Work Text
“You’re moving?” Rimi parroted, her face awash with surprise.“Arisa’s moving?” Tae echoed after her, eyes wide and nonchalance for once absent from her voice. Arisa had never seen Tae make that expression before, and she felt a twinge.She glanced at Saya as well, but Saya had found interest in her drum set, concealing her reaction with a slow nod and a thoughtful face. Even her hands, gripping her drumsticks, were still. Arisa wished she could borrow Saya’s ability to read people, if only for a moment, just to know what was going through her mind.Their usual afternoon band practice had concluded just a few minutes ago. A modus operandi that they had not broken since their high school days, their sessions kept them together. They had a reason to see each other daily, to wake up early in the morning on weekdays—a reason to wake up in the morning period, and a reason to go outside and live life. And on a normal day, they relaxed about the Ichigaya residence afterward just to wind down and catch up.This was a normal day, or rather, it had started out like one. Arisa hadn’t wanted to break the news to them any other way. How, where, and when had bugged her for a whole month, ever since things had started to turn final. The most natural thing to do, she had reasoned, was to bring it up like any other conversation topic: after practice, in the warehouse basement while they sat on green ottomans and armless sofas.Ever since their band had formed, they had talked about almost everything in this way. Arisa wasn’t ready to change that formula just yet.She had come to practice prepared to face everything from questions, crying, and an argument, but seeing her closest friends’ shocked, sad faces ripped at the composure she had scraped together.Arisa swallowed and looked at Kasumi. She was their main vocalist, and main motivator, and befitting of her role in the band, she normally spoke her mind first out of anyone. When she failed to do so, it meant her mind was somewhere else.It was no secret that following graduation, their band as a whole had been closer than ever before. Hardly a day passed that they did not talk to each other, even if simply through text messages. They practically spent their lives together nowadays.In fact, in the middle of their first live show out of high school three months after graduation, it finally sank in for Arisa that the band wasn’t destined to dissolve after high school. Up until then, she had been so worried that one day they would all just have other things to do and drift apart. But their last song had dashed her worry to pieces. It had been right after the buildup, when Kasumi stopped for breath—and the next note they had all hit as one. Emotions had swelled up so suddenly and strongly that she had taken a second to wipe her eyes, and at that exact moment one of the camera operators decided to zoom in on her face. Everyone still teased her about it.And Kasumi had been at the center of it all. On the best of days, she seemed to be everywhere. On the worst, she came back the next none the wearier. Always happy, always having fun, and always coming up with new material, she had blossomed over the past six years. It was easy to tell just in the way she stood, in her singing as she stood before the microphone. As if life had opened up before her, and she were simply taking all the right steps. That was how much she loved her band, and the feeling was mutual four ways back.So if Arisa had to pick who was most likely to be the most upset by the news, then yeah—it was Kasumi.“Hey. Say something already,” she said, leaning forward to snap her fingers inches away from her frozen face. “You’re almost making me nervous.”Starting, Kasumi straightened up until her shoulders touched the top of the sofa. “Ah, sorry.”“That’s it?” Arisa blinked. She cleared her throat. “No crying, no desperation or anything? I expected something like, ‘wah, don’t leave me Arisa, I don’t know what I’d do without your epic piano skills!’ Something like that would have been more fitting for you.”Kasumi started to apologize again then stopped. She averted her eyes to the table. “It just kind of surprised me, that’s all.”Yeah, I can tell. Arisa bit her tongue, her mouth feeling dry. She shifted in her seat. Not only Saya, but now Tae and Rimi were looking away. The twinge from earlier came back, stronger this time. “Yeah,” she muttered, “for sure.”Silence stretched out like a fraying rubber band.“When are you moving?” Kasumi finally asked. Her voice was so fluttery that if Arisa didn’t know better, she wouldn’t have believed she could sing the way she could.“Two months. The warehouse just has to be taken care of. Most of the stuff’s going to be sold online, or donated, or given away. There are other pawn shops, so we shouldn’t have any trouble getting rid of it.”Unbeknowst to her friends, Arisa had been moving boxes around the warehouse, opening them up for the first time in years and all the while making sure to restore the scene back to its original look before they came over again. She hadn’t wanted them to find out that she had been planning to move yet, and she would feel bad if she had to lie. Maybe she was worse for having done everything without telling them. But she couldn’t bear to live here anymore, especially not surrounded by so many things from the past.It had taken a full week just to take inventory. There were so many things in there—she had always had a rough idea, having looked through them briefly before, but never in her life had she gone through and unpacked every box.Among the piles and piles of possessions were things that had belonged to her parents and her grandmother. She knew that much, but no more than that; she didn’t know which shirts her mom had worn or if her grandfather had owned an ancient disassembled computer, or if her grandmother had stitched up a pair of old cushions for the floor.