There’s something worldly about her. She’s not elegant or dainty. She’s raw, unapologetic, a type of beauty only confidence can wear. Anywhere she goes, anyone she encounters, Hikari is a universal puzzle piece. She belongs wherever she sets foot.
Tonight, Hikari is unguarded, even in the dark. Her hair is straight, thin, a bit frizzy near the top of her head. She wears a nightgown that reaches just past her knees, little yellow flowers spread about the fabric. From afar, you could mistake it for a hospital gown. It sways around her legs as she roams the halls, looking into rooms, into people, exploring past curfew.
The windows welcome her in sequence. They do, as the night does, create those dreadful mirrors. Hikari doesn’t look long. She tucks her hair behind her ears, adjusts her glasses, fixes herself. She doesn’t gleam at the bandages on her arms or the scar on her neck. What the mirror dares to show of her illness, she claims power over.
She ignores it.
“Sam?” I should mention that I’m hiding behind a hall corner, suspiciously peeking out by a hair right now. I jump, turning around to find Eric right next to me with his hands on his hips. “What are you doing?”
Due to our criminal acts, Sony and C have been confined to their rooms, and though I wouldn’t mind joining them on a normal day, I’m currently suffering from my curiosity’s ceaseless desire to follow the sun that’s infested my home.
“Absolutely nothing.”
I try to smile, but Eric finds it off-putting.
“Go do absolutely nothing somewhere else.”
“Okay.”
I go back to following Hikari as inconspicuously as possible.
Also, I have a job to do.
Neo’s in surgery for his back. His parents wait in his room, where there will be no evidence of their son to rip apart. Tonight, his heart is mine to protect. It makes for hefty luggage when following a girl.
Hikari reaches the elevators a few minutes later, sketching on those papers she stole earlier. It’s a short hall, so I have to wait on the other side to avoid being found. Although when I peek, she’s already disappeared.
There’s only one place she could’ve gone from here, and my curiosity and I both know it.
The door to the roof creaks when I open it, the wind that goes feral at night flurrying into the stairwell. The only luminescence is that of sleepless city dwellers who keep the lights on and the dull stars sifting through clear skies.
That and the yellow with whom the night flirts. Only now, the yellow isn’t exploring the roof. It’s on the ledge, the silhouette of a girl standing against the moon.
My stomach drops. The box falls from my hands, announcing my presence far more abruptly than the door did.
“Oh,” Hikari says like I’m a pleasant surprise on an otherwise uneventful evening. “Hi, Sam.”
“What are you doing up there!?”
“It’s quite the view. I thought I’d see what it has to offer at night.”
“We have windows for that, you know!?”
“Don’t be silly. How can I befriend a breeze behind a window?”
“The breeze is going to push you over the edge, please. I–”
“Look at the stars, Sam.” Hikari upturns her chin to the sky, wonder aplenty in her eyes. As if the wind isn’t playing with the material of her nightgown and caressing her hair in a sweet, almost threatening way. “They’re so faint tonight.” A sigh works through her. “Don’t you wish you could brighten them?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Stars aren’t eternal. They should burn and shine with everything they have while they can,” she says. “Those five right there. You see them?” She leans back and points up at flickering specks of white against the black. “You can almost draw a five-point star between them.” Her head shakes like it’s a shame. “They’re edging to show their light. I can feel it.”
Hikari looks back at me again. When her body weight shifts back on her heels, I shiver. Every movement she makes is like a finger hooked on a grenade pin. My lungs cease when her hand so much as reaches for the pencil at her ear, and adds a detail to her drawing.
I realize then that she’s doing the same thing we were when watching smoke rise from cigarettes and foam bubble in beer bottles. Admiring a weapon.
Truth is, I’ve been thinking about her. What else would I think about? When I grabbed Neo’s box, and he lay drugged in his bed, I thought about how Hikari would give him something to smile about before the strenuous journey. While roaming, I thought of every word she said. I thought of her yellow, her voice so flirtatious and playful, her conspicuous bandages, and that scar. I wondered if she was sad about her parents and what she would do with her spoils. I wondered if she thought about me. Every time I pictured her and listened to her in my head, all I thought about was this urge I haven’t felt in years—this urge to want.
