Agrippa
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All right! Fine! I will take you! - Chapter 8 - Haruno’s Dull Musings
🕑 Added 2021-09-03 01:35:41 +0000 UTCAs I dropped the phone I had just used to masturbate to the image of Hachiman tenderizing Shizuka’s vagina beside my head on the sofa I was lying on, a single thought ran through my head:
Yukino is going to kill me.
Right now, I was staying at the little brat’s flat while she found herself back home. Or, more likely, while she vacillated over what she should do and what did others expect her to do and if there was even a difference between the two notions.
My adorable little sister could be downright insufferable when she tried to act all high and mighty while barely disguising the utter and total lack of self-determination that lay right in the middle of most of her problems. So, as the one who had had to suffer her moods the most over the last few years, I felt justified in the spark of schadenfreude at knowing that I would have to clean her sofa off the results of me masturbating over the sexual escapades of the boy she thought she liked. It wasn’t fair, it was cruel; some may even say it was monstrous.
But I remembered…
One of my first memories, one of the first things that I knew for a fact I did by myself rather than live through, was of me playing checkers with my little, adorable, clumsy, chubby Yukino. Houtarou, our acceptably eccentric uncle, had brought the western game home when I was little and played with me for a while. I had enjoyed it, so, when Yukino was the same age I had been at the time, I remember explaining the rules to her and letting her make the first move.
She looked seriously at the board until she finally picked a piece and pushed it. Straight forward.
“No, Yuki, you need to do it diagonally, see? Like this.” I moved my own piece in a diagonal line and smiled at her, expecting her to correct her mistake. She nodded in that ever so serious way she still does up to this day, and moved a piece diagonally. The same one I just had.
“No, no, those are mine, you need to move the white ones. See? Those are yours, the black ones are mine.” And she looked up at me and pouted, as if offended I didn’t let her play with my pieces. So, trying to be a good older sister, I took the board and turned it around.
“Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter. You can have the black ones, I will just play the white side, okay?” I smiled at her, and my little sister smiled at me. I started feeling relieved at having solved the problem, when she grabbed a black piece and then a white one, and started putting them one over the other. And this was the first time I experienced dread.
I gave up on playing checkers and just made cheerful noises at my still roundish sister until I heard the main door open and mother’s clacking steps at the entrance. I told Yukino to stay put, and I went to give my mother the grave news.
“Mom… Mom, there’s something wrong with Yukino.”
What follows in my memory is a blur of movement as she ran and did all those things young, proper mothers are supposed to do if one of their children may be in danger. I remember watching in anguish until mother took me to another room and sat me on her lap so I could tell her, in my own words, what the actual problem was.
So I told her. I told her I tried to play with Yukino like uncle Houtarou played with me, and that Yukino just didn’t understand, even though I had been so patient and careful. That something that was supposed to let us have fun together as sisters had just shown me how Yukino wasn’t at all able to do what I had done at her age, even though I had checked the photo albums to make sure she wasn’t too young before I tried, so something must be wrong, because I had done everything right, and yet, Yukino, my little sister…
And then I was crying as my mother cradled me in her arms, rocking me back and forth until I calmed down. And when the tears ran out and I was too tired to keep the sadness in my face, when someone may have thought I had calmed down, mother explained it to me.
There was nothing wrong with Yukino. She was a normal child, no, a very bright child, it was just that I… wasn’t.
I had always known I was smarter than kids my own age, it hadn’t taken much to figure that out, but my sister… I had always hoped…
And my next memory is standing by the doorframe, watching as Yukino played with the black and white pieces of this game I no longer found fun on the floor, and thinking:
How dull.
Shizuka, you just had to leave me a melancholy mess again, didn’t you?
Suddenly feeling restless, I get up from the couch (and I can’t help an amused smirk at the wet spot I leave behind) to go to the kitchen, where I open the small cupboard I have appropriated and filled with alcohol. Because I can’t get drunk, not really, but I can enjoy faking it.
