Ranko thrashed her head to the side, her ponytail flying over her shoulder as she danced. She was positively glowing.
She had faced Genma Saotome and come out not only unscathed, but having made him feel small for a change. Nabiki was working on the stuff with the label, and she’d had a chance to work with the boys on a couple of new songs. She was in college. She’d formally joined the cheerleading squad at Minato University a few days ago. She was with her friends and her family. Sakura had come home and all but instantly pulled Yui out of her months-long funk. She had made up with Akane - even though some of the things they’d fought about in Hawai’i had yet to come up again since. She was up on her stage. She was home, and everyone else she loved was about to be, too.
On that Thursday night, Ranko Tendo was joy incarnate.
“I gotta BE the one that’s rockin’ out the hardest in the club, and OH! I’m gonna go until the…”
Ranko raised her hands to her shoulders, palms up, as the crowd continued the chorus of one of her newest songs for her. She extended her arms toward the roof, punctuating each of the words with a brief pause in her upward motion.
“SUN! COMES! UP!”
She swiveled on her heels, her pleated pink skirt flaring around her hips as she turned to face Hitomi and pointed to her with two fingers. “YOU know whatcha gotta do, and who ya gotta do it with!”
Giggling, she leaned backward until most of her weight was supported by Emi’s chest just behind her. She panned the crowd with her hand, flashing her Firebirds a smile that outshone the sun as she jiggled her butt against Emi’s hip.
“AN-yone can do it, if you’re not afraid to wiggle it!”
The effervescent redhead shaded her eyes with her hand as if blocking the sun from her face, looking to the front door. What she saw there caused her cheeks to all but explode in a rain of glitter and joy, but she held herself together. Gotta finish the song first.
“See me on the floor giving it all that I got, so…”
She turned her hand to the side, resting the back of her hand on her forehead as if she were exhausted. She was not. She could have danced all night.
“Eee-ven if you’re tired, pound your drink, and take your shot!”
She mimed throwing a shot back into her mouth, and then pointed forward to the crowd.
“I feel the THUMP of the bass, and I’ll be UP IN YOUR FACE!” She stepped forward, almost threateningly, toward Hitomi, who threw her hands forward and jolted the redhead’s shoulders backward.
“Ya gotta shake it with me right where it counts, counts, COUNTS!” Ranko giggled as she wiggled her backside toward the crowd, ignoring the camera flashes as she did. I got nothing to worry about now, boys. Akane got me the hookup with these compression shorts. Not gonna see anything that belongs to her now, are ya?
“So, if you wanna be with me…” Ranko pointed to the crowd, indicating to them to finish the song as she executed the six dance steps associated with the letters that spelled the song’s title alongside her backup dancers.
“B! O! U! N! C! E!”
Ranko nodded, jumping high in the air and kicking her heels behind herself hard enough to kick herself in the butt as she thrust her fist upward. “That’s right! You need a little bit of BOUNCE!”
The ebullient redhead landed on the stage in a superhero pose, with one leg kicked out and one fist on the stage floor. Three hundred and sixty-four voices roared for her.
She only cared about one.
Ranko rolled forward, laying herself out as she shifted her weight to her hands and launched herself upward to her feet. “Hell yeah! That’s how we do it, Phoenix!”
She turned and nodded to Crash, who began to disentangle from his instrument. Ken stood from his drum set and Shinji returned his bass guitar to its stand to Ranko’s left. The drummer got a gentle hug from Hitomi as the girls exited the stage, leaving only Ranko and Jacob on it. Jacob waved down to the edge of the stage, where his pink-haired partner had danced in concert with the three women on stage for most of the evening. Ranko threw a quick wave in their direction, too. Sorry, Zo. Any other night, I’d be thrilled to have you at the VIP table all night with Akane and Ukyo, but… not tonight. Sorry. Tonight, it’s reserved.
“You know, guys, I gotta tell ya, I fucking love this bar.” Ranko sat on the edge of the stage as she spoke, dangling her feet off a few centimeters from the floor.
Another roar came from the crowd in acknowledgement of the Phoenix itself, newly reopened just a few days ago after an eight-day closure.
