FLCL Fan Fiction ❯ N.O Return Address ❯ tres ( Chapter 3 )

I'd forgotten that Suzume had a car, but it's red and it's old and junky and I didn't really think it would carry all four of us back to their house.

 

Chisune had gone home soon after Raharu vanished, claiming a broken curfew and an already suspicious father. Mika had called her place but gotten only Suzume - and, it had turned out, Reiko.

 

“Get in!” the three of them chime at once, and who am I to refuse?

 

Reiko has obviously called shotgun which delegates Mika and I to the back. She worms in behind her sister and Reiko helps me into the other back seat before climbing in herself. She almost hits my head on the doorframe and I contemplate murder. Mika lets me lie down across the back but puts my feet at her end.

 

“So what the fuck is going on?” Suzume demands, loud and abrasive against the quiet night.

 

“Don't you have any consideration? He's got a damn alien chasing him down and bashing his head in!” Mika looks at me with eyes that are sorry and skeptical and sexy. I want to look back at her with a face full of everything will be all right but my expression is stuck in permanent pain and what-the-hell. She turns back to the front seat. “And don't you even think about turning on the radio!”

 

“You can't tell me what to do!”

 

“I can so, bitch, he's bleeding from the head!”

 

“Not on my carseat!”

 

“This car's a piece of shit!”

 

But Reiko's ears had perked almost as soon as Mika had spoken. “Alien?” she repeats slowly, and an exchanged glance between me and Mika means we have made a mistake.

 

“Some chick calling herself an alien, anyway. Personally, my money's on a complete mental case.” Mika makes a face as if finally losing an internal struggle and wraps her expensive-looking blue jacket around the wounds that have reopened on my head. She cringes a little when she reaches my forehead and oh god oh god that lump must be there again and there is no way that is attractive. “She hit Taro with a guitar earlier, Cheeze says, and was about to do it again when we saved his ass.” But the next look she gives me is tell me everything later. I nod my head against her jacket and am relieved to feel only about ninety-five percent as much pain as before.

 

By now we're out of the field and back on the main road, driving away from the school in a direction I never go but which is obviously the way to their house. I can almost see objects passing by in silhouette out the window behind Mika's head. Suzume in the driver's seat is forcibly silent and I know Reiko is lost in quiet contemplation. She doesn't have her purse, I realize, or that book'd be out. Better than some kind of radar, I guess.

 

“What'd she look like?” Suzume asks finally, clearly fed up with the silence.

 

“Tall,” I manage, “bleach-pink hair, eyes were this funny gold color…Tall more than anything though, she had to bend to meet my eye level.”

 

“Damn,” Reiko mutters, but anything else she's going to say is cut off as Suzume makes a sharp right into what must be their driveway and we all shift awkwardly from the centrifugal force. It sends my head into this place where it's reeling and pounding at once and yet again I almost cry out in pain. But that would be such a pussy thing to do.

 

We pull up and the car stops and Suzume and Reiko get out. With the three of them tugging and shoving I emerge from the rear seat, dizzy and heavy and barely alive but alive nonetheless. Mika follows me out and insists on helping me inside, but Suzume does it anyway because Mika really is too small to support me. That close to Suzume I notice that they don't even smell the same.

 

We're through the front door and I'm really expecting to be unceremoniously deposited onto a futon or something but Mika manages to spur her sister onward until I make it up the stairs and to the guestroom. And past the guestroom. And onto Mika's bed.

 

I am blissfully confused until she rudely reminds Suzume that their uncle is coming to visit tomorrow. Reiko and Suzume retreat into their room and leave me and Mika alone.

 

I am almost glad to have bled so much from the head because I now have less blood that runs elsewhere unwonted. I'm staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars puttied up on Mika's ceiling and trying to purge my mind of impure thoughts as she drags a bedcot out of her humongous closet. Then, of course, I'm staring sideways into her closet and trying to find the green shirt with the cherries on it because I can't remember the last time she wore it and I fucking love that shirt. I get all of three seconds' search time before the door clicks closed a little too hard and she plops the cot onto a floor so clean that she didn't have to clear a space.

 

I'm so incognizant. “You never wear the cherry shirt.”

 

“It got too small, I'm…older, now.” She says it without even pausing to process my totally random statement. Why is this girl perfect.

 

“You mean too small in the chest, then,” I reply, so casual, so unaware of the words that are actually leaving my mouth. “It's okay, it looks really good like that.”

 

`You've developed this terrible habit,” she informs me, “of staring at my boobs.”

 

And of course I have, because she's always right because she's Mika, and so I slowly draw my gaze away from where her arms are folded across her chest to her face, staring down at me from where she's standing over me and making me feel even more nonexistent, even less coherent.

 

“I'm giving you the bed, to prevent damage to your head, and taking this shitty cot myself.”

 

This instantly flips my chivalry switch. “I can't let you do that. You'll be miserable.”

 

“I can't let you die on my watch.” A pause. “Or in my bed. That would look bad.”

 

I manage a half-assed smile. “I'd die happy.”

 

“My dyke sister has guy pajamas if you want them.”

 

“Or we could share the bed.”

 

“Prop yourself up so the fluid doesn't collect in your skull or something.”

 

“Your bed smells so nice.”

 

“You've evidently been addled in the brain. Stop speaking.”

 

And I follow every last one of her orders, because I can't refuse because she's Mika.

 

~-~-~-~

 

In my dreams I am six feet tall.

 

This is the first thing I notice. I know I am six feet tall in my dream - in real life I just look it, I am five-eleven and constantly being ragged on for being taller than all my friends but I still know that I'm not six feet tall. Except in my dream I know that I am.

 

The next thing I notice is that I'm standing on the top beams of a suspension bridge. I lurch as my fear of heights kicks in but then I realize I don't have a fear of heights. So I look down, expecting to see something even more surreal and getting a pretty big surprise when everything seems completely normal.

 

Below, by the bridge, sits a girl almost my age and a boy a good bit younger. She looks like what Reiko would be if she weren't a ganguro - still the same big lips, school skirt too short and rounder, softer in a way that doesn't make her fat, just curvy. The boy looks exactly like Chisune did the day before I broke his tooth.

 

And then it hits me - despite all logic and the fact that I shouldn't, I know who these kids are.

 

Samejima Mamimi holds a cigarette between her lips, not unlike Reiko's recurring lollipop from a few months back before she discovered bubble gum. She blows smoke in Takkun-Naota-Atomsk's face and he coughs way too much for someone who spends time around a smoker a lot. She giggles. He scowls. The wind blows and I'd laugh at the way he struggles to keep his hat on but the bridge is swaying and I just know I'm going to fall off.

 

Except I don't.

 

I hear them as well as I see them, and that hits me as way too well considering I'm stories above their heads.

 

“Didja hear?”

 

“About the baseball game? Yeah, we lost by a lot. I don't get why you keep going to those things, Haruko always beats us.”

 

“Canti's going to beat her one of these days. He's a god, he's just letting her win until he gets sick of playing fair.” She inhales with a drag that should leave any normal human coughing like the dying. “But not that. She didn't tell you?”

 

“Tell me what?”

 

“Some boy broke Haru-san's brain.”

 

“It sure as hell wasn't me.”

 

“No,” she says, “I think it was him.”

 

She turns skyward and jabs her index finger at the boy she shouldn't be able to see that is me. Looking down at her, down her finger, I almost feel like laughing. Who the hell is this girl?

 

Then I burst into flame.

 

I want to escape it, to fucking run from it because running is what I do, but I'm on top of this bridge and I can't.