Wha—Kaho-chan, was that you?
“You are,” my sister continued, “literally the only person in the entire world who thinks that.”
“No, I swear, there are lots of other people just like me! Online, that is!”
That’s why I just had Kaho-chan refer me to a store and then picked my shoes out on my own. I wasn’t about to let anyone watch me.
But that wasn’t all.
“And what if my friends ask me my opinions on their clothes?” I asked. “I don’t even know what I think about my clothes, so how the heck could I judge other people’s? Sure, all my friends are nice folks. But I keep thinking they’ll look at me and go, ‘She’s no fashion disaster. She’s a fashion apocalypse LMAOOO!’ And I would rather die than let that happen!”
“Do you enjoy living like this, or what?” my sister asked.
And she really meant it too.
Honestly? I didn’t know. There were a lot of sucky bits. Maybe more than the good bits. But…
“I guess so,” I said. “Things’ve been…really nice lately.”
“Really? Well, good for you.” My sister patted my shoulder.
“So before they find out that I have no fashion sense whatsoever, I need you to bequeath your sense of style to me,” I said.
“The nerve.” She laughed at me. “Don’t you already look over my fashion magazines?”
“Kinda…”
“How do you ‘kinda’ look over a magazine?”
“I read them,” I clarified, “but it’s not like any of it sinks in. The models are all pretty people, you know? Anything looks good on you when you’re pretty enough.”
“Okay, edgelord. Put the cynicism away.”
“Ugggh.”
“First, you need to decide what kind of clothes you’re into,” Haruna explained. “Like do you go for cute things? More casual looks? High fashion? And then, once you figure out what style to follow, you go learn about what’s in vogue for that look. Once you’ve got that down, you can focus on accessorizing, swapping colors, playing with fit… This is all going in one ear and out the other, isn’t it?”
I shriveled into a desiccated corpse by way of response. My sister smirked.
“Here, the next time I’m free, I’ll teach you how to really read those magazines,” she said. “And we can do a face match.”
“A what now?”
“It’s an app. It finds a celebrity who looks just like you. It’s not super accurate since it doesn’t take physique or bone structure into account, but it does let you get a pretty good idea about what stuff would look good on you.”
“Wow, I didn’t know they had things like that,” I said. “Wait, am I literally the last person on Earth to find out?”
“Dunno, don’t care.” My sister sighed and shrugged. “Y’know, it’s not the worst thing in the world to be ignorant. So long as you’re willing to learn, there’s no harm in tackling one thing at a time. That’s how you handled your glow-up. You put in enough effort, and now look at you. You finally have friends.”
“Okay, fine…I’ll put in Effort. If I must.”
“Good. Thank you for cooperating.”
That’s supposed to be my line, I huffed to myself. Whenever my sister cooperated, she would actually lay stuff out for me. Like, in a straightforward way. That was why I could never afford to lose her.
“It’s the classic carrot and stick technique,” I muttered to myself. “That’s how they getcha.”
My sister beamed at me, oh-so innocently. “What if we skipped the carrot?”
“What if we skipped the stick?”
“Sure. Only for the low, low price of 2,000 yen an hour.”
“Hello?!”
“If I give you an inch, Oneechan, you’ll take a mile.”
The Satsuki-san in my head nodded and said, “I wholeheartedly agree.” I could never let the two of them meet. They would be a pairing from hell.
“Oh yeah? You think you’re so hot?” I spat back in frustration. “Well, you—you—you know nothing about me! So there!”
My sister ignored me and walked right on into the clothes store. Great, now I looked like a weirdo on the streets yelling at air. Way to pull the rug out from under me, Sis.
Before we headed home, I bought my sister a couple slices of cake as thanks for taking me shopping. She looked happy, with that lighthearted grin on her face, as we walked along in the late afternoon light.
“I never knew you were a comedian,” she teased. “You had me in stitches back there.”
“For the tenth time,” I said, “I’m still nowhere ready to ask retail workers for help.”
Both of my hands were full of shopping bags. For some mysterious reason, some of them were my sister’s. A mystery, indeed. Maybe because I was the eldest—or, well, eldest in name only…
“I keep telling you, your social anxiety’s ruining your life,” my sister said. “You don’t even need to read fashion mags. Just go into a shop, find one of the people who works there, and ask ’em what’s hip. Store clerks know everything about fashion. Be casual about it. Just, like, say, ‘Which of these two would look better on me?’”