“Two months...” Kasumi eventually said, loud enough that it startled Arisa out of her recollection. Her shoulders back, Kasumi’s head touched the wall when she leaned back to look at the ceiling. Since she had poked her head into the storeroom in their first year at school, she had grown a lot. She was taller, with a more mature figure. But she still had the same postures, the same hairstyle, the same expressions. “Two months isn’t enough time.”Arisa nodded, half-hearted, but said nothing. Kasumi was the type of person to usually see two months as time enough to do anything; “not enough time” just wasn’t a part of her vocabulary.“We should have another live show.” Saya finally opened her mouth. Everyone’s eyes went to her, and a smile appeared on her face. “It’s been a while since we’ve performed. Performing is why we practice in the first place, right? Let’s do it.”“We can do it somewhere we’ve never been before,” Rimi added. Over the years, she had come out of her shell a bit. Everyone had been extra encouraging.“Let’s do two live shows,” Tae said, hand on her chin. “No, three.”“Um... We may as well do a tour instead.”“We can make our global debut! A Poppin’ World Party!”“Aha ha, we might not be able to go that far.”The three of them went back and forth, slowly moving from jokes to real possibilities. Their chatter filled the room, and Arisa felt a bit more relaxed. She wasn’t quite calm enough to join in yet, but she listened and looked at whoever was talking, just following the conversation. Kasumi, too, stayed out of it.Her eyes eventually drifted back to Arisa.“Why did you decide to move?” she asked quietly, hard to hear above something that Tae was saying about a tour bus. However, she was close enough to Arisa that the two of them could speak to each other in low tones. Arisa made to reply, but then the question sank in, and she hesitated.Why? That was a difficult question to answer. It could have been one specific thing, or a combination of things. She herself wasn’t too sure; for a while, she had felt perfectly fine living alone. Then one day, it had felt soul shattering. Whatever had changed, if anything, was impossible to pinpoint.Knowing she couldn’t put off the question forever, Arisa took a deep breath and exhaled, sliding down in her seat from perfect posture into a comfortable slump. Saying something was infinitely better than shrugging lamely and saying that she didn’t know.“I told you all when it happened, but my grandmother isn’t here anymore. She... literally gave me the house. Her friend comes over every day to check up on me, so I’m not exactly living by myself, but she gives me so much space that it feels that way.“I could stay here until I turn twenty and I officially inherit the house. In a way, she’s giving me the choice to. But all my life it’s been like she was protecting me from having to do that. I’ve always offered to help her do the laundry and clean, but she always told me it was okay. I think it’s because she wanted me to use my time doing something, not being busy taking care of myself. So I talked things over with her friend, who helped me find a small, affordable place. It’s only a few kilometers away. Just a small studio apartment, but it’s got a window and enough space to keep all my stuff. It’s about the size of my room right now, but I think I’ll get used to it.”Saya, Rimi, and Tae had stopped talking some time after Arisa started. The room was silent for a time.Saya gave her a smile that was, as far as Arisa could tell, reassuring.“It’s not like you’ll be going far. Is it still in the same ward?” Arisa nodded. “See? We could still see each other almost every day.”“Will our time together be even more precious because of the distance?” Tae asked, directed at no one in particular. Arisa failed to stifle a groan. Sappy as she was, Tae hardly seemed to notice. Or care.“Not really, but if looking at it that way helps, knock yourself out.”With a bit of apprehension, Arisa looked at Kasumi again.Kasumi tried to speak, but she stopped as if at a loss. She sounded so plaintive that nobody else said a thing—afraid, almost, of washing away whatever she was trying to say.“What’s going to happen to Ryuseido?” she finally asked. “Our band room?”Everyone looked around, at their instruments, at the familiar wallpaper, the comfortable decorations. None of them had thought that it would eventually go away one day. Who would want that?Quietly, Arisa told them that the property was going to be sold.“Most likely it’ll be demolished and rebuilt. There’s a chance someone’ll want to keep it and renovate it, but it’s unlikely considering how old the house is.”Either way, she thought, all the traditional austerity of her home would be gone. The rest of the group seemed to think the same. Gradually, the topic shifted toward their favorite things about Ryuseido and how much they would miss them.Her grandmother would have missed it as well. She had lived in it her entire life, yet she had never grown tired of taking care of it—not when she had lived with her husband, not when her children had lived with her. Not when Arisa had lived with her.Arisa didn’t want to think of selling the house and moving away as failing her grandmother, but once the notion crossed her mind, it lingered and refused to leave.She listened to Tae talk about how good Grandmother’s cooking was, though she disagreed that her sauté