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The day that Aoi Akane moved into the house across the road should- in theory- be something that Aoi remembers well.
The pieces are all there; faded photos in family albums, fond dinner-table stories about Aoi wiping her muddy hands on Akane’s shorts three minutes after they met, a warm summer day when an empty house became a full one.
Instead, all Aoi knows is this: one day, there is a boy in her garden. One who's a month older than Aoi but somehow a whole inch shorter, one who swears he remembers the day they met even if Aoi can’t, because they’re best-of-friends. (Aoi calls him a liar for that; they were only three and nobody can remember that far back, not even best-of-friends.)
They’re the only two who can’t remember. Somehow, it doesn’t feel fair.
Because Aoi’s mom can recall the day a moving van pulled up across the street and a kid with wide eyes shuffled across the threshold of the doorway. (When she talks about it with her co-workers, she leaves out the part where Aoi decided she hated Akane on the spot and smeared half a flowerbed onto his nice beige shorts.) Because Akane’s mom can remember going to meet the neighbours and accidentally stumbling into a years-long friendship. (When she laughs about it over a cup of the fruit squash she always keeps in the kitchen for Aoi, she smiles over how she’d never seen a girl so small yet so sure of herself.)
All Aoi knows is that one day, there’s a boy in her garden. One day, the dandelions are pushing their funny yellow heads between the blades of grass, and the next Akane is sitting right amongst them, pulling off their petals. Like he’s always been there, impossible to uproot.
When Aoi is six, she comes to the logical conclusion that Akane is like a weed. His roots dig in deep, she doesn’t remember planting him, and no matter how many times she throws mud at him, he doesn’t go away. (She also comes to the not-so-logical conclusion that, just maybe, that’s what friends are for.)
-
The first thing that Aoi can remember about Akane- properly, in vivid detail, not a pretend-memory built out of theories and family photo albums- is hitting him in the face with a baseball.
They’re five, it’s summer break, they’ve just stolen the ball from Akane’s dad’s drawer of cool-things-that-kids-aren’t-allowed-to-touch. Aoi wanted to take the pocket knife, so they could carve their names into the trees around the back of the park- (The trees there are already scarred by generations of names; a census of kids who found that secret path between the walls and hedgerows. Besides, they’re learning how to write the kanji of their names in class. It’d practically be homework )- but Akane had stopped her. Whispered about getting in trouble. Stared into the drawer with those earnest eyes that always made Aoi want to drop centipedes in his hair and hold his hand forever and ever.
So, they take the ball instead.
They play twenty questions as they pass it back and forth; even though there’s nothing about Akane that Aoi doesn’t know, and there’s nothing about Aoi that Akane doesn’t know, either.
“Do you think ghosts are real?” Aoi asks, then hurls the baseball clumsily into Akane’s face.
It knocks one of his teeth clean out. He stares numbly at the white curve of it in the grass, before he starts bawling on a three second delay. He cries, Aoi starts crying too even if she’s not sure why, and Akane’s mom comes running out of the house to see what all the fuss is about.
She slices up a plate of honeydew melon for them- soft enough that Akane can eat it with the new, painful gap punched in his teeth, sweet enough to take Aoi’s mind off tears and baseballs and questions about ghosts.
“I don’t believe in ‘em.” Akane tells her later, with melon juice running down his chin. He probes at the gap between his teeth and says, articulately; “Ow.”
“You can hit me in the face too, if you want,” Aoi replies, because that’s how these things work. (Her mom and dad argue, her mom storms out of the house for an hour, and then her dad disappears for a few days in retaliation. Aoi hits Akane in the face with a baseball, and so he should knock her tooth out, too.)
This time, it’s Akane’s turn to pat her on the head, leaving sticky fingerprints in the strands of her hair. “Don’t wanna,” he says, sincerely as a five year old with a wobbly gap-tooth smile can manage.
He gives Aoi the rest of his melon, and it tastes like summer.
-
There’s a deadline that nobody ever bothered to tell Aoi about. A point at which digging holes in the flower beds to look for faeries and showing up to dinner with dirt beneath her nails stops being cute and starts becoming weird.
