Chapter 4 - salt

I dreamed.
I don’t remember what about, I never really do. But I did dream.
I can tell. When I wake up, I’m still half-drowning in the murky waters of my mind; my head is heavy with a lingering feeling, and it feels like something has its clutches around me, trying to drag me back in.
I must have been holding something in my arms, in that dream. It wasn’t there anymore, and it hurt like a long-lost limb.

It was ten in the morning on Saturday. The sun peered into my room through a small gap in the curtains, and Raana was gone.
But as I traced my fingers along the unmade sheets of my bed, I noticed, the warmth of her body hadn’t yet left my sheets, and the dull, tingling soreness hadn’t left my arm.
Once I finally felt conscious, I let my body climb the ladder down from my loft and walk out of my bedroom, like it always does. I followed it, lagging behind, looking down at the floor as I went.
I noticed my spare set of pajamas, strewn haphazardly over the floor, leading out of my room like footprints. In its wake, I kept walking.

At some point, I got to the kitchen. It was lit by an eerie, almost… bleach-like morning gleam, shining right through the window, making my eyes squint as they adjusted. Dad was sitting at the table.
“Tomori. Good morning.” He noticed me peeking through the doorway, as he ate a piece of toast, on his own.
“…Morning.”
“Your friend rushed out the door a little while ago. She told me to tell you ‘bye-bye’.”
“Ah… Y-yeah…”
I glanced down the hallway, and at our closed front door.
“Um, where’s Mom? Did she go to work already?”
The chair she usually sat in was empty.
“Yeah. We got home and went to sleep, but she got called in at six in the morning. She really can’t catch a break…”
Dad rubbed his temples and took a bite.
“Did you two have… a good time together, at least?” I asked.
“Yeah, we did! How about you, Tomori? Did you two have fun?”
“…”
“Tomori? …You okay?”
I looked away and ran my hand along my arm.

Did I have fun?
I’m still not sure what “fun” is.
I’ve tried to figure out what the word means from the way people use it, but I still don’t feel like I can grasp it, feel its shape in my hands.
Could what I felt last night have been it?
Could that be fun?
Could it be that feeling
that rushes into my head
when I don’t know what’s about to happen,
but I want to find out so badly my chest hurts?
like when I’m lifting up a moss-covered boulder near the water at the park, wondering what’s crawling under it, or
when I’m walking into my favorite stationery store at the mall, after hearing they got a new series of buttons in or when
I see orange leaves start falling off the zelkovas outside my window in October and I want to run outside and pick them up see what shapes they dried into this year and how they crinkle apart in my hand
or, when I feel her hair and the tip of her nose, grazing against my skin, and I don’t know when or where she’ll sink her teeth into me, or how hard, or for how long?

Is that what it is?
Did I have fun?
I…

“You think you did, huh? Well, your friend looked pretty happy.”
I must have said something.
“…She did?”
“Yeah. She was skipping along and humming a little song on her way out.”

That lingering feeling didn’t go away like it normally does. It stayed with me, like an anvil, weighing me down.

I had some toast with Dad and talked about Mom’s work, and then went to wash my face and brush my teeth.

I got dressed and I sat at our couch in the living room, turned on the TV, and flipped through the channels for a while, but the longer I did it, the more it started feeling like the light from the screen was singing the back of my eyes and the sound from the speaker was digging claws into my eardrums, so I turned it off.

I looked at my phone.

I tried to put my earbuds on and listen to some music, but no matter what band I put on, it gave me this strange itchy feeling in my chest like it was eating me up from the inside, so I stopped.

I looked at my phone again.

I stared at the ceiling, at the patterns of sharp bumps on the stippling. They seemed scarier than usual today, and the way they swirled around in my vision gave me vertigo.

I looked at my phone a third time.

This time, I opened my messages. I sent one to Raana.
It was the first time I’d messaged her privately, outside of our group.

raana-chan
11:38AM
are you okay…?
11:39AM
where did you go…
11:39AM

I lingered on the chat screen for minutes, hoping she’d see it and respond. Eventually, I sighed, held my phone to my chest, and closed my eyes.

