Mei looked at her watch nervously. Come on, Ranko, she thought to herself. Five minutes until opening. The line already stretched around the corner of the building, waiting for the women inside to open the doors to begin their weekend revelry. “Where could she be?”
Izumi darted through the saloon doors, tossing her purse on a shelf under the bar top. “Hey, Mei, did you take the trash out?”
The blue-haired girl shook her head. “No, but it wasn’t full. Why?”
Izumi shrugged, tying a little black apron holding her notepad and straws around her waist. “The back door was unlocked. I thought somebody might have gone out.”
Yui frowned. She knew she’d locked the door after bringing in the week’s liquor delivery. Hana was in her office, so if none of the other girls had opened it…
“Mei, can you handle the bar for a few minutes?”
Yui’s request was met with a shrug. “I guess so. I’ve got nothing to do, since I’m supposed to be running a show for a singer who isn’t here. Why, what’s up?”
Yui looked toward the back room, a concerned expression in her eyes. “I just need to check on something.”
Mei slid over to Yui’s well behind the bar, and Yui stepped through the saloon doors and looked up the stairs. With a sigh, she began to ascend. She fervently hoped she was wrong, but she hadn’t been able to get Ranko’s demeanor from the other night out of her head.
Quietly, she turned the doorknob and entered. Normally she would have knocked, but she didn’t expect an answer whether the room was empty or not. The bedroom was pristine; the bed was made, no dirty clothes on the floor or dishes in the sink. But there was also no one in it. She had just turned back for the stairwell when she thought she heard a soft sound coming from the bathroom. She held still, holding her breath for a moment until she heard it again, and frowned sadly. That was a sound she knew all too well.
The bathroom door was pulled closed but not latched, so she gently pushed it open. There she found her youngest sister, still fully clothed in a silver skater dress covered with purple flowers, curled up in a ball in the bathtub. There was no water in the tub, unless one counted the salty deluge raining from Ranko’s eyes.
Yui sighed, walking into the room gingerly and sitting on the closed toilet seat next to the tub. “Ranko, honey, what happened?” She spoke as softly and disarmingly as she could, unsure if Ranko could even hear her over her sobbing.
The younger girl curled herself tighter into a ball, seeming to try in vain to hide from Yui’s sight. “Just… leave me alone.”
Yui reached out to put her hand on Ranko’s shoulder, but her sister shrank even further away from her touch. “I think we both know that’s not going to happen. Please, talk to me?”
“I d… don’t want to… talk about it…” The teen sniffled, wiping her running nose on her right forearm.
“Maybe, but I think you might need to.” Yui sat forward on the toilet seat, trying to be as close as Ranko would let her. She remembered what Hana had told her about the night Mikado had attacked Mei; how hard it had been to get Ranko to open up. Like her surrogate mother, she knew that her youngest sister needed an outlet for her feelings, even if one had to jackhammer through years of hard-won emotional walls to help her release them.
“Please, Ranko. What happened?”
The crying teen’s words echoed hollowly in the tiled shower stall between her sobs.
“I want to give up.”
Yui blinked, looking her over instinctively. Those words hit her differently after what had happened with Kimiko, and what she had tried to do to herself in response. The bandage on Ranko’s hand was intact. She doubted that the incident with the paring knife had been a deliberate attempt to hurt herself; it was all wrong for such an intent. Then, she noticed that the bracelet around Ranko’s scarred wrist was upside down, which brought her some concern.
“You know that’s not a thing we allow around here, right? Giving up?”
“I just wanted to sing, Yui. It’s the only th… thing I’m good at anym… more. The only thing I’ll ever be good at. And he just…” If there was an end to the sentence, it was lost in the teen’s wailing sobs.
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Yui moved from the toilet seat to the edge of the tub, perching on the porcelain ledge and brushing Ranko’s hair from her face softly with her fingers. Prodding her further would do no good; this would have to come out in its own time. A part of her wished Akane were here to help her calm Ranko down, but another part of her was grateful she’d called ahead and said she couldn’t come tonight due to a school function. She doubted Ranko would want her girlfriend to see her like this.