Aoi’s mom signs her up for violin lessons, and theatre lessons, and keeps turning her birthday parties into networking events for boring kids and their important parents- who drink fizzy stuff in silly little glasses and trade fake laughs in the corner of the kitchen. Aoi just wants to pull the dead flower petals off her tulips. Maybe drop them down the back of Fuji’s shirt because he has the worst taste in cartoons.
Some things are still cute. She’s sweet when she wears princess bows in her hair and when she makes her mom a bouquet of dandelions and when she insists on running across the road in her flip-flops with a bar of chocolate so she can split it half-half with Akane. She’s sweet when she makes a set of tin-can telephones and stretches it across the three metre gap between her and Akane’s balconies. She’s sweet when Akane stays over and the two of them fall asleep in a pile of blankets on the bedroom floor.
But- nobody tells Akane off for keeping spiders in jars (not that he’d want to) or for spending playtime digging impressive trenches in the sandpit (not that he’d know how to) or for listing the name of every plant in the school garden (not that he’d be able to). Akane is a month older- March to Aoi’s April- but somehow, he hasn’t hit his deadline yet.
She asks him about it once, sand between her fingers. The sandpit is her world now, ever since she bit a girl who tried to push her out of it and almost got sent home. “Do you think I’m weird too?”
Akane stares at his shoelaces for a long time.
“I think you’re cool,” he decides, eventually.
Being cool isn’t the same as being not-weird , but Aoi can live with that.
-
They make up their own secret knock, after Akane watches too many spy movies and the arguments between Aoi’s parents go from a weekly-thing to a daily-thing. A concise pattern of one-two-half-knock-three; only to be used for dire emergencies and when either of their cupboards are out of popcorn.
Something shatters against the kitchen wall so Aoi slips out of the side door, crosses the street, stands on Akane’s doorstep and lets her fist fall against the wood. One, two, half-knock, three. Akane never asks; just leads Aoi up to his room so she can beat him at mario kart, or to his garden so they can hunt for ants together even though he’s scared of their weird crawly legs, or to the kitchen so they can drink glasses of fruit squash while Akane’s mom sends pitying glances across the road.
Sometimes Aoi stays for dinner. Sometimes she spends the night. Sometimes she goes back home after an hour and her dad is nowhere to be seen.
One day, Aoi’s mom sits her down at the kitchen table and tells her that her dad isn’t coming back, because he’s a liar and sometimes love isn’t really love at all and they’re going to have to get through this together . Her left hand grips Aoi’s shoulder. She’s not wearing her wedding ring any more.
And- Aoi’s dad helped her plant her garden, taught her how to do magic by raising plants from seeds and he never thought she was weird for the dirt under her nails or her schoolyard sandpit empire. (Her mom called him a liar. Aoi wonders how much of what he said was not-truths .)
Her mom is a liar and her dad is a liar and the house is too big for two people so she runs across the street to Akane. Summons him with their secret knock and cries into his shoulder because he’s the sort of person who always tells the truth. Earnest and good and Aoi both hates him and loves him for it.
They end up in the garden- not hers, not the one her liar-dad helped her raise- eating ice-cream from the freezer even though it’s barely turned spring.
“We can never, ever get married,” Aoi tells him, popping another spoonful into her mouth then wincing around the brainfreeze. “’Cause my name would be Aoi Aoi, and that’s stupid.”
Akane seems to mull that over for a while, before nodding sagely. “Never ever.”
“Getting married is dumb, anyway,” sprawling sadly into Akane’s personal space, Aoi continues- with all the sincerity of a seven-year-old who thinks she knows the whole world. “ Boys are dumb.”
“I’m a boy,” Akane reminds her.
“You’re Akane.” Aoi replies- because there’s a difference.
-
Sometimes, Aoi hates Akane.
Hates how he gets along with everyone, how he’s got big earnest eyes that make people feel sorry for him, how he’s good at climbing trees and talking to people and maths questions. Hates how he tells the truth, all the time, in all the places where Aoi is bitter and tells lies to get herself out of trouble.