“Please,” I beg, and from the breath alone, Hikari finally notices my panic. “You’re scaring me. Can you please get down?”
Hikari’s glasses reflect me in a much kinder way than the night would. Her contagious smile curves to one side, and under different circumstances, it may have reached me.
“Since you said please,” she whispers, sitting on the ledge, shifting on her seat, and hopping back onto the safe side like you’d hop from a swing. “You followed me.”
“Yes, I’m sorry.”
“Why?” she asks. “I would’ve been disappointed if you didn’t.”
Flipping the pencil in her hand, Hikari eyes me up and down. I draw to her wrist, the white band around it, glossy and reflective with her bandages to match. One of them seems fresher than the other, specks soaked red at the seams.
“Why did you steal that sharpener and screwdriver?” I ask.
Hikari shrugs, circling me. “Why does anyone steal anything?”
“To sin?”
“To be human?” She smirks, reminding me that to her, I’m merely an instrument of amusement, a plaything, a puzzle she wants to solve because she doesn’t know how she fits with it quite yet. “Although you aren’t very good at being human, are you?”
“I feel like I’m supposed to be offended by that.”
“You probably aren’t very good at being offended either. You’re quite awkward.”
“I’m starting to think you’re quite mean.”
“Give me your story, Sam,” she demands. “Sate my quite mean curiosity, and maybe I’ll tell you why I stole what I stole.”
“Something tells me your curiosity is quite greedy.”
“Tell me about the Hit List,” she says, and her scent and voice surround me like a whirlwind, obscuring everything else until I’m sure I’d tell her anything she wanted to hear. “What’s it for, other than thievery? Who are you killing?”
“Time,” I say.
“Ooh,” she mocks. “Crafty enemy.”
“Disease.”
“Cruel enemy.”
“Death.”
I didn’t notice I was stepping backward till my heel knocks into Neo’s box, the cardboard and contents jostling like a sound of pain. I pick it back up, dusting it in apology.
“How do you kill Time, Disease, and Death?” Hikari asks.
“You steal what they stole.”
“Cigarettes and Beer?”
“Moments,” I correct. “Childhoods. Lives.”
Hikari stops her circling. She looks at me for a long while, that breeze that loves her so, filling the silence. I should tell her more. I should tell her of our great plans to escape this place, to go to the ends of the world and back. It’s C’s plan, Sony’s plan, Neo’s plan. It’s our plan to reach a place we don’t have to steal at all.
“You really think I’m mean?” Hikari asks after a while.
I shrug. “A little.”
“Mm.”
“Neo’s mean too.”
“Is he?”
“Constantly.” I hold his box closer to my chest. “But he needs me.”
Neo barely cleared the requirements for his surgery. His doctors wanted to operate for years. His spine is beginning to displace his organs, organs weak enough from malnutrition. They had no choice but to risk it. It’s scaring me more than I care to admit. That his heart, after tonight, may only be mine.
It helps to just focus on a mean girl and her pretty words.
“He’s well read,” she says, eyeing the titles of the scattered paperbacks in the box. “Hamlet, Lord of the Flies, Slaughterhouse-Five, Wuthering Heights.”
“Wuthering Heights is my favorite,” I say, inclined to impress her.
“You say I murdered you. Haunt me then,” she says, the way she introduced my name to the sky. A lyric. A line from a poem. Prose. It stills in me. Clears my vision, drops my jaw, till I pick it back up, swallowing down my wonder.
“A stupid wish,” I mumble.
“Is it?”
“The dead do not haunt, no matter how much you beg them to.”
“Sam?”
“Yes?”
“Why are you wandering the night with Neo’s books?”
“It’s complicated,” I say. “Neo never asks for anything. Salvaging his stories is the least I can do.” Hikari asks with her eyes that I say more. “His parents are here for his surgery. They don’t like his books. Or his stories,” I explain. “They love him, I think, but-”
“But sometimes parents love the idea of their child more than the person they are.”
