gentle angel • kousano

VIII. i dont wonder about your indifference

Akiko was a troublesome girl from birth, too troublesome for her own good, some would say. Where she grew up, girls acting in such a way was considered taboo. It was unladylike and inhuman.

She was sitting under a lone oak tree on the edge of the playground, twirling a piece of grass between her fingers, when two boys came lumbering toward her. She knew this was going to be bad; nobody ever seemed to approach her with good intentions.

"Hey, freak!" one of them leered.

Akiko sighed, rising to her feet slowly and steeling herself for whatever shit they had to say.

"Heard you're working at some shitty-ass candy store, eh?"

"Oh."

It wasn't as if Akiko was keeping her job at the candy store a secret or anything, she just had no one to tell.

"Where'd you hear that?"

"Friend of mine saw you working there."

Akiko hummed, pleasantly surprised that the boys hadn't immediately started bullying her, but not ready to let her guard down.

"Was that all you wanted to ask me?"

"Well," the boys exchanged a glance and a pair of feral grins that would have been intimidating if Akiko herself wasn't taller than both of them, "we were just wondering what a kid like you was doin' working in a candy store. Your mom poor or something?"

Akiko clenched her fists and took in a shaky breath.

Mom told me no fights all week and I would get ice cream.

Breathing out again, Akiko smiled saccharinely at the boys, "Sorry to break the news, but no, we're well off," lie, "I just thought that helping out would be fun and nice of me," half-truth, "what? Are you guys too lazy to help your parents out," she hummed, "I suppose I could've guessed," truth.

The boys scowled at her and exchanged another glance, this one far more readable than the last.

Akiko sighed, no ice cream this week she supposed.

By the time she was eight and still sassing boys who told her to act like a 'normal girl', her mother begrudgingly decided to make her quit her job at the candy store and send her to an all-girls boarding school in hopes that they would correct her outlandish behavior.

It didn't work.

Akiko continued to cause trouble, even making a few friends who shared her sentiment that the way they were supposedly meant to act was insane.

Yosano Akiko was, by no means, a boring person, and she wasn't going to let some prissy all-girls school change a thing about her. If her mom was disappointed in her behavior then she was just going to have to deal with it.

She really did adore her mom, but she wouldn't stand for changing herself just because their stuck-up town didn't like the way she acted.

She said that to her mom when she got home from her first year at the school. She was ten at that time and didn't quite understand the severity at which her mom would take her words because, for the next year, she would not speak to her.

Not a single word was uttered; it was absurd.

Her mom would meet with a strange man on a weekly basis, and she would always be harsher in the days after they saw each other.

Akiko could tell that this pained her mother. She could tell that this was not what she wanted for her. It was obviously the town, and the man, who were forcing her to change, making sure she would mold her supposed demon of a child into the picture-perfect girl they desired.