cloth comes away pink. She turns it to a clean fold and goes on gently in small circles, until the cut is a thin clean line, and Mari’s face under her hands is only a face again, flushed and alive. “There. It’ll heal in two days.”

“You’re so good at this.”

“I’ve had practice.”

“Not on me, you haven’t.” Mari catches her wrist, grinning. “Thanks. I’m gonna shower. Wouldn’t wanna eat dinner smellin’ like a sock.”

She stands and crosses the room with her hands in her hair. The bathroom door closes. The pipes cough, and sputter, and then the water evens into a steady stream, because Mari knows the trick now.

Lara stays on her knees on the floor.

She looks at the gauze in her hand. There’s a small dark flower on the white, the sort of thing that appears in any kitchen on any day after any small accident. But her fingers have begun to shake so hard that she has to press them against her thigh, then to the floor, then flat to the floorboards, one by one, like she’s trying to hold the building still.

Here, she says, to no one. Here. Here.

Through the bathroom door, over the roar of the water, Mari has begun to sing, working through the verse of a song Lara’s heard playing from one of her records.

She listens until her hands are quiet.

Then she folds the gauze into a small square, buries it at the bottom of the bin beneath the eggshells and the flour bag, where no one will find it, and gets up. The curry has begun to catch at the bottom of the pot. She turns the heat low and stirs, scraping the brown from the bottom in long slow strokes.

Her phone is still where she left it; lying face-down, its screen long since gone dark. If she were to turn it over and wake it, the page would still say what it said before.

She doesn’t touch it.

The email arrives the next day, at fifteen minutes past ten while she’s decorating one of their cake orders.

She feels it before she hears it, a small hum against her hip, the phone in her apron pocket shivering like a trapped bird. She doesn’t reach for it because she’s been feeling that hum for four days, and each time it’s been a delivery notice, a sale at the supermarket, a message from the bank. She lays the buttercream on the cake and turns it. The phone goes quiet and then buzzes again, once, persistent about something that’s been waiting to be read.

“Go,” says Chef, from the other end of the bench, without looking up.

“It’s only—”

“Go.”

She wipes her hands on her apron and goes into the walk-in, because it’s the one room in the bakery with a door and no windows. The clean slap of the cold takes her at once, and the shelves of butter and cream stand around her like a congregation. She holds the phone in both hands, and the screen wakes with a name she knows.

Subject: Notice of Award - The Confectionery Association Scholarship,

She reads the first line and her eyes slide off it, as eyes do from a bright light. She starts again.

We are pleased to inform you…

The rest comes in pieces, out of order, like something surfacing. Full tuition for one academic year. A living stipend. Nominated by your chef. This award is conditional upon admission to an accredited program of your choice. Admission must be confirmed by the end of the next intake cycle.

Next intake. She closes her eyes and counts. Applications open in the winter for the spring term. She might need to rebuild her portfolio, and the interview is a thing she can’t yet picture. But there’s a door in front of her now, with a handle, and the handle turns.

Joy comes up through her like heat through a floor, so large and so sudden that she has to put her hand flat against a shelf. She laughs, a small cracked sound that echoes off the steel. She presses her fist against her mouth and she’s eighteen, or fifteen, or two hundred, standing at the edge of the lake with her feet in the shallows and the whole radiant surface of the world spread out before her.

Then she feels it in her legs.

It’s only the cold, perhaps. It’s only the standing. But the ache comes with: how will you stand for ten hours a day, in a school kitchen, on stone?

She stays in the cold until her fingers have gone white. Then she wipes her face with the heel of her hand, and goes back out.

Chef is at the bench with his back to her. His shoulders are perfectly square.

“Well?” he says.

“I got it.”

For a moment he does nothing at all. Then he sets down his scraper, lays both hands flat on the bench, and exhales through his nose, a long slow breath. “Good,” he says to the dough. “Congratulations, Shiomi.”

