The idea was Mio’s. The planning was Mom’s.
“Kohoku New Town,” said Mom, on the Thursday. She was at the kitchen table with her tea and a map of the Yokohama subway on her phone. “Saturday. There’s a big shopping center there. Two big shopping centers. Nobody we know goes there. It’s forty minutes away and it’s full of families from the new apartment buildings.”
“I’m not going,” I said.
“You are,” said Mio.
“I don’t need anything.”
Mio looked at me across the table.
I was wearing my oldest T-shirt, a big gray one from a school trip in middle school, and over it a hoodie, zipped up to the neck, in July. It was thirty-one degrees outside. I’d been wearing the hoodie zipped up for a week.
“You need things,” said Mio, quite gently for her.
I didn’t argue. I knew what she meant.
Since June my chest had ached, the dull, growing ache you get in your shins at twelve, and it had changed. Not much. Enough that I’d started wearing the hoodie. My pants had started to sit wrong, too, catching at the hips, hanging loose at the waist and dragging under my heels, and my old school shirts pulled across the front in a way they never had.
Nothing had changed since I’d stopped going to the roof. But nothing had gone back, either.
“Saturday,” said Mom. “We’ll get the subway from Yokohama. We’ll be there when it opens.”
“The cat stays home,” she added, without looking up.
From the top of the fridge, Kohaku made a small offended noise.
* * *
We left at eight.
Mom wore her weekend clothes, a navy cardigan and the pants she irons, and carried the big shopping bag she takes to the wholesale market. Mio wore something with a lot of buttons and her hair in two clips and was in a better mood than I’d seen her in weeks. I wore the hoodie, with my hair tied back in Saki’s hair tie and the sweatband on my wrist.
On the train to Yokohama, Mio leaned over.
“Today,” she said, low, “in public, you’re Haru.”
“What?”
“Haru. It’s a name. It works either way.” She sat back. “If I call you Haruto in a lingerie department, people are going to look. Haru, nobody looks twice.”
I thought about it. Haru. Spring. A name you could give a boy or a girl. Nobody had called me that since I was very small.
“Fine,” I said.
“And we’re going to say she.” Mio was looking out of the window, not at me. “When we talk to people. Only to people. It’s easier. You pass, mostly. It’s less to explain.” She glanced at me. “Is that okay?”
I looked at the floor of the train.
“Three out of four,” I said.
“What?”
“Strangers. They say she three times out of four.” I didn’t know why I’d told her. “I’ve been counting.”
Mio was quiet for a moment.
“Okay,” she said. “So we’re just keeping up with the strangers.”
* * *
The shopping center at Kohoku New Town was enormous, five floors of shops around a high glass atrium with a fountain at the bottom, full of families with strollers and grandparents with walking sticks. It smelled of coffee and new carpets.
Nobody looked at us. That was the point.
Mom approached it like stocktaking.
She walked into the first department store with her shopping bag over her arm, stopped in the middle of the floor and looked around it the way she looks at a delivery from the wholesale market, working out what was there and what was needed and how much of it. Then she started.
“Underwear first,” she said. “Then pants. Then tops. Then shoes, if there’s time. Two of everything, three of the things you’ll wear every day.”
“Mom…”
“Haru,” said Mom.
She said it very carefully, as if she’d been practicing.
“This is the easiest way. We do it in order. We get it done.”
The underwear department was on the third floor. I stood at the edge of it in my zipped-up hoodie and wanted to die.
Mom went straight to the counter. A woman in a black uniform with a tape measure around her neck looked up and smiled.
“Good morning,” said Mom. “My daughter needs her first bras. She’s sixteen. She’s a late starter. She’s very shy.” She put her shopping bag down on the counter. “What do you have?”
The woman looked at me. I looked at a rack of socks.
She smiled again, much more gently. She had clearly seen a lot of shy sixteen-year-olds.
“Of course,” she said. “Come with me, dear.”
I went with her.
* * *
It took forty minutes.
