Yakusoku (Avara Stadium Book 1)

Graveyard Flowers

He'd kept sending her texts, even though she didn't send one back. He'd detailed extensively through text what he'd intended: his finances and his connections, with her know-how.

Yeah, as if.

The morning consisted of water, a long shower, more water, and the headache of a lifetime. She'd thought she'd get used to hangovers, but it turns out they're just not a thing you ever really get used to. Finally, once she could make out words on a page again, she sat down at her desk and pulled out the next interminable textbook.

Because what the hell else was she supposed to do on a Saturday, go out with friends? She was done with friends. Friendship had ended with Natsumi. Now she had exams.

So she spent five straight hours studying, before she threw on her warmest clothes and stumbled outside. It was already April, but she was just always cold, always cold.

The narrow streets were packed with life today. College kids roving in packs, yelling and laughing about whatever it was they did. Gangs of girls with all their Uniqlo bags, kids clustered around gacha machines. Sometimes it seemed like there weren't any real adults around here. That was the beauty of Machida after the robotics boom, right?

Maybe that was why she was here. She knew she'd never make it as a real adult.

She fumbled into the JR station and slapped her purse against the scanner, too lazy to reach in for her card, and it let her through into the subway. The trains were as packed with people but somehow sterile and quiet as ever today.

She got off at nowhere and made her way north, up to where the streets faded into thickets of trees and where the flat roofs of packed buildings fell away into the slanted roofs of houses with walls and family name plaques, where she heard the yap of the Pomeranian in the Terada family house, and where the air seemed to get colder than usual. That was the air graveyards all had, wasn't it?

She pulled the flowers from her purse as she went into the graveyard. By now she could have gotten to her grave with her eyes closed, but she still looked for the pile of flowers, and dropped the new ones on top.

Why flowers? Why even bother? She didn't know. Maybe it was because the one time she'd come here without flowers, burning incense instead, she'd felt empty and wrong, so she kept bringing flowers. The pile had at least one of every flower imaginable, heaped up before the grave to the point she couldn't even read the names on the plaque. There were never enough god-damn flowers to throw on the god-damn pile. It never fixed anything.

She knelt, breathing in the smell of incense with the subtly sweet scent of all the flowers, and prayed.

How long she was there, she had no idea. Sometimes she spent hours here. Sometimes she only made it ten minutes before the hole in her chest was too painful.

She was sick of this. Sick of living life this way. Maybe she did need a change. Not robotics, though. Never robotics. She'd never let the same thing that happened to Natsumi happen to her.

Who knew it was possible to love someone and hate them so much at the same time?

Today hurt more than usual, leaving the grave. She couldn't bear it. She was fed up this time, done with things, done with this god-awful life, ready for something else but not wanting anything else, not that she wanted what she had now. All she knew was that she could never do robotics.

A bunch of junked-up nerdy boys in neon with controllers making robots fight to the death, so rich people could watch and pretend the fun was in watching and not placing bets. A bunch of cover for a big celebrity drama, shining spotlights on everyone in the industry until the pressure made them do something stupid enough that rich people could have something to talk about. It wasn't the high-octane pursuit of action and celebrity lifestyle people thought, it was being a god-damn rat in a cage for the upper-upper class to watch, to condescend over.