They’re best friends and best friends tell each other everything, so when Akane is trying to help Aoi off the pavement she just fell knees-first into, she tells him to his face that she hates him.
It never makes them any less like best-of-friends when they argue. They’re Akane and Aoi, red and blue, March and April, a matching pair. Who cares if Aoi prefers secret knocks over admitting out loud that she’s upset. If she’d rather keep things locked up close where people can’t poke and prod and send them spilling out all over the pavement. She’s learning to make her own do-not-touch signs to hide behind (all with the same footnote- exception: Aoi Akane ).
Who cares, because Akane is honest enough for the two of them.
(That’s why, when he tells Aoi he hates her too, it hurts more than anything .)
-
They’re drinking fruit squash on their balconies, feet dangling through the railings, when Akane calls her cute.
It’s late evening, the sun is setting over the rooftops, and he throws it out there awkward and unsure and trying way too hard to be casual . Aoi laughs in the way she always does when anyone assumes that they’re together just because people don’t know what best-friends are like. If she laughs hard enough, she can ignore the dark, uncomfortable pit that settles in her stomach.
“I thought I was cool.” She replies, swings her legs, pouts a bit. Her squash suddenly tastes bad.
“Yeah, that too.” Akane grins over his glass, like nails on chalkboards.
-
The floor beside Akane’s bed is as familiar to Aoi as her own room.
She spends at least one night there a week and never returns the favour because her own house is too-large and too-empty even though they share the exact same architecture. Akane’s room is cosy, it’s full of books he swears he’s going to read one day, and his walls are more Pokémon poster than actual wallpaper. Aoi’s mom goes on lots of work trips, and Akane’s mom always says that one more mouth to feed has never hurt anyone.
Aoi sprawls on the floor in a tangle of blankets, hair light and loose around her shoulders, and she tells Akane that she’s been watching baseball lately. That she thinks it's cool and she likes the sound the ball makes when the batter takes a good hard swing at it. She steals a handful of Akane’s popcorn and jokes that he should start playing too, like his dad. Maybe he’d be cooler if he wore a cap and hit baseballs instead of getting his teeth knocked out by them.
Akane hums like he hasn’t quite heard her- and that’s fine because Aoi was just joking. (Akane isn’t cool and that’s what Aoi likes about him; he’s honest and he’s annoying and he never cares what Aoi thinks.)
To her dismay, three days later, Akane joins the school baseball team.
-
Aoi is eleven and she’s just learned the term; ‘ compartmentalise’.
To sort things into sections, to fit things into boxes, to tidy away all the little messy pieces and put them someplace where they can’t get in the way. That’s what her mom does when she gets in from a stressful day of work- compartmentalises away all the hard things that make her want to pull her hair out at the roots, leaves them at the door with her black heels and her too-full handbag.
Aoi doesn’t think her mom is very good at compartmentalising. Her boxes are full of holes, leaking all over the dining room table when she tells Aoi to sit up straight because slouching is a bad habit to nurture, to focus on her homework instead of poking around in her garden all afternoon.
Aoi is better at compartmentalising than her mom, even if she hasn’t been doing it for very long.
At school, she’s nice . She leaves behind her sandpit empire, keeps her nails tidy, smiles at her classmates even when they’re boring her to death. At home, she’s good . She does her homework as soon as she kicks her shoes off by the door, leaves bouquets of flowers on the dining room table, keeps her room neat and pink and tidy. With Akane, she’s kind. She doesn’t tell him that she hates him anymore, she lets him win at Mario kart sometimes, she even gives him Valentine's day chocolates, once.
She makes her boxes, sets herself apart, learns how to survive.
(Only alone, in her garden, can she just be Aoi .)
-
Akane has always been honest- then they start at Kamome Gakuen, and suddenly he isn’t .
Middle school is a transitional period, Aoi has been told. (In truth, Aoi has found it more like an upheaval. A tectonic shift where suddenly, violently, everything is different.)