We had lunch. A piece of roasted salmon, with tamagoyaki, cabbage salad, and miso soup for sides. I took longer than usual to finish it. Then I went for a walk, to try and think about something else. Dad waved me off with a smile.

The park closest to home is a fifteen minute walk away. I have the route memorized, and I take it slowly, walking close to the buildings by the road, watching the relief on their facades jump up and down, watching the fences come and go, all with their own, comforting grids and lattices of wood and metal and brick, seeing how the patterns of dust and pollen and grime on all of them change from week to week.
And on days when I’m feeling especially lost, I run my fingers over those reliefs, and drag my hands along the fences, trying to feel them as much as I can, to remind myself I’m still really here.

I reached the park. It was a half hour later, and my fingertips were mottled with black and brown and gray dust, and they pulsed with a delicate soreness.

The park grounds were hidden from the sun this time of year and day by the rows and rows of trees lining its perimeter. That thought gave me some relief.
There was a large pond in its western section where some turtles lived. I couldn’t see any of them on that day, though, and the sheer emptiness of the water made my hands tremble, so I turned around and took a walk along one of the paths instead.
The gravel road was covered in withered amber leaves, which were peeling from the trees above it and falling down, scattering over the path in clusters and pockets. It looked just like a fish kill, like when sardines and mackerel die by the hundreds from pollution or acidic algae blooms and then wash up, their corpses dotting themselves along the beach.

I walked up the path, letting my sneakers dig into the gravel as I did, looking down all the while, seeing what would come up from the depths. Two large, reddish brown rocks surfaced amid the sea of gray, and I picked them both up and I looked them over.
They were about the width of my thumb and mottled with white marbling and dirt, and their texture was rough and bumpy. When I held them up to the sunshine that snuck in through the trees, the light painted calm, scattered shadows on their surface.
As I turned them over, I noticed both rocks had a sharp, clean break on one side. I touched them against each other, and they fit together perfectly, sending a warm chill down my spine. They were one and the same.
I held them together as I put them into my pocket, hoping they wouldn’t come apart.

I kept walking, drifting, letting my feet take me along, past flower patches and little ponds, catching squirrels and birds in the trees in my peripheral vision, but never managing to get a good look at them.

And then, I felt a buzzing vibration at my hip, then another, and another. I hurriedly snapped into focus, and I reached for my phone and pulled it out in a hurry, but my grip on it was weak so it slipped out of my hands and fell on its face into the dirt and grass at my feet; I scrambled to pick it up and get a look at the screen. The glass was caked with mud, but my eyes barely noticed that.

おk
1:41PM
[Kaname Raana sent a photo.]
1:41PM
Cat
1:42PM

The photo was of a tuxedo cat, just like she said. It was streaky and out of focus, but you could make out the colors, the pointed shape of ears, and lines of glowing green light that seemed to be a pair of eyes. I also saw Raana’s finger poking in front of the lens in the corner.
I replied.

oh
1:43PM
that looks like a nice cat… do they have a name?
1:43PM
yeah
1:45PM
Cat
1:45PM
cat… i think that’s a nice name, it’s
1:46PM
honest…?
1:46PM
hey… raana-chan
1:47PM
where are you?
1:47PM
i
1:47PM

i want to see you
1:49PM

I stared at the screen, but no response came. I didn’t see a read receipt, either.
I realized slowly, then suddenly, how fast my heart was beating, and that I was still in that park, and my knees were buried in the dirt below me.

I thought. I thought as hard as I could.
I opened the photo Raana sent me again, and I tried to find something, anything, that might show me where she was.
Immediately, I saw a bright, colorful sign. It was nestled in the corner of the picture. If she’d moved her finger a little, she would have covered it up, but it was there; I zoomed in, deciphered the blurry text as best I could, and typed it into Guruguru Maps.

Mejiro station is quiet, especially on the weekends, since it only serves the Yamanote line. It has a really high ceiling, and the tiles on its floor are big, comforting squares of off-white ceramic. I made sure to keep my feet away from the gaps between them as I walked through the building and out into the concourse.

The train snaked its way into the station, and ground itself to a loud, metallic stop. Something about the way it lurched past me made my stomach queasy.

