Last year's Princess

Miho Saijou had a name that really rolled off the tongue. In the heady days of middle school when I had first referred to her as “my girlfriend,” I would sometimes lie awake at night and repeat it to myself like an idiot. That was all gone now.

“Miho.”
We were still somehow on a first name basis. That, at least, hadn’t changed. Everything else had. I waited for her to say something else, but she just stared at me as if expecting me to say something else. The wordless days where we could signal all our feelings with just a name were also a thing of the past.

“When did you become my mother?”

Miho wasn’t in the mood for my sass.

“I don’t have to be your mom to have common sense.”

She wasn’t wrong. Even I knew that going along with Kanamaru’s plan would be trouble. Well, trouble and a lot of money, if that really was why I was doing this.

Wait, why was she even here? This was the 4th floor of the annex building, and she didn’t have any classes here this late as far as I knew.

“Why are you even here? There’s nobody here but me and Kanamaru’s club.” Not quite correct. Kanamaru, like any good thief, had vacated the scene of the crime with the screaming rational part of my mind stashed away deep in his pocket. Now it was just us two. Miho thumbed a strand of her hair nervously. I had just caught her in a situation she couldn’t possibly explain without giving up the fact that-

“I saw you follow Kanamaru up here. Why are YOU up here? You don’t have any friends in the 4th year. I figured you were getting roped into something.”

The rest of that thought had been “the fact that she still liked me.” It vanished in a puff of smoke. Miho was just being a good citizen and classmate. I was just assuming that she had done it because of some kind of unresolved sense of guilt over what she had done to me four months ago.

No, wait. It was way too soon to tell anything like that. She had followed me up here because, at some level, she was still worried about me. That line of attack would work.

It had worked on her before in the dark days of early 2nd year of middle school, where I had played the bad boy who brooded while reading the poetry of Lord Byron. I didn’t understand the English-only copy of his collected poetry that I had nabbed from a used bookstore, but I knew that girls liked broody guys who read romantic poetry like Byron and Shelley. It shouldn’t have worked, but since nobody else in the class could read English poetry (let alone prose), it somehow worked. Miho fell for it, all right. For all of 2 years. I put on my best impression of my cringe-y middle-school self. It was unsettling how easy it was to slip back.

“Why do you even care? It’s none of your business who I talk to. Aren’t we over? Let things be over, Miho.”

She was staggered by this, all right! I had barely talked to her since starting high school, but even before we had broken up I hadn’t used bad-boy Touma voice in a long time. She recovered quickly, though. The new Miho was always ready to roll with the punches.

“Touma.”

Now I was the one being staggered. She hadn’t called me by my name in four months. The old Miho would have never used my own tactics against me so flippantly. She wouldn’t stoop so low.

“Kanamaru’s a dangerous guy to hang around. You don’t get homeroom teachers warning you about specific students unless what they’re doing is REALLY out of line. It’s a wonder he hasn’t been expelled yet. He’s just using you as an easy mark. As a classmate and your-”

She stopped. Your what? She couldn’t define our relationship any more than I could. You could say we were exes, but there wasn’t any fight or tearful breakup scene. We were, and then at some point in the last 4 months, we weren’t. It was a big depressing anticlimax. Was that what being exes was like? I couldn’t bring myself to press her on this.

“-your classmate.”

How tautological. Miho was playing with her hair again, twirling it around her pointer finger, like she did whenever she wasn’t sure what to say or do. It was chestnut-brown and a bit shorter than shoulder length, and she wore it with a ragged ponytail cocked to one side.

It was fake. I had known her long enough to know that. Miho was an early bloomer; In the first year of middle school she was among the tallest in any of our classes. She had used that early game advantage to refine the image of herself as the cool beauty with her jet black natural hair left to fall all the way down past her elbows. That was the Miho I had called “my girlfriend.”

Her early advantage didn’t last. By the beginning of third year, she was thoroughly average in height and stalled in all other proportions. I didn’t really care, but she did. The “cool beauty” persona proved impossible for her to maintain without that 4 centimeter advantage over every other girl, and she started looking for an image change right as fall turned to winter. One of the last conversations I had with her was whether I thought she would look good as a brunette. I didn’t commit.

It was something of a trial balloon to see whether Touma Nishizawa could be part of the new Miho. I couldn’t. She changed her hair, her attitude, and sense of fashion. She threw out all the old clothes and accessories that didn’t match. I guess that included me, too. If she had done it a bit sooner I would have had time to save face and at least change my choice of high school- though neither she nor I could agree on who had followed who to Akiba North. Doing it in the winter of 3rd year left neither of us any time to do anything except accept the fact that we’d still be seeing each other on a daily basis.

When spring started, the new Miho had completely displaced the old Miho. She was friendly, approachable, and, to the delight of all the boys in the class who wanted to settle for less than a princess- available.

“Hey. Touma. You’re doing that creepy-stare-thing again. Knock it off.”

According to Miho, that was one of my character flaws. I didn’t realize how long we both had been sitting there in silence, but it must have been an uncomfortably long silence for Miho. The new Miho, anyway. The old one was perfectly fine with a brooding, searching stare.

“I know Kanamaru’s dangerous.”

It was the truth, by any objective measure.

“I’m just humoring him. If I ignored him, he’d keep sending his goons to press-gang me into doing something. It’s really, really not your place to be worried about me.”

That set something off in Miho.

“You sounded like you were already in on going to-”

Ah, she had said too much. I knew she was spying on me, but I wasn’t clear how much she had heard. She really was listening pretty closely, but didn’t want me to know it.

“- on doing something with Kanamaru. You can’t trust him! He’ll tell whatever kind of lie he needs to get an easy mark like a dumb freshman who's in way over his head!”

Miho was right. Kanamaru wasn’t necessarily lying about having done it - the money he was flashing around was as good as proof that he was at last onto something big. However, he was still being really cagey about the risks. Was 40,000 yen really enough to get you off the hook for smuggling if you were caught? Was his so-called “rat tunnel” really a secret?

I decided this warranted a second opinion. I pulled out my phone.

“Hey, don’t ignore me!”

What did she want now? I had acknowledged her. I had agreed with her. Kanamaru was leading me into something dangerous. That was obvious to anyone with enough brain cells to be immune to his greasy attempts at charm.

“I’m not ignoring you. I told you, I’m just doing this to humor him so he stops bugging me.”

“You're pulling out your phone on me! You don’t do that to someone who’s- hey!”

I had turned around. Okay, Miho, you’re right on this one. I was ignoring her. I scrolled down through my recent texts until I found one Hiroki Shinji. He’d be the one person to know the risks better than Kanamaru. It was kind of his specialty.

Got a minute to talk? I’ve got a question.

Miho stomped around to my front to face me.

“You’re really being rude to a friend who’s looking out for you.”

Friend? Was that what we were now? A few seconds ago, it had been just “classmate.” Miho paused, aware that she had just upgraded or perhaps downgraded our relationship.

“Sorry. Trying to get Hiroki on the line. He’s good with this sort of thing.”

Miho’s face knotted up.

“You’re gonna trust Shinji more than me? He’s just going to say the same thing I did in a nerdier way. Kanamaru’s a bad influence and you shouldn’t be hanging out with him.”

Ouch. She wasn’t wrong, but that wasn’t a nice way of putting it.

“Hiroki’s my friend. You’re…”
I stopped.

“...something.”