Once More With Feeling

Chapter 8: Needles

I keep my head down as we walk from the practice studio to Sakura's dorm room across campus, tucked into the collar of my leather jacket (that still smells a little like brown sugar cinnamon, after I loaned it to her the other night). She doesn't really notice, with her hair down for once and a crazy look in her eyes, like she's just won the lottery but doesn't know who to tell first.

I'm heading to Sakura Haruno's dorm room after 11 pm. I know for a fact every guy on campus – including and especially my moronic best friend – would kill to be in my shoes right now, and here I am like it's something to be ashamed of.

Not that I have any intentions, hidden or otherwise, in hanging out with her. But I know what this looks like. The famous Sasuke Uchiha sneaking into an attractive girl's dorm after almost everyone else has gone to bed? I know what it looks like, and I know people would talk if they knew. And when you have almost no privacy anymore in your life, you value it all the more.

The walk is long and it's dark and it's cold, and I realize that Sakura does this all the time. Alone, late at night. It's frustrating. A smart girl like her should know better, but she doesn't. Or worse: she does, and doesn't care.

There's something...different about her. I can't really place it. Besides her hair loose for a change, out of that frustratingly perfect ponytail she has to wear all the time, there's something off. It's not a bad thing, but I notice it right away. Something in her walk. She still has that bizarre grace that only comes with years of grueling practice, but she's carrying herself differently, somehow. I can't place it.

"I'll order a pizza," she says, when she swipes us into her building and takes us up to her floor. We don't pass anybody in the hallways, which I'm glad for, and she unlocks her door and lets us both inside, then shuts it behind her. "Then I'm gonna grab a quick shower before it comes, I'm so grimy. Make yourself at home," she adds, with a sweet little smile. Then she grabs a towel and a shower caddy and disappears into the adjoining bathroom like it's the most natural thing in the world for a guy she barely knows to be left to his own devices in her room.

It's awkward, being alone in here. Sakura and I are friends, sure (at least, I think that's what we kind of decided on) but it's still uncomfortable being in a place that reeks so much of her that I'm almost choking on it. But here in the place that's most sacred to her, the only place she has to let her hair down, so to speak, there's so much revealed to me about who she really is that I'm instantly intoxicated.

I hear the shower start in the bathroom after she's ordered our pizza, and I take a look around from my stiff seat on her bed. I see pictures on her nightstand and all over the utilitarian white walls, pictures of herself and other people, many of them featuring a girl with blonde hair I've seen around campus a few times here and there. Probably her best friend. A very old one sits in a little black frame on her bedside table, one with a pink-haired toddler cradled in the arms of a young couple. Presumably her parents.

I frown at the picture, because that's the only one with her parents in it; the rest of the pictures feature a growing pink-haired girl among different families, families who look nothing like her.

I come to the hazy conclusion that Sakura's a foster child. And that's weird to me, that she didn't bring it up. But once I think it over, it's not that weird. I don't know her very well yet, and she doesn't know me very well, either. Plus it's not like foster kids walk around with numbers tattooed on their wrists to let you know who they are. It probably isn't a big deal to her anymore.

But it's a new fact I learn about her, along with her love of rotten boy bands and classic movies, judging by the posters on her walls; she's surprisingly messy for someone who dances during the day and scrubs floors at night, with clothes strewn all over the floor and on top of a very full hamper. She probably doesn't have much free time to do the laundry. I can relate; my own hamper's overflowing in my dorm on the other side of campus. There are thick, heavy, old books in her bookcase, well-worn and well-read. Surprising authors, too. Austen, Joyce, Tolstoy; I wonder how she's got time to cram in fine literature around everything else on her plate.