“—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 4th,
10th, and 17th, 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.
____