“I love it for the atmosphere. I love it for the crowd. I love it for the drinks. But mostly…” Ranko smiled, blinking a tear from her eyes. “I love the people. The people who made this place not just a watering hole, but a home. A family. And there’s one person more than any other responsible for that.” Ranko extended her arm to the double door at the opposite end of the room where Akayo waited, supporting a woman nearly twice her age on her arm. “Firebirds, make way for the heart of the Phoenix - my mother, Hana Takahashi!”
The crowd parted instantly, turning to the back door to look. Yui thought the roof would come off as the place rocked under their collective voices. Hana released her grip on Aya’s shoulder, smiling and waving to her patrons. She wore her trademark leather jacket over a white tee shirt and a pair of black jeans.
“I’ve got it from here, baby,” Hana whispered to Ayako, taking a step forward. As she did, the applause in the bar began to organize itself into a more rhythmic clap rather than haphazard cheering, and it seemed to grow in power with every step Hana took toward the VIP table at stage left in the two-meter wide channel the crowd had made for her to walk through.
“HA-NA! HA-NA! HA-NA,” the crowd chanted as they clapped, amplified by Ranko herself joining the chant through her headset microphone.
“You guys, excuse me just a second,” Ranko said as Hana took her seat at the round table to stage left. She slipped her backside off the stage to land on the bar floor, flitting around the table and leaning down to hug her mother tight around the shoulders.
“Welcome home, Mom,” Ranko said, either not realizing or not caring that the headset microphone she wore would pick up her words. “I love you.”
“I love you too, little star,” Hana said, and her voice also carried through Ranko’s headset. A chorus of awwwwwwws rained around the pair, and Ranko blushed a bit at the sound.
“I’m gonna go sing now, ‘kay?” Ranko giggled at Hana’s nodded response as she gestured over her shoulder with her thumb. She bounced back up the three stairs excitedly.
As the songstress adjusted her headset after the hug, Mei slipped through the side door from the kitchen with a large orange earthenware bowl, setting it in front of her mother with a thousand-watt smile. “You hungry, Mama?”
Hana glanced down at the bowl, raising her eyes to her blue-haired daughter with daggers in them. “Not for that, I’m not. When the fuck did my bar start serving salad?”
Mei shrugged, handing her a pair of disposable bamboo chopsticks. “About five seconds after the onion rings almost killed you. Now, I love you, but shut the fuck up and eat your green food.”
“I’m still your mother, you know,” Hana said defiantly despite her smile. “You’re not the boss of me.”
As she did, Izumi, who had made her way from behind the service bar in her silver sparkly dress, leaned over the table and pushed the bowl closer to Hana’s chest. “Then you shouldn’t have taken in enough of us strays that we outnumber you five to one.”
“Six,” Akane said, crossing her arms and throwing a wink down at Hana.
“Seven,” came a call from behind Mei, and Sakura leaned on her roommate’s shoulder with a smile down at Hana.
“... Damn it,” Hana said, sighing as she picked up the chopsticks and began poking disinterestedly at the lettuce drenched in orange ginger dressing.
By the time Hana’s eyes made it back up to the stage, Jacob’s synthesizer had been pushed forward from the rear of the stage to the center, and he and Ranko stood over it talking with him. Her microphone had been cut off.
“Are you sure you're ready to do this, Ran-chan,” Jake asked her, his back to the crowd.
Ranko nodded. “I think I’m ready, yeah. Just get everything set up for me, ‘kay?” She reached behind herself, switching the battery pack powering her headset back on, and she stepped forward to address the crowd as Jacob worked.
“November eighteenth, 1989. It wasn’t that long ago at all. Not even three years yet.” She pulled up a wooden stool, perching on it. She was speaking to the crowd, but her eyes were locked on Hana. “I guess you guys see me as this badass girl that has the world in her hand. International tours and scholarships and autographs, married, loving family, and all that shit. And yeah, I guess that’s me, now. But, if you’ll give me just a minute… let me tell you about the girl I was on November eighteenth, 1989, and how I got from there to here.” She reached up with a shaking hand, wiping a tear away from her eyes before it could do much damage to her eye shadow.