As a proper Japanese family heiress, I should take the bottle of sake and enjoy sipping it from a sakazuki under the moonlight.
As a proper me, I take out the bottle of Pinot Noir. I am in the mood for something soft on the palate.
I go back to the sofa (and switch cushions) and let my head fall over the backrest as I stare at the ceiling while the bottle of Burgundy breathes. It may be an affectation, many people say it is unnecessary, but it also allows the wine to chill in the ice bucket I have prepared. Because letting wine breathe may be an affectation, but drinking it overly warm is the province of those that don’t know that “room temperature” doesn’t mean “warm.” And that wine cellars tend to be much colder than modern homes.
Like Yurika.
Yurika was sophisticated, popular. The girl everyone either wanted to be or be with. Any other time and place, she would have ruled Sobu High School with a silk-clad iron fist. But Yurika was my age.
“I can’t believe he still hasn’t asked you out,” I remember telling her, carefully omitting that Masanobu, the star of the soccer team (and wasn’t that a stereotype that only needed blond hair to completely fit the mold), had already tried to ask me out already, and only my outright evasion had frustrated his attempts so far.
“I know! I mean, look at me.” And I did. Despite her boastfulness, Yurika resembled much more a classical Japanese beauty than I did: slender of frame and immaculate, pale skin that almost seemed iridescent against her straight, ink-black hair. But she was a nouveau riche trying too hard to fit in whenever she visited me. I almost pitied her clumsy attempts.
I can’t remember every single word we exchanged, because what I remembered was playing a game. Was this the right answer to seem mischievous without crossing the line into cruelty? Was this flattery timid enough to come across as shy admiration? Was friendship something you could fake until you made it?
But, even as I played that game with a bit more skill than young Yukino playing checkers, all that I could think was, once again, ‘How dull.’
Until the day Yurika had been crying on my shoulder after she had finally gathered her courage to be rejected by Masanobu (that worthless fake), and I did what the rules of the game bid me do: I gently smiled, I patted her back soothingly, and cared for her like a small, distressed pet during a fireworks festival. Because I never meant any harm for Yurika, even if she frustrated me with her insincere adulation, with her empty admiration, with…
It was painful, to feel put on a pedestal even as I tried to play at normalcy, and a part of me resented her, but another had invested so much in trying to connect with her, trying to lower myself to her level of vapid gossip and uninteresting blabber, that I couldn’t stand to see her hurt. Not my friend. Not like this.
But something was wrong about my play, because even as I felt offended on her behalf, I couldn’t stop myself from letting out what I really thought about Masanobu, about good looks that were only skin thin, about his fake, vacuous platitudes, that made it so plain to see the boy wouldn’t recognize a deep thought if it were handed to him by the Bodidharma himself, no matter how much he played at being the intellectual of our class with all those pretentious books he always liked to show off even if their spines were suspiciously unwrinkled.
And I lost the game.
Because Yurika at first laughed, eager to hear anything that made her unrequited crush unappealing and undesirable, but then… Then my complaints and insults hit far too close to home, and I could see it in her eyes, the moment she realized she wasn’t that different from Masanobu, and that every dart I had thrown in his direction may as well have been aimed at her.
There weren’t any fireworks, any explosive bursts of emotion or dramatic overreactions. She still let herself be comforted, and she thanked me afterward. But Yurika stopped coming by the Yukinoshita household shortly after, and it hurt, but I was also relieved at no longer having to put up with her clumsy attempts at graceful etiquette, and, in the end, once again, those two damned words. Unbidden. Unwanted. Familiar.
How dull.
They say drinking wine is an experience for all the senses. The taste, the aroma, even the texture on your palate play a part in it. Personally, when I am feeling moody, what I enjoy the most is the sight: the play of shifting light through ruby as I swirl it in my glass, the caustic network cutting through its shadow in scarlet… It has a mesmerizing, soothing quality. Sometimes, I think I could more easily get drunk on this than on the alcohol.
