Chapter Twenty Nine - Wave

“You’re late,” Emi chastised me, opening the front door before I could even reach for the handle.

“Were you lying in wait for me?” I cocked an eyebrow suspiciously.

“Yes, and you’re late. There’s so much to do! We don’t have a minute to spare!” Emi grabbed my uninjured arm and whisked me through the house toward a room near the back. She threw open the door and I was hustled into what appeared to be a spare bedroom which had been converted into a makeshift sweatshop. Mizuki waved without looking up and Saki appeared to be half buried in cloth. “Can you cook anything?”

“What?” Emi was in full-on chaos mode, her thoughts changing gear faster than her mouth could keep up.

“I can’t cook!” Emi shook her head, dropping heavily back onto her seat.

“Mizuki can cook,” I replied. Mizuki shook her head.

“No can do, I’m on costume duty and we’re out of lace!” Mizuki glanced at me with wild eyes before returning to her sewing.

“Well, I can’t cook,” I shook my head. It was somehow comforting to slip back into something resembling normalcy after the Aria yoyo. She was like a theme park ride which never stopped and it, quite frankly, exhausted me.

“Can you cook, Saki-chan?” Emi turned desperate eyes to the girl weakly struggling beneath the pile of fabric that had fallen over on her.

“Um…the basics, I guess,” Saki grunted as she managed to free one arm and her legs. “I think this is too much, Emi-senpai.”

“Can you cook mille-feuille, macarons, opera cake and madeleines?” Emi ignored her and drove forward relentlessly. “Mmm, madeleines!”

“I don’t know what half of those are, Emi-senpai, and I doubt I’d be able to pronounce the other half properly without hurting myself,” Saki shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“I can’t boil water without burning it,” Emi sagged. “Well,” she flung her hands up in the air in surrender and flung herself dramatically into a bean bag chair, “we’re screwed. All of the coolest costumes in the world won’t help us if our maid café has no actual café. Wait! We’ll buy the food! Yeah!”

“I have 60 yen,” I shook my head. “I couldn’t buy my way out of a paper bag at this point.”

“Well,” Emi sighed in resignation. “Looks like grandma’s money’s going to a good cause. I have 10,000 yen. That should be enough, right?”

“Your grandma gave you 10,000 yen?” Mizuki gaped at her in astonishment, looking up from her sewing. “Did she rob a bank?”

“She always gives me 10,000 for my birthday,” Emi blinked at our astonishment. “Isn’t that normal?”

“I thought you got gift cards!” Mizuki shook her head. “My grandma gives me a box of doll parts for my birthday. It’s weird.”

“Remember that time she gave you that entire package of heads? I had nightmares for a week,” I shuddered. Mizuki’s grandma made dolls in her spare time and assumed Mizuki would enjoy doing the same. She did not but also couldn’t exactly say she didn’t so each year another box of doll appendages got added to the growing pile of porcelain and plastic parts in Mizuki’s closet of horrors.

“That’s jacked up,” Emi muttered. “Like…really what the actual hell jacked up. Anyway! We’ll buy the café stuff and then sell the stuff we bought at a profit! The free-market economy strikes again! Take that communism!” Emi laughed maniacally.

“Kasumi senpai, may I ask you something in private, please?” Saki had finally extricating herself fully from the pile of fabric.

“How bold young Saki-chan is!” Emi grinned lasciviously. “Do you need to borrow my book for reference?”

“Stop,” I scowled as I dutifully followed Saki out of the room, ignoring Emi waggling her eyebrows suggestively at me.

“In here, senpai,” Saki gestured to a bathroom. She closed the door behind her and turned to me. “Are you ok?”

“Huh?” I cocked my head in surprise at how forward Saki was being. The normally quiet and shy girl had a fierce look to her as she stared at me.

“How did you get hurt?” Saki gestured to my arm.

“Oh. It’s…nothing,” I shrugged.

“Let me take a look at it,” Saki moved forward and gingerly took my hand in hers, peering at my swollen wrist intently. “Blunt force contact, minor deformation of the bone, swelling and discoloration. It looks like you’ve got a hairline fracture of your ulna, Kasumi-senpai.”

“Huh?” I stared at the wrist held in her delicate hands and scowled. “But I can still move it, though.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, senpai,” Saki shrugged. “I think you’ll find it’s broken if you get an x-ray.”

“Are you sure?” I’d smacked my wrist hundreds of times in shinai training and had never broken it.

“Well, not without an x-ray, but I’m pretty sure, yeah,” Saki nodded.

“I guess volunteering at the hospital helps, huh?” I smiled.