chicken was the best; her pan-fried tofu was way better. She listened to Rimi talk about the antiquated recipe book, found in the warehouse buried under a bunch of oriental junk, that she had yet to finish trying. Nobody knew that Arisa had already rewritten all the recipes in it two years back, and she had cooked all of them. She listened to Kasumi talk about the peeling star stickers that a young Arisa had earned by playing the piano correctly and put all over the street leading back to the pawn shop, and Arisa recalled showing her grandmother every single one and getting a smile before going out to stick it in whatever place she fancied at the time.She didn’t add to her friends’ conversation. Only listened. She was afraid to speak lest she allow a touch of bittersweet pride to steal into her voice.Certain parts of the house, Arisa tried to avoid. The kitchen was a necessity, but she rarely cooked outside of simple meals or reheating leftovers. She usually ate in her room or the hallway and afterward scrubbed the dishes clean before heading outside to check on the garden. A lot of her time these days went to tending her bonsai, but then again, it always had.Arisa squatted in the garden watching a cricket crawl across the ground in front of the warehouse step. When it stopped, she nudged the grass nearby with her foot and sent it hopping away.Her grandmother’s friend was cleaning the house right now. The front door had been left open, so Arisa could hear her moving around inside, grunting with the exertion of moving things around and dragging furniture into the main room closest to the street. So it could be picked up.Yellow light spilled out from the opening onto the veranda. From where Arisa was, it made the house seem warm, lived-in. Out by the warehouse, she had to squint to see clearly in the dim.Her friends had left two hours ago, not so much in the afternoon as right before evening. Their faces had been pinched, as if none of them wanted to leave, but none of them had offered to stay. In hindsight, she could have just askedthem if they would have liked to, but the mood had been so heavy after she had told them about the move that she hadn’t bothered.Someone appeared in the doorway, profiled by the light from inside and the shadows from without. “I’m finished moving stuff for today, Arisa-chan. Do you need anything before I go home?”“Nah. Thanks for doing it.”“No problem. It’d be wrong to make you do the work all by yourself. Take care, alright?”Waving good night, her grandmother’s friend left. She also left the lights on. For a while, Arisa stayed where she was, doing nothing but look at the garden and the house’s semi-translucent walls of paper and latticed wood.But eventually she rose and, with a stumble from squatting in one place for too long, went inside.If she ignored the corner where pieces of furniture from different rooms in the house had been left, then everything looked the way it was supposed to in the entryroom. The low table and red cushionswere still at the center, the set of drawers still stood next to the hallway, and nothing had been removed from the alcove. But in spite of it, a feeling of being very small struck her as she stood in the entrance looking in.Somewhat dazed, she went toward the kamidana, her household shrine, which had been mounted in the wall near the corner for as long as she could remember.A dull pain surfaced in her core as she stood before the little altar. Surrounded by ceramic bowls and vases containing evergreen sakaki branches and other offerings, it was fixed above than her head level, spiritual yet incompassionate, inanimate. She bowed her head and shut her eyes.Padded footsteps brought her back to the present. They could have belonged to literally anyone, not even necessarily another person, but before she even saw who it was, the aching in her chest died down a bit.“Oh, you’re here. Hi Arisa!” Standing in the doorway and smiling as if they had met by chance on the street, Kasumi for once did not have her guitar case slung over her left shoulder.“Eh? Kasumi... Why are you here so late? Did you forget something?” Arisa couldn’t think of any reason that she would visit at a time like this. Kasumi had definitely been carrying her guitar when she had left, and Arisa would have noticed if she had left her phone behind...“No, that’s not it. I just thought I’d visit.”“You just thought? At”—she glanced at the wall—“eight o’ clock at night?”All Kasumi had in her defense was a sheepish grin. “You’re so weird,” Arisa said, almost laughing. Exasperated, but relieved, she started to step away from the kamidana until Kasumi held up a hand and stopped her.Approaching the altar herself, fingers laced in prayer, Kasumi stood next to her. Her eyes were closed, but unlike how Arisa had felt earlier standing there herself, she looked at peace. Her lips moved quietly, reforming into a faint smile afterward. Arisa stared at her, but eventually she turned to face the shrine again.They prayed.Kasumi tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey, have you seen the sky tonight?” she asked.Arisa looked at her, puzzled. The question was completely random, though it definitely seemed like something Kasumi would ask. She shook her head. “I went outside, but I didn’t really look up.”“Seriously?” Kasumi took her by the arm and tugged her in the direction of the hallway. “So many stars are out tonight! I saw them on my way here. Can we go look at them? Your room has a balcony, so the view has to be great up there! Please?”She had a determined gleam in her eye, one that everyone in the band had gotten very used to, Arisa included. For such a small thing like this, it would be pointless to refuse even if she wanted to.