“I hadn’t eaten in three days. I’d just had the living shit beat out of me that morning. I looked like a dirty clothes hamper and probably smelled worse. Everything I owned was in a backpack I could barely lift because there wasn’t anything left of me but skin and bone. I was sleeping in a park a few blocks from here. I was utterly, entirely alone in this world, and I had nowhere to go. And I mean nowhere. I was seventeen years old, and there wasn’t a soul on this earth who wanted me.”
She looked down at her hands, her voice cracking a bit as she spoke. “That morning, I was sitting on a bench right out there across the street, trying to decide if I had enough money for one last rice ball, and I see this little red now hiring sign in that window right back there behind the hostess stand. I thought, what the hell, I’ll probably suck at being a waitress, but it beats going hungry, and I all but crawled through that door back there with my last breath.”
Ranko sniffled, letting her tears fall freely from her cheeks onto the stage floor. “And that incredible woman, sitting right there, gave me a chance when I didn’t deserve one. I wonder if any of you guys were here that first Saturday night, and remember that frantic redhead with grass in her hair running around this place like a chicken with her head cut off, fucking up everybody’s orders and praying she didn’t break any glasses she couldn’t afford to pay for. I worked like every bucket of ice I delivered or plate I put in the dishwasher was the difference between eating and starving, because for me, it was.”
Akane stood behind Hana, resting her hand on her shoulder. She wasn’t sure which of them hearing the story from Ranko’s point of view was harder for.
“It, um… It was raining really hard that night, and Yui and Hana pulled me aside after my first shift. I swear, you guys, I thought they were gonna fire me and put me out in the storm. I’m sitting there, my mind going a thousand kilometers a second trying to figure out what I did wrong. And that woman… that beautiful, kind, gentle woman right there, tells me, we can tell you need help, and there’s an apartment upstairs you can use. Clean clothes, whatever I wanted to eat, and the first hug I’d had in months. And now, I’m like, what’s the catch? Who the hell does this for some fucked-up, homeless, hopeless kid they just met?”
Ranko looked up, flashing an adoring smile down at the VIP table. “Hana Takahashi does.”
She stood, picking the stool up and carrying it to the back corner of the stage as she continued to speak. “I, um… I didn’t exactly win the parent lottery growing up. I mean, you guys have heard Freak and You Don’t Know Me, so, like, I don’t need to get into all that. I didn’t know my ass from my elbow about anything. Two years behind in school. Hadn’t seen my mother in twelve years. I was an absolute, unmitigated trash fire of a human being, and calling me a disaster would’ve been a step up.”
Ranko returned to the edge of the stage, where she spoke over absolute silence in the bar as the sympathetic crowd listened to her story.
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“And she…” Ranko lowered her eyes, wiping them with her fingers. “I’m sorry, I just…” A quiet applause filled the room as she took a moment to compose herself. Nearly a full minute later, she felt ready to continue.
“She decided she was gonna be the mom I never had. Her daughters were gonna be the sisters I never had. And they taught me… gods, everything. They gave me help, and hope, when I didn’t have any of either. When I didn’t even think I deserved any of either. Whatever it is you guys love in me…” Ranko sniffled as she pointed down to her mother with an open palm, her face drenched with tears. “She put it there.”
Ranko’s voice cracked, losing the battle to control her tears enough to keep speaking. “And just… the night I heard she got sick, I was on a plane all night trying to get home, just praying I’d get one more second to look that woman in the eyes and tell her thank you.” She sniffled loudly into her headset microphone. “So, thank you, Mom, from the bottom of the heart you glued back together, for making me so much more than I ever could have dreamed was possible.”
Akane and Izumi both squeezed Hana around the shoulders as she cried softly into her uneaten salad.
“And that night, sitting on that plane, I was going crazy. I’d have flapped my arms if I thought it would’ve made the damned thing go faster. All I could think about was all the things I wanted to say, and how I didn’t know if I was gonna get home in time to have a chance to say ‘em. And my buddy Crash - who flew back from Australia with me like an absolute fucking hero so I wouldn’t be alone - told me to write it all down, just so I’d have something to do with my hands.”
