A Year in June: Chapter 1

 There are two types of people: those June could stand and those she could not. This particular person, she thought as she jammed her spoon against the cheese stubbornly burnt to the side of the ramekin, was quickly becoming the latter. She had just satisfactorily incised an edge of the spoon into the blackened Parmesan when an upward inflection floated into the edge of her conscience.

“—isn’t it?”

She looked up and fast enough to induce mild vertigo. An old habit, she thought, and looked down again, ignoring the question.

The old schoolmate seated across from her became indignant, “Really, Juniper, I am trying my best to communicate here. So will you tell me what’s going on?” His hand went to tuck a stray hair behind his left ear, “I thought we were friends.”

“Yes,” she started “yes, we were—“

“—are” he finished for her, “seriously, what happened to you?”

It was a question only she knew the answer to, but also the question she liked answering least. She gave him her standard answer, silence.

In silence she stood up and in silence she placed $6.25 on the table for the French Onion Soup, put on her jacket and left the café. The door jingled to acknowledge her exit as she walked into the frigid March air.

Cambridge, Massachusetts—how is it possible to have lived so long in a place, yet know so little about it? She knew the bus stops and the regular panhandlers. But after a mere year away everything else had changed. The short walk from the café to her apartment only confirmed what she already now understood, cold wind, cold stares, cold hearts.

Walking up the winding staircase to the third floor she meticulously counted the steps, making sure to skip the 4^th, 10^th, and 17^th, the ones that always creaked. She had a habit of counting subconsciously; it was beyond her control. The seconds it took to drink a full cup of water, for example, or how long it took to urinate after holding onto a full bladder for a while; anything that was long and sustained was fair game for her to count. In fact, the stairs were actually a bit of an anomaly, but because it was repetitive and something she did every day for the last 10 months, she had unintentionally begun to count the way up, but it still wasn’t a habit for her to count on the way down.

As she rummaged through her coat pocket for her key she closed her fingers around her keychain. It was a gift from Minazuki. The air warmed around her as she remembered that day.

It had been a day in June, her first full day in Japan. June had graduated college only a month before and she was shaky on her real-world feet. But when she took her first faltering steps, she was fortunate enough to find someone beside her. With a sideways grin and a steady hand, Minazuki gave June her first pair of wings.

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