The rainy season came in the second week of June and didn’t stop. Every morning the sky over Ofuna was the color of wet concrete, and every afternoon it rained, steady and warm, and the hydrangeas came out along the railway embankments in heavy blue heads.
By then strangers called me she three times out of four.
I’d started keeping count without meaning to. The kiosk lady on the platform. A man at the convenience store who held the door. A tourist on Wakamiya-oji who stopped me to ask the way to the shrine and said “Thank you, miss,” in careful English. Mostly it happened when I had my hood up. Sometimes it happened when I didn’t. My hair was past my collar now and wouldn’t stay behind my ears. My voice had stopped cracking and settled somewhere higher, and I’d stopped answering questions in class.
Teachers had started looking at me. The homeroom teacher kept me back one afternoon and asked whether everything was all right at home. The PE teacher asked when I was going to get a haircut.
“Soon,” I said.
I didn’t get one.
* * *
On a Wednesday in the middle of June I was standing in the corridor outside our classroom at lunch, waiting for Shun, with my hair in my eyes. It was raining hard against the windows and the corridor smelled of wet umbrellas. I kept pushing my bangs back and they kept falling forward.
Saki came out of the classroom with her clipboard.
She stopped in front of me. She looked at my hair for a moment. Then she took a black hair tie off her own wrist, a plain elastic one, and held it out to me without saying anything.
I took it.
“Thank you,” I said.
She nodded. Then she held out the clipboard. It was the fire bell petition, three pages of names now, nearly the whole school.
“Would you like to sign?” she said. “We’re taking it to the principal on Friday.”
I looked at the fire bell through the corridor window, rusting on its little steel tower at the edge of the field in the rain. Then I took her pen and signed my name at the bottom of the third page.
“Thank you, Asakura-kun,” said Saki, and went off down the corridor.
I put the hair tie on my wrist, next to the sweatband.
I didn’t use it that day. I didn’t take it off, either.
* * *
Mio worked it out in about a week.
I didn’t know she was doing it. I found out afterward, from her, in pieces, the way she found things out about clients’ hair: one thing, then another thing, then a pattern.
The first thing was the photo.
A photographer from a weekly magazine had been at Yuigahama on the day of the fish, by accident, covering something else. He’d taken four hundred frames of the beach that afternoon. The magazine printed the best of them across two pages.
It was taken from behind, in the second she let the wall of light go, when she was spent and her arm was up. You couldn’t see her face in that one. You could see pale hair streaming. You could see the red and the white.
And you could see the staff in her raised hand, clear as anything: dark gray iron, with a thin line of gold winding up it.
Mio had seen that gray and that gold before. She’d seen them on my wrist at the bathroom sink, one morning in May, when I’d taken the sweatband off to wash my hands and left it on the shelf for a minute. She’d been coming in to get her hair clips.
She’d seen my wrist.
The second thing was the laundry. Sand in the pockets of my jeans, even in June, when I hadn’t been to the beach. Salt dried white in the seams of my jacket. Seaweed once, a strand of it, in the hood.
The third thing was my face.
* * *
She came into my room on Friday night with a tube of something and sat on the end of my bed and looked at me in the light from my desk lamp. She said nothing. She just looked, the way she looks at the mannequin head before she starts on it.
“Your jaw’s different,” she said.
“What?”
“Your jaw. It’s softer. It’s been getting softer since about April.” She leaned in. “And your lashes. They’re longer. I’d kill for those lashes. And your arms.” She took my wrist, the one without the sweatband, and turned it over in the lamplight. “You haven’t got any hair on your arms. And you’re treading on the backs of your pants. You’ve been doing it for a week. They used to fit.”
“I never had much.”
“You had some. You had a bit. You had that stupid little line of hair on your top lip that you thought nobody could see.” She let go of my wrist. “It’s gone. All of it’s gone. You haven’t shaved since Golden Week. I’d know. You leave the razor on the side of the sink.”
I had nothing to say to that.