Adachi, who’s been listening at the pass with her pencil pressed hard against her lip, squeals and flings both arms around Lara’s neck.

She tells Mari that night, at the door, before the other girl’s overshirt is off.

She’d meant to be graceful. She’d practiced a sentence on the walk home, in her head, with a calm clear opening. Instead she opens her mouth and nothing comes, and then she’s holding out her phone with the email on it like a child with a drawing.

Mari reads it standing in the entryway with her socks still on. Her lips move, slightly, on the long words. Then she looks up, and her whole face goes, with no warning, entirely to pieces.

“Lara.”

Lara nods quickly. “I know.”

“You—it’s the whole—”

“I know—”

“You did it!” Mari drops her bag, and she’s across the floor in two steps with her arms around Lara’s waist, and then the floor is gone.

Lara shrieks. Mari has lifted her clean off the ground, her arms locked around Lara’s middle. She spins her in a circle in the tiny apartment, laughing, her head thrown back, the blur of the apartment wheeling around them: the cabinet, the plants, the record player, the gold of the lamp. Lara’s legs dangle, light as reeds. She isn’t bearing any weight. For the length of one whole turn the ache is gone, and she clings to Mari’s shoulders and laughs until she can’t breathe.

“Mari! Put me down! Put me down, I’m gonna be sick—”

“Never!”

“You’re gonna drop me!”

“I ain’t ever dropped you before!”

Mari sets her down at last, gently, with her hands on Lara’s waist, and holds her there at arm’s length with her face shining. “I’m so proud of you. I’m so proud. You know that, right? You know that?”

“I know.”

“We need to call some people. We need to celebrate. I’m takin’ you to that barbecue place you wanted to try last week—”

Lara has sat down on the edge of the bed. She does it neatly, as if she’d meant to. “That sounds lovely.”

“You look tired.” Mari crouches in front of her, hands on her knees, the joy wavering for a second into something more watchful. “Long day?”

“Yeah.” Lara reaches out as she speaks. “But I’m here now.”

Her palm finds Mari’s cheek, warm and slightly rough with wind. It’s only meant to be a touch. But Mari’s face is tilted up to her, her eyes wary with the question still sitting in it, and the sentence is right there, already shaped on her tongue.

Mari.

My legs—

Lara leans down and kisses her, and she does it with her whole mouth to keep it closed. She feels Mari go still against her, and then, a half-beat late, she kisses back, one hand lifting to rest on Lara’s wrist, and Lara presses closer, as if she could press the sentence all the way back down to her throat.

Say it.

The voice arrives from the quiet place under her ribs.

Say it.
Say it.
Say it.

Mari pulls back.

She does it gently, with her hand still on Lara’s wrist, and her forehead stays close, her breath warm and uneven between them. Her eyes search Lara’s face with the same look as before, brief and searching, there and gone, like a hand passing over a surface to feel for a crack.

Then she smiles, and the look vanishes.

“Okay,” she says, a little breathless. “Wow. Okay. Noted.” She squeezes Lara’s wrist and stands, rolling her shoulders. “I’m gonna go shower, and then you’re gonna go shower, then we’re calling all our friends, and then—hey. Before I forget.”

Lara sits a little straighter.

Mari scuffs her toe against the floor. “We’re still going to Mom’s, right?”

The room goes quiet.

Lara has been picturing it for days, and the picture never changes. Flowers. A bucket of water, a wooden ladle, Mari’s hands rinsing the stone as if it were a sleeping face. And then Mari stepping aside, with her sleeves pushed to the elbow, and saying, Mom, this is Lara.

Lara isn’t frightened of the silence that will come after. A dead woman can’t refuse her. She can’t forgive either, and that’s the worse of the two. There will be no hand to take, no face to read, no word to press her forehead against. There will only be a quiet that listens, as the lake once listened, and keeps its own accounts.

She knows exactly what she’ll see when she closes her eyes to bow. She’s seen it every night since the lake: something swinging, dragged out through a back that was warm a moment before. The woman who wore that cross passed it down to her daughter, and her child’s killer will kneel before the stone with the same hands—rinsed clean—and put her palms together.