Ranko reached into the shallow pocket of her blue denim half-jacket, which she wore over a white tee shirt featuring a large pink heart embroidered on it with a puffy texture. She extracted a folded sheet of white notebook paper out of it and began to open it. As she did, the stage lighting shone through the page, revealing more than one place where the blue ink had been smudged by falling tears while it had still been wet.
“Guys, I, um…” She bit her lip, shaking her head as she looked up at the back bar, where Yui and Sakura stood watching her, hand in hand. “I know, this is supposed to be a party. Mom’s home, and she’s okay, and we’re all supposed to be happy, and I am! I swear I am, but…” She held up the paper in her shaking hand. “Would you guys mind giving me just a couple more minutes?”
The crowd cheered their assent, and Ranko rounded on her heels and took a few steps backward. To the surprise of Hana and everyone who had not been in the bar earlier that afternoon for rehearsal, she took a seat on the black padded bench Jacob had pulled forward along with his instrument. Taking his cue, Ariel dropped the house lights until the bar room was in near-total darkness, illuminated only by a single soft white spotlight on Ranko and the five white candles Jacob had left burning atop the black-lacqured wooden casing surrounding his keyboard. She propped the unfolded paper up against the casing around the synthesizer, closing her eyes and whispering a silent prayer for courage.
Okay, Mr. Gankuji. I hope I don’t embarrass you too badly, Ranko thought as she remembered her twelfth-grade music teacher. She’d learned on an acoustic grand piano, though, and the array of buttons, levers and knobs on the electronic synthesizer absolutely baffled her. Thank the gods Jacob set this up for me ahead of time, because I’d have about as much of a chance to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile with this thing as I would to pick the piano sound.
She reached her trembling hands forward for the keys, resting her right index finger on middle C and exhaling heavily. Here goes nothing. I can do this. It’s for Mom. Nervously, she began plucking a simple melody from the keys, closing her eyes and willing her fingers to remember the pattern on their own so she could focus on singing. No sound had yet escaped her lips, and Hana was already fighting back tears with Akane and Izumi standing at her side.
Ranko played the simplistic chord progression through twice before finding the confidence to add her voice to the synthesizer’s piano tones and maintain both at once. Once she did, it was a soft, almost haunting tone that came forth from her, not unlike her first performance of There Are No Words on her wedding day.
“I am intelligent - at least, in my own way - and there’s always someone out there who cares what I have to say. I am powerful - and not just in a fight - but it’s okay to ask for help if I don’t think I’ll be alright.”
Ranko smiled up at the crowd, nodding as a few of them in the front row pulled their cigarette lighters out of their pockets and flicked them to life, waving them over their heads. The first to do so had been Zoe King. Her voice trembled as she sang, and more than once, she had to pause for half a beat to swallow back her emotions.
“People respect me - and not only ‘cause I sing. I know kindness costs me nothing, but to some, means everything. Though I might be a world away, as long as there’s a phone, I’ll never spend another minute thinking I’m alone…”
The redhead looked up from the keyboard, smiling at her sniffling mother at the VIP table. Her voice took on an added confidence as she entered the chorus, as if she were somehow surer of what she was saying than she had been in the verse before.
“I am beautiful, and not just in my face. Though I may make mistakes, I have what it takes, and I’ll always have a place! There’s gotta be a million, and so these are just a few…”
Ranko swallowed back her tears behind a wide smile. “... of all the things… all the things… whoa, all the thi-i-i-ings…”
She nodded softly in her mother’s direction after a two-beat pause. “... I’ve learned from you.”
Ranko thought back again to the last conversation she’d had with Hana in the apartment above the Phoenix, just minutes before she’d left on tour. You told me to spread my light, Mom. You told me to make sure everyone around the world got to see what I’ve learned, and I will, I swear it. But I’m gonna make damn sure they know where it came from. It’s not my legacy I’m spreading. It’s yours. All I am is what you made me, and I’m damn proud of it.