She sat there, turning the tube over in her hands. I saw it was hand cream. She hadn’t brought it for any reason. She’d brought it so she’d have something to hold.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”
She went. I stayed where I was and listened to her door close.
* * *
At one o’clock she knocked again.
“Balcony,” she said through the door. “Now. Please.”
The balcony is narrow, off the living room, with the clothesline and Mom’s pots of shiso and a view of the elementary school roof and the Ofuna Kannon on her hill. It had stopped raining. Everything was dripping. Mio was standing at the railing in her big sweatshirt with her arms folded, and when I came out she didn’t look at me. She was looking at the Kannon.
“I want to say something,” she said, “and I want you to let me say all of it before you say anything. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” She took a breath. “I know what’s going on.”
My stomach turned over.
“I know,” she said. “The hair, the skin, the jaw. The voice. The lashes. You going out at five in the morning and coming back at six looking like you’ve been crying. You not letting me cut your hair. You not letting me take your picture. That sweatband you never take off.” She still wasn’t looking at me. “I’ve got clients who’ve done it. I’ve seen what it does. I know what it looks like when someone starts.”
“Mio…”
“You said you’d let me finish.” Her voice was shaking. “If you’re transitioning, I’m on your side. I want you to know that. I’m on your side. Mom’ll be on your side too, eventually, you know what she’s like, she’ll go quiet and then she’ll make a list. But you can’t do it like this. Not pills off the internet. Not stuff you’ve bought from some website in another country. You don’t know what’s in them. You don’t know what they’re doing to your liver. People get really, really sick. One girl at my college ended up in the hospital.”
She turned around then, and her eyes were full of tears.
“Please. Please don’t do it like this. There are doctors. There are real doctors. I’ll come with you. I’ll find out how. Just, please, stop taking whatever it is.”
I stood there in the wet with my mouth open.
It was so wrong that for a second I nearly laughed.
And it was so close that I couldn’t breathe.
“It’s not that,” I said.
“Haruto.”
“It’s not. I’m not taking anything. I swear. It isn’t like that.”
She looked at me for a long moment, with the tears running down her face, and I could see that she didn’t believe me. She didn’t believe the denial at all. The only thing she believed was the fear.
“Okay,” she said.
Then she went inside and shut the balcony door behind her, and I heard her go into her room, and I stood out there alone with the dripping clothesline until my feet were cold.
* * *
On Saturday afternoon I came home from the library and found Mio in my room.
She was on her knees by my desk with the bottom drawer pulled out, going through it. My school things were on the floor beside her in a heap. My wardrobe door was open. The shoebox I keep old trading cards in was open on the bed. The source of this chapter is g.com.
“What are you doing?”
She didn’t stop. “Where are they?”
“Where are what?”
“The pills. Patches. Whatever it is.” She pulled out a folder of old homework and shook it. Nothing fell out. “Is it injections? Please tell me it’s not injections.”
“There aren’t any. Mio. There’s nothing.”
“There’s something.” She sat back on her heels and looked up at me. Her eyes were red. “Something’s doing this to you. Your face is changing. I’m not stupid. I’m not blind. I do this for a living.”
“Get out of my room.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
“You’re going through my stuff.”
“Because you won’t tell me!” She stood up. She was shaking. “You won’t tell me anything. You lie to my face. You said you’d tell me if something was wrong, and something’s wrong, and you’re lying.”
I didn’t have an answer to that.
She was right. I stood in the doorway of my own room and looked at the heap of my things on the floor, and couldn’t say anything that wasn’t another lie.
Mio took a good look at me. Then she pushed past me into the hall, went into her own room and shut the door. Her bed creaked as she sat down on it, and then there was nothing.
I put my things back in the drawer one at a time. Kohaku sat on the bed beside the open shoebox and watched me.
“She’s frightened,” said Kohaku.
“I know.”
“She’s frightened because she loves you, and she thinks you’re poisoning yourself.” Kohaku looked at the wall between my room and Mio’s. “That’s a very hard thing to be.”
* * *
She followed me up to the roof the next morning.