I rode that train for just one stop, and got off to transfer at Ikebukuro station.
Ikebukuro– is much more crowded. Every time I come here, I feel really thankful that I live somewhere I can take the tram to school and to practice.
The tiles on the station floor are angled so they looked like sharp rhombuses, and they’re much smaller, too small to avoid their gaps. And there were people everywhere, so I had to keep my eyes up and off my feet anyways. I tried not to think too hard about it, and I kept walking until I reached Tokyo Metro platform 4, got on a train on the Yūrakuchō line, and rode it for one more stop.

My phone told me I had arrived at my destination.
It was hard to believe it when I was just reading off directions on my phone. I must have let it slip by my conscious thoughts, but, seeing the sign in person as I left the train, it was hard to ignore the name of the neighborhood I was in.
I looked at it, at the kanji and the Latin letter transcription beside it, and felt a thought about fate in linger my head.
I let it pass, and walked past the sign, and out into the streets.

The avenue in front of the station was quiet, so quiet that I could hear the wistful cries of unfamiliar birds. I walked along it, past bookstores and family restaurants, and kept going until I saw the sign I was looking for.
I scanned the area, straining my eyes, until they finally caught her white hair shining in the sunlight.

A soba shop sat on the street corner: a small, timid-looking green building with slats of bamboo over its windows, shrinking into the rest of the block. In front of it was Raana, sitting on the floor, slurping soup noodles from a little cardboard box, with her eyes set on the stray cat napping across from her.
I walked towards her.
I went slowly at first, but the more clearly I could see her face, the faster my feet started moving.
It felt like I’d been suddenly cut loose from something. I sprinted across the crosswalk, and tripped over the curb and stumbled onto her side as I called her name.
“Raana-chan…!”
My knee slid across the pavement, leaving a faint trail of the dirt that it had picked up back at the park.

She looked at me. Her eyes had widened ever so slightly.
“Tomori.”
“R-Raana-chan. Um, hi.” I said, through ragged breaths.
“Mm.”
She pulled another strand of soba into her mouth and sucked it in.
“How’d you know?” she asked, while chewing on it.
I pointed at the sign, a few meters past her. “I saw that… in your picture.”
“Hmmmm,” she said as she looked over at it, then back at me.
She swallowed her food, then asked–“Why?”

…Why?
That question hit me like a punch to the sternum.
I gasped when I heard it, and once I did I couldn’t breathe back out.
I hadn’t considered it even once.
I’d just let this tugging in my chest pull me all the way to this street corner, in this quiet, unfamiliar, unsettling neighborhood; pull me with such force that I’d ended up half-collapsed on the sidewalk, in front of her, with a gash on the cloth of my mud-stained leggings.

Was I worried about her? About what had happened in her home that led her to run away?
I think I was; I must have been… but it didn’t sit right as an answer. It felt like… like it was hiding something.
Something frightening. Something I couldn’t touch.
I just sat there. I felt the cold sweat start to run down my temples, and all my hands could do was weakly reach out towards her. That was the best answer they could muster.
Raana seemed almost to smile as she watched me.
She reached out and grabbed my wrist, then said, “follow me,” and stood up, still holding her box of noodles in one hand.
I went along with her. I couldn’t manage to do anything else.

We walked past and under the colorful sign that hung over the street ahead, which read “Ebisu-dōri Shopping Street.”
Raana pulled me along for a long while, but she eventually let go to take another bite of soba. I kept moving behind her, like a shooting star fueled by gravitational inertia.

I managed to ask her where we were going.
She said, “somewhere calm,” without looking back.

The shopping street was nearly silent. It was devoid of the stirring sound of crowds, and many of its stores were closed and boarded up or replaced with residential developments, except for a restaurant here and there, or a secondhand clothing store, and a single café. I could hear both of our footsteps echoing through the alleyways.
Every so often, we would move past an older person out on a walk, and they would all eye us with expressions I couldn’t decipher.
Even the air seemed to be frozen in time here. It felt a little sad, and a little beautiful.

