Part II, Chapter VI | An Alluring Abnormal

Louisa draped her arms over my shoulders from behind me and nestled her head in the crook of my neck. “Aaaannaaaaa!” she moaned. “Listen to this!”

“Annamarie,” I corrected by reflex.

She snorted into my neck, which felt a little gross. “You said the same thing when we first met. I thought we were over that.”

“Sorry. Not yet, I think.”

She stopped hanging onto me and flopped onto the client's couch instead. “Well anyway, a boy from Class Six asked about you. I think we’ve got ourselves a new client, or maybe he wanted to ask you out. How serious are you about Oliver?”

“Uhh. Kinda serious, at least.” It was taking me longer than I thought it would to reorient myself.

“Are you okay? You look a little…”

“Hey, Loumelette—or I mean…”

She frowned when I said the name, and my voice caught in my throat. Her frown quickly morphed into a grin, though. “Momo told you too, then? I hate the name. I hope it doesn’t catch on. Is being able to cook really that special?”

“Cook? How do you mean?”

“Didn’t she tell you how she came up with it?”

“No,” I said.

“You know how we’re still living together, right?” The words breathed life back into me. My confusion receded back away, and I only felt hope again, that I had set everything right. “Well, I started to get up early to make her breakfast—make us breakfast, I mean—and since I like eggs, I somehow got really good at making omelettes over the summer. It only took until maybe the third time I made them before she came up with a nickname. It’s just a stupid portmanteau. Louisa. Omelette. Get it?”

“That’s funny.”

“Were you about to ask me something?”

“Right…” My eyes wandered around our counseling room. It wasn’t all too different from how it usually was, but when I woke up that morning, I couldn’t find Ms. Lyre. I wondered and worried that I had done something horribly wrong. “Can you remind me, how many members are in the counseling club now?”

“Counting them again won’t make the number go higher, you know.”

“I know, just, please.”

She grinned. A grin from Louisa was an odd sight. Just as it was odd to see her with short hair, when it was once long enough to fall past her fingertips at her side. It’s said a girl is most like to cut her hair when her heart is broken. But she seemed today more happy than I could have ever imagined her in a lifetime. “Well, as you know, our last recruitment fell through, so it’s still just you, me, Oliver, and Momo. Samira says she might join eventually, and you said you can seduce Sylvia to our side, but I have my own doubts, so it’s still only us. Four Arys-certified counselors.”

“Four,” I repeated.

“I don’t think you should worry very much about it. You’re still competitive in the rankings. If I were Alina, I’d be quaking in my boots.”

“And our club advisor?” I asked, restless.

“Ms. Lyre? What about her?”

“I haven’t seen her around. Know anything?”

“No idea,” she said offhandedly. “I’m sure she’ll show up before homeroom starts.”

But she didn’t. Her substitute, an old, stout man, explained that she was on extended leave, and would not return for a while. It filled me with unease again. Too many unexpected things had changed, the most curious among them being that I had found myself in the morning not in Ms. Lyre’s hideout, but in an actual dorm. My roommate was Oliver.

This was the truth as I saw it. I had gained the ability to alter the past, but while I seemed to be the only one who could remember what used to be, I remained ignorant to all things that had changed as a result.

“I think I’ve got it,” Oliver said. We were eating dinner together. How had that come to pass so casually? Across our little dining room, you could see the sky through the window, which was flecked with deep red as night settled in. The room itself was filled with a pleasant, delicious aroma. He had cooked dinner himself, just for us. Baked tilapia with rice and beans, portioned small enough to satiate but not to fill. His portion was much larger, of course. Perhaps in this reality, I had told him how self-conscious I was of my increasing weight. “We met in Pyraleia,” he finished.

I was so caught up in my observations that it took me time to register what he had said. “We met in Pyraleia?”

“There’s this strange memory I have…” he said, but he shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why are you trying to guess where we first met?”

He smiled. “What do you mean?”

That response made it obvious that it was not something I would have simply forgotten. Thankfully, we received a knock on the door before I had to explain myself, so I rushed to meet whoever it was.

The door opened to a girl—Moemi Chiyoda. I knew it right away even though I had never seen her before. She was the spitting image of the girl I had first imagined from Louisa’s description. Short black hair. Small, shy, and childishly cute.

She held something in her hands, close to her chest like a squirrel. “L-Lou and I made too many cookies.” She tried to smirk. It was a stiff thing, but kept all the charming confidence expected of it. “I’m not sure if you can p-partake though, with your diet and all. You can offer Sylvia some on your d-date tomorrow.”

“Date?”

She turned to leave once I accepted the cookies from her. “Don’t ask me to make s-sense of your relationship with that girl.”

Once she rounded the corner out of view, I closed the door. Again, I feared what I’d done. I feared the changes I’d caused that snowballed out from the simple act of having prevented her death. What did she mean, make sense of my relationship with Sylvia? In this world, did she simply know of its oddity as I knew it, or had something irreparable happened between the two of us? Some event I had no knowledge of?