I didn’t know. I’d checked her door at a quarter to five and it was shut, and I’d heard her breathing. I went up the stairwell in my hoodie with Kohaku on my shoulder, and pushed open the broken door to the roof, and walked out to the middle of it by the water tank where the concrete was dry.
The sweatband went in my pocket, and Saki’s hair tie after it.
I said the word under my breath.
The seam lit. The warmth came up my arm. My hair dropped to my waist. The cuff ran off my wrist into my hand and grew into the staff, and the light came off me into the gray dawn. I was standing on the roof of our building in red and white, with the hems of the hakama glowing.
“I knew it,” said Mio behind me.
I turned around.
She was standing in the stairwell door in her pajamas and sneakers, with her phone in her hand, not filming, just holding it. Her face was white.
“I knew it,” she said again. “Well.” She swallowed. “I didn’t know that.”
I didn’t know how to answer.
I stood there glowing on the roof with my hair down to my waist. My sister looked at me, at the hair, the sleeves, the boots and the gold eyes, and at my face, which the whole country had seen, and which she’d never once thought was mine.
She came across the roof slowly. She stopped a meter away and looked down at me.
Mio isn’t tall. She’d never had to look down at me in her life.
“You’re tiny,” she said.
She put out one hand and touched my sleeve, the white over-robe with the gold stars on it, the way you’d touch something in a museum when the guard wasn’t looking.
“It’s you,” she said. “It’s actually you. On the news. On the keychains. At Yuigahama.”
“Yes.”
“You saved Shun’s aunt.”
“Yes.”
“You killed a fish with a stick.”
“It’s a staff.”
She put her hand over her mouth. For a moment I thought she was going to cry again, or scream.
Then she sat down, right where she was, on the wet concrete of the roof in her pajamas.
“Who else knows?” she said through her hand.
“Nobody.”
“Nobody? Mom?”
“Nobody.”
She took her hand away from her mouth. She looked up at me, sitting on the roof, with the dawn coming up gray behind the Kannon. Her face did something complicated. Then it went very still and very fierce, the way it used to when we were small and someone at the park pushed me off the swings.
“Then I do now,” she said.
I sat down on the concrete beside her. I didn’t decide to. My legs just went.
“Onee-chan,” I said.
I hadn’t called her that since I was about nine. It came out in the light, clear voice. She heard it, and her face went again. She put her arm around my shoulders and held on, hard, in the wet, and neither of us said anything for a long time.
Then she wiped her face on her sleeve and looked at the staff, lying across my knees.
“Can I hold it?”
I gave it to her. I held it out flat, and she took it in both hands, and the moment I let go it went down like a dropped girder and hit the roof with a clang that must have woken the second floor.
She tried to lift it. She got her fingers under it and pulled until her face went red, and one end came up off the concrete about the width of a coin and went down again.
“How do you even carry that?”
“It doesn’t weigh anything.”
“It weighs about a car.”
She let go of it and stood up, and looked at me, and something came into her face that I hadn’t seen since she was about fifteen.
“Take me up.”
“What?”
“You fly. On the news. You fly.” She pointed at the sky. “Take me up. Once. Right now, before I think about it.” Find the original chapter at g.com.
So I did.
I picked up the staff and put one arm around her waist, and she put both of hers around my neck, and I went up off the roof with my sister hanging on to me in her pajamas. She screamed. Then she swore, steadily, every word she isn’t allowed at dinner and some I’d never heard her use. I took her once around the Ofuna Kannon, close enough to see the rain on the goddess’s white cheek, and back over the railway lines, and down onto the roof again by the water tank.
She sat down hard on the wet concrete. She was shaking. She was laughing so much she couldn’t get any air.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god.”
I sat beside her. The sky was getting lighter over the hills.
When she’d stopped laughing, she didn’t say anything for a minute. Then, not looking at me, in a different voice: “Do you like it?”
“What?”
“Being her.”
I didn’t answer straight away. I looked at my hands on the staff, narrow and pale in the gray light.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Okay,” said Mio.
She didn’t push. She never brought it up again.
That night I lay awake for hours knowing that I don’t know hadn’t been true, and I didn’t let myself get any further than that.