She feels the weight of the blade in them now. It’s only a memory, but it’s exactly the right size.

“Yes,” she says. “Of course. I haven’t forgotten.”

Mari beams at her before she heads into the bathroom. The pipes begin to cough, and the water evens into a steady stream.

Lara remains on the edge of the bed. She can still see that sentence clearly. We are pleased to inform you. Somewhere a long way below the joy, below the ache in her calves, something cold and weighty lowers its anchor and holds.

She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. After a while, she folds them in her lap, one over the other, as if holding something that might escape.

The first truly cool day of the year comes down on them like a hand laid over a pot, and the city, it seems, yearns for the bakery.

By noon the queue reaches the door. By one it’s bent around the corner, a patient crooked line of scarves unpacked from drawers and college kids in new jackets. The bell never stops. Adachi is dragged to the front of the house to work the register, and Chef has gone entirely silent, which is how he shows panic, shifting trays from oven to rack with the efficiency of a man defusing something. Lara hasn’t sat down since the start of her shift.

She hasn’t slept much either. The night had been a long one: the dream, Mari’s heartbeat, the slow retreat to her own side of the bed, and then four hours of staring at the ceiling and counting. At the door that morning Mari had given her another boxed lunch and said, make sure you eat your vegetables, and Lara had said that she would. She hasn’t found a minute to open it.

The ache began before the doors did. By ten it was a live wire. By noon it had stopped being a wire altogether and become something with edges, a slow radiating pressure down the long bones of both legs, as if she were walking on the blades of small knives. She’s been walking on them since. She does it well. She’s always done it well. It’s only that the knives seem, lately, to be growing.

At a quarter past two, the last of the muffins come out of the oven, and she crouches to pull the bottom tray. She’s done it a thousand times—the tray slides out on its rails, heavy and fragrant. She gets her hands under it and begins to rise.

The room tilts.

Like a boat taking a wave, the entire steel kitchen slides a degree to the left. The edges of things go white. She hears the tray before she knows she’s dropped it, a long clanging crash that seems to arrive from a distance. The floor rushes up to meet her with the deliberate patience of a tide.

It’s cold against her cheek. The tile is clean. She watches a single crumb of streusel roll across it, slowly, and come to rest against a drain.

Here, she thinks, absurdly. Here. Here.

“SHIOMI-SAN!”

Hands. Quick and shaking, turning her onto her back. The newbie dishwasher’s—Tateishi’s—face is above her, white as paper. Then a shadow across the light and a bigger pair of hands lifting her head, and Chef’s face, closed as a shutter, with something behind it that she’s never seen there.

“Breathe,” he says. It is a command.

She breathes. The kitchen swims back into focus by degrees, the steel and the pans, the muffins scattered across the floor like fallen debris. “I’m fine,” she says. “I stood up too fast.”

“You’re not fine.”

“It’s the heat. And I skipped—”

“Shiomi.” He hasn’t raised his voice. “Sit up slowly.”

They get her to the stool by the walk-in. Someone presses a paper cup of water into her hands, and she drinks it, her fingers shaking so hard that half of it spills. Out front the bell is still ringing. The queue is still waiting. Adachi darts back and forth between them with her hands pressed to her mouth.

“I’ll call someone,” Chef says. “Who do I call? Adachi mentioned you live with your p—”

“Don’t.” It comes out too sharp. She sees him register it, a flicker at the corner of one eye, and she softens it at once, as she would fold a sheet of laminated dough. “I’m sorry. It’s only dizziness. I’ll go home and rest.”

He regards her for a long moment—he’s a man who’s never once in her hearing asked about her life, and she sees him decide, with visible effort, not to begin now.

“Go home, then,” he says. “Take the day off tomorrow.”

***

The bus stop stands at the bottom of the hill, a plain bench under a plastic shelter, with a timetable gone yellow behind scratched glass. Lara sits down on it.

