It started the year after her mother died. She didn’t want to be the sad girl with the dead mum. She wanted to be wanted.
Haruka had survived a year of birthdays and summer festivals, she had endured New Year’s Eve and Girl’s Day, and had come out the other side, defective but still alive. She had survived a year of Jiji’s anger and Baba’s cloying loss. She had survived an entire year without her Mama.
She was fourteen: her legs had grown, her face had lost some of its softness and she had discovered makeup. Matsumoto Kiyoshi drugstore makeup the colour of candy. Cherry reds and aquamarine blues. She discovered how the lick of a mascara, the dab of a blusher, blurred out the drab and coloured in an edible girl that smelt sickly sweet. People started taking notice. Her beauty masked her death smell. Men on the street, boys in the classrooms, jealous girls in after-school bathrooms. The smiles from the girls were both an invitation and a threat.
You can be one of us.
Just don’t be better than us.
She started hanging out in a group. They weren’t the sporty, cool girls with the medals and the matching rucksacks. They were middling—a combination of promising beauties and class jokers. There was Kaori, the funny one, with thick black bangs and braces. Saori, the stick-insect-thin flutist who was mostly defined by her father’s tenuous links to the Yakuza. Natsuki, the rule-abiding head of the debate team and organiser of controlled fun. And Haruka. The makeup-wearing, leggy girl with the dead mum and absent father. The darkling. The pusher. The wicked one. The growing favourite as the leader of the pack. The one who never turned down a dare. The one who talked back to the teachers. The one who put you in a headlock between classes. The one who every girl spoke about to their mothers when they got home from school, their tone dripping with superiority as if to say,
What a lost cause. At least I’m not like that. You should be grateful, Mama. I’m a good girl. I’m not broken, like her.
Sometimes, the group of girls would venture out into the parks on weekends to hang out with the boys, giggling behind cupped hands, fiddling with freshly cut fringes, sticky with lip gloss. But most of the time Haruka’s friends were bare-faced and boring, hurrying back home to do homework or to the extra-curricular clubs and cram schools. The wildest thing they ever did was a Ouija board in the upstairs room at Saori’s house. The other girls wanted to communicate with the dead, but Haruka knew the dead didn’t talk back. Maybe the butterfly tapping against the glass, or the sudden shift in breeze was a mother’s way of checking in from beyond the grave. But otherwise, there was silence. Cruel, empty silence and little girls screaming at nothing.
Haruka’s first sexual experience was with a boy in junior high. It was unremarkable. There was lots of teeth banging and apologising on his part. Haruka had cornered him, a brutish boy called Daisuke, in the year above. They both took English conversation club after school, though without much enthusiasm. Daisuke had to drop out of baseball club after tearing a ligament and spent most of his time in English spread-legged, pitching phantom balls at people’s heads. She made a play for him on the way home, late in the evening. Haruka suggested they go into a temple. He said yes . Haruka knew his heart rate had picked up, his blood pumping around his body, preparing him for what was to come. He had acne: red, deep pits that were compelling—gross and strangely sexy. Haruka led him to a shadowy, wet corner of the temple garden where a tree grew and the ground was slippery. They kissed. He was inexperienced. Haruka liked how he flinched when she stuck her tongue into his mouth. He tasted like metal. Somehow his hand found her underwear and he coaxed her against the maple tree with a come-hither motion. Haruka rubbed her hand against his erect penis but she was afraid to get it out. The needy, expectant, engorged hunk of muscle. She bit his lip and it bled and she smiled and said,
See you tomorrow.
She left him there, under the tree. Hard and confused.
After Daisuke there were more boys like him. They had smelled her like she was a carcass and came looking for a meal. Hungry boys, curious boys, boys who didn’t even want her but felt they ought to. She had started dating some of them at an arm’s length, but as soon as she felt a scrap of emotion she would drop them, making a game out of it with the insatiable ones; the ones who pushed it, who weren’t afraid to go all the way, the ones who hadn’t lost their confidence to porn or rejection.