“I thought they were going to help me. You all worked so hard to help me im… impress him…” Her whimpering grew louder and more desperate as the subject of the sentence changed from they to him.
Yui noticed. So he was likely the source of the problem, whatever it was. She stroked Ranko’s hair gently, trying to impart some measure of calm and comfort to her as best she could. “Shhh… Take a couple slow, deep breaths, honey.”
Ranko complied, and found it easier to speak after. “They aren’t letting me sing. They just dressed me up in all these ridiculous outfits and took all of these… gross pictures of me. He told me I wasn’t good enough on my own. They stuck me in this group of idiot girls with this really handsy choreographer, and…” Her breath caught as she quaked through a sob.
Yui did not like where this was going one bit.
“Have you talked to the guy that was here that night? Takao, I think his name was? He seemed to think the sky was the limit for you.”
She nodded, turning her face away in shame. “He said he could make me a star.”
Yui dared risk a smile. “See? There’s someth…”
“If I slept with him.”
Yui cringed with a deep sigh, leaning down and wrapping her arms around her sister’s back and shoulders. “Oh, gods, honey. I’m so sorry. You deserve so much better than…”
Again, Ranko interrupted her, her voice barely audible with her face buried in Yui’s shoulder.
“Maybe I should just do it.”
Yui pulled back from the hug, bracing Ranko’s neck in her hands and forcing the distraught girl to look at her. “You what?! No way! Why would you even consider something like that?”
The smaller girl shrunk away from her sister, curling up again as if she thought that if she contorted herself into a small enough ball, she could just disappear. She could not bear the pity in Yui’s eyes. Somehow, it made her feel even dirtier. “I don’t want to. Gods, I don’t. But I don’t think I really have a choice.” The whole of her body shuddered. She felt Mikado’s hands all over her. She was disgusted with herself for entertaining the idea at all, but she truly had no backup plan.
The elder girl leaned over, resting her hand on her sister’s shoulder. “Ranko, baby, listen to me. You always have a choice! Especially about that!”
Ranko shuddered, sniffling. “Maybe it won’t be so bad. Ten, fifteen minutes, close my eyes, just pretend I’m somewhere else. Akane doesn’t even have to know. And then it’ll all be done.” Until not that long ago, her feminine form was a costume; something she could put on and take off as it suited her. And like any costume, she could try and tell herself that whatever happened to it wasn’t quite real, didn’t really matter. What she would have given in that moment for just a few minutes of that sort of dissociation, even though it had never worked with Mikado, or anything else, really.
Her sister shook her head, not that Ranko saw it with her eyes averted. “Honey, it won’t be, and I think you know that. He’ll be able to just move on, but you won’t. If a guy tries to manipulate you with something like that, he’ll never keep his promises anyway. It’ll always be one more thing they want, one more thing they’ll promise or threaten you with. It’ll never be done. Once they know they can control you like that, they never let go.” She stroked Ranko’s arm with her fingers softly. “It’s the only way jerks like that can ever get with a girl, so they don’t give it up once they’ve got it. You can’t give in to this, sweetheart. You just can’t.”
“I think I have to, Yui. I don’t have anything else. I’ll never amount to anything else.”
Yui scoffed. “What are you even talking about right now?”
“I got my test results back. I’m basically never gonna graduate. I’m too freaking dumb to catch up, and I’ll never be able to get a real job. I’ll never be able to take care of Akane, and I’ll be waiting tables and being pawed at by drunks my whole life, just like Hana said. So the only thing I’ve got left is singing. And if I want to get anywhere as a singer, I have to…”
“No, you don’t!” Yui squeezed her shoulder, hoping to somehow confer a little strength on her younger sister. “There’s always another way. It might be hard, but if you want it badly enough, we will find a way to make it happen, without you having to give yourself to this asshole. I’ll tutor you every day if I have to. But I want you to promise me you won’t give that little prick what he wants.”
Ranko sniffled. “But I…”
Yui put up her hand, gesturing for her to stop her sentence. “Promise me, Ran-chan. Please. For your own sake.”
The redhead looked away and nodded.
“I need to hear you say it, honey. We both do.” Yui rubbed her forearm reassuringly.
“I… I promise.”