A bus comes. She watches its doors fold open and shut again, and she doesn’t get on. She tells herself that she’s waiting for the dizziness to pass. A second bus comes, and goes.

The knives haven’t stopped. They’ve settled into a low, steady cutting, from her heels to the backs of her knees, constant now, and almost companionable. She presses the heels of her hands against her thighs. She’s known this pain since the day she first realized she’ll never have a tail again. She’d thought she had made her peace with it—a small price, something she paid in the margins, a tax on the miracle of being here.

Her phone is in her pocket. She takes it out and wakes it, and the screen fills with Mari.

It’s the photo she took in July, on the day they went to the planetarium in Akashi. Mari stands at the foot of the tower in the last of the evening light, with the big clock face above her and the sky behind going the violet of a healing bruise. She’s mid-laugh, one hand holding her hair out of her eyes, and she hasn’t noticed the camera. She was laughing at Lara, who’d cried a little in the dark under the painted stars and insisted it was the dust.

Lara took the picture without a word, and the next morning she made it the wallpaper. She sees it a hundred times a day. It’s never once failed to change the way she breathes.

Her thumb goes of its own accord to the contact at the top of the list.

Mari.

She could call. It would take one touch. Mari would pick up on the second ring, because she always picks up on the second ring, and Lara would say I’m at the bus stop and I can’t stand up, and in the time it takes a bus to traverse city lanes Mari would be here, crouched in front of her on the pavement with her hands on Lara’s knees and her face full of fear.

She’s seen that face. She’s seen it every night since she was fifteen, from the other side, in the dark.

She knows, distantly, that she brought Mari back. She knows she reached into the depths and pulled her out. She knows it as a fact in a language she can read and doesn’t speak.

The third bus comes. She gets to her feet.

It takes a long time. She stands with one hand on the shelter’s frame and waits for the street to stop leaning, and then she walks, a step at a time. Past the dry cleaner and the shuttered shrine and the grape-soda machine, up the long slope with her hand brushing the wall, she counts her steps, and when the count gets too high she starts again.

She’s halfway up the slope when she remembers that Mari would already be home.

The record store opens at nine, and Mari’s hours end at three, and by three-fifteen she’s always home, in an old T-shirt, with the record player turning and something started on the stove. On most days, Lara would still be at the bench until seven. The apartment won’t be empty. It will be warm and lit, with someone in it who has no reason to expect her early.

She stops under the dry cleaner’s awning and presses her back against the cold glass, and she begins to build the lie.

I’m sick will not do, because Mari would have her on the bed with a thermometer inside a minute. Chef gave me the afternoon won’t do either. With the queue around the corner, he’d sooner give her a kidney. She turns it over and over, testing each seam. It has to be something true-sounding that can’t be checked, small enough to bore, and dull enough that no one will ask a second question.

The oven tripped the breaker. She tries it in her head. Chef shut down early. Everyone went home.

It fits. It’s a little too good, and she knows it, and she hates how easily it came. In January, she’d held Mari’s hands and said that they hadn’t been honest with each other lately, and they had promised. Whenever. Anything. She’d meant every word.

But she’s gotten fluent at lying, and that’s the part that frightens her. Her throat tightens and her eyes sting and she holds the edge of the glass until the feeling passes.

It’s only for today.

She pushes away from the wall and climbs on.

***

The stairs are the worst.

She takes them one at a time, with her bag held in front of her like a shield. On the landing she stops, closes her eyes, and breathes through her nose until her face is her own again. She sets her smile; the sort of smile a person wears after a good day’s work.

Through the door, she can hear the record player. The smell of rice and something frying drifts out beneath it, and the rattle of a pan.

She turns the key. It sticks, and she jiggles it, and the door swings open onto warm air and yellow light.

