VIOLET SKY, takigawa chris yuu

━ chapter three

act i

this shouldn't be happening.
( oh but it is. )

chapter three

❛how've you been?❜

━━━━━━

"I don't get it."

Amara sighs. "You're dumb."

"Obviously." Rena's voice resonates from the speaker on her phone, a little distant because Amara is in the middle of brushing her teeth and her phone is still on her bed a few feet away. "I'm just . . . What were you guys doing? Like you didn't know his name. But you think . . . what, you like him?"

She chokes on her toothpaste.

"I didn't say that," she rasps. "I did not say that."

"But you think he's hot. And you've been thinking about him."

"Yeah, I think about people I find hot, so what? Doesn't everyone?"

"Eh. And on top of that . . . you don't know his name."

She spits out the rest of the toothpaste, rinsing her toothbrush and putting it back in her bag. She pats her mouth dry then wanders back to her bed, dropping onto it and frowning down at Rena's face taking up the screen of her phone. Her roommate, a reserved second year on the tennis team, Saito Asano, is gone for the day; she'd said something about hanging out with her friends and heading to the Tanabata festival downtown tonight.

"So, we didn't know each other's names. Is that a necessity for being friends?"

"Yeah, it kind of is."

"That's stupid."

"That's the social infrastructure!" Rena says cheerily. "Hey, listen, I'm not saying you guys weren't friends because you didn't know his name but I honestly get the feeling you don't even wanna label whatever it was you had going on with him as a friendship. But you say you don't like him, so, pretty girl, what's the deal?"

Amara sighs. "I don't know. I just haven't seen him in like a month and a half. I stopped going to that neighborhood at the beginning of June and I haven't gone back."

The image on her phone is grainy and pixelated but Rena's dark eyebrows raise just a tiny bit.

"So . . ." she trails off expectantly. "Are you experiencing hot guy withdrawals or —?"

Amara falters.

It's true. She kind of misses it. She misses the kids, largely, and their abundant enthusiasm in playing soccer, even when it's sticky and warm and the sun drains them after only a couple hours, but there's the stranger, too — he has a guarded presence and it's wonderfully steady.

But she's so busy. She can't make time to go out there anymore. The kids understand, naturally, and say that their old spot opened up, so if she ever wants to venture back, that's where they'll be.

Third year takes up too much of her time, though.

"I'm just . . . thinking," she ends up saying lamely.

"Well, stop. Don't you have that thing you're going to do today? Festival? Tana . . . tana —"

"Tanabata."

"That."

She lies down on the bed, holding her phone over her face. Rena starts helping herself to a bag of hot fries, her fingertips stained red and covered with crumbs.