The taste is not bad by any means, of course. Not when it has such a price tag attached. A sip and a slight aspiration through wet, barely open lips makes the aroma bloom inside me, a burning touch that only leaves fragrance rather than embers, and I let myself savor the aftertaste. What would be proper for me to mutter now? A hint of oak and a strong aftertaste of red fruits?
As if I care about what’s proper. No. As if I still cared.
And I remember her.
Yurika and I had exchanged our polite, fakely cordial greetings of the day, and I had retired to my seat to read a book with a leather jacket when I caught my homeroom teacher staring at me. I hadn’t paid much mind to her yet. I thought she was amusing, a Japanese language teacher running around with a labcoat as if she felt the need to proclaim to everyone who listened that she was working as something she had never actually prepared for, and still doing a better job of it than most of the other staff. I smiled at her, and she frowned.
“Yukinoshita, could you come by during the lunch period?”
I froze. I had never been in trouble, and here I was, in the first trimester of my first year of high school, already being called out by my homeroom teacher. The rest of the class had fallen to silence and I caught Yurika’s barely disguised glee at my predicament before I mumbled a polite acceptance. Ms. Hiratsuka’s frown seemed to deepen, but she nodded and proceeded to do the roll call.
And lunch came, and I was in the staff room, facing a woman wearing what no longer seemed an amusing ensemble that wouldn’t have been out of place in a yakuza movie, not with the way she languidly reclined on her seat as she took a drag of her cigarette.
“Relax, Yukinoshita, you are not in trouble.”
And I let my shoulders fall as I faked accepting her words, and she shot me a glare at that.
“Let me take that back: you are in trouble, but not with me.”
I didn’t have to fake my confusion.
“Look, I know things are hard for you, but you are going about this in the worst way possible.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about, Ms. Hiratsuka.”
She seemed about to chew on the cigarette filter before she caught herself.
“No, of course you don’t.” And she sighed, rubbing at her temple with her free hand. “Sorry for springing this on you, and you would be right to tell me to mind my own business… except you never would, would you?”
“I… would never be so rude to a teacher.” And there was a bitterness at the admission that I didn’t know the cause of. Not back then.
“No. You would. The actual you.”
“The actual me? Is this a self-help speech?” And I bit back what I thought of those, and she barked a laugh that confused me.
“You could say that. Look, you will have to forgive me if I am blunt, but being roundabout about this will only make it harder for you: it’s not because you are too smart.”
And, for the first time in my life, somebody said something to me that I knew, absolutely, for certain, I would be unable to understand if they didn’t explain.
“Wha…” I couldn’t even finish the question.
“It may have started like that, and I am not saying there won’t always be a trace of it with any of your relationships, because you are damn smart, kid. But that’s not what’s keeping you apart from them.”
“Then… Then what is?” I asked, not knowing if I wanted to finally be able to win the game or… or something else. More.
“Yourself.”
“That doesn’t help. That makes it worse.”
She paused to take another breath of purple smoke, and she let it out in slow, lazy whorls.
“Yes and no. Because you can’t be less smart than you are, Yukinoshita, you never will, but you sure as hell can change the way you let it affect you.”
There was more. More conversation, more words, but that line? That was the line that started it all. The line that gave me hope.
I stopped covering my books with fake jackets, stopped laughing at things I didn’t find funny, stopped answering empty platitudes with the same coin. It took time, months, but one day I found myself letting go of a sarcastic quip in the middle of a group conversation and people laughed at it. With it.
They may not have understood everything I meant by it, every single reference and layer of meaning, but that wasn’t my fault. It was no one’s fault. It just was.
And I owed it to Ms. Hiratsuka.
The wine bottle has lost a third of its contents to my musings, and I am already feeling the slight, pleasant buoyancy of my senses delaying the coming of the world to my self. This is the stage where people let go of their inhibitions, where tongues are looser, where consequences fade into a distant future. This is the stage where I watch them and slur my speech that tiny bit that doesn’t seem out of place, where I blink deliberately and giggle at inappropriate comments. It is its own kind of fun, being the observer, but it is also a stark reminder.
