Work Text:
“To be honest,” Miho said conversationally, jabbing into her milkshake with a striped straw, “I never even knew you liked Suou.”
Beside her Mami chimed in, already giggling as though her amusement was something she felt deathly obligated to make clear, “Me neither! And we’ve been in the same class again for, what, five months already.” She slid both elbows forward and leaned across the plastic restaurant table, drawing her mouth into a grin – all half-joking, vacuous curiosity. “What else have you been hiding from us!”
Lisa, to her rather well-deserved credit, did not roll her eyes or flinch away the casual increase in proximity. She had by now understood on an objective level that this was a thing friends did – for the sake of it! – and there was no need for her to pull back into herself, to show that she had always been bracing for the inevitable verbal slap, regardless of whether it would come or not.
Caution could make up for lack of certainty. That motto had been enough to get her through the cruelly barren years of middle school, and the similarly dreary, cleanly forgettable years before, all excised unconsciously from her present narrative but nonetheless never truly gone – but she graduated and grew taller and started dictating the length of her own skirts’ hems, and other things, by their own natural progressions, changed to follow suit.
High school friendships, she couldn’t help but think, were such tenuous things. And she was only a second-year.
Oh, please. There’s so much you don’t know about me. Instead Lisa muffled a hand over her mouth, and burst into girlish laughter: pink and bubbly and vapid, taking longer to fizzle out than she’d have liked. It lingered, sticky and sweet like soda stuck in the back of her throat. Ah, what an irritating feeling that was! She recovered quickly, smiling as though nothing had happened, and immediately went to pick at her fries. She made a show of softening her eyes and fluttering when she looked up.
“I-It’s just,” she said, all bashful, “I’ve never really … noticed up until now, you know. You two understand!”
This, of course, was not just a lie but also complete and utter bullshit. Two weeks into the first year of high school, after the initial dust of new social territory had settled, Lisa had found herself sitting hunched over at her pristine desk, cracking open the planner her father had gotten her to keep track of her schedule and diligently drawing up a chart chronicling the painstaking course of action she needed to take to get to the upper elevation of the school social pyramid as quickly as possible. She had rented over half a dozen kung-fu titles during the summer, ravaged them with an almost obsessive compulsion, and now she scraped her memory for the best lines to scribble in the margins so they could motivate her in future times of need.
She’d spent the first few months too distantly preoccupied with imagining the impending glory of peer validation that in the process of having her hair consistently done up, subtly disguising the evidence under her eyes suggesting she had been up late the night before, and obtaining two groupies daring to call themselves her friends – she never did correct them when they could hear – she had completely forgotten that in order for a girl of her prudent age to achieve anything of note in terms of social status in this day and age, she needed a boyfriend. And the old perverts she spent the weekends linking arms with surely couldn’t be counted on to impress. So that was out of the window straightaway.
Anyway! She might’ve missed her preemptive head start, but besides her good looks and personality she had nothing if not perseverance. Months upon months of silent strategizing and agonizingly boring stakeouts had culminated in her zeroing in on Tatsuya – for whatever that was worth, considering the grievous disease that had by then caught itself up with half of the male students, which did sublimely in limiting her scope. It wasn’t nothing, in any case. She was the sort of terrible girl who took what she could get. If her friends knew anything about this surely they would immediately go up and leave her alone at the table, shoving cold fries into dollops of hot sauce. She felt certain of that.
And how awful would that be! She had almost forgotten the brittle cold feeling of being by herself, but the thought made the memories rush back up suddenly, the shock like sink water splashed across her face during a bathroom break, washing away the warm sting of her adolescent tears. She couldn’t even remember what it was she had been weeping about, only that her reflection had looked stupid. That must’ve been years ago by now. She had gone such ways since then – had almost grown out of the act of looking back, over her shoulders and towards the little girl she used to be, fragile and blurred at the edges.
“Hm!” Miho made a sagely noise of approval. Lisa blinked, alerted. “I’d say it’s puberty’s quirks at work.”
“Probably,” Lisa said, a flippant concession curtained by the practiced flush of her cheeks, and bit into her burger. Probably, she thought, with some semblance of satisfaction – for how else could you explain a teenage girl’s fickle heart?