Mari is at the stove with her back turned, in one of Lara’s old T-shirts, a spatula in her hand. She’s humming. She’s started dinner early, the way she does after her shifts, because she likes to be ahead of herself, and the pot is already lidded and ticking. She hasn’t heard the lock, and she hasn’t heard the clogs.

Then the floor creaks under Lara’s foot, and Mari spins, spatula up like a weapon, and her whole body jerks.

“What—” Her hand slaps to her chest. “Lara?”

“I’m home.”

“You scared the—” Mari stares. Her gaze goes over Lara’s shoulder, to the clock above the door, and back. “It’s not four yet.”

“Yeah, the oven tripped the breaker.” The lie slides out as smooth as butter. She slips off her clogs in the entryway one at a time, with a hand against the wall. “Chef shut everything down. We all got sent home.”

“Huh.”

“I almost walked the long way. It’s lovely out.”

Mari doesn’t move. There’s a kettle singing on the burner behind her, and the record turns, and the spatula hangs forgotten from her fingers. The surprise hasn’t left her face, but something quieter has come to sit beside it. She’s looking at Lara’s face, only her face, with her head tilted very slightly to one side. It lasts exactly one beat longer than it should.

“Okay,” Mari says.

Then she turns back to the stove, and the room breathes again.

Lara hangs her bag on the hook. She crosses to the table and lowers herself into the chair. The moment she does, her legs thank her in a visceral rush that she bears without a flicker. The record turns. The pot ticks. On the counter, Mari has laid out the marinated pork. There’s half a head of cabbage cut fine as thread, and the pot with its steam rising straight up in the air.

“Hope you’re starvin’, ‘cause I think I made too much,” Mari says, before she goes on to talk about her day. Lara lets her because it’s the easiest thing in the world. As she cooks, Mari talks about how her coworkers Seiji and Utage got into it again, about the state of J-pop after the 2010s, and Seiji said something about Naniwa Danshi that made Utage chase him around the store with a broom. A man came in with a hummed fragment of a song from a commercial in 1998, and nothing else, no words, no name, and Mari stood there with her eyes shut and said wait, wait, and then pulled a record from the third bin without looking, and he cried a little. “I didn’t know what to do, so Iroha gave him a tissue and then charged him for it.”

Lara laughs. She knows she should get up and change, but her legs are dead to the world. She watches Mari from the table instead—gesturing, glowing, telling the story of her own day as if it were an adventure—and something eats away at her with every breath.

“—and then Seiji goes, ‘Actually, bein’ a jazz enthusiast DOES mean you’re better than everyone else, ‘cause’—”

Mari’s phone buzzes against the counter.

It is face-down, a small black rectangle beside the cutting board, and it shivers once, and goes still. She glances at it without much interest, flips it over, and her thumb moves to open it.

“Oh, it’s Suiren,” she says, easily. “Hold on.”

Lara’s blood runs cold.

Suiren.

That's Adachi's given name. Lara and Mari are close enough with her outside of work that Mari almost never refers to her by her surname.

The air in the room changes.

It’s nothing that anyone could point to, but Lara feels it all the same; a pressure drop, the way her legs feel a storm coming a day before the sky does.

Mari reads. A small line appears between her eyebrows, a puzzled one, not yet anything else.

“Suiren just asked me if you got home okay.”

Lara’s mouth is dry. “Oh... did she?”

“Yeah.” Mari is already typing, her thumbs quick and unconcerned. “Wonder what that’s about.”

She says it aloud as she types, as if the words were only passing through. Yeah, she’s home. Why? She hits send, then she sets the phone next to the cutting board before picking up her wooden spoon again.

Lara watches the phone.

She can’t read the screen from here. She can only watch the black glass, and Mari beside it, stirring a boiling pot. The seconds stack up. Somewhere in the apartment the record reaches the end of its side, and the needle begins to tick like a clock in a room where someone is dying.

The phone buzzes.

Mari picks it up. She reads it, and Lara watches her face change.

