Marionette

Oceans, Chapter Eighteen - Genkidashite! [元気出して]

Sometimes, it was just better to roll with the punches than to fight against them.

Right now, Amaya guessed this was one of those times, for her.

After accepting Maehara and Isogai's insistent remarks that they were escorting her home Wednesday evening, Amaya found that her luck wasn't anywhere near as bad during that time.

An unfortunately familiar pair of delinquents from the next school over had noticed her, but at the sight of both Maehara and Isogai with her, they decided that it was best to leave her alone that evening. Further to that, there had been three times where either of her two acquaintances had caught her by the arm to stop her from tripping over upturned pavement or any other perfectly avoidable hazard.

If she had insisted on walking herself home on her own, she would have been jumped by those delinquents, and if she had managed to run fast enough to lose them, she would have ended up smashing her face on the pavement instead.

It turned out that both Maehara and Isogai took the same train to and from Kunugigaoka, and they lived one stop further from the pathetic school than Amaya and Karma. In fact, Maehara had said that he lived just a couple of blocks away from the station, and Isogai lived just on the other side of the river further along. Amaya guessed the only reason she had never seen the boys on the train before was because she always took the one an hour earlier than them if she could help it, and she was normally involved in some kind of fight and delayed in the afternoons.

The twins had spent that night staying at Mako's house again in order to finish their little group project, which was convenient, since there was no safe food in the fridge, and nothing was running in the apartment. The electricity hadn't been turned on, yet, however it appeared that a couple of other tenants in the building were having the same problem, so it wasn't necessarily something exclusive to her. It meant that there were actual problems with the power of the building, therefore, as soon as it was fixed, everything would be in order. She just had to deal with cold showers until then.

She spent her conscious time propped up on the windowsill of her room, once again, however this time she made certain to set her alarm and drag herself to bed before she actually fell asleep.

Amaya's appetite was still rather non-existent. She didn't feel hungry at all, but after thinking about it throughout the evening, she realized she'd been functioning just on an onigiri and a couple of bites of an anpan over the past two days. Therefore, on her way to school, Amaya made certain to stop at one of the convenience stores in order to pick up a couple of rice-balls to ensure that she was at least eating something, even if she had no appetite.

She had done a lot of thinking over the night about what was going on in her life, and the oddities that were beginning to surface. Lots of things that didn't mean very much at all, but they accumulated and just made everything confusing and emotionally heart-wrenching for her. She hadn't gotten anywhere with them, either.

She guessed that another day would yield her at least some more snippets of happenings to help her cycle through the questions that were surfacing in her life right now. Maybe she'd figure out whether she should apologize to Karma for throwing that tantrum at him, or not.

Amaya arrived at the Class E Campus by 6.30am, to find that there was nobody there yet. Clad in her uniform plus her white hooded jumper with peach-coloured music notes just because it felt horribly cold to her, it was all Amaya could do to just stare at the empty, lifeless building.

It was odd, it was peculiar, and Amaya wasn't sure what was going on.

At the main campus, there was at least someone there at 5am, even. When Karma set all those fizzing pranks in the Administrations Office, he actually had to sneak in at 4am just to set them without someone stumbling upon him mid-way through the work.