I fill my cup yet again, and I roll the stem between graceful, steady fingers.
And I remember the day I knocked on the staff room’s door, only to find a harried Ms. Hiratasuka despairing over unmarked tests.
She always was that mix of maturity and childishness, of wisdom and foolishness, that I couldn’t help but laugh at with my newfound freedom. I teased her from time to time, and she always played along, letting me probe the limits of… But I am getting ahead of myself.
“I see you are getting along better with your classmates,” she said, after deciding that procrastinating was perfectly in character for her, even more so if she had the excuse of guiding one of her wayward students.
“I… I guess I am. Something’s still missing, but at least it’s not me.” And she smiled. Warm. Soft. So caring it hurt.
“That’s not a line I would have expected from you a month ago.”
“Maybe you aren’t that good at reading people, then,” I answered with a cheeky grin. I was still unused to them, but they felt right in a way proper, and measured smiles never had.
“Careful, brat, the disciple has yet to surpass the master.” And we both chuckled. And there wasn’t anything missing.
We talked a bit more and ended up going to the roof to chat while she smoked her way through half a pack. I didn’t like the bitter smell, but I liked her profile as she let smoke trail from her lips while she leaned her elbows on the low wall and the wind played with her long hair and her fluttering coat. Ms. Hiratsuka had always had a cinematographic quality to her, as if her natural habitat would have been a silver screen with a Vangelis song playing in the background. And I didn’t know it back then, but it seems far too obvious now what it was that I felt as I kept looking at the way the orange sky tinted her glowing silhouette.
And then the conversation shifted and she told me what I was missing. The piece I lacked to complete my playset.
“Something genuine.”
I looked at her, my lack of understanding still novel, and she elaborated.
“You are special, Haruno, but it’s not special that you are.” She gestured at the students leaving through the gates with her cigarette. “Each of them, each of you, is unique, has circumstances that set you apart. Maybe one of them works at the family dinner to help a widowed mother make it through the month, maybe one of them is struggling with her studies, because she absolutely needs to get into that certain university where he is waiting for her, and maybe there’s one who is trying to be as bright and cheerful as people think he is, because he cannot see how to fit any other way. All of you have stories, unique stories, that set you apart, but some learn how to reach across that distance.”
She quieted down for a moment, as if remembering something.
“You have already managed that first step, Haruno, to stop hiding who you are, to offer what only Yukinoshita Haruno can, and the rest… The rest is not always up to you. You need to find someone who offers something that you want even as they reach for what you allow them to grasp. And that something, for someone like you, who can see through appearances, who knows that most people wear a mask, that something must be genuine.”
I was mesmerized as the shifting clouds played the setting sun across her white skin and white coat, as the wind made colors deepen and brighten with each ripple. I was mesmerized by Ms. Hiratsuka’s twilight figure.
I reached a tentative hand to grasp the sleeve of the arm that terminated in a glowing ember and purple, drifting whorls, and looked into dark, soft, warm eyes.
“Can I call you Shizuka?” I said, my voice trembling for maybe the first time since I told mother there was something wrong with Yukino.
“Of course, Haruno,” she answered, as she cupped my face with a tender hand.
And I cried in her arms.
Half a bottle of wine should be enough to make me lightheaded and uninhibited. To make me giggle at the stupidest jokes and cry at any painful memory. My eyes are dry, maybe a bit too dry after unblinkingly staring into the pool of ruby twirling over my hand for too long.
Years passed. I was the formidable Yukinoshita scion who effortlessly took on every challenge a school could throw at me, to the quiet pride of the matriarch of my clan, the adulation of masses of students I found far too dull to concern myself with, and the ribbing of a teacher who took her job far too seriously and far too lightly. And I only enjoyed one of those three things.