She watches a girl with long hair getting a glass of water at her mom’s work party, feels like she’s swallowed a hornets nest, and discovers that she couldn’t relate to her classmates’ movie-star crushes because she was looking in all the wrong places. She joins the school gardening club and meets Yashiro Nene beside the run-down greenhouse, and learns for the first time what it means to have a second-best-friend. She decides that she hates it when people try to break their necks staring up at her like she’s a girl on a pedestal, but that she’d prefer that over being looked down upon any day. (She’s getting good at this whole compartmentalising thing.)
Akane starts calling her Ao-chan . Akane starts carrying around an old antique pocket watch in his school bag, and spends a whole week following her like a shadow- like she’ll die if he lets her out of his sight. Akane stays over at Aoi’s house for the first time since they were six, and doesn’t even try to play their usual game of twenty questions late into the night.
( Do you believe in ghosts? Aoi should ask him. Why are you looking at me like I died? When did you become so difficult to talk to? )
“Do you like anyone?” Aoi asks him instead. Playing the part of sweet-normal-Ao-chan to prove that Akane isn’t the only one who can make things uncomfortable .
Akane replies; “I like you.”
It’s the first open thing Akane has said all week. It feels almost like the world is ending.
-
“I like you,” Akane tells her again, a week later on their way to school.
“I like you,” Akane tells her again, as they take the proper route back home instead of the secret one behind the park.
“I like you,” Akane tells her again, as they get their books out for class.
(The realisation creeps in fast and dangerous and cold as frostbite, that maybe they’re not quite best-friends any more.)
-
“I need time to think,” Aoi tells him on their way to school, because Akane only started liking her when she became Ao-chan .
“Try again later,” Aoi tells him on their not-so-secret walk home, because he no longer sees her rough edges, the dirt beneath her nails, the torn hems of her old school skirts.
“One point out of ten,” Aoi tells him in front of the whole class, because she doesn’t know what else to do.
-
There’s something wrong with Akane.
Not just the confessions, the way he clings white-knuckled to her every word, the way he starts carrying a baseball bat over his shoulder like an open threat. He disappears for entire lunchtimes, hour-long stretches where he might as well be a ghost in the corridors. He turns tail and runs like he’s dying whenever he spots Minamoto Teru from the year above hanging around the stairwells. He gets oddly defensive whenever anyone asks him the time. He starts wearing glasses, even though he’s boasted since the age of seven about his 20/20 vision.
There’s something wrong with Akane and- terribly, awfully - Aoi doesn’t care.
She’s got other things on her mind, after all. She’s started reading ghost stories; first because Nene grins wide and bright when Aoi tells them, then because she finds herself entranced by school mythos, by things that go bump at the end of poorly-lit corridors. Hanako-san and the clock-keepers and the Misaki stairs. Dark avenues Aoi can run away down, sitting behind her ribs like old family secrets. She’s helping to shape the school garden into something beautiful, working with the seniors to craft a proposal for a new greenhouse, some extra space to plant fresh vegetables once spring rolls in. Her friendship with Nene does not share the same openness as her early days with Akane- a new, comfortable thing which takes different shapes entirely- but Aoi lets it flood the gaps, lets it fill her time with seafoam-colour hair dye and warm, bright eyes.
And so, Aoi doesn’t have time for Akane. This new version of him, who doesn’t see her. Who still thinks her favourite colour is forget-me-not blue and once almost broke a boy’s kneecap for leaving a letter on her desk.
She doesn’t recognise him, and so she doesn’t care.
-
“I can’t date him, because I don’t want my name to be Aoi Aoi. ” She tells Rika from two desks in front one afternoon, switching history textbooks for physics worksheets in the time before their teacher arrives. When she laughs, there’s no humour behind it. “Could you imagine that?”
Rika doesn’t return Aoi’s laughter- doesn’t even try to. Something about her expression turns cold and familiar as creeping frost, shutters snapping closed behind her eyes.
