Chapter 5 - teardrop

The pain blossomed outwards from the nape of my neck as her teeth sank into my skin. I closed my eyes and caught a breath of the dusty, stale air, letting the fresh oxygen blunt its edge. Its bitter sting turned into a sugary-sweet and comforting blanket that laid itself in gentle, stuttering steps over my nerves, forcing desperate whispered whimpers out of me as it went.

I reached around and under her clothes and pulled her towards me, begging her with my hands to keep going. My fingernails dug into her back and immediately I felt her listen and respond and shift her weight forwards, pushing me into the wall behind me. The rough texture of the granite dug into my back and caught itself in the fabric of my hoodie. And then she kissed me with her teeth again, and again, and somehow, she knew how to make it hurt just as much every time, like she knew my body better than she knew her own.

I had only lasted a few seconds after we shared that kiss. And soon enough, I’d succumbed to the urges stirring inside me and selfishly dragged her into them. But she accepted them without a word of protest, gently pulling me along, lending me her hands and her mouth.

The bright patches of sun filtering in through the skylight crept slowly away from us, marking the passage of time, and as the minutes went, I ran out of breath, and then she ran out of breath, and we collapsed into each other, gasping for air. Her breaths filtered into my clothes and ran along my back, and her warmth mingled with my cold, leaving behind an absence of feeling. A pleasant numbness. I closed my eyes and simmered in it.

Once she’d caught her breath, which took her so little time I had barely come to my own senses, she shifted over and sat down beside me with her knees tucked around her arms. She looked at me. I was still recovering, running my hands along the marks on my back.

“You’re funny, Tomori,” she said. Apparently, she was enjoying the spectacle of my awkward, unsettled fidgeting.
“Eh? F-funny how…?” My voice came out sounding hoarse and tired, and it cracked a little.
“Unpredictable. I can’t guess how you’ll react.”
“Um, is that… is that bad?” I shrank and stuttered. Had I… put her off by scratching her?
“I like it,” she answered. “Never met anyone like you before.”
“A-ah…”

I looked down and touched my left cheek, and a strange warmth settled over it.

“Reminds me of when I learned guitar. Ages ago,” she continued, staring off and into the corner of the room, a faint glow of reminiscence settling in her eyes. She looked… happy, or wistful. I couldn’t decide which.
“I’d just put my fingers all over it, and it’d sing out these weird new noises every time.”
I saw her, a tiny version of her, messing around with a guitar way too big for her hands, plucking out confused, discordant melodies. It took a toll on my imagination to think of her like that. When I saw her play, at practice and in our shows, the instrument seemed like a part of her body. Like she’d been born with it in her hands.
“It’s… nostalgic,” she said after a moment, and she reached out and touched the wrinkled bandage she’d placed on my shoulder yesterday evening with her index finger. I jumped and made a noise, and she giggled.

“R-Raana.” I said her name, and just her name. She perked up and stared at me expectantly, her head tilted to one side.
Her recounting had reminded me of last night; of everything she’d told me; and a murky substance equal parts concern and curiosity had slowly coalesced and spread throughout me, and forced me to speak.
“I… I want to know about… your family. A-about why you’re skipping school.”
Upon hearing this, her smile faded, and she narrowed her eyes. “Hmmm.”
“I want… I want to know you. So tell me. Please.” I leaned over and noticed I’d put my hand on hers.
She narrowed her eyes even more.
“Hmmmmmmm.”
Her gaze quickly turned that mixture of concern and curiosity into an acrid poison made of guilt and regret. I averted my eyes and shrank into myself.
“A-ah, n-nevermind… It’s okay if you don’t–”
“I’ll tell you,” she said, interrupting me. The look in her eyes immediately melted my worries away, somehow.
“But you gotta wait. Five minutes. I’ll be back.” She held up her hand with all five fingers spread open. Then she pushed herself off the floor, dusted herself off, and walked out of the room.

I waited, and counted the minutes.
I ran my finger over the dust-covered ground, wondering what she was doing. I tried to draw something, like a pillbug, with the negative space in the dirt to focus my thoughts, but the strokes were too thick, and it ended up a messy, unrecognizable splotch.
I kept counting. Five, six minutes, seven.
She wasn’t back yet. Eight. I started to worry that she might have just gotten sick of me and left. Nine minutes, then ten. I started drawing again to stop the racing thoughts.

