The morning came in gray, and Juna walked to class the way she walked everywhere now, limply, carefully, like her body was something borrowed that she was afraid of returning damaged.
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But today there was something else underneath the fear. Something warmer, and worse.
She had decided, in the smallest hours of the night, that today was the day.
She thought about the water bottle incident sometimes, when she let herself think about you at all. Not the pain of it. She had trained herself not to keep that part. What she kept, instead, was the fact that you had been the one to notice her. Really notice her. Not look through her the way Yukie did, not use her as scenery the way the rest of the school did. you saw her. you always saw her.
She told herself that seeing was a kind of love, because she had never been given a better definition to compare it to.
She remembered the shove into the lockers last spring, you's hand flat against her sternum, your face close enough that she could count your eyelashes before the pain arrived.
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She remembered thinking, in the white second before impact, that you were so close to her. Nobody got this close to her.
She remembered the slurs, Dosei, Yakkai-mono, the ugly, familiar shapes of them in your mouth, and how, afterward, alone in her room, she would say them to herself in a softer voice, the way a person repeats a name they've been given by someone they love, turning it over, trying to find the tenderness that must be hiding somewhere inside it. There had to be tenderness in it. you wouldn't spend so much time on her otherwise. Nobody else did.
This was the logic she had built her heart around, brick by brick, over years of having nothing else to build it with: attention, even cruel attention, was proof she existed.
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And if it was proof she existed, then surely, surely, it meant something. Surely it was the only love that had ever bothered to find her.
She had written the letter without anyone forcing her this time.
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That was the part that made her chest hurt worst of all, lying awake with it clutched to her sternum. Nobody had held her down for this one. She had wanted to.
The letter had taken her three nights.
I know you don't see me the way I see you. I know the only time you look at me is to hurt me. But I've thought about it a lot, and I think, I think that's still more than anyone else has ever given me. I don't need you to be gentle. I just need it to be real.
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And it always feels real, when it's you.
She had read that paragraph back more times than she could count, crying without quite noticing she was crying, the way she did most things now, quietly, as a background process to whatever else her body was occupied with.
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She did not scratch this one out. She meant every word of it, and that was exactly the tragedy the words could not see about themselves.
She folded the letter carefully, the way a person folds something sacred, and she did not crumple it in her fist through the night the way she had the last time. She held it flat between her palms instead, protective, careful, the way you would hold something you were afraid might be your only chance.
She sat through her classes that day not shaking from fear this time, but from something that felt dangerously close to hope, which frightened her more than fear ever had, because hope was a thing that could be taken away, and fear was just a thing that could be survived.
When the last bell rang, nobody dragged her out of her seat. Nobody needed to.
She stood on her own, letter pressed flat against her chest, and walked out into the low gold light of the afternoon, and there, a few meters off, unbothered, unaware that she was even approaching, was you.
She thought, walking toward the person who had left more marks on her body than anyone else alive: this is the closest thing I have ever had to being wanted.
She stopped a few steps away. Her hands were steady, for once, steadier than they had been in the hallway last spring, steadier than they had been under any of the slaps or the shoves or the words that were supposed to have taught her, by now, to run in the opposite direction.
"...you," she said, and her voice, for once, did not shake first before it broke. It simply broke, softly, from the very first word. "I know you don't, I know this isn't the kind of thing you'd want. But I wanted to give you this anyway."
She held the letter out with both hands, unbent, uncrumpled, the one thing she had managed to keep whole.
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"You're the only person who's ever really looked at me," she said, and there was no self-pity in it, only a terrible, quiet certainty, the belief of someone who has never once been shown the difference. "Even if it hurts. Even if you don't mean it kindly. I don't think anyone else ever will. So, so this is yours. I wrote it because it's true. I'm not asking you to be nice to me. I never expected that. I just wanted you to know."
She lowered her head the way she always did, bracing, out of habit, for whatever you would choose to do with the one whole thing she had ever handed anyone, and somewhere underneath the bracing, in the last unbruised corner of her, she was still hoping, impossibly, that this time, being seen might finally feel like being loved.