Haruka enjoyed making them fight for her virginity. Eventually she decided on a funny, harmless boy whose skin tasted salty. They were both disappointed, but as with all things when you’re young, they told themselves it would get better. Haruka didn’t orgasm, not even close, even though she had been doing so for years all on her own. She couldn’t remember the first time it happened: she must have been a kid when she pressed herself against a rocking horse or a car seat. She only remembers the embarrassment of others walking in on her as a girl. If only they had sat her down and told her there was nothing wrong with what she was doing. But instead, they tutted, told her to stop, grimaced and laughed. If only they’d told her to treasure the things in this world that bring you easy pleasure. Maybe then she wouldn’t have gone seeking the ‘right’ kind of orgasm. Those mythical, mighty ones found at the end of a penis.
After the salty boy there were more. Experiments in pleasure. She would sleep with them but her heart was entirely untouchable, fenced off by a learnt coldness. She would give them what they wanted once, then never again.
Her group of friends began to distance themselves from her. The other girls at school called her a slut, a whore. The boys called her easy. She was anything but. Haruka wasn’t easy. She was a shortcut that led to a dead end. She was their ending. All the boys fell in love with her. The ones that called her names and the ones that didn’t. They came crawling on their hands and knees, begging for more. Buying her hopeless gifts, pocket mirrors and hand towels, then raging when she said no, as if what lay between her legs was a promissory note. Haruka turned their desires inside out so that all of them were at her disposal. She found her super-strength. A herculean calling.
It wasn’t until she met Kai that she fell. They met over Instagram. He slid into her DMs. He didn’t mention she was cute, he didn’t even say hello. He simply wrote,
How old are you?
Sixteen, she replied.
It was an exaggerated love born out of desperation. He was in Tokyo. She was in hell. He asked for photos. She sent them willingly. They were creative. Not your average tit pic.
Curated, partially naked photos of teenage girls are the love letters of today, Haruka told herself, as she twisted her body into frame in the school toilet cubicle. In years to come, the average student will not be studying Basho’s haikus, but Haruka’s hand placement and side boob.
Kai. When Haruka is older and wiser and boring, she will realise that this kind of love is a fattening up of the hollowed bits. That this love, if you can call it that with someone you have never met, is a misshapen puzzle piece to her missing parts. She will learn that she was never deficient. Only underfed. Starved by the lies and false learning.
He was older, of course. Eighteen and so, so pretty. He had dark eyes and beautiful hair and the bone structure of a fairy. When he told her she could be a model, her throat burst open. She double-tapped the message, milking the heart out of it. It was the kindest thing anyone had ever said to her. Night after night they sent photos, emojis, GIFs. The words started off direct, lacking in any punctuation or romance. Then they turned thoughtful, long, painstakingly considered. In between the snapshots of raspberry nipples, beneath cheap chiffon bralettes, was the romance of the Roppongi Hill nightscapes, sunsets and stray cats. They opened up to each other in a way that is easy to do when no eye contact is required. He wrote to her about his parents’ disappointment, his depression when he didn’t get into his university of choice. Haruka replied,
At least you have parents.
The sympathy came, but not like the cloying, empty words of others. Kai’s words were invitations. Question marks that hooked her close.
What was your mother like?
How are you feeling today?
What can I do to make the hurt go away?
He told her about his job working at a club where ugly women spend millions of yen just to sit and hang and drink with him for the night. He told her how he wished he could just spend his nights with her. He told her about his favourite reality TV show and how the smell of chlorine made him nervous. She told him about her dislike of tiny dogs, the way women carry them around in buggies. She told him she never, ever wanted to end up like that, and if she ever did, to shoot her and the dog in the fucking face. Together they wove a future made up of when and soon and one day. Haruka told him about the grief and the loneliness. She told him things she had never told anyone in her life. The sad, funny, slow truth of it all. Kai learnt about the red-faced shouting matches with Jiji. How Haruka hadn’t spoken to her grandfather in weeks, even though Baba was thinner and greyer because of it.
She sent him photos of his name written in the snow,
海
Falling snow, full of remembrance.
She waited for him to say the three words first. Then she would make her escape. She would follow him to Tokyo. Work in a bar where men paid good money to drink with her. She knew what they wanted, how to save the corners of herself from contamination.
Kai said it with a GIF. A bear hugging a beating heart.
Annata suki desu.
Because the word love is too much.