Kumiko sighed, watching the cheerleader to her right warily as they walked down the crowded hall to Mr. Nishi’s second period history class. She half-expected the redheaded girl to explode and take out half the campus at any second. She couldn’t seem to get Ranko to talk about it, but something had her best friend in a foul and volatile mood for going on three days now. Maybe it was the terrible grade she got on her math test, being made to stand in the hall for showing up late yesterday, or just feminine physiology taking its toll, but whatever was causing it, Ranko had been walking on the edge of a knife all week. Judging by her bloodshot, sunken eyes and her yawning, she hadn’t slept worth a damn in days either, which couldn’t be helping. It was worryingly reminiscent of the way she dragged herself through school earlier in the year, before she burned her hands at work just before Halloween.
“Hey, Ran-chan?” Tamiko sidled up to her friend, waving politely to Kumiko. “You good? We didn’t see you at practice yesterday.”
Ranko shrugged nonchalantly. “Yeah, sorry. Wasn’t feeling real good.”
Her fellow cheerleader nodded in concern. “You good now, though? We need ya for the judo match tomorrow night.”
The redhead shook her head, her braid almost whipping Kumiko in the face. “I wouldn’t count on me, Tami. Please tell Shiori I’m sorry, but… I just don’t think I can make it.”
“Alright.” Tamiko bobbed her head softly in worried acknowledgement. “I’ll let her know. You take care of you, huh? Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
Ranko chuckled darkly. Feel like killing a panda? “Yeah, will do, Tami. Thanks.” Her voice was devoid of all emotion, but there was a tinge of venom around the edge of her bluntness, a hidden threat that if the box she was desperately trying to keep sealed was opened, no one would like what came out. Ranko waved half-heartedly as her friend darted off in the direction of her art class.
“So, I was thinking. If you don’t have work until later, maybe ice cream? My treat?” Kumiko smiled hopefully, desperate to pull her friend out of her funk.
Ranko glowered. “It is not physically possible for me to give less of a fuck about ice cream right now. Like, I might actually give negative fucks about it. Literal negafucks.”
Kumiko frowned. “Sheesh, Ranko, you don’t gotta be so mean about it.” She lowered her eyes, falling a step or two behind her friend on their journey to room 218. “I wish you’d talk to me about what’s going on with you. I know something’s up, and I can’t help you if you won’t let me.”
It’s not you. I’m not letting anyone in. Ranko sighed, remembering the events of the previous evening. A family had come into the bar to celebrate their college-age son’s birthday, and the second the birthday boy used the word father to describe the elder gentleman in the group. Ranko slammed their pizza down on the table so hard that the cherry table top broke off of its base and they’d had to comp the whole party’s meal.
Yui tried to pull her aside to talk to her, Mei too, but Ranko had kept them at arm’s length. I can’t have you involved in this, she’d thought to herself at the time. Anybody who gets too close to this – to me – is gonna get hurt. Better to keep you safe.
Izumi had already been giving her crap for the fact she hadn’t worn a dress in three days, opting for conservative, boring jeans-and-tee-shirts outfits. Beyond that, she’d put her hair back in the basic braid she used to wear, taken out her earrings, and hadn’t worn a lick of makeup. About the only feminine thing she still wore was her engagement ring. It was as if everything Izumi had taught her over the last seventeen months had been completely erased overnight. Indeed, if it weren’t a requirement, she wouldn’t even be wearing the pinafore skirt of her school uniform, and she dared not flout the uniform policy at Yusue the way she routinely had at Furinkan. She had too much to lose if she were made to stand in the hall again right now.
“Hey, Ranko! I’m talking to you, ya know!”
Ranko looked up. “Yeah. I’m sorry, Kumi. I just got a lot on my what the… fuck! Get that away from me!” She physically jumped back, glaring at the purple-haired freshman girl walking down the hall in the opposite direction. The bewildered girl had no idea why the adorable panda backpack her boyfriend gave her for Christmas would bother the upperclasswoman so much, but she thought it best to just keep moving and not cause any further trouble.
“Ranko, seriously, are you okay?” Kumiko looked her friend over with ever-increasing concern. “You’re really being kind of a jerk lately, and it’s not like you.”
Ranko had nearly finished preparing an excuse when she heard a male voice over her shoulder. “You should listen to your friend. You’re never gonna land another boyfriend if you keep being such a bitch, no matter how much you put out.” Her spine bolted straight up as she felt the boy swat her hard on the backside through her red pinafore skirt.
“Hey! Don’t b…”
Kumiko’s admonishment of the boy fell to silence as Ranko whirled, grabbing the short blonde boy by the collar of his white uniform shirt. With a feral scream, she lifted him off his feet and drove him backward a meter and a half until his back slammed into the upper row of steel lockers with a hollow bang. Having dropped her school bag on the floor in the middle of the hallway, Ranko clocked the boy across the nose with a closed left fist, and she was certain she felt his nose break under her knuckles. She cocked her fist back again, holding it over him menacingly. A trickle of blood began forming down one side of his nose where her engagement ring had punctured his skin. Her eyes were wild with rage. “Fucking call me a slut again! Go on! DO IT!”
Kumiko pushed through the first ring of students that had begun forming around the fight, cautiously resting her hand on Ranko’s left shoulder. “Ranko, stop! You’re gonna get in trouble! We gotta get you out of here!”
Screaming primally in the boy’s face, Ranko pulled her right arm back and threw the young pervert’s body back into the bank of lockers with a loud slam as she released his shirt.
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He crumpled to the floor, scrambling quickly to his feet and shielding his mangled and bleeding nose from the view of the assembled students with one hand. “Crazy bitch!” He darted off back down the hallway in the direction he’d come from, pushing through the crowd. His green book bag remained on the floor where he’d been snatched off of his feet.
