Limit Test

Ai's room was silent, dark. Most unusually, she had spent the week with the door shut. This fact didn't go unnoticed by her parents, not that they could or would do anything about it. She heard them through the walls as usual, albeit without the usual bickering for once.

Ai buried her face amid the bed sheets and plushies. They still carried the lilac scent of his detergent, albeit faintly.

Almost an entire school week passed since the scent was fresh. And there was only today in the way—one measly Friday—until she could hold him in her arms again instead of a stuffed lion.

Her cat alarm clock meowed once, and she slapped it to sleep before it could sound again. After floating through the morning motions that were required of her, Ai paused at the door. Glancing at her meager workstation, she saw her brand new pair of headphones reflecting the window crack of morning light back at her.

The vast, crowded atriums of the mall sprang up around her. The shadows on the wall above themselves into identifiable, monstrous forms. The whispering of her parents from down the hall transformed into the jeering whispers of strangers staring. Ai’s eyes dropped to the floor as she ran for the darkest corner of the room. Her hands fumbled instinctively until they touched upon the metallic casing of the headphones.

It would do her no good to leave them at home.

---

“Hey, Ai.”

Kiro's smile was a welcome sight—one that she acknowledged with a nod from her seat at one of the empty cafeteria corner tables. Her chin rested in the palm of her hand as she stared longingly at nothing in particular.

“Is everything okay?” Kiro asked, taking the seat next to her.

“More or less,” Ai replied, turning to him and rubbing her eyes. “I just haven't been sleeping too well.”

“Oh, me neither,” Kiro said, his smile growing mischievous, “ I stayed up all night practicing my roleplay. We're going to kill the Spasilisk today in D&D, so I wanted to make sure that I had all my equipment in order. You know, it's easy to forget about all the things you have at your disposal when you're staring down the big monster.”

“That's nice.” A yawn worked its way out of her mouth between strokes through her hair. “But I wasn't trying to stay up late.”

Though he tried his best, Kiro couldn't help but yawn in return. “I feel that. I wasn't either. But I guess it makes sense that you're tired, since you've been quiet all week and all.”

Ai put all her energy into giving him a warm smile. But four class periods, multiplied by 24 hours of sleep deprivation had taken their toll on her. The most she could do was close her eyes and lean on his shoulder. In doing so, the cold metal of the headphones around her neck pressed into the skin through her hair.

Kiro eyed them. “You have your headphones on again.”

She shrugged. “The music helps keep me awake.”

It was a good excuse. And yet, Kiro stayed uncharacteristically quiet.

“Hey, Ai? About what we talked about last weekend. You know, at your place-?”

The bell launched a surprise attack, as if in protest to his question. Ai practically leapt to her feet. Running on stolen sips of her parents’ black coffee and a desire to avoid any thinking that would whittle that precious energy supply down, she touched a hand to his shoulder and said:

“I have to get to class.”

“Oh, okay!” Kiro called after her as she walked off towards the exit. “See you later?”

Ai turned to him and nodded. “Yeah. See you.”

---

The paper before her was a mire of numbers. Variables buzzed around like mosquitoes. Formulas floated through the languid, white waters of the paper like alligators, waiting to snatch the pencil from her hand if it came too close. Ai was two sleepy nods of the head away from falling into the water when Mrs. Statyczny called her name.

“Miss Suzuyoku. Is everything all right?”

“May I use the restroom?” Ai asked.

“Yes, you may.” Mrs. Statyczny buzzed in approval.

Ai dragged herself to the bathroom, keeping her head hung low in equal parts exhaustion and fear. Half a dozen splashes of cold water to the face did little to restore her energy, but at least it shook her awake. A waterfall of droplets in the mirror blurred out her face, distorting what was visible. She watched the droplets run down from the mirror and pool in the corner, where it met the sink top.

Her phone vibrated, sending a ripple across the newly-formed pond:

“Hey, are you okay?”

Ai sighed at Kiro’s message. “Aren't you supposed to be in class right now?”

“Yeah, but I can't focus. I'm worried that I upset you.”

The angst she felt in that moment shook her awake. Her mind ran wild with the half a dozen ways that she wanted to hold him accountable. But before her fingers could even press the first key, another message came in:

“I just wanted to tell you that I'm genuinely sorry. I care about you, and if I ever do anything wrong, I want you to be able to tell me so I can help. I mean it, Ai.”