* * *
“Hello,” said Kohaku.
She’d shown herself. Not as a cat. She was sitting on the edge of the water tank in her gray bob and her dull blue kimono, swinging her bare feet, with her cat’s ears turned toward Mio.
Mio looked at her. She looked at the ears.
“Okay,” said Mio.
“I’m Kohaku,” said Kohaku. “I come with the bracelet. I’ve heard a lot about you. You have very good scissors.”
“Okay,” said Mio again. She went on looking at Kohaku. Then she looked at me. “Is she real?”
“She’s real.”
“Does she eat?”
“Fried chicken,” said Kohaku. “Fish. Whitebait. Anything, really.”
Mio nodded.
“That’s fine,” she said. “Honestly, that’s the least weird thing that’s happened this morning.” She frowned at Kohaku’s kimono. “You must be freezing. It’s five in the morning. Your sash is on wrong.”
“I know,” said Kohaku. “I never could do these.”
Mio got up, went down the stairs, and came back three minutes later with one of her own hoodies, a big gray one with the name of her college on the front. She held it out.
Kohaku put it on over the kimono, ears and all. The hood had to sit behind them. She pulled the sleeves down over her hands and looked pleased.
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s very giving.”
“What?”
“Don’t,” I said. “She’s been watching videos.”
She wore it for a week. She wore it on the roof and on the fridge and on the end of my bed. On the Thursday she wore it down the hill to the konbini by the station, in her other shape, with her ears sticking up through her hair and a hundred-yen coin of Mio’s in her fist, to buy her own fried chicken. She’d never bought anything in twelve hundred years.
She came back twenty minutes later with the chicken and a face like thunder.
“She said they were cute,” said Kohaku.
“Who did?”
“The girl at the register. She looked straight at them. She looked at my ears, and she said, ‘Cute,’ and she gave me the chicken.” Kohaku put the bag down on my desk. “She thought they were a hairband.”
“Everyone’s going to think they’re a hairband,” said Mio, from the doorway. “You’re in Kanagawa. Half the girls on the Enoden have got ears on.”
“They’re real.”
“Nobody cares,” said Mio. “Eat your chicken.”
Kohaku ate her chicken. She was offended for the rest of the day, and wore the hoodie to bed.
* * *
Mio did my eyebrows on Sunday.
She sat me on a stool in her room under the ring light, with a towel around my shoulders, and came at me with tweezers, a little brush and a pencil. I sat there with my eyes watering while she worked.
“Hold still.”
“It hurts.”
“It’s supposed to hurt. Beauty is pain.” She pulled another hair. “You’ve got good brows. They’ve just never been looked after. Nobody’s ever looked at them.” She tilted my chin up with one finger and studied me. “There. Now they look like you meant it.”
She held up a hand mirror.
I didn’t look. I looked at the tweezers.
Mio lowered the mirror. She let it go. She put it face down on the desk, and started packing her things away.
“I’m telling Mom you’re running with me,” she said. “In the mornings. I’ve been meaning to get fit anyway. If anyone asks, we go around the park.”
“You’d lie to Mom?”
“I’m not lying. I’m covering.” She zipped up her makeup case. “There’s a difference.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is it’s not mine to tell.” She looked at me in the light of the ring lamp. “It’s yours. When you’re ready. If you’re ever ready. Until then, we go running around the park.”
* * *
At breakfast on Monday, Mom was at the counter with her tea, in her work fleece, about to leave for work. Mio came out yawning in a tracksuit, with her hair in a bun, and sat down at the table.
“I’m going running with Haruto in the mornings,” she said. “Before college. We went yesterday. Around the park.”
Mom looked at her over the tea.
“You?”
“Me.”
“Running.”
“I’m getting fit.”
Mom looked at Mio. Then she looked at me, at the end of the table with my bowl of rice, with my hair tied back in Saki’s black hair tie and my eyebrows done, and Mio’s college hoodie on the chair beside me where Kohaku had left it.
“Good,” said Mom, and picked up her bag, and went to work.