Shouldering Ranko’s school satchel on the arm opposite her own bag, Kumiko pulled at Ranko’s wrist. “C’mon, before the teachers get here.” Still vibrating in her rage, Ranko allowed herself to be led across the hall into a large closet full of cleaning supplies and tools. Kumiko closed and locked the door behind the pair, and Ranko slumped down onto a large gray plastic paint bucket, her body weight slamming into the drywall behind it with a loud, hollow thud as she did.
Kumiko dropped both her bag and Ranko’s on the floor, rotating her shoulder in a windmill motion with a grimace. What the hell do you have in that thing, bricks? “Okay, I’m not playing anymore, Ranko. Spill it.”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.” Ranko glowered, pulling her braided ponytail free of the steel shelving unit behind her that it was getting caught on.
“I get that, but, no offense, Ran-chan, once you hulk out on somebody on the way to history class so bad that the freaking science fair champion has to pull you off, it’s kinda past the point of being optional.”
Ranko looked down at her hands. “It’s too much. Nobody will understand. It’s best if you just steer clear of me for a while. I’m fucking radioactive, and I’m gonna hurt anyone who gets too close. Nobody gets it! I’m trying to keep you safe from me!” And what’s coming for me, she thought in terror.
Shaking her head as the electronic buzz of the class bell sounded through every recessed speaker in the drop ceiling, Kumiko chuckled darkly. “Well, it seems I’m spending the next hour locked in a broom closet with you one way or the other, so you might as well talk to me.”
“It… It’s my dad, okay?!” Ranko shook her head, trying to shake loose some of the cobwebs in her mind that caffeine, exhaustion and anxiety had deposited. It’s getting hard to keep what bullshit I’ve told who straight again. “He doesn’t approve of my life, and he’s trying to fuck up everything about it. I don’t want the people I care about anywhere around me when it happens.”
Pulling up another paint bucket, Kumiko sat opposite her friend in the narrow closet. “What’s not to like about your life? You’re a celebrity, an athlete, and a champion. What more does he want you to have?”
A dick, Ranko’s mind spat at her. “I work in a bar. I make money dancing. I’m a cheerleader. Everything with Akane. All of it. The better something is for me, the more he hates it.”
Kumiko shook her head. “Okay, that makes no sense. Like, why would your father have an issue with you having a roommate?”
Fuck, Ranko thought. I forgot she didn’t know. Oh well, I was going to have to tell her before the wedding anyway. She shook her head. “Akane’s… not just my roommate, Kumi.”
She reached down into the collar of her white uniform shirt, pulling the dainty silver rope chain around her neck out of it to reveal the silver diamond solitaire ring dangling from it. “She’s my everything. She’s my whole world, Kumi.”
And I’m going to fight like hell for her. Even if it destroys me in the process.
Kumiko gasped, covering her mouth with both of her hands. “Oh my gods, really?! All those times I’ve been to the Phoenix and she’s waited on me, that was… your girlfriend? And you never said anything?! How did I not peg that about you? I’m normally so good at that, too! So, like, you like boys and girls?”
Ranko shook her head. “Nope. Just girls. Well, just the one girl, anyway.” She managed to crack the faintest hint of a smile, already knowing what follow-up question she was about to receive.
“But then… the whole thing with Eiji…” Ranko could see the pieces of the truth forming in the mystified girl’s eyes.
“Yep. It was never real. It was all a sham to hide the truth about myself from everybody.” And the truth about him, but we don’t need to get into that. “Everything else I said about the experience is a hundred percent true, though. He wanted to pretend to date me so the girls would leave him alone, and it suited my purposes, too. It was never Eiji that gave me the ring in the first place, it was always Akane. But I forgot to take it off, and things got out of hand.”
“So… the ring is… you and Akane are…”
Ranko nodded, managing the tiniest crack of a smile. “We’re getting married in July. I’m so sorry I wasn’t honest with you about it, Kumi. I should have told you from the beginning. I wanted to, but I was too scared.”
Please don’t hate me. Please. I can’t take anything else falling apart right now.
Kumiko stood from her paint bucket, looking down at Ranko judgmentally. “Honestly?! I can’t fucking believe you!”
The redhead lowered her head, nodding in acknowledgement. “I’m sorry, I…”
Kumiko cringed, realizing her joke hadn’t landed the way she’d intended it, and cut Ranko off before she could continue. “If you’re getting married in four months, I want to know where the fuck my wedding invitation is!” She cracked a wide smile.
Ranko waved her hands defensively, a smile cracking through the ashen expression on her face. “We haven’t sent ‘em yet, but you’re getting one, I promise! You can’t fucking scare me like that, Kumi!”
Kumiko cocked her head cutely with a grin. “Seriously, though. I’m so glad you’re with somebody that makes you happy. You deserve to be, and I’m so sorry everything else makes it hard.”
“Yeah, until my asshole pop wrecks it all.” Her smile vanished as Ranko dejectedly tossed a paintbrush from the shelf behind her into a utility sink on the opposite wall with a loud clatter. “Like, what the hell am I supposed to do when he shows up and stomps my whole life into the fucking dirt?!”
The younger girl stood, stretching her back. Those paint buckets weren’t especially comfortable. “So, my best friend has this thing she tells people about days like this.”
Ranko looked up. “Yeah? Anything good? What’d she say?”
Kumiko smiled supportively, closing the distance between herself and her friend and placing her hand on Ranko’s shoulder, waiting to speak until Ranko’s eyes met her own.
“You ignite, and you rise.”