Just as I did, the door creaked open, and she was there, with a small plastic bag hanging off her hand.
She walked over and sat cross-legged across from me, putting the bag down between us both. The white polyethylene slid away and revealed two things.
The first was a large green bag of hard matcha candy, which described itself as “extra crunchy”. The nutrition label said that one serving contained 20 grams of sugar.
The second was a can, the tall, 500 milliliter kind. It was colored like bare metal, and the label read “Masashi Super Dry,” and said that it contained 5.2% alcohol by volume. I stared at it for what felt like ages. At some point, she snapped me out of my trance by grabbing it and opening its tab with one hand. A shrill pop and a threatening hiss rang out in succession, and an overpowering, medicinal smell permeated the air.
“…I-is that… is that… beer?”
“Mm.” She stared at the can dangling from her hand.
“Is… isn’t that, um, against the law? How’d… you get it?” I asked.
“Little store nearby.” She motioned towards the door with her head. “The owner’s scum, so he lets me buy it.”
“S-scum…?”
“So he says. ‘I’m scum’. Funny guy,” she smirked.
I stared, my mouth agape. “S-so you’ve… had it before…?”
“Once.”
“And… you like it?”
“No. I hate it. It’s gross.” She shook her head, then picked the green bag up. “But it feels nice. That’s what the candy’s for.”
“O-oh…”
“This stuff makes your head go all funny. Makes it easier to talk. If I have some, I can answer you.”

She raised the can up to her mouth, then suddenly jerked backward and took a swig of the drink, rushing through it as if to get it over with as quickly as possible. She swallowed, immediately started coughing, and then she hissed. She hurriedly opened the bag of candy with her teeth and threw one into her mouth. It cracked between her molars. The cloying matcha flavoring seeped out of the shattered sugar block and floated towards me on her breath.
She held the can of beer out to me and spoke between two little coughs. “Here. Try it.” She was rubbing her temples, looking like she was struggling with something as she chewed on the candy faster and faster.
As I looked at the can, I felt the slightest pang in my stomach, like it was trying to tell me I was about to do something I shouldn’t… but it was unusually, scarily easy to ignore it.
“…Okay.” I took it from her. The condensation on its surface clung to my palm, making me flinch. Cautiously, I brought it up to my mouth.
The sharp, volatile smell of the alcohol drifted into my nostrils and set their sensitive lining alight. I inhaled and let it travel down into my lungs. It was a strange, fascinating feeling, and it made my hands tremble slightly. And overtaken with curiosity, I turned the can upside down and let the cold, fizzy substance spill into my mouth.

It hit me all at once. My taste buds were overwhelmed in an instant by a burning, bitter flavor. Soon enough, they’d stopped registering anything at all.
But… I didn’t hate it.
Actually, I was… captivated.
The way it overwhelmed my senses was like nothing I’d experienced before. The heat, giving way to the cold, giving way to the tickling feeling of carbon dioxide effervescing on my tongue, and then fading back into heat, in a cycle.
I held my hand up to my mouth to keep myself from spitting it out. Some managed to spill out through the sides and ran in a streak along my chin, dripping onto the floor. Before my gag reflex could kick in, I swallowed it all.
I felt dizzy.

“Fufu. Gross, right?” She was looking at me, seemingly rapt with attention, her head rested on both her hands. “Have some candy. It’ll wash it off.”
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve.
“…Actually, I think I might… like it…” It felt weird to say, like I was admitting to a crime, or a cardinal sin. Which… I guess I was.
“Really?,” she smiled and furrowed her brow, and the weight of her gaze somehow doubled in my mind. “You’re something else.”
“Um, t-thank you…?” I said, staring down at the can in my hand, still heavy with liquid.

The fire in my mouth faded and gave way to a strange aftertaste like burnt toast or oversteeped barley tea. Something about the way it lingered on my tongue made me feel depressed, so I quickly took a matcha candy from the bag and started chewing on it.
It was incredibly sweet, but it didn’t wash the taste away; it blended with it, and became something new, something with a life of its own. It tasted like eating blades of grass that had been burnt to a crisp by a passing wildfire and then covered in fresh morning dew once the sun set and rose.
It was… kind of addicting, and I kept on chewing as if in a trance, until the candy had completely dissolved in my mouth. I remembered a waiter at a nice restaurant we all went to once telling my mom about ideal wine pairings, and wondered if this sensation is what he was talking about.

“My turn.” She reached over and took the can from me.

We kept going, passing it back and forth and eating matcha candy as a palette cleanser. I gradually got used to the sting of the alcohol, and it became easier and easier to keep down.