I didn’t hide myself, not anymore. At least, not in the way I had used to. I didn’t conceal my wit in mild words nor my superiority in mediocre conversation, but I still played my game. I refined my maneuvers, my strategies, so that the mask only came on when I meant it to, when it served a purpose. Mostly, it was to hide disdain.
I couldn’t help it, I was proud. Always had been, because that had allowed me to survive my separation, to point at something and proclaim to myself ‘See? This is why. Because they are beneath you.’ And so pain had mixed with pride, which had made it at least a bit more tolerable. Until I had found someone who understood, who reached for what I had to offer with a hand that had something I desperately wanted.
I wasn’t nice, at the time, there was far too much bitterness, far too much rancor—and mother’s expectations, knowing my future was already decided, didn’t help matters. But I was, up to a point… genuine. And I had someone to be genuine with.
And so came graduation. And I swore to her I would keep in touch, even as Shizuka chided me about spending far too much time with a woman who was not as young as I was (because heavens forbid she even used the word ‘older’).
And I did.
I went to college to get that degree mother wanted me to adorn my future office with, and got drunk with friends that perhaps weren’t as dull as my classmates had been, maybe because people in college are smarter or maybe because they were finally growing up to the point where they could finally start to catch up, but there was always that spark they lacked, always that thing that still kept me apart and made me resort to my mask far more often than I had meant to.
And mother kept dragging me to gatherings of heirs, to further calcify what remained fluid of my future, and they were all so dull.
So I lost my virginity.
It wasn’t a big deal. My friends had invited me to a mixer where I faked being as drunk as them till a cute guy who had a fiancée and wouldn’t bother me a week after the fact decided to chivalrously escort me to a taxi and then dragged me to a love hotel. I almost laughed at him, but I had a mask to uphold.
The act itself was a bit disappointing. No fireworks behind my eyelids, no masterful playing with my body teaching me things about myself I had yet to learn. Just… release. Meaningless, fun, and, up to a point, satisfying release. Now I knew what the big deal was, and I found I didn’t care much for it. Not with all the complications it entailed.
And the boy was promptly discarded. And Shizuka wasn’t.
Now that I was of age, we met for drinks far more regularly than she could afford. It turned out my idolized teacher was even more of a mess than she had let on through our early friendship, but even as my rosy glasses finally dropped after the umpteenth time she started ranting about the latest scummy guy who had somehow talked his way into her apartment (among other things) only to turn out to be a predictable disappointment, I didn’t find my fondness decreasing. Shizuka was fallible, scatterbrained, prone to trusting far too quickly and to rash decisions that she ended up regretting. Shizuka was not a perfect, gallant figure who only offered sage advice as she helped a young girl mend herself into a semblance of a functional person before it was too late. Shizuka was human.
And she was genuine.
And so I kissed her.
Her rant had ended at the same time as the last bottle of beer, and we had been silently walking through Chiba Port Park. The chill of the night had made it natural for us to huddle closer till she ended up covering me with half her coat, and I turned to see her silhouette glowing with moonlight, the silver light so apt, so perfect for her and her alone, that I found myself reaching up before I knew what I was doing. What I was going to do.
Maybe, for the first time in my life, I had been drunk.
Her taste carried tobacco, beer, and far too many salty snacks. Her lips were dry and her clothes smelled like she tasted, but I didn’t care, because it was her, only her, that mattered, and everything else was forgotten in that perfect moment where I finally did understand what it actually was that made sex appealing, what it was that could maybe bring me far more than satisfying release. And my tongue danced with hers as my arms draped around her neck and my body molded to her own, my soft curves against her contained ones. And I finally understood what it was that young Haruno had really asked Shizuka on that rooftop three years back.
And so did Shizuka. And her palms reached up to my shoulders and gently, softly, lovingly, broke my heart.
“You don’t want this,” she told me, and, for the first time since we met, I knew Shizuka Hiratsuka was lying to me.
“I do. I had… I didn’t know, but I have wanted this for so long, I have wanted this so much. Shizuka, please.” I had never begged before. Never have since then. It was useless, after all.