It was mostly tape measures, a fitting room with a curtain and the woman in the black uniform being kind and fast, while I looked at the ceiling. At the end of it there was a small pile of things in plain colors, soft and simple, on the counter. Mom paid with the card she uses at the market, put them in her shopping bag and ticked something off in her head.
“Next,” she said.
Pants were easier. Tops were where Mio took over.
Mom picked plain things, practical things, things that would wash. T-shirts in navy and gray. A cardigan like her own. Two pairs of soft pants with an elastic waist. Mio followed her around the racks adding things to the pile when she wasn’t looking.
In the pants section Mom held a pair of jeans up against me in the middle of the aisle, with families going past on both sides.
“How are they at the hips?”
“Mom.”
“The ones you’ve got catch at the hips, and they’re too long. I’ve seen you pulling at them.” She turned the jeans around and held them up against me from the back. “These might be better.”
“Can we not do this here?”
“We can not do it,” said Mom. “Or we can get you pants that fit. You choose.”
I looked at the jeans. I looked at the families going past, none of whom were looking at us.
“The ones that fit,” I said.
“Good,” said Mom, and put three pairs over her arm.
Mio came back from the next rack with a skirt.
It was dark blue and pleated, the kind girls wear with tights in autumn, and she held it up hopefully.
“No,” said Mom.
“Why not? It’s cute.”
“It’s cute,” Mom agreed. “And she hasn’t asked for it.” She took the skirt gently out of Mio’s hands and hung it back on the rail. “When she asks, we’ll come back.”
Mio opened her mouth to argue. Then she looked at me, standing in the aisle in my hoodie holding three pairs of pants that fit, and closed it again.
“What’s this?” said Mom, at the fitting room, holding up a top she hadn’t chosen.
It was pale yellow, with small white flowers on it and a little ruffle at the collar.
“No idea,” said Mio. “It was on the pile.”
“I didn’t put it on the pile.”
“Somebody did.” Mio looked at the ceiling. “Haru should try it. Since it’s here.”
Mom looked at the top. She looked at Mio. She looked at me.
“Try it,” she said.
I tried it.
I came out of the fitting room in it and stood there, in the pale yellow top with the white flowers, and didn’t look at the mirror on the wall beside me, and looked at the floor instead.
Mio was silent. So was Mom. There was a pause long enough that I looked up.
Mio had her hand over her mouth. Mom was standing with her arms folded, holding the shopping bag against her side, looking at me with her head on one side, the way she looks at a fish.
“Yes,” said Mom. “That one.”
* * *
Late in the morning we stopped on a bench outside the fitting rooms on the fourth floor, so Mom could go and find the shoes, and Mio got out her makeup case.
“No,” I said.
“Just one thing.”
“No.”
“Mascara. That’s all. Not even all your lashes. Just to show you.” She was already unscrewing it. “You’ve got lashes people pay for. You might as well know what to do with them. Look up.”
I looked up.
She held my chin with two fingers, lightly, and brushed the mascara on, quickly, in short strokes, with her tongue between her teeth. It felt like a spider walking on my eyelids.
“Now you,” she said, and handed me the wand.
I tried. I did it in the little mirror in the lid of her case. It was the first mirror I’d looked into on purpose in about five years, and I kept my eyes on my lashes and not on anything else.
I put far too much on.
“Less,” said Mio.
I tried again.
“Less than that.”
“That is less.”
“Less than that,” said Mio. She took the wand back and wiped it on a tissue and handed it to me again. “It’s not paint. You’re not painting a fence. Just the tips. Like you’re barely doing it. Like you don’t care.”
I did it like I didn’t care.
Mio looked at it, very close, and sat back.
“Fine,” she said. “That’s fine. That’s actually fine.” She screwed the mascara shut and dropped it into my hand. “Keep it.”
On the escalator up to the fifth floor I saw Ono.
Ono Rika is in my class. She sits two rows in front of me, or did, and she was at Saki’s funeral, crying, in her uniform. She was coming down the other escalator toward us with her mother and a little brother, holding a bag from a bookshop.