“But what if they lie to me just to offload some of their old stock?”
“Why do you always assume the worst of people?”
Again, an honest question.
You know what’s weird? My people person little sister believed that everyone had good intentions while I, the shy recluse, had the worldly experience to think the worst of people. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?
My sister sighed. “Whatever. You’re a mess. You spent a whole day shopping, but you still have a long way to go before you’re ready to graduate from People School 101.”
“Sorry for being a D student…”
“You’re just too darn shy. That’s your only issue.”
I couldn’t even “eep” at that. There was no point in trying to hide around my sister. She knew me inside and out. No matter how many friends—or girlfriends—I got, there was only one person in my whole family—hell, the whole world—that I could be totally, a hundred percent honest with. My sister.
The interclass athletics competition taught me that, sometimes, you needed to be brave enough to let other people think bad things about you. Even so, that didn’t mean I was comfortable with the idea. I didn’t want other people to see me the way I was deep down: a cynical, doom-and-gloom misanthrope. I think that was why I needed my sister. Well. Maybe I needed her.
Just then, my sister stopped a few paces ahead of me and turned around. “Huh?” she said. “Oneechan, why are you walking funny?”
“Huh?” My heart rose in my throat. “I’m not walking funny.”
She ignored me and circled around behind me. “Are your shoes too loose? When did that start?”
“Uh…”
I looked away in an attempt to dodge the question, but that trick didn’t work on my sister.
“When?” she demanded.
“…When we left the café.”
Truth was, those new shoes hurt like heck. For a while, I managed to act like everything was all hunky-dory, but in the end, I still got found out.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Haruna said. She put her hands on her hips and gave me a look that radiated disappointment.
“I’d really rather not say…”
“Why?”
“Because you know. These were the first shoes I ever bought on my own…”
My sister looked at me in confusion for a few seconds before she finally put two and two together. “Ahh. What, you think I’m going to make fun of you? Just because you messed up on your first attempt to buy yourself shoes? Do you think I’m gonna be like, ‘You really can’t do anything on your own, huh?’”
I groaned and hung my head in shame. My hands balled into fists. And the fact that my feet hurt like hell was the garbage icing on top of this crap cake. This was the exact reason I didn’t want her to find out!
“You’re so stupid,” Haruna said.
“Hey!” I snapped, but when I lifted my head to yell at her, I saw her crouched down in front of me with her back turned toward me.
“Get on,” she said.
“What?”
“We’re almost home, so I’ll carry you the rest of the way.”
“Wha…” I blinked a couple times. “Wait, what? I’m the older one!”
“Yeah, and I’m buffer. Got ’em.”
“What does that have to do with anything?!”
“Oh, shut up,” said my sister. “Your feet hurt, don’t they? So get on. It’s not like anyone’s watching. Hurry up, I don’t have all day.”
“You’re just going to try and get free ice cream out of me later,” I protested.
“No, I won’t!”
“You promise? Cross your heart and hope to die?”
“Yes! God, you’re so stubborn.”
She glared at me to shut me up, so I finally gave in and climbed onto her back.
“Oh, goddamn it…” I muttered to myself, now resigned to my fate. I hooked the shopping bags through the crook of my arms.
My sister’s head swiveled around. “You mean, thank you?”
“Thank you…”
“That was the least thankful thank you I’ve ever heard,” she mumbled under her breath.
Then she started for home with me on her back. Her pace was steady, unlike my roiling emotions. She acted like it was nothing to be the only thing holding up the full weight of a whole other person.
“Aren’t I heavy?” I asked.
“Nah. Besides, I’ve carried classmates to the nurse’s office when they’ve twisted their ankles and stuff.”
“Are you sure? Like, really, really sure? Because I’ve gained some weight again recently.”
“Yeah, I can tell. You know what? You’re really heavy. Uggh, so heavy. Pushing two hundred kilos heavy.”
“You little brat!”
I wanted to whack her on the back of the head, see how she liked it! But that was beyond rude when she was she being my ride, so I let my anger fester inside of me instead. I tried pinching my upper arm to vent the emotions, but that didn’t help. All it did was make me feel even worse.