Ten Things I Hate About Mitsuhide

Chapter 20: Limbo

"She's not dead. Oh Gods... I thought she was dead."

"Katsuko – you could have been killed."

"I wasn't, though." I broke into my energy bar stash and offered him one.

He pushed it away. "I'm done."

I didn't pretend to misunderstand. "Wait. Don't. I'm sorry."

"No, you're not." But he hugged me in spite of his harsh tone. "I can't keep watching you chase death."

Toshiie? Where are we?

Is this how she felt? Is this what my mother had lived with every day? The unrelenting greyness that muffled all sound, blinded sight, reached inside and amplified everything dark, muffled everything bright? Had it been like this before? Too long had passed since my last journey through the wormhole. It was familiar, and yet not. No. This was not what I remembered. I could see nothing but grey. The fog invaded my eyes, my lungs, my throat. It was... My fingers were getting numb... I couldn't feel my toes. I couldn't feel. I could sense nothing. How could I escape from a place that appeared to be part of me? I was as one with the fog. There wasn't a step I could take, a direction I could move that would separate me from the grey. Someone looking at me would only see a fading shadow, perhaps darker in some places, and translucent in others. The darkness would fade last.

"Kaya. Open your eyes." The voice was insistent enough that I tried and-

Ow. No. Hurt.

***

...Me against the mountain. The bright snow and crisp wind, sailing on the board, trusting my balance, my mastery, my freedom. At the top of the pipe, I twisted and... crap! Over rotated, misjudged the run... and I tumbled into the hard packed snow in the bowl of the half pipe.

The few other early season boarders let out an 'ooh' of sympathy. Yeah, that's going to leave a mark. A headache began at the base of my skull and slush slid down my back.

Time to pack it in for the day.

Happy Birthday to me. It wasn't literally my birth date. That had been, six weeks ago. Toshiie and I had had a small dinner at home, with only our mother as a guest, though I knew that Toshiie had celebrated the night before with his boyfriend. Mom lasted through three bites of the cheesecake I'd made for the three of us, then retreated to her room, leaving Toshiie and me to pretend that was had been planned after all. After a few moments of awkwardly staring at her closed bedroom door, we gave up and instead found a movie to stream.

But that was six weeks ago. I was over it. Today I had been determined to have a belated celebration just for myself, the way I liked to spend my time, testing myself against the sky ... although my plan hadn't included wiping out on the half pipe.

Oh well. First snow of the season. Always takes a couple of runs to get the kinks out.

While waiting for the bus to take me back to town, I remembered to turn my phone back on, only to see a stack of increasingly frantic texts from my brother. Shit. Guess they'd found out I wasn't at the library studying.

I considered ignoring the messages (new phone who dis), but it would only be postponing the inevitable. I braced myself and called him back.

"Where are you?" Weird. Toshiie never skipped the greeting. That was my gig.

"Mount Kosha. Waiting for the bus." With about one hundred other people. Hopefully, I would get a seat. My headache had become impossible to ignore.

His sigh of disgust sent the pain ricocheting around my skull. "I'm sending a taxi to you. Take it."