“That’s a bit of a stupid reason,” Rika tells her, and it’s a testimony to Aoi’s compartmentalisation when she doesn’t immediately agree with her. Because it is a stupid reason. The sort of thing a seven-year-old would tell a seven-and-one-month-year-old over a tub of ice cream. Rika’s eyes are like dark shards of ice and Aoi is struck suddenly and violently by how pretty anger looks on her. (That’s another thing Akane doesn’t know. Another thing Aoi can’t tell him.)
Still Aoi can’t tell Rika the truth. That she can’t date Akane because he sees a version of her that doesn’t exist, because they’re supposed to be best-friends and she hates him without exception for ruining that, because Aoi knows she doesn’t like boys and she’s not sure if she ever did.
Aoi already knows that Rika doesn’t like her, so she shrugs. “He’ll have to try harder, if he wants to date me.”
Rika- with her glacial eyes and pretty anger - is gone before the bell for class can even ring.
-
Aoi wants to leave. There’s a fishing hook lodged between her ribs, pulling and pulling stronger with every ghost story and rumour she commits to memory. There’s something fundamentally wrong with Kamome Gakuen’s oldest and darkest corridors, and Aoi has never found anything so fascinating.
“Do you ever feel like you belong somewhere else?” Aoi asks Akane on her way home. They’re walking side-by-side, but somehow it still feels like he’s following her.
“Wherever Ao-chan goes, I’ll go with her.” Akane replies.
Wrong answer - Aoi thinks, bitterly.
-
Aoi is starting to believe in ghosts. She wants to smash a baseball into Akane’s teeth, and ask him if he does too.
-
All she’s looking for: one broken, bleeding fragment of truth. Anything to prove there’s still something worth staying for.
-
Then, Nene disappears too. She skips gardening club three days out of five, starts hanging out in the haunted school bathrooms, her wonder and enthralled laughter at Aoi’s most haunting ghost stories turns into something empty and terrified.
Aoi knows she shouldn’t expect honesty, not when it's something she can’t give in return. When she plays the part of good-sweet-kind Ao-chan; who encourages Nene to go for it after she falls in love for the fourth time that week, even if all she wants to do is tell her selfishly I’m here, turn around, they’ll never see you the way that I do.
Aoi has no right to demand truth when she won’t offer it herself.
But the tomatoes are ready to pick and Nene isn’t there beside her and- Aoi feels it deep in her gut as the final tether pulls, and snaps, and breaks.
-
Aoi stares at Akane across the depths of the far shore, and she hates him.
Because even now, dressed up like the sacrifice she was maybe born to become, he doesn’t see her. Doesn’t see that this is who she is, with all her carefully-made boxes dragged out, torn to shreds, up-ended onto the sacrificial ground below her bruised, bleeding feet. All the parts of her that didn’t work, all the dirt below her nails, all the pieces that were too messy and out-of-place to fit into sweet, kind Ao-chan. Her pedestal only had so much room, could only bear so much weight.
There’s a tiny scar on Akane’s face that she’s only just noticed, right on the bridge of his nose. Aoi doesn’t know how he got it, and she hates him.
She hates him and she wants him to die for lying to her. For loving a fake version of her. For listening to her knock one-two-half-knock-three on his door and forgetting what a call for help sounds like. She wants him to die and- maybe- she wants herself to die too for sitting there and letting it happen. For tidying away all the parts of her that weren’t Ao-chan. For burying her selfish-bitter edges instead of wearing them loud and screaming try to love me now. She wants to rip herself free from the world and land somewhere far, far away from anyone else, somewhere not even Akane can follow her.
Akane falls. Aoi isn’t sure she wants to reach the bottom alive when she realises that she’s falling with him.
-
(“We’ll be best friends forever,” Akane told Aoi once, a few days after she knocked his tooth clean out. She can see the gap when he talks, when he sits back in the grass and pokes at it with his tongue even though his dad told him not to. “Until we die.”
Aoi laughs. She calls him morbid even though she’s not entirely sure what that word means yet, then links their fingers together and swears on it. “Until we die.”
She supposes, as she’s falling, that neither of them are very good at keeping their promises.)