“Yeah, yeah, we can go,” Arisa yielded.“Yay!”“But you don’t need to grab me. You can let go of me now.”Kasumi gave her such a radiant smile that Arisa had to look away. At a speedy walk, she hurried to the stairs, Arisa in tow. Either she had not heard Arisa’s request or chose to ignore it. In no mood to resist, Arisa let herself be dragged along with only weak protest.“Alright, whatever. But! If we’re going out then we’re taking some blankets with us, since it’ll probably be cold. And you’d better be right about the stars, okay?”“Of course!” Kasumi hadn’t lied. There were a lot of stars. And they were pretty.Out on the balcony, the stone walkway and grassy yard far below them, they leaned against the metal railing each with one of Arisa’s spare blankets pulled around their bodies. Night embraced everything outside, hiding the gaps between the planks underfoot and blurring the treetops into seamless dark spots that appeared to merge together into one.Without words, they took in the view. Two blips in the universe, anchored to solid ground with their eyes in the sky.Seeing the neighborhood at this time reminded Arisa of paper lanterns floating out at sea—a bunch of distant boxes of light filled with handfuls of memories, epitaphs written on their sides. Like the stars, a few houses on every block were lit up. An urban, second-rate reflection of the heavens.Below, her house was all dark.“Hey, Arisa.” Kasumi looked away from the stars long enough to glance at her. “Your house is a star, isn’t it?”“What the heck do you mean by that?”“Ryuseido!” she said, grinning. It meant ‘shooting star,’ and it happened to be the name of the pawn shop run from the warehouse. A shooting star was a meteor, or a star falling from the sky. “It’s a star for our band because it’s never going anywhere. As long as we know where to look, we’ll be able to see it. That makes sense, right?”Arisa gazed at her for a few seconds, stunned by her positivity, then shook her head and turned back to watch the houses to see if any of the lights would go out. “Hahhh... Only you would say something like that. But, I guess so. I suppose that is a nice way of thinking about it.”She heard an mhm, but Kasumi kept looking at her. Arisa crossed her legs and shifted on her elbows, then flattened out the top of one of her socks with the other foot. Eventually she couldn’t ignore it any longer and gave Kasumi an inquisitive look. “What is it?”“Arisa...” Kasumi’s smile had disappeared, and she wore an unexpected expression on her face. “Are you okay?”“... Huh?”Kasumi moved a bit closer, as if Arisa would whisper something she didn’t want to miss.“... Yeah,” she lied. “Sure I am.”Arisa suddenly couldn’t meet her eyes. She chose instead to focus on the sky. And all the stars. But keeping every single one in her vision was a little difficult. They were constantly twinkling and disappearing. Some of them got brighter and formed long blurry lines, like translucent streaks in the sky. It only worsened as she gripped the rail and leaned forward, squinting both eyes.In the bottom of her field of sight, one of the houses went dark. Then another, and one more, but they were all too far away from each other for it to have been anything but a coincidence.Staring straight past all the stars and into the darkened sky, she tightened her jaw as tears shook in her eyes and eventually spilled down her face, hot and defiant and sad.“I miss her,” she finally whispered. “I miss her so much.”In no time at all, Kasumi was hugging her, the corners of her blanket still clutched in her fists. She started tearing up herself; the drops melted into the shoulder of Arisa’s shirt, black tears on black fabric on black night.“She’s everywhere in this house; we both lived here literally our entire lives, three whole generations, and I’m the last one. It’s so lonely here without her. It sucks waking up and not finding her downstairs. I literally can’t stop thinking about her, and missing her, and wanting her back—”Words that had been long bottled up poured out, and she bit her lip trying to stop the flow until Kasumi gave her a comforting squeeze.For the first time in four months, her shoulders sagged. Trembling, she wound her arms across her stomach and around her sides and hugged herself as hard as she could. She started crying—the ugly type of crying that came with loud shuddering sobs, that hurt her throat and her jaw, that ruined her face with tears and snot, that didn’t do anything to cover or fill the hole in her heart but let her live with it, let her stand on the edge and look in, no longer denying its existence. No longer trying to run away from it and pretend it wasn’t there or that it would go away eventually. Because it wouldn’t; she knew that. That hole wouldn’t ever be covered or filled, but she knew she would have to learn how to live with it.While she cried, Kasumi stayed with her the entire time, the two of them wrapped in a twofold layer of blankets, holding her as if letting go meant saying goodbye forever. She didn’t try to move or speak; she just hugged Arisa tighter the more her shoulders shook.Kasumi held her until she stopped crying, then held her until she stopped crying.Kasumi sat with her in the bath and dried her hair with the hair dryer when they finished.Kasumi crawled into bed with her and hugged her again, keeping her company through the hours of night that Arisa had come to find so cold and drawn out. Holding her as if letting go meant drifting away from each other amid the stars in space, and she was never going to let that happen.