I froze.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t turn around on an escalator. I stood there with Mom’s shopping bag, Mio beside me, my hair tied back and my lashes done. Ono came down toward us, closer and closer, and looked straight at me.
She looked at me for about a second, the way you look at anyone on an escalator.
Then she smiled, a small polite smile, the kind you give a stranger, a girl about your age you’ve accidentally caught the eye of.
And she went past, down, and was gone.
I stood on the escalator and held the moving rail.
“Who was that?” said Mio quietly.
“Someone from my class.”
Mio looked back down the escalator. Then she looked at me.
“She didn’t know you,” she said.
“No.”
We got to the top. I stepped off. I stood there for a moment by the rail with people going around me, and I didn’t know what I felt. Relief, mostly. And something under the relief, sharper, that I didn’t have a name for.
I’d sat two rows behind Ono Rika since April. She’d looked right at me and seen a girl she’d never met.
“Haru,” said Mom. “Shoes.”
I went.
* * *
The shoe shop was full of families.
Mom had found a pair of plain white sneakers and a pair of soft black flat shoes, and she made me try them both while she stood over me and pressed the toe of each one with her thumb.
The assistant in the shoe shop was a young man with a lot of hair gel. He knelt down to check the fit. He looked up at Mom, then at Mio, then at me, with the pale yellow top in a bag at my feet and my lashes done.
“Your daughters?” he said to Mom, making conversation.
Mio went still beside me.
Mom didn’t hesitate at all. She didn’t even look at me.
“Yes,” she said.
The young man nodded, pressed the toe of the white sneaker and said it fit well. Mom said we’d take both pairs, and he went to get a box.
That was all. It took about two seconds. Mom paid for the shoes and we went.
Mio let it pass. Neither did I. But in the elevator on the way down she reached over and squeezed my hand, once, hard.
* * *
We had lunch at a ramen place on the ground floor, where Mom ate everything in her bowl and half of mine, because she’d been up since half past four. Then we got the subway back to Yokohama.
Yokohama station is enormous and always full, and you have to walk a long way to change from the subway to the JR lines, through underground passages full of shops. Halfway along, Mio stopped at an ice cream stand.
“Ice cream,” she said.
“We’ve just had lunch,” said Mom.
“It’s thirty-one degrees.”
Mom looked at the ice cream stand. She looked at the full shopping bag, and at me, still in the hoodie but with the pale yellow top folded on top of the bag, and at Mio.
“Three,” she said.
We stood in the middle of the underground passage at Yokohama station with people streaming past us in both directions and ate ice cream. Mom had green tea. Mio had something pink with sprinkles. I had vanilla, because I couldn’t decide. It dripped down my wrist onto the sweatband and Saki’s hair tie, and Mio laughed and gave me a tissue.
Mom stood with her ice cream and her shopping bag and looked at the two of us without saying anything.
She looked, I thought, sort of tired. And sort of happy.
I’d forgotten what she looked like happy.
* * *
On the train home they talked about the day.
They sat on either side of me on the long seat, with the shopping bag at our feet, and they talked about it across me. Mio said the woman in the black uniform had been amazing. Mom said the pants were good value but the cardigan wasn’t. Mio said the yellow top had been the best thing in the whole shop. Mom said it would need washing on a gentle cycle.
And they said she.
Not to me. About me. Like Mio had said they would, to keep it easy. She looked good in the yellow. She needs another pair of the pants, she’ll wear those every day. She’s got good feet, she needs to look after them. It went back and forth over my head, quietly, with the train rocking and the sun coming in through the windows in long hot bars.
The train went through Hodogaya and Higashi-Totsuka. It went through Totsuka.
At first I thought, they can stop now. We’re not in public anymore. Nobody here knows us. Nobody’s listening. They can stop now.
They didn’t stop.
They didn’t seem to notice they were doing it. Mio was talking about shoes.
I sat between them with the shopping bag against my legs and my lashes done. I looked out of the window at the houses going past, and the sea somewhere beyond them.
I found that I didn’t want them to stop.