Raana took a turn into a dark alley and stopped in front of a door.
It was tall, and made of steel or iron. Its gray paint had flaked off almost completely, and layers upon layers of striated corrosion dyed the metal reddish orange. My eyes lost themselves in it for a moment.
She grabbed something from her pockets and reached for the chain and padlock that were holding the door shut. The lock looked brand new, compared to the door, its silver shackle shining among the rust.
She held two bobby pins. One was in her left hand, bent into an L shape. The other was in her right, spread open, with its flat side held out.
She slid them both into the lock’s keyhole, and it clattered and creaked with mechanical noises, like it was crying out in pain.
I shuddered as I heard them, and averted my gaze, but the curiosity overtook me, and eventually I looked.
Her left hand held the lock steady between its fingers, and at the same time, pushed the L-shaped hairpin into tension. Her right was holding the other hairpin as she deftly wriggled it into the lock’s innards, probing for something.
I caught a glimpse of her face. She looked like she was comfortable; confident. Raana was good with her hands, after all.
Every so often, the lock would ring out a click, and it would make my heart skip two beats.

The fourth click was louder. It released the shackle, and Raana grabbed it and undid the chain holding the door closed. She looked to her side and then her other, and then finally opened it.
Its creaking rang through the alley. I thought that it sounded just like those hyenas I saw once at the zoo in Chiba.

The door opened into a large, deserted room made of brownish-gray concrete and granite. It looked like a warehouse or a storage space, but nothing sat on the metal shelves lining the wall. There were skylights across from me, and the sun shone through their shattered glass panes, and painted an unsettled square on the floor with its light.

The one thing that lived here was dust. It covered every surface I could see, and it danced around in the light, looking for somewhere to settle. It filled my nostrils as soon as I walked in, carrying with it a peculiar smell, the smell of something tired and lonely. It sent me into a sneezing fit.
Raana watched me blow my nose as she closed the door behind us.

She walked past me and into that square of light in the middle of the warehouse. It cut across a ledge that split the room in half. She jumped up and sat on it, letting her legs dangle.
Then she patted the ground beside her, sending more dust flying, and she said my name, and called to me with her eyes. She kept picking away at her lunch.
I walked over, still wiping off the liquid that ran from my nose, and I joined her.

“Hm. Soba got cold.” Raana spoke through a mouthful of it, then took a sip of the broth.
“S-sorry…”
“I kinda like it.”
“O-oh, me too! I’ve always, um, I’ve always liked zaru soba better than kakesoba. A-and sōmen better than ramen, too.”
The words leapt out of me, like a dam had burst.
“Hmmm…” She looked at me.
“B-because hot food… feels like it doesn’t… want me to eat it, like it’s fighting back, so, it makes me a little uncomfortable… but if it’s cold, or room temperature, it feels like it’s telling my mouth, ‘it’s okay’, and that thought calms me down…”
It felt like I’d found something to cling to, and I was holding onto it for dear life.
“Hmmm~mmm.” Raana narrowed her eyes. I noticed too late that I had inched up towards her and that I was leaning into her face. I recoiled away, certain I’d creeped her out, and mumbled a “sorry”.
“Here. Last one.” She was dangling a noodle from her chopstick, holding it towards me.
“U-um, okay.”
I tried to catch it with my lips, but Raana pushed it into my mouth as soon as it was open.
“Mm-!”
It was cold. Not ice cold, but room temperature. It sat comfortably on my tongue, slowly melting away. Its springy texture pushed back against my teeth, and its taste was pleasantly doughy, and salty.
I felt it around, and swirled it around in my mouth.
It reminded me of yesterday.
Of how she felt.
Her right index finger. And her dry, chapped lips. And her tongue.
The taste in my mouth at that moment flooded back from my memory, like it had never left. Iron and zinc. It swept away any taste of the broth.
I caught my teeth digging into my lip.

We sat there in silence for a moment. Raana had set the little noodle box, now filled with just a shallow pool of broth, aside, stretched her arms at her sides and closed her eyes. I closed my own, trying to chase away the anxiety welling up in my chest.