A harsher edge of Hikari’s puzzle piece emerges. She stares at the books, her fingers toying with the nightgown, bunching the material near her thigh. “That kind of love is suffocating.” Like fingers closing around a wrist.
“Why are you wandering the night on ledges,” Hikari. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall?”
“Of course, I am,” she says. “But fear is just a large shadow with a little spine.”
My fear snarls at that. It resents her, tugs me further by the rope, possessive, but I pay it no mind. Her gravity is stronger.
“You’re a writer,” I breathe like I’ve found another treasure of the world.
“More of a reader,” she says. “Hamlet was my worst influence.”
“Does reading make you happy?” I ask. I want to know all things that bring her joy.
“Reading makes me feel,” she says.
Feel.
Emotions and I don’t have the best relationship. It’s a distant, bitter affair—a divorce. Emotions are disgusted by me. They’re a gust of wind on the other side of that ledge, and even if they toy with my hair or stroke my skin, I ignore them. Emotions are with the ghosts I buried, husks of what they were, hollow hauntings. But who knows? Maybe Shakespeare can dig them up.
“I haven’t read Hamlet yet,” I say, peering at the cover.
Hikari looks at me like she has a devious idea, and you already know I’m done in by it.
—
We read on the rooftop for an hour. At first, in the white noise. In the breeze, an intruding, whorish bastard who can never stop copping a feel. I ask if we can go inside and read in the warmth. It’s a lie. Hikari keeps the roof plenty warm. I just want to get away from the wind. I’m jealous of how free it is to touch her.
Hikari agrees, and we settle in the crook of a hall I know where very few pass. It used to be an extension of the cardiology department, but now it’s more of a dead-end spot where doctors come to take a phone call or have mid-shift breakdowns. Either way, I like it. There’s no wind. It’s a place where hearts were once healed.
Hikari and I sit against the wall. I’m the one who holds the book. She’s the one who assigns theatrics. She claims certain characters, gives me the role of others, and we read aloud. It’s less passive than I’m used to, with lots of existing involved, but I like it. I like hearing her voice travel, the dramatic pauses, and the dedication she takes to her audience of one.
Sometimes, she scoots closer to me. A funny feeling tingles in my chest when she does. I think she likes hearing my voice too but in a different way. She likes the stuttering when I peek at her, the nervous swallows, the guttural clearings. She likes my reaction, not to Hamlet, but to her.
She keeps enough distance. We share it. We play with it like an extra pair of hands.
Hours pass. Hours I don’t notice. We aren’t around windows anymore. It may as well be morning. Hikari’s patience thins with daybreak. As we reach certain scenes, ones she says are pinnacle, she becomes less an actor and more a stage director.
“Sam, you’re doing it all wrong.” Hikari slaps her hands on her hips. “Stand up.”
“I am standing.”
“That’s not standing, that’s hunching.”
I look down at myself, puzzled.
“Hunching?”
“Hunching. Do you even have arms?”
“My arms are right here.” I extend them from my body as far as they’ll go, the book still propped open at the heels of my hands.
“Those aren’t arms,” Hikari says. “They’re appendages at best.”
“You’re starting to hurt my feelings.”
“Sam, come here.”
“What about Hamlet?”
“I’m Hamlet.” Yes, she did claim the character. However, those words don’t fit right in her mouth. “What?” Hikari catches my distaste, the way my nose crinkles. “Am I a poor actress?”
“No. You just have nothing in common with Hamlet.”
“Because I’m not bitter?”
“Because he’s not a sun.”
Hamlet is earthly.
“You think I’m a sun?” Hikari asks, head tilted.
“You’re bright,” I say. I put my hand out, fingers apart, mimicking a reach. Hamlet rests at my side in the other. “I feel like if we touch, I’ll burn away like paper.” The picture of her sifts over the hills of my knuckles. She stands there, listening. The kind of listening you can tell only belongs to me.
I retreat, catching myself. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Hikari’s shoulders bounce once. Her amusement pinches her lips, half pursed, half curved. “You actually remind me of a moon.”
“A moon?”
“Yes. Gray, subtle, only brave in the night. Maybe those were our past lives.”