She thought she could water her guilt down with music. It might have even been possible to drown it out entirely. But seeing those words on the screen, imagining him saying them to her. That empty pang from a week ago came back in full force.

“Like I said, I’m just a little tired recently.”

“Gotcha. But if there's anything I can do for you, justsqwcohpefm”

Ai narrowed her eyes at the message, and then let out a sigh-laugh. Considering that he just got caught texting in class, all because he was trying to be sweet, meant that she couldn’t be too mad at him.

Washing her face one last time, she applied a couple of eye drops. Far from curing her reddened eyes, it at the very least offered some relief for her endless floor staring. But that was just it. How long would she be staring at the floor? How far could she keep up behind him before he walked away without her realizing?

No.

The only way was forward. If she didn’t test her limits, then she would never be able to keep up with him.

When Ai returned to class, she paused with her hand on the door. By force of habit, her head started to sink into her shoulders, and her chin curled into her neck. She shook herself out. Knowing that it would be impossible to keep her head straight and face what that entailed at the same time, Ai decided to trust her subconscious. She cleared her head of any thought and envisioned within the darkness a small switch, like that of the fire alarm beside the door.

She took in a deep breath and then cast it out of her, using that momentum to flick the switch in her head. At once, her overthinking was locked behind the invisible screams of mental sirens. She opened the door.

With her head upright, the first thing that she noticed was that everything was a lot more colorful than the floor. In fact, everything was so violently visceral that it seemed to blur together. Horns and limbs and jaws, in crimson, azure, and emerald. Forms that shifted and melted into one another amid the bright blue daylight that poured in through the windows. Amidst all the details, the final picture that reached her was no more legible than a time worn polaroid. Taking this blessing up in both hands, Ai headed for her seat.

Just as the comforting cold plastic of her seat was but a step away, she was jabbed gently in the arm. Snapped from her unclear picture frame, Ai glanced at the pencil as it was retracting from her sleeve. The hand that held it wasn't a hand at all, but rather a mucus-covered mitt of gelatinous, pink flesh. Inevitably, her eyes followed up the monster's limb, tracing past a torso that gave her the impression of a semi-transparent hot dog of flesh bursting from the bun of its clothes. The creature's arm went up in a wave and a warble that Ai recognized as that of the monster who lent her the class work a while ago.

But Ai's eyes stopped short of the face and went no further. She offered a smile and a nod of acknowledgement in the monster's direction with closed eyes. She took her seat without further incident, hoping desperately that her classmate would not turn to look at her at any point. To her great relief, the rest of the class passed without a single disturbance. the gelatinous classmate filed out with the bell and no more than a warbling wave. By that point, her battery had almost recharged. Very fortunately so, because stage two of her limit test would now commence.

Ai navigated the rows of empty seats without a rush. The switch in her mind had dropped into an off position over the course of the class. It was now up to her to generate the significant momentum to activate it once more.

The teacher's desk soon stood before her. In the time that it took for Mrs. Statyczny to turn around, Ai finally managed to gather a full breath.

Lights. Camera. Static.

Ai locked eyes with her teacher, only to realize that there was little in the way of eyes to lock with. What stood before her in a modest cardigan and pencil skirt was nothing more and nothing less than a mass of shifting electricity. The teacher’s hair, if it could be called that, was loaded up into a frizzy afro, and set somewhere below that was a pair of spectacles. Between the bolts of lightning that composed her shifting, jagged skin, the teacher's flesh crawled with little, living clumps of static in black and white. They appear to be the source of the ever-present noise that emanated from the monster as if she was a perpetually disconnected television.

"I'm glad that you came to class today," Mrs. Statyczny said, her voice bristling with a radio crackle. "Is there anything that you wanted to talk to me about?"

Ai nodded. The longer that the girl stared between the cracks in the creature's flesh, the more that she felt she was going to be pulled into the hellish void of static within. Ai focused on the pair of glasses floating on the sea of molten plasma and spoke:

"I just wanted to apologize," she started, grabbing onto her own sleeve with one hand, "for my lack of focus as of late."

One of the teacher's lightning tendrils went up in a dismissive, but gentle wave. "Don't worry about it. I can't expect every student to be able to focus wholesale on mathematics. And besides, it's obvious that you've been making enough effort as is."