-
Sometimes, Aoi wonders if Akane even wants things to change.
There’s a tunnel yawning ahead of her like a dark, terrible mouth and she knows- deep in the pit of her stomach, as much of an impulse as fear, as a hand recoiling from a hot stovetop- that she will not leave the other side of it alive. So she lifts up her torn, sacrificial skirts, walks towards a light that she cannot see, and tells Akane that she likes giraffes. That she wants to go to the zoo, one day. That she likes games and sweets and listens to Akane laugh into that invisible light as if he remembers a single one of these things.
(That’s the thing about amends : you’re supposed to make them before you die.)
“What do you like?” She asks him, then. (Twenty questions, you go first.)
“I like you, Ao-chan.” Akane tells her.
(That’s the other thing about amends : they’re supposed to be a two-way thing.)
Aoi lets go of Akane’s hand like she’s been burned, the second before he disappears.
-
“I want you to stop calling me Ao-chan,” she tells Akane, after it’s all over.
They’re standing on the school rooftop, the leaves are turning the first golden hues of autumn, and Aoi’s garden is singing its death throes like winter is already upon it. (The people around her may have forgotten an entire summer of absence , but her plants seem to know it in their roots. She doesn’t want to be at home to see them wilting.)
“But-” Akane starts.
Aoi cuts him off. “You used to call me Aoi. You can do that again.”
She doesn’t tell Akane to stop loving her- because he never really has done. He loves Ao-chan; who grows pretty flowers and wears pretty ribbons in her hair and once gave him pretty Valentine’s chocolates because that was the sweet-normal-good thing to do. Aoi tucks her loose hair behind her ear and considers planting a vicious tangle of brambles in the corner of her garden- because she can’t be Ao-chan any more. (Not if she wants to live.)
She doesn’t tell Akane to stop loving her, but something behind his fake-glasses shatters like she has done.
And, a knife-blade of his own, Akane doesn’t ask if they can stay friends. Because they haven’t been, not for an impossibly long time. Aoi feels something breaking behind her own ribs too, a final bit of hope she didn’t realise she was clinging onto until it was gone.
(It hurts and it hurts and it hurts and- it’s proof that she’s still alive.)
-
(Every year, on the cusp of summer, Aoi pulls the heads off the flowers in her garden. Cuts back their leaves, cleaves their stems, tears away their withered petals.
Akane had once shouted down at her, horrified, from his own balcony; watching Aoi set upon her flower beds like a nine-year-old grim reaper with a pair of gardening shears.
“I need to get rid of the dead bits,” She’d explained- gardening gloves cupped into a makeshift megaphone that smeared soil across her cheek. “So they can grow back stronger next year!”
Akane had replied- that’s alright, then- before asking if she’d needed any help. Aoi had tossed him up a pair of gardening gloves, and she can’t remember the last time she smiled so bright.)
-
There’s a boy in Aoi’s garden again.
Akane’s standing in the doorway like an unwelcome guest, with a tupperware box and an awkward comment that his mom bought too much food, that he thought he’d bring some over. He’s not wearing his glasses, Aoi notices. It’s been a long time since they last spoke, an absence which feels more and more like a healing wound as winter fades into spring and first year comes to a close.
They sit side by side on the garden step, elbows not touching, taking turns picking fruit out of the box which divides the space between them.
Aoi stares down at her hands- at the dirt which stains her fingertips, her chipped black nail-polish- and she admits quietly; “Y’know, I don’t actually like honeydew melon anymore.”
And, somehow, that makes Akane laugh. An open, honest sort of laugh, one that Aoi hasn’t heard him make before. It’s not the same laugh he gave to Aoi when he was a kid with big earnest eyes, and it’s not the same laugh he gave to Ao-chan when he was a shallow version of himself. It’s a different sound altogether; one that’s not an apology, not forgiveness, not a promise of something more.
It’s just new , and Aoi kind of wants to laugh with him.
(“It’s funny,” he tells her later, right as he’s preparing to leave. “Because I don’t like it either.”)