Maybe they were our first.
Hikari raises her hand. Her palm faces me like the pretense to a wave. She takes a step, our distance squirming. Alarm flinches through me, translated into a violent step back. Hikari halts at the little noise my body makes—the shuffle of my clothes, the screech of the floor beneath my shoe. Like I’m prey and her hand is an open maw. Her eyes travel from the trembles to my face.
“I won’t burn you. I promise,” she whispers, but it doesn’t matter.
I can’t touch her. Touching her would mean admitting that she’s more than a ghost of my imagination. It would be admitting she was real.
“It’s alright,” she says.
Coaxing the hesitance away, I raise my hand the way she did. I let it draw parallel, a sliver of space between our palms.
“Good,” Hikari says, the word just barely skidding past her teeth. “Now, pretend I’m your mirror.”
Her fingers trail left, palm following. I do the same, right, following her. Then, she moves the opposite way, so I do too. She draws up. She draws down. She makes patterns in the air. I do the same as if strings tie us together.
“Are you teasing me?” I ask.
“I’m teaching you.”
“How to be human?”
“You’re so caught up in trying not to exist, Sam,” she whispers. “If you’d only let yourself go, you’d see how easy it is. Haven’t you ever dreamed of dancing?”
“I don’t dream.”
“Never?”
“Not anymore.”
“Why?” she asks, and I can’t help but indulge the tragedy in her voice.
“It’s not a part of me.”
“Who stole it?” I almost want to smile at the way her wit survives even the sad moments. “There must be something you want.”
“I want answers,” I say.
“Answers?”
“Reasons.”
“I thought reasons didn’t exist.”
“I wish one did.”
“And what one reason do you wish for?”
Our words fold over each other, dance together as our hands mimic them, act them out, that comfortable, ruinous distance the only thing keeping her mine, ghostly, unreal. But her questions, her voice, her scent, they feel so palpable I want to bottle them.
“I want to know why people die,” I say, but asking why people die is the same as asking the dead to haunt. There’s no one there to answer you. I shake my head. “I know it’s stupid–”
“How long do you have?” Hikari asks, sullen.
“What?”
“Are you dying?”
I scoff. “We’re all dying.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“No matter how you see it, everyone you know is eventually going to die.”
“Is that why?”
“Why what?”
“Why you’re so afraid to be close to someone?”
Neo’s box of books has eyes. It looks back and forth between us like it’s waiting for a victor.
In Hikari, it sees dreams by the plenty. It sees them flooding behind her eyes, heavy on her body. She wears her dreams in yellow, in flowers on her nightgown, and in her trusting nature. She is a feeler. She’s married to feelings. It’s addicting to witness. Whatever she feels next, I know I’ll see it written on her, hanging on her mannerisms.
That’s what he used to do. He used to carry himself without shields. He used to tell the world, even without speaking, everything he ever wanted with a look on his face.
I don’t remember his face. I barely remember him. There are only slivers left, escaped details from the coffin frames. I choose to not remember, just like I choose not to wonder too much or feel or dream.
“Sam.” Hikari doesn’t realize that my name from her lips is a power. Little shadowed and large spined. So for all I say of needing to walk away, you know I won’t.
“Yes?”
“We’re going to meet here every night.”
I blink. “Huh?”
“Since we’re all inevitably doomed to die, I will be Hamlet, and you will be Yorick, and this shall be our grave.” She looks around at the empty hall like a house yet to be a home and smirks back at me with ambition in the curve. “I’m not sure what you are. All I know is you’re a beautiful set of bones and some curiosity tied together by gray, and I want to bring you to life. I think that would make me happy.” The more my jaw loosens on its hinges, the more everything in me relaxes in awe of her.
“I want to see you,” she whispers. Hikari slips a piece of paper no larger than the size of my palm from a fold in the bandage of her elbow. She smooths down the crease at the center and hands me a drawing of a figure holding a box of books with stars circling them like dancers.
“You think I’m beautiful?” I breathe.
“All readers are,” Hikari says. “Goodnight, stranger.”
And when I look back up, she’s gone.