The audience stood in silence as Ranko’s keyboard playing took on a bit more of a flourish, filling the gap between verses and giving her a moment to regain control of her emotions and recover her voice. It seemed as if she felt more confident playing the synthesizer when she could concentrate on it alone and not also need to sing. Salty drops of water rained down on the backs of her hands from her eyes as she played.
“I’m not a burden. People like having me around. I won’t ever be so lost that there’s no hope of being found. I’m just a kid, and I’m still figuring out living, so when I screw up - and I know I will - I deserve to be forgiven.”
“She seriously wrote all this on the plane?”
Crash leaned closer to Hitomi, replying in a whisper without taking his eyes off of his best friend as she sang. “In about forty-five minutes.”
“I’m a good person,” Ranko asserted in song, thinking back to all the doubts she’d carried about herself after fleeing the Tendo home. “I don’t have to feel ashamed. I never got a say in how I was raised, and probably can’t be blamed.”
She glanced down at her bracelet, dangling just off the edge of the keyboard on her left wrist. She thought about her recent encounter with her biological father, and the things he’d said to her.
“I’m not a failure because I ran when things got grim. It was never that I’m not enough - I’m just too good for him.”
Again, Ranko’s voice found new strength as the chorus began, seeming to shift out of a hauntingly soft, timid timbre into more of a confident assertion.
“I am beautiful, and not just in my face! Though I may make mistakes, I have what it takes, and I’ll always have a pla-a-a-ace! I know that I am wanted, and I’m worthy of love, too, ‘cause of the things… yeah, all the things… whooooa, a-all the thi-i-i-ings…”
The redhead swallowed hard, closing her eyes. “I’ve learned… from you.”
Hana slumped forward a bit, and Akane knelt next to her chair to check on her. The Phoenix’ matriarch hid her face behind her hand, and the gentle flow of tears that had begun at the first few lines had given way to a torrent of liquid emotion. Akane just squeezed her around the shoulders, holding her wife’s mother as Ranko sang. Izumi slipped away from the pair, heading back toward the bar.
“Love is honest,” Ranko continued. “It has nothing to confess. It knows no boundaries or conditions; there’s no if, and no unless. Love is given. It’s not a thing I have to earn, and the only expectation’s that I love you in return. Love’s not easy. It takes courage. It takes trust.”
I’m allowed to protect myself, Ranko thought. Even from the people who are supposed to be closest to me. It was one of the hardest things to learn.
She swallowed hard before singing the next line. “And, if someone breaks my heart too much, I can leave them in the dust.”
Behind the main bar, Seiichi reached out, squeezing Mei around the shoulders as she swayed with her sister’s song in the darkness. Similarly, Yui leaned backward, resting the crown of her head on Sakura’s shoulder as her girlfriend held her around the waist from behind.
Ranko smiled up at the girls behind the bar from her seat at the keyboard. “And I’ll always have a family. It’s not something I can lose. I may not have been born into it, but that means I got to choose…”
The redhead stood from the bench, leaning over the keyboard as she played with more force, leaning a bit of her weight into each stroke to generate a fuller sound from the touch-sensitive electronic keys.
“I AM BEAUTIFUL, and not just in my face! Though I may make mistakes, I have what it takes, and I’ll whoa-a-always have a pla-a-a-ce! I finally understand so much I should have always knew: all the things… all the things… whoa-a-a-a-ALL the thi-i-i-ings…”
She took her hands off the keyboard, turning to face the VIP table. Hana’s eyes were not focused on her, still hidden behind her trembling hand as Akane held her tight around the shoulders.
“I’ve learned… from you.”
The redhead retook her seat at the synthesizer, careful to mind her skirt as she did despite the pair of black compression shorts she wore under it. Almost done, Ranko. One more verse. Breathe. Everything’s okay now. Mom’s okay. There’s no reason for this to be sad.
Ayako slipped between Yui and Izumi behind the bar, setting down the bottle of Midori in her hand. “Is it time?”
“Not yet,” Yui whispered, stealing a glance down at the device mounted to the wall under the bar counter on Mei’s left.
