Ranko slipped quietly through the front door into her apartment in the same white floral dress she had worn to work the night before, yawning as her eyes darted around the living room and kitchen. She suspected Akane had already left for class, but she didn’t want to wake her if she hadn’t. She felt like an idiot for not bringing her school uniform to work last night, and she needed to change and get to school in time for English class. She did not have the energy to stand in the hall all period if she got there late.
Last night, Kasumi had come over for dinner with Akane, and Ranko had spent the night in her old room at the Phoenix after work. It still felt like home there, but she hadn’t slept much regardless. She’d started on an essay on Don Quixote for her homeschool humanities class when she got off work at 2:00 AM, and by the time she’d crawled into bed at half past four, she was too upset and too caffeinated to sleep. She felt a little like Quixote, she’d realized. Fighting every battle she could, wearing herself down to nothing, to try and win the favor of a woman who sometimes seemed to barely notice she was alive.
She nudged the bedroom door, stalking carefully into the room, mindful of the squeaky boards in the floor. She found the room empty. The bed was unmade and an empty tea cup rested on Akane’s nightstand. Ranko sighed and tried her best not to resent the possibility that she’d be expected to tidy up her home after a night she hadn’t been invited to spend in it.
She reached into the closet, pulling her school uniform out. She didn’t remember hanging it up after she changed last night; Akane must have done it for her. Ranko smiled, appreciating the little act of consideration Akane had shown. She slipped off her dress, tossing it into the laundry hamper and turning to the dresser for a clean set of undergarments. As she did, she stopped, noticing something wrong, and looking at the dresser in dismay.
The little photo frame commemorating the couple’s first night in their apartment was missing. Its outline was still faintly visible in the thin layer of dust that had accumulated in the last three days since Ranko had last wiped it down. Ranko got down on her hands and knees, checking under the dresser and the bed, worried it had somehow been knocked off onto the floor and broken. Not finding it, she stood again. She wouldn’t have, would she?
Ranko opened Akane’s underwear drawer, the top one on the left, and found nothing out of the ordinary. Well, one thing out of the ordinary, she thought with a smirk as she plucked a pair of emerald green panties out of the drawer. Nice try, Akane, but these are mine. She opened her own underwear drawer to return the satin hipsters to their rightful place, and there, resting on a pillow of Ranko’s underthings, lay the photo frame, face down.
She staggered back and sat on her unkempt bed in nothing but her underwear, awash in her thoughts. Akane hadn’t hung up her school dress to be nice, she realized. She’d done it to hide her presence. Just like she’d done when she hid their picture, the one little memento they’d eked out of their nonexistent budget to declare the tiny apartment as their own and commemorate the start of their future. Stuffed in the underwear drawer like it was a teenage boy’s dirty magazine.
Was that all she was to Akane? Just some infatuation she was ashamed of? Did Akane not even miss her presence enough to put their things back out after Kasumi had left? She certainly hadn’t showed up at the bar last night, and there was no chance Kasumi had stayed late enough to prevent it. If the Tendos kept roosters, Kasumi would have woken them with breakfast in bed every day before the sun rose.
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She turned hesitantly, looking at the back wall of the room. She knew what she expected to see, but she prayed she would be wrong.
Ranko walked to the corner containing the folding tray table that served as her nightstand, right next to the window, placing her hand on the wall. Her fingertips slid over a tiny pinhole in the floral wallpaper, almost invisible at the center of a tulip. She traced a horizontal line about a half-meter to her left, finding another hole. Then, down a ways, another, and a fourth at the same height, directly below the first. She had to feel them, to prove to herself that their existence wasn’t a dream in the first place. The four holes outlined a rectangle, where until sometime after she left for work last night, four red push pins had held up a poster announcing the limited release of a certain sold-out pop single. To Ranko, the little pocks in the wall may as well have been four puncture wounds in her heart.
Ranko wiped her eyes. She didn’t have time for this. She pulled on her school blouse, forgetting to change into clean undergarments. She tried to swallow back her anger, her hurt. Tried to remember everything she’d told Hana about how she didn’t want to blame Akane. She sat back on the bed, looking up at the empty place on the dresser.
“I love her, she loves me. I know that. She doesn’t have a choice,” she begged herself out loud to believe as she slipped into her red pinafore. “She wants me. She said so. She’s doing what she thinks she has to. She…”
Ranko shook her head, looking up at herself in the mirror, sniffling as she watched the reflection of a tear roll jaggedly down her cheek. Her voice lowered to somewhere between a whimper and a whisper as she recited aloud something Yui had taught her ages ago, in her first few days at the Phoenix. The last full night of Ranma Saotome’s life.
“I am wanted. I have worth. I have people who care about me. I am wanted. I have worth. I have…”
Her eyes fell back on the dresser, where the picture frame still mocked her from its rest in the center of her open underwear drawer. She decided not to return it to its proper place. She wanted to see how long it took Akane to remember. Ranko had to see that it was important to her, too. It was vindictive, it was petty, and try though she might, she couldn’t will herself to care.
Something had to give, and Ranko was down to one way left to get the point across to Akane. She’d tried so many times to talk to her, and allowed guilt and empathy to blunt the words she needed to convey how it was killing her to exist as the skeleton in Akane’s closet. It was going to hurt her – hurt them both – but she couldn’t live this way anymore. She was going to have to break Akane’s heart to make a place for herself in it. She hated it, but she’d fought too hard to build herself into a real person again, and she could no longer bear the thought of people lining up around the block to celebrate her every night while the love of her life treated her as a stranger. She could not live as a ghost again. She would not. Not anymore.
Ranko stood and gently closed the drawer containing the photo, her eyes lingering sadly for a moment on the drawer just below it where she kept her bras. I don’t even think that could get through to her right now, she thought sadly to herself. This is the only way. I’m sorry, Akane.
She walked to the kitchen, her hands shaking as she reached for the beige telephone mounted to the wall and dialed a number on the white push buttons on the underside of the receiver. She leaned her backside on the wall near the front door, at the limit of the coiled beige cord’s reach, as the electronic whirrs droned in her ear. A groggy-sounding masculine voice answered the call on the sixth ring.
“Do you have any earthly idea what time it is, girl,” the man groaned. It always weirded her out that he knew it was her calling; he had recently gotten one of those new machines that showed the number that was calling while the phone was ringing.
“I’m sorry, Crash, but I really need you. Tonight, as soon as school gets out, at the bar. Please?”