“So, just checking – you know I hate you, right?”
Yui giggled, shaking the square piece of celluloid that had just ejected from her camera with a plastic wobbling sound. The loose yellow sleeves of her blouse pillowed as her arm waved the photo, encouraging it to develop faster. “Whatever. Just don’t forget to smile while you do it.” She leveled the Polaroid at her sister again.
“Seriously, Yui.” Ranko forced a smile, holding her black school satchel in front of herself as another photo was taken. “This is ridiculous.”
With a smirk, Yui set the developing picture on the bar next to the others. “Hey now, little sister. I gave up eight months of Sundays to get you ready for today. I don’t remember ever saying there wouldn’t be a price to pay.”
Ranko groaned. She was right, she did owe Yui for all the work she put into tutoring her, but this might be a bridge too far. She turned to her side in her school uniform, smiling for yet another photo. “Okay, have you had your fun now? I mean, you’re making me feel like Hoshi over here.”
“Oh, Ran-chan, honestly. Don’t be silly.” Izumi tittered to herself, grabbing another lemon from the tray she was slicing behind the bar as Yui adjusted the red bow in her sister’s hair and snapped another picture. “Hoshi grew out of this stuff years ago.” Yui cackled at her sister’s comment.
With a playful glare, Ranko picked up a lime and tossed it gently in the direction of the stool on which Izzi was perched, making certain it could do her or her baby no actual harm. “Oh. I see how it is. Okay, well that’s two of you on my list, then. At least mama’s not participating in this shitshow.”
Before her sentence was even fully uttered, Hana emerged through the blue saloon doors, clutching the enormous pink teddy bear that was left onstage for Ranko some time ago under her arm. Ranko had left it in her old apartment upstairs, having had nowhere to put it in her new place. She felt ridiculous admitting it, but she did kind of miss cuddling it sometimes. She loved sleeping next to Akane and wouldn’t trade it for the world, but the bear didn’t snore and its feet were never cold.
“Oh, come on! Mooooom!” Ranko flung her hands to her sides in exasperation.
Hana smiled, handing it to her. “Aww, play along, Ranko. I didn’t get to do this with any of your sisters, after all.”
Ranko did manage to smile at that. As absurd as she felt -- and she did feel well and truly absurd – she had to admit, she’d missed this in the days since moving out. Just being with her family, being the little sister and the center of attention, joking around and teasing with the girls. For as new as it still was to Ranko, it felt like the kind of family she always saw on TV, where people came to each other with their problems, supported each other, and had fun with each other. It felt so natural, so normal, even though until last year, to Ranko, it had been anything but.
She hoped Akane was handling the change to move away from her own sisters better than Ranko had. In fairness, Akane’d had almost nineteen years to bond with Nabiki and Kasumi, and Ranko hadn’t even had one with her sisters yet. She wondered if the difference made it easier or harder for Akane than it was for her, but however tight-knit the Tendo girls had been, she doubted any girl on the planet could feel as close to her sisters as Ranko did. At one point or another, in one way or another, all of them had saved her life at least once. Plus, most people just got stuck with the family they were born with, and she knew from first-hand experience that some of them sucked. Ranko had the good fortune of being able to choose hers, or at least, having been chosen by them. She never dreamed of finding a family when she wandered into the bar cold and hungry last November, but whatever gods and good spirits inhabited this world, Ranko thanked them daily that she had.
Besides, selfish though it may have felt, there was a part of her that did enjoy anything she got to do with Hana that the other girls hadn’t. It made her feel special, like she wasn’t just the latest fixer-upper to roll off of the assembly line. She blushed at the thought – was this what it felt like to have a sibling rivalry? To compete for their mother’s attention? Plus, she felt terrible that Hana hadn’t gotten that experience before, especially given that Ayako actually was her biological daughter, a fact that Ranko was still the only one of the five sisters to know.
Squeezing the soft pink bear tight around its waist and smiling more earnestly than in the previous shots, Ranko posed for what turned out to be the last slide of film in the camera’s cartridge. Yui waved it in the air, setting the camera down on the polyurethane bar top. “Alright, I suppose we’ve tormented you enough. For now.”
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Ranko sighed with a smile, propping the bear up in a chair at one of the nearby tables. “Thank goodness. I’m gonna go get changed, then.”
Hana smirked, leaning back against the bar counter. “Not so fast, young lady. We still need to hear about everything. How was the day?”