“Having started out with nothing doesn’t have to be a curse. My struggles made me different, but they’ll never make me worse. I have people I can go to if I’m ever in a jam. I am special, strong and valuable exactly as I am.”
Ranko smiled at the candlelight sparkling from her wedding ring as her fingers danced over the keys. The idea of marrying Akane, like so many other things, had seemed so out of reach when she’d first come to the Phoenix. She’d thought her life was over, but it had only just begun.
“I am unique, but I don’t have to change myself to fit. And the only thing a girl can never, ever do… is quit.”
A few whoops and claps rose from the crowd. While most of the audience were keeping quiet in respect for the slow, soulful nature of the ballad, certain sentiments could not go unlauded in the estimation of some of the Firebirds in attendance that night.
“There is nothing I can’t do if I can only find the nerve.”
Ranko bit her bottom lip hard, struggling to get the final line of the fourth verse past it. The sentiment was one of the hardest lessons she had learned since her arrival at the Phoenix, and having put in writing that she finally understood it was cathartic in a way no lyric could begin to describe.
“There is nothing that I want from life that I do not deserve.”
Izumi wiped her eyes, nodding to Mei. The younger girl reached under the counter in the darkness.
“I am beautiful,” Ranko sang with the full force of her voice, admonishing herself for letting her voice crack with emotion in the previous line. Her confidence seemed to grow at the keyboard as the song went on, and she had begun injecting little flourishes between the key notes of the rhythm as she played. “... and not just in my face! Though I may make mistakes, I have what it takes, and I’ll whoooooa-always have a pla-a-ace!”
She smiled down at Hana, who had managed to compose herself enough to return her eyes to her youngest daughter on the stage.
“The dreams I never dared to dream are starting to come true, thanks to the things… all the things, whoa-a-all the thi-i-i-ings… I’ve learned… from you.”
Ranko shifted both her hands to the right, moving the entire rhythm up into the next octave higher. Her voice joined it to match.
“When people hear these words, I’m glad that they will learn them, too. All the things, all the things, whoa, all the thi-i-i-ings… I’ve learned from you.”
The redhead stood from her borrowed instrument, walking off the edge of the stage without taking the stairs. She landed effortlessly on her toes in her white heeled sneakers, closing the three steps to the edge of the round table at which her mother sat. As Hana smiled up at her, Ranko sat gently on the tabletop. She reached over her mother’s untouched bowl of salad and took both of Hana’s hands in her own. With no music behind her, Ranko smiled down into her mother’s eyes, her own still glistening with tears. Her voice was soft, almost childlike, and spoken rather than sung.
“Mom, I need to tell you this, right now, before this life is through. Thank you.” She returned to a gentle singing voice. “For all the things…”
“All the things,” came another voice that was not Ranko’s. Nor was it Hitomi or Emi’s. Hana swiveled in her seat, finding all four of her other adopted daughters standing behind the main bar holding hands. The handheld emcee microphone was in Mei’s fist, and she passed it to her right as the last word was sung.
“All the things,” Izumi sang brightly, blowing her mother a kiss before passing the microphone again to her right.
“All… the th…ings,” Ayako sang haltingly, a timid, tender tremble in her voice as she squeezed Izumi’s right hand for comfort. She clutched the microphone tight just under her chin, and Yui had to reach across her body for it.
Yui pulled the microphone closer to herself, but Ayako’s fingers remained locked around it, so the blonde leaned down to sing into it in her shorter sister’s hand. “All the things,” she sang, ignoring the tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Whoa, a-a-a-all the thi-i-i-ings,” Ranko belted in the fifth octave from her seat on Hana’s table, squeezing her mother’s hands tight. She flashed Akane a quick smile at her mother’s side.
The redhead released Hana’s hands, running her fingers through her mother’s salt-and-pepper hair. She leaned down from her perch on the tabletop, gently kissing the woman who had saved her life on the forehead with her strawberry-glazed lips. Her voice fell to barely a whisper for the final four words as she beamed into her mother’s eyes.
“... I’ve learned… from you.”