“Haruno,” she reached up, and her fingers trailed down my hair until her tender palm cradled my face once more, “you have a future. A family to make. A woman can’t be by your side.”
“I don’t want it. Not at this cost. Not if it means I don’t have you.”
And she looked into my eyes. And maybe she believed me, but I think she didn’t.
“But I do.”
And that was it, wasn’t it? Shizuka Hiratsuka wanted a family, and I couldn’t give it to her. Not the way she had dreamed about, with a doting husband and father of her children. But that was the second time she lied to me.
Because she did want that, she always had, but the real reason, the one I could see behind a façade she had never before worn in front of me, was that she didn’t think it was right. She thought she would be taking advantage of me, her former student she had helped grow out of her shell into an actual, quasi-healthy individual.
And she was a woman who, more than anything else, wanted to always do the right thing. And I wasn’t right, so she wouldn’t do me.
I guess wine does make me a bit crass, after all.
We talked long into the night before we separated at the station. As the train carried me away and I stared at her white coat trembling with the passage of the vehicle, as I looked at the mask covering Shizuka Hiratsuka, the two words came unbidden after having rested so long.
How dull.
We still meet for drinks, still have fun, still play around at the batting cages from time to time. But it’s never been the same, it’s always felt like there’s that tiny bit of distance that shouldn’t be there, and I don’t know if it’s because Shizuka’s wary of me or because I am disappointed in her, but it hurts, and sometimes I will pretend I didn’t see her message me because I don’t know how to answer, even if Haruno Yukinoshita is precisely the kind of woman who never wants for the right word.
And then we met Hachiman.
He’s… hilarious, actually. A wrecking ball in any social field he deigns step in, and he marches forward without any of my subtlety, but…
“It’s not because you are too smart.”
And she was right. Because he isn’t. He’s maybe as bright as Yukino, but… But he approaches things, understands things, in just that way that I can see myself doing. And he’s clumsy, inexperienced, the proverbial bull in a china shop, except that he tends to break precisely what he means to, and I can see how my Yukino is finally getting a clue about how to be a real girl, something I haven’t managed after years of telling her that not being the heir and being able to choose her own future is a good thing!
I am so damn tempted to stain the damn sofa with what’s left in my cup…
But maybe he’s far too much like me, because he fell for Shizuka just like my younger self did.
And maybe he isn’t, or maybe he’s profiting off my experience, because he’s dragging her toward what she wants.
And I don’t know whether to smile at having triumphed over that particular hurdle or do something far more undignified at not having managed it when it was my turn to try.
So I lay back, only half a cup of wine left and a now dry spot where I rest my legs, and take my phone. On the screen, I can see the recording of Shizuka’s face as she is pleasured by her lover, because I have erased what comes after. Our conversation.
“It won’t last.”
“How can you say that? After what he just did?”
“Haruno, he’s young, full of hormones. Sooner or later he will realize he’s making a mistake and leave me for one of the other girls orbiting around him. It will be better for him when he does.”
“I don’t care about what’s better, and neither should you.”
“Then what should I care about?”
“What’s genuine.”
And I almost cry at the words, and she doesn’t say anything more, letting the silence stretch while I try to make it so my voice stops being so raw with emotion after the best sexual experience of my life and the latest pang of betrayal from my teacher and friend.
“I am sorry, Haruno.” And she is, but for all the wrong reasons.
There are more words, but I feel too petulant to remember them. I have erased that part of the video for a reason.
So I let the video of what should have been a happy, triumphant memory show me their faces: Shizuka’s vulnerability, Hachiman’s determination, their… their love.
And I drop the phone, barely stopping myself from doing the same with my cup, and stare at the ceiling.
“How dull,” I say.
But I don’t believe it.
Comments
Agrippa
Thank you. This was more or less what I had in mind in the second chapter, but, as usual, Haruno took the reins and ended up being a bit more than I expected. As for the future... Well, I am sure she has more to say.
Nick Russo
Beautiful and painful. I hope she can find some happiness.