Ranko blushed, fidgeting with her hair with a bit of embarrassment. Family or no, she’d been an adult coworker to these women for months, and it felt like a strange regression to now tell them about her first day at school. “It was… not bad, all things considered.” Of course, she wasn’t about to tell them that the whole act of going to school and being a girl at the same time was warping her brain and challenging her confidence in ways she didn’t previously know possible.
“Yeah?” Hana tossed the empty vodka bottle from Yui’s well, making a note to grab a replacement from the cabinet in the back. “Make any new friends?”
Smiling, Ranko nodded. “There’s this girl Kumiko, who’s in three of my classes. She’s kind of been showing me around a little bit. Timid as hell, but she’s kind of fun, too, I think.”
A little “awwww” escaped Izumi’s lips. “You should bring her by sometime.” Ranko nodded in assent.
“And what about your classes? Do you like your teachers?” Yui flushed the soda gun into the steel sink to her left, ensuring the lines were clean.
“They were okay. My English teacher’s nice enough. History and math are gonna be tough for me, but we kinda knew that going in. My Japanese teacher’s kinda boring, I guess. My science teacher’s a total nutball, doing these weird experiments and stuff in front of the class. Home skills is gonna be… interesting. No chance I’d have been able to do that without all the lessons you gave me in the kitchen, Mama. I’d have burned half the school down.” At least whatever she produced would be something approaching edible; back at Furinkan, it was never the bell over the PA system that dismissed home skills class, but the smoke alarm whenever Akane tried to complete her assignments.
To any of her sisters, this conversation was as normal a part of the first day of school as finding one’s classrooms, but to Ranko, it was surreal to have a family that showed any interest in it whatsoever. She’d never experienced that before. She wondered how much different her past school experience would have been if she hadn’t felt as if she was dealing with it entirely alone. She might have almost given a damn if anyone had given her a reason to think of it as anything other than seven hours a day of involuntary captivity.
“What about clubs? Sports? Anything catching your eye?” Izumi twisted her wrist, spiral-cutting another orange with her paring knife. She giggled a bit, looking down at the oversized pink shirt covering her abdomen and within, the little girl that she and Kaito had conceived on their wedding night. “Hey, you! Settle down in there! That tickles!”
Ranko blushed. “Izzi, you know I don’t have time for that extra stuff! I’ve got classes, the home school thing, plus work, the band, housework. I’m beat as it is.” Besides, most of the classes were either based around stuff that didn’t excite her much, like anime, or were gendered. The boys’ clubs wouldn’t have her. As for the girls’ clubs, she didn’t exactly have a lot in common with many of their members. Sports would be risky for the same reason martial arts were; the power of the Full Body Cat’s Tongue had rendered her entirely too fragile to risk most physical pursuits.
Hana frowned a little, crossing her arms over the Janis Joplin tee shirt she wore. “If you find something that interests you, you should do it, Ranko. You only get this chance once. You’ll have your whole life to work and do dishes. We can figure out the scheduling and stuff between us if we have to.”
Ranko shrugged. “I doubt anything’s gonna catch my eye, but I’ll let you know if I change my mind.”
Yui smirked. “So, anybody make a pass at you yet?” She began stacking highball glasses on the back bar behind her.
“Yui!” Ranko blushed furiously, hiding her face in her hands.
“Well? I know you’re with Akane, you know you’re with Akane, but they don’t, and sometimes it’s fun to get flirted with, after all.” The blonde grinned mischievously, pulling another Collins glass out of the dishwasher.
Ranko shook her head, smiling and rolling her eyes. Her cheeks were still aflame. Yui hadn’t been on a date in the entire time Ranko had known her. Ranko got the sense that she was living vicariously through her youngest sister, especially as she was the only one in the family besides Yui who had an interest in girls. “Sorry to disappoint, but no, no two-timing to report today.”
Ranko looked up at the clock behind Yui’s head nervously. “Now, can I please go get changed and help with prep? We open in 90 minutes!”
Hana shook her head, handing Ranko back her school bag. “Not a chance, missy. You sit your butt down right there, and you don’t touch a single glass in this place until your homework is done. Let us know if you need any help.”
Ranko smiled warmly. Having a family was a pain in the ass sometimes, but damn, it felt good to have people who cared whether or not she succeeded. If rules were the price of that, she was willing to make that trade.
“Yes, mama.”