The fear ate away at me through the night, and I fell asleep dreamless in the dark.

“I knew you’d oversleep.”

It felt as if no time had passed, but my fatigue was gone, and the voice returned my thinking to me. Dried drool flaked from the corner of my lips, and it reeked of rotting. I groaned and turned onto my side, and only then realized that Sylvia was standing by the door. It was her voice, which I’d already forgotten I heard. In a panic, I threw my blanket over myself again, hoping to hide my sorry state.

“What are you doing in my room?” I asked, even though this room was still like a stranger’s to me.

“Oliver let me in. We have a date today, remember?”

“I remember,” I said. “G-Get out. Let me change and stuff. I’ll be five minutes.”

She walked off. “It’ll be thirty, though.”

And she was right. Between brushing my teeth, doing my hair, and trying to figure out how to wear makeup for the first time only to give up in the end anyway, I didn’t get back to her until thirty minutes later. Almost a full hour after we had apparently agreed to meet.

She was sitting at the island table, mindlessly scrolling through her phone when I finished. I tapped her on the shoulder to indicate that I was ready to go.

“Why are you in your school uniform?” she asked.

“It’s the weekend,” I said as I realized it.

“Still half-asleep?” The sound of her laughter startled me. Her voice was unusually gruff. Tomboyish, even. Somehow, everything artificial that had both fascinated and irritated me about her had been shorn from her flesh. All that remained was the skin of a normal teenage girl. Skin in skinny jeans and a long-sleeved blouse; white, fashionable, and… there was no hat. No witch hat, insisted upon her like a bad joke. Like an old cosplay gone on too long.

“Your hat…?” I mumbled.

She rose from the stool by the island and flashed me a smile. “How about breakfast?” After walking over to the microwave and setting the timer, she suddenly looked sheepish. “I made breakfast for us, but it’s already cold.”

She still wore a silver hoop in one ear. That, at least, hadn’t changed. Why did that make me happy? It should have reminded me of when I’d lost control of myself. Instead, I could only think about how she’d gotten it for me because I did.

The microwave oven hummed while Sylvia took the stool beside me again. “I want us to be normal friends,” she said.

Normal friends. The phrase lingered in the air and tightened around my throat. I couldn’t say anything to that, and we ate together in silence.

For our date, we watched a movie. The Film Club was small and not very popular, since they put all their effort into making films and none of it into marketing themselves. Despite that, the auditorium was full when we arrived.

I had trouble paying attention when it came to it, though. Whenever I felt about to fall asleep, I’d look over at Sylvia and watch her emote instead. She made me feel lucid again. Her face remained stone-like the whole way through, but when she felt scared, her knees squeezed together; when she was excited, her feet bounced; when she was sad, tears ran down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe or even blink them away.

In the end, I could recall almost nothing of the story.

“What did you think?” she said. We hadn’t talked the whole way back, and now we were standing in front of her dorm room.

I locked eyes with her and said that I loved it. For some reason, her eyes helped the lie emerge from my lips.

“I’m glad,” she said. We stood there together, awkwardly at her front door. She didn’t seem to want to leave yet. Not knowing where to put my eyes, I focused on the wall behind her and read the nameplate. It read Sylvia la Veya. Then under it, Samira Aryo. It was just a small detail I tucked into a fold in my brain and promptly forgot.

When Sylvia smiled, her bottom lip, which I noticed at the start to be somewhat chapped, cracked and bled. And like the tears she shed in the theater, she didn’t move to hide her smile or wipe the blood away.

“Just to make sure again,” she started suddenly. “Oliver was okay with us today, right?”

The question confused me, so I asked her to clarify, but my confusion seemed to be answer enough. There were few things I despised more than sad smiles. They told me so little for how much they pained me to notice.

I turned away, to forget or to leave, but she pulled me back in by moving closer. Close enough to touch.

“Can you see me, Annamarie?” Her warm breath prickled the cold skin of my neck, even from this distance.

“I can see you,” I said.

“Really?” Sylvia carefully pried the glasses from my face and watched my eyes with intent. “I don’t think you can. I don’t think you even try.” Her gaze intimidated me, so I focused on the pores of her skin instead. They were so visible at this distance. Would anyone but me think for a moment that her pores were pretty? She had freckles too, the faintest kind that I had never noticed before. “Your eyes look so fuzzy to me,” she continued. “Sometimes I wonder how close I need to get before…”

She paused, shook her head, and chose not to continue. Instead, she folded the arms of my glasses and placed them in my hands, where she kept me in her grip and pulled me even closer. My knuckles pressed against her belly, warm even through her blouse.

“Just normal friends, you said.” My voice couldn’t help but come out in a whisper.

She let the statement linger in the air. The seconds we remained there felt like minutes before she finally pulled away. “Goodbye, Annamarie.”