It doesn’t happen all at once. First the line between her eyebrows deepens. Then her mouth goes slack, just slightly, the way a person’s does when they’ve missed a step on a stair. Her thumb scrolls. She reads it again, from the top. The color goes out of her in a slow tide, from forehead to throat, and her fingers tighten on the edges of the phone until the knuckles whiten.

She turns off the burner.

She looks at Lara.

“You passed out at work?”

Lara opens her mouth.

Nothing comes.

She has the words. She can feel their shape on her tongue. But the place where her voice lives has gone smooth and blank, like a wall where a door used to be, and she remembers, suddenly and with impossible clarity, a shore at the edge of the sea and a bargain made in the dark. She’d paid for her legs with her voice once. She thought she had it back.

“Wait.” Mari’s voice is urgent. “Wait, but you said... you said the oven—”

The look in her eyes feels like a slash across Lara’s face.

“You lied to me?” It climbs, cracking at the top. “You came in here and looked me in the face. You got home early because you passed out?”

“Mari, I’m sorry—”

Lara’s voice comes out brittle and thin. She hears it with horror. It’s hardly a voice at all.

“You didn’t tell me? How could you?”

“I didn’t want you to worry—”

“I’m always gonna worry about you!” It rips out of her, raw and far too loud for the narrow room, and Lara flinches as if the sound had a hand. “That’s the whole—that’s what it is. You’re my—”

The word catches on her like a sleeve on a nail.

Lara waits. Her heart is going so hard that she can feel it in her fingers.

“You’re my girlfriend,” Mari says, much quieter, and somehow that’s worse.

“It was busy,” Lara says. She hears herself start, and can’t stop. The lie is already in motion, a cart on a downhill slope. “It was so busy, the queue went around the block. I stood up too fast, I skipped lunch, it wa—”

“Nobody passes out just from standin’ up too fast.”

Mari says it like a ruling. She turns from the kitchen and crosses the floor in four strides, snatching her jacket from its hook. The paper crane on the key ring swings wildly in the wake of her.

“I’m takin’ you to the ER.”

“Mari, no, wait—”

Lara is up. She doesn’t know how. Her legs scream the moment they take her weight, a long shriek from heel to hip, and she ignores it, bounds across the floor in what’s very nearly a stumble, and steps between Mari and the door.

She plants herself there.

They stand an arm’s length apart, breathing. Mari has one sleeve of the jacket on. Her hand is half-reaching for the doorknob, and it stops in the air a few inches from Lara’s waist. Lara sees her measure the distance. She sees her understand, as clearly as Lara does, that Mari could move her aside with one hand as easily as lifting a bag, and that she will not, because she’s afraid of what she might break.

It’s the cruelest thing Lara has ever used, and she didn’t even choose it.

“I have the day off tomorrow,” she says. Her voice has found itself again. It comes out like she’s calming horses. “Chef told me not to come in. So I won’t have work, and I’ll rest, and then I’ll be better, okay? I promise. Everything is going to be fine.”

Mari says nothing.

She stands with the jacket hanging off her shoulder and her eyes fixed on Lara’s face. It’s a long, unreadable silence. Lara holds still beneath it, and feels her pulse go up and up like a thing running from a fire.

“Is it... your legs?”

“No.”

It’s out as the question barely finishes. It overlaps the last word, and Lara hears the lie landing hard on the back of the truth with no breath between. She sees Mari hear it too.

“It’s just the hours,” she says quickly, too quickly. “I’ve been on my feet since morning. Anyone would be tired. But it’s nothing to do with my legs.”

“Then...” Mari’s voice drops, like she’s decided something. She looks past Lara’s shoulder to the door and then back, and her jaw sets. “I can’t have you workin’ yourself to the ground like this. If we’re short on money, if that’s how it is, I’m droppin’ the—”

“NO!”

The word leaves Lara like a bullet.

It cracks off the cabinets and the window and the glass of the stove, and Mari stumbles back half a step. Lara flinches with her. She didn’t know she had a voice like that. It came from somewhere deep in her that doesn’t take orders, and it’s still shaking in the air between them like a struck bell.