Some time passed. I think. No, it must have. I just don’t remember how. At some point, she had laid her head on my lap, nestling it between my legs, and she was looking up at me and smiling with her eyes half closed, and she looked seriously, unbelievably cute so I started running my hand along her hair like doing so was the most obvious thing in the universe. She was purring, I could feel it in my palm. My head was spinning and I couldn’t think straight but her fur, I mean hair was ridiculously soft and her weight on my legs kept me grounded, which was a relief because I’m pretty sure otherwise I would have floated away and into the clouds above and been blown by the treacherous autumn winds into a faraway continent, undiscovered by civilization, never to be seen again, and that thought made me really, really sad. But she was there holding me down so it was okay. I could relax. Everything my five senses could sense, her hair and the skin of her cheek and the outline of my own body from my clothes and the air around me, the way the air smelled and the muffled sounds of people and cars outside, it was all blurred and smeared, like every thing was bleeding into everything else the way the colors on my favorite shirt bled into the rest of my clothes in the washer when I was little, and I found it strangely comforting.

I closed my eyes and waited and opened them and I blinked but I could barely tell the difference.

“It’s about school.”
Her voice reached my ears slowly and sounded muffled as if we were sitting at the bottom of a pool of blue water, and I could almost smell the chlorine.
She had opened her eyes. My hand stopped and rested on her cheek as the information from my senses filtered slowly, heavily, like mud, into my conscious mind.
“…School?” I pieced together a response.
“High school. Entrance exams.”
…That’s right. She was in her third year of middle school, and it was drawing to a close. Even though she’d just be transferring to another division, she’d still need to take the entrance exams like anyone else.
She grabbed my hand and pushed it into the side of her face as if to tell me to keep going, so I did. She really was unnaturally soft. I thought that I could keep doing this forever if she’d let me.
We kept talking, but her voice faded into something low and whispered and gravelly, and she hesitated as she spoke.
“Mom keeps… telling me to study more. She says… my grades have been getting worse and I need to ‘grow up’. And I don’t even… know what that means. And when I ask her she just says more… stupid-sounding stuff.”
“A-ah…”
“She won’t… shut up about it. And everyone in class keeps talking about it too. The kids and the teachers. I hate it. I even looked it up on my phone and it says high school isn’t com… compul… computer… it says I don’t have to go if I don’t wanna.”
“…Compulsory?” It took me a second, but I found the word somewhere in my memory.
“Yeah. And I don’t wanna. But she wouldn’t listen. And Dad took her side too. And so… And so I went and… told Grandma and, I thought she’d tell them off, but…”

Her eyes drifted away from me and suddenly she was looking past me and off into somewhere really, really far away. She looked like she wanted to say something, but didn’t have the strength to force it out.

And then, all of a sudden, the corner of her eye started to twinkle with light and a tear gently rolled off of it and slid down her temple and into my hand.

I had never seen her cry before, not even once, not even a little.

I looked at the shiny little wet spot that had formed in my palm. It felt like I was holding something incredibly precious.

“…Did she… not take your side?” I asked, trying to help her along.
She closed her eyes and shook her head, shifting its weight across my lap, and she tried to pull my hand into her face once again. I resisted. I didn’t want to lose the treasure cradled in my palm. She insisted, though, and I gave in, and ran it along her cheek, painting her face with it.
“She… she said all the same stuff. She said I needed to grow up. I tried to explain but she wouldn’t listen.”
As she said this, her voice cracked in ways I didn’t even think voices could crack in, and she sounded like a completely different person. Her words were painted black with melancholy and helplessness.
“I… I thought she understood.”
For a moment I saw something well up in her eyes again, but she took a deep breath, and she held it back.
“I’m done with school. And with all of them. I don’t need them anymore.”

Her voice had returned to its usual, relaxed tone.
She ran the ticklish calloused tips of her fingers along the back of my hand and then opened her eyes.
“I have my guitar. And the band. And I have you. That’s all I need.”

Her words washed over me and slowly sunk in, and an indescribable feeling welled up in my chest, then lodged itself in my throat. My head felt warm and fuzzy, like it was filling up with white noise.
I tried to place the feeling. Was I… happy? Was I scared?

“That’s all I need.” So she said. My hands trembled faster and faster the more I thought about it.

I’d never considered straying from the path my parents laid out for me. 
Going to school was… a steady, comfortable routine I could steady myself on, and the alternative seemed such an dark, uncertain path that I hadn’t even given it a second of thought. I was even scared of graduating.

So I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t know… what the right answer was.
But I could feel the way it suffocated her. It resonated in my chest.

This girl, who seemed so distant, so very far away, so very comfortable in that distance, was suddenly… clinging onto me for dear life. I could feel the desperation, the breathless rasp in her voice as she spoke. Like fingers digging into dirt and grass and pulling through it.

Was I happy? Was I scared?
I started to think that maybe it was… neither.
Maybe feeling needed was something entirely new.
I thought I might even… like it.

I reached for her free hand with mine and took it, and let my fingers slide in between hers, and squeezed as hard as I could.
The cold of her palm faded away into me, as this enrapturing new sensation welled up in my chest.