“Raana-chan.” After a while, I spoke up.
“Hm?”
“Is… I-is it really okay for us to… be here?”
“No,” she said, and she smiled as she did.
“A-ah…”
“That’s why it’s fun.”
Fun. The word bounced around in my head, and I started fiddling with my fingers.
“And it’s fine.” She kept talking. “I come here all the time, no one’s ever caught me.”
“But… someone could, couldn’t they?”
“Mm. We’d be in trouble if they did.”
“Is that… fun?”
“Yeah. Doing what you want is fun.” She wasn’t smiling anymore, she was grinning. “Twice as fun if someone doesn’t want you to.”
She looked up and out through the broken skylight.
I didn’t say anything back.
The taste of salt and chicken lingered in my mouth, but turned to blood and metal as soon as I took notice of it.
“What do you want, Tomori?”
She’d turned to look at me.
“M-me?”
What I… want?

The first question Raana asked hit me like I’d opened my front door to let in a freezing winter wind. It paralyzed me, it made me tremble, it made me want to hide.
The second question, this one, it was different. It hit me like a white-hot iron had been shoved into my chest. It stung, and it burned.
“I…”

I leaned towards her and I rested my hands on the concrete by her legs.
――I’m not very good at talking about myself.
Raana’s face glowed in the sunlight as she looked at me. Something about it looked just right, her skin, the outline of her hair and of her jawline meeting.
――I’m not good at answering questions, like what I thought of something, or how I’m feeling.
I reached for her. My right hand was covered in grime where it had rested on the concrete. I placed it on her cheek, and as it trembled with nerves I ran it slowly along her face, and watched the dirt smear onto her soft supple skin.
――I always seem to say something people don’t expect, and trying to explain it always makes things worse.
I leaned further in. Still, she just stood there. I didn’t know what she was thinking.
――But right then, I didn’t feel like I had to use my words.

I closed my eyes, and my lips grazed hers. A spark of static electricity danced between them.
The shock ran through my whole body, standing every hair on end, and a shrill cry of adrenaline filled my mind.
I let it take me over.
――I want to know her.
I threw myself in, and the desperate fire in my chest spread to my hands and my legs and through to the topmost layer of my skin. It was like I was burning up in the atmosphere.
――I want to know everything about her.
Her lips were still dry, rough and chapped, and
the way they leeched the moisture from mine was intoxicating.
――Even if she doesn’t want me to.
My hands danced up and down her arms, spreading their dirt onto her clothes
and her breath tasted like soba, like sleep, and like her
and her tongue touched against mine, and it was soft and perfectly warm, like it was inviting me in.
A hand slid around my waist and pulled me closer. It slipped under my clothes and touched the skin on my back. It was so cold, that I whimpered into her mouth, but as it stole away my body heat, it started feeling like just another part of me.
My consciousness faded, into the blurry haze of our mingling breaths, of the threadlike water dancing between our mouths, of our bodies touching and sharing their warmth.

I don’t know just how long I spent there. Eventually, I woke up, as if it had been a dream. A lucid dream. One I could remember.
My skin washed over with pins and needles and prickles and thorns as I opened my eyes. It turned hot, then cold, then hot, then incredibly cold as I reeled from the adrenaline.
Raana was still there, and I was straddled over her right leg. A strand of saliva still held on between us both, and my breathing was ragged. Her eyes were half-closed into a gentle, peaceful shape I’d never seen them in before, and it kind of felt like if I stared into them for too long, into the gravity well of her shining Albireo, I would fall into a deep, dark sleep that I’d never wake up from.
I blinked.
And I noticed that the trail of dirt that I’d left on her still ran from her cheek down the length of the sleeve of her shirt. So it wasn’t a dream, after all, I thought, once I could think in words.

I tried to catch my breath, drinking in a mouthful of dusty air and holding my hand up to my chest, but right then, Raana took my chin in her hand, leaned in, and bit my lower lip, hanging onto it for a second, and another.
It didn’t hurt. Her teeth felt just right, digging into the vermilion border of my skin. I kept my eyes open, as did she. I looked into Albireo again.
Once she let me go, she ran her tongue around her own lips, and she said, “that was fun.”
“…Yeah,” I said, now trying to calm my heart. “It… yeah, it was.” I think I was smiling, a nervous, tired smile.

I looked at the girl in front of me, at the way she grinned ever so slightly and at how she started rubbing her face clean, and considered licking the dirt off of herself, but stopped short, like she had thought better of it. And one of the million knots in my stomach undid itself, and I breathed out in relief.
She was at home in my eyes, finally.
I felt like I knew her just a little better.