“I’m sorry,” she says. It comes out ragged. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout. But don’t. Please. Not for this.”

“Lara—”

“I mean it, Mari.”

“It’s a membership.” Mari’s eyes are bright and wet and furious. “I can box again any other day, but I care about you more than a damn gym, how is that not—why is that so hard for you to—”

She stops.

Lara doesn’t mean to put her hand on her mouth. It’s only that the sentence has reached her and gone straight through, and she can’t stand up under it. I care about you more. It’s the kindest thing anyone has ever said to her, and it’s the very thing she can’t let be true, because it means that the girl in front of her would burn her whole life down on the table for someone who’s lying to her face. And Lara has already seen what that costs. She’s seen it from the other side of a knife.

She says nothing. She can’t.

They stand in the wreck of the entryway, listening to the needle tick, tick, tick in the empty groove.

At last, Mari’s shoulders come down.

It’s something more tired than surrender. She takes the jacket off her one arm and drops it on the floor, scrubbing the heel of her hand over her face and leaving it there a moment.

“Fine,” she says, behind it. “Fine. No ER. Not tonight.”

Lara’s knees nearly go.

“But you’re stayin’ in bed tomorrow. All day. I mean it. No bakery, no cleanin’, no nothin’,” she says roughly. “And I ain’t askin’ you this time. If you pass out one more time, if you feel dizzy, or weird, or anythin’, you call me. I don’t care if I’m mid-shift. I don’t care if I’m at the top of a mountain somewhere. You call me.”

“I will.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise,” Lara says.

Mari looks at her for a long moment. Then she steps forward, takes Lara’s wrist in her hand, and turns it palm-up between them.

Two fingers settle against the inside of it.

Lara goes cold from the scalp down.

“What are you doing?”

“Checkin’.” Mari does not look up. Her lips move, very slightly, counting. The little crease has returned between her eyebrows. “You find the pulse, and you count it for fifteen seconds, and you multiply. It’s the first thing they show you.”

Her pulse is going like something trapped. She can feel it hammering under Mari’s fingertips, a traitorous thing, and there’s nothing in the world she can do to quiet it.

“Ninety-six,” Mari says.

“Is that bad?”

“It’s a little high. For restin’.” The fingers do not lift. “But it’s probably because you ain’t feelin’ well.”

“Or maybe because we shouted at each other,” Lara says. She meets Mari’s eyes. Her heart pounds against those two fingers, and she waits for the floor to open.

“Yeah,” Mari says, slowly. “We did.”

She guides Lara back into the apartment.

Lara gets changed, then they eat dinner in silence at opposite sides of the table. Mari clears the plates. She runs the water too long. She doesn’t hum. When she’s done, she dries her hands on the hem of the T-shirt and stands for a moment with her back to the room, one palm flat on the counter, as if the building were a ship that had just taken a wave.

Later, in the dark, they lie side by side.

Lara waits. She listens to the breath beside her slow, and deepen, and settle, and she counts to three hundred. Then she turns, by degrees, a breath at a time, until her face is toward Mari’s shoulder. She lowers herself the last few inches and lays her head on Mari’s chest.

Beneath the worn cloth, a little to the left of the scar, is the heartbeat.

It’s going too fast.

Lara lies near-motionless and listens. It’s quick and hard, a drum being played by a hand that will not rest, far too quick for sleep. She tells herself it is a dream. She tells herself that Mari is back in a ring somewhere, or on a hill, or a stair. She tells herself many things.

A hand settles in her hair. Warm and heavy, entirely still. It only rests there, the way you rest a hand on the head of something you’re afraid will bolt.

Lara holds her breath.

She’s asleep, she thinks. It’s a sleeper’s reflex. She doesn’t know.

The heart beneath her ear goes on. Outside, in the dark, a train passes on the far side of the hill. The window shivers and goes still, and Lara counts the beats until she loses track.