“Well, I’m going to be a doctor, so I do lots of studying, too.” In that moment I admired Saki more than I had anyone in my life. There was no hesitation, no “when I grow up, I want to be a doctor”, there was only the certainty of her convictions and the drive to see them through. What did I have?

“Wait here, senpai,” Saki gestured to the toilet. “I’ll be right back.” I sat on the closed toilet and sighed as she rushed out of the room. Now that my adrenaline had faded, my wrist really did hurt a lot. I put my head in my uninjured hand and sighed again.

What ambition drove me forward? None. I had no ambition. I had no drive. I had only today and a vast sea of question marks spreading out before me. Did I want to go to college? Did I want to join the workforce? Did I want to be a NEET? What did I want? What was I doing? All I knew was I didn’t want to stay in Tottori but knowing what I didn’t want left me no closer to what I did.

The reality is I had no plan. No interests. Nothing. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why dating Aria scared me so much. When you only have today; anything that threw that out of alignment destroyed everything, I guess. With nothing to look forward to except a sea of endless todays with tomorrow an illusion it would be only natural, I guess, to be afraid. Well, also the obvious issue with her also fucking, apparently, 70% of the rest of the school on the sly played an active role. Saki reappeared and closed the door behind her before searching through Emi’s medicine cabinet for something.

“Don’t worry! I asked Emi-senpai if I could look for something,” She assured me before moving to the drawers. She finally pulled free a first aid kit and began to rummage through it.

“I assume Aria-senpai is involved with your wrist somehow?” Saki said, gently taking my wrist and moving it upward until it was even with my shoulder before applying an ice pack.

“I see your telepathy’s working well today, Saki-chan,” I muttered. Saki shrugged and smiled at me. “I don’t like people being bullied. Even her.”

“’Even her’ or especially her?” Saki asked.

“Maybe both somehow?” I shrugged. “I don’t understand her at all. She’s like a rogue wave on a calm sea. Everything’s going smooth and then…WHAM! You’re sinking to the bottom with no rhyme or reason.”

“Isn’t there always a reason, though, Kasumi-senpai?” Saki asked, her doe eyes regarding me kindly. “Even if we don’t understand what the root cause is, there’s always an explanation, isn’t there?”

“What do you mean?” I blinked at her.

“Well, a rogue wave is just energy and you can’t create energy from nothing so there has to be a reason for them. Even if we don’t fully understand that reason there has to be a cause. Aria-senpai is similar. The reason for doing what she does, though maybe not plain to us, are valid for her. Maybe you should ask her why she does these things? I don’t know, but it seems to me that life is a lot like science in that respect. If you don’t ask the question you can’t reasonably expect to find the answer.”

“But how am I supposed to ask her something like that?” The pain from my arm was beginning to subside as the ice pack numbed it. It seems recently the best I could hope for was being numb and that was not an encouraging sign. “Am I supposed to just be like, ‘so, why are you such a slut?’?”

“Well, maybe not that bluntly,” Saki chuckled. “But why not? If someone does something that hurts you or causes you to doubt them isn’t it better to talk to them and ask them why? Even if you don’t get the answer you want to hear, you’ll at least get an answer and I think it’s better to know than not.”

“Once more you’re proving yourself a sage and philosopher,” I smiled. Saki was absolutely right, of course.

“No, no,” Saki giggled. “I just know how I would like to approach things if I was in your position, senpai.”

“Are you hinting there’s something you’d like to ask me?” I regarded her keenly.

“No, senpai,” Saki shook her head. “I know the answers already to any question I’d ask right now so there’s no need.”

“Oh?”

“I-I love you, senpai, m-more than you could imagine,” Saki stuttered. “You know that and don’t judge me for it, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for that. It’s not the time for me to be selfish. Maybe one day I can, but not now.”

“What if that day never comes?” I asked, not trying to be mean but sounding mean to myself, nonetheless. Saki just smiled and shrugged, though.

“If it never comes then it’s the way it is meant to be, I guess.”

“You sound like a fatalist, Saki-chan.”

“Not at all, senpai,” she shook her head. “I don’t think anything’s predetermined. I just think things happen for a reason and, even if we don’t understand the reason at the time, eventually it’ll be clear. Sometimes you have to ask why and sometimes you already know why.”

“So, I take it you’re in the latter camp.”

“You could say that, I guess,” Saki nodded. “I think you need to know why, though, senpai, and there’s only one person who can give you that answer.” I nodded.

Would she answer if I asked? Even if she did answer, would I believe her? At this point, was it even worth it? I didn’t know. I just knew that the way I felt at this moment was horrible and I hated it. I wanted to crawl into a hole and stay there like hedgehog until it all went away. Saki pulled away the ice pack and looked closely at my arm.

“We need to get you to the hospital to get this checked out, senpai.”

“Ok,” I nodded.