Ai, for lack of words and lightness of head, performed a small curtsy. Then, she promptly collapsed sideways, the only thing stopping her from falling to the floor being the blackboard.

"Are you alright dear?" came her teacher's voice, like the high-pitched whines when Ai didn't fully plug in her headphones.

Pushing herself off of the blackboard and straightening out, Ai hummed affirmatively. “Don't worry, I'm fine. I just haven't been getting much sleep recently.”

The sudden force of her fall had inadvertently dragged the switch back down, and Ai could not fight her instincts to watch the floor tiles. She was grateful though, that beneath the usual apprehension, she felt the slight twinge of plain old embarrassment.

"You know," Mrs. Statyczny said, "I'm quite impressed with your personal progress recently. But that doesn't mean that you should be forcing yourself to this extent. Whatever is happening, just remember that there are people that care for you, and I'm sure that they would be there for you if you asked for help."

People.

Ai gave her a customary smile. "I'll keep that in mind. Thank you."

Ai repeated the word in her head for several minutes after she excused herself from the classroom. Once outside, she took to the nearest wall for support. Her legs, pressed to her chest, were not shaking even half as much as she expected them to. Granted, it was hard to breathe, and completely impossible to look up at the passing shadows, but the result was clear.

Her limit test was a success.

She had never come this far before. She would overcome her problem. She would be who she needed to be for him.

She…

Ai slid down the wall, her legs finally giving in as she sat on the floor.

… would not go back to being alone.

---

For the first time in what must have been a full week, Ai awoke in her room feeling well rested this Saturday. The only catch was that her cat clock read 3 PM and that she could hear her parents perpetually disagreeing over something down the hall.

After getting ready and gussying up, Ai found herself pausing before the archway that led into the kitchen. She was fully prepared to slink across to the doorway with the hope of not being seen, until something occurred to her.

It’s the perfect opportunity for one more test.

Ai stepped out from behind the archway and set foot upon the cold, sleek tile of the kitchen. The conversation that must have been going on since morning stopped abruptly. The banality of the situation and the familiarity of the environment made it so that the switch required little activation force. With a simple, quick sigh, Ai faced her parents.

Her father was a concentric cloud of eyes, orbiting an axis of mirrors that were arranged in the vague imitation of a spinal column. In each reflection were Ai’s own two eyes, warped by the perpetual shifting glow of a sniveling face wrought from a spotlight head and face.

Her mother, on the other hand, was a patchwork bodysuit covered from head to toe in clamoring mouths. Her inch-wide seams appeared to be that of paradoxically vibrant, normal skin—she was like the vaguest shape of a woman without any of the messy substance that would make her identifiable.

The two of them stared back at her in the only capacity that they could. They readied a spearhead of comments, only for their initiative to go bouncing off of a simple greeting.

"Good afternoon, Mom, Dad." The girl said, with a curtsy.

Her father's eyes stopped shifting, hanging languidly in place. Her mother's nigh-infinite mouths were either pursed or shut. Before either of them could react to this most rare of circumstances, Ai was already leaving the kitchen.

"I'm going out for a bit," she called over her shoulder, as she slipped on her shoes.

As she closed the door shut behind her, the switch came off too. But this time, it was not out of her control, nor was it a controlled demolition. She had merely, and quite neatly, flicked it off with her exit. Her chest inflated with easy, regular breaths, and her exhales came in the form of mouthing the address that Kiro had provided to her in a text message. After their special moment, he had insisted upon it.

It'll be a pleasant little surprise, she thought to herself. One that would prove that she had what it took to be with him. With every step, the world seemed to yield to her initiative. She felt a magnetic pull as she closed in upon her destination. Even half an hour on public transportation couldn't snare all the butterflies that were flitting around in her stomach. They whipped into a frenzy as she rounded the final bend.

Before her was a quaint, two-story house, its adobe plaster walls painted an unassuming, cool tan. She undertook the short gravel path leading to the door with little apprehension, and paused with her finger over the bell. Robbing herself of the opportunity to overthink, Ai pressed the button and simultaneously flicked the switch.

She heard a stomping on the other end and braced herself. After an indecisive series of back and forth fiddling with the locks, the door creaked open. Whether it was Kiro on the other end of the door or his father, she would not allow herself to look away. But it was neither Kiro, nor was it his dad.

The face that greeted her was none other than Mad Dog's.