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Somebody up there must have liked Ibuki, or at least liked to make things interesting for her, because somebody had to have intervened to make sure that when she found herself in a predicament it was Byakuya-chan who answered her wails for “Haaaaalp!!! Ambulance! Fire!! Search and rescue!” The Byakuya-chan on whom she had nursed a crush for weeks, that Byakuya-chan had been summoned to Ibuki’s cabin! These things didn’t happen outside of otome games. But here he was, large as life, frowning up at her. Usually that would be down at her, but Ibuki’s predicament, that which had necessitated her hollering, had flipped things. She had woken up that morning to find herself hanging upside-down from the ceiling. The laws of gravity, it seemed, had ceased to apply to her.
“Personal polarity reversal,” Ibuki panted, catching her breath from the screaming. Togami stood in the doorway, polishing his glasses on his shirtfront before replacing them on his nose and staring again at her in disbelief. “These things happen to Ibuki,” she explained.
“This defies all logic. A shared hallucination. Folie a deux,” Togami said. “Or at least that’s what Sonia would call it, I’m sure, if she was here.”
“What would Byakuya-chan call it, if he was—ohmigod, he’s here, he’s right here! What would he say?”
“He would wonder if superglue was involved,” Togami said drily. “He’s a skeptic that way.”
Ibuki lifted first her left and then her right foot to demonstrate that superglue was not involved. “Ibuki thinks this must be a glitch. Man, the programmers sure have digi-egg on their faces.”
Togami looked vaguely disturbed, as he circled below her to investigate. “What programmers? Don’t talk nonsense. Now, should I alert the others?”
Ibuki considered this. “No-ooo. Sometimes Ibuki likes stares, but...everybody crowding in here to get a look...she doesn’t want to feel like a circus freak. Let’s keep the folie between us deux, non?”
Togami nodded. “If that’s what you want, Mioda.” She learned that he had a Usami-mandated shift of island clean-up duty that day, so he had to leave her alone. “Stay inside,” he instructed. “I suspect you would float away if you went out.”
“This was Ibuki’s off day,” she sulked. “Ibuki was going to go to the beach and then have a bath. Ibuki used her allowance on lavender-smelling bath salt from the Rocketpunch Mart!”
“It’ll keep,” Togami said. “And the ocean will be there.” This was some comfort to Ibuki: Byakuya-chan always did know exactly what to say.
There was nothing, absolutely nothing for Ibuki to do alone in the cabin. She couldn’t reach her guitar, which was on the ground by her desk, and she would be afraid to drop it from ceiling-height anyway. Usami had confiscated her cell phone with everyone else’s, like a typical field trip chaperone, and she didn’t have any books out from the island’s library either. And then the ceiling of her cabin was a singularly unenriching environ. Ibuki slept a little but the ceiling’s popcorn texture was so sharp that she skinned her knee rolling over and woke up. It hurt too much to drum on it with her palms. She tried to harmonize with the tropical birds she could hear singing outside, then tried to do a mating dance like the birds of paradise in nature documentaries. Then she imagined what would happen if she and Togami were discovered by aliens and taken to be representative of the entire human species.
“A typical mating pair,” Ibuki’s imaginary alien announced, in a nasal voice because she knew little green men just must sound nasally, “as evidenced by these two specimens, consists of two highly dimorphic individuals, the larger very large and drab, with dull pigmentation, and the other tiny and vibrant and in possession of a set of large, threatening keratin horns, possibly of use in mating, or for intimidation in sexual competition.”
When Ibuki got tired of that, she did something she’d been doing to entertain herself since she was a little kid, folding her legs to her chest so that her sharp kneecaps were right up against her eyelids and leaving them there until she saw stars on the insides of her eyelids. Then she unfolded a little and blinked the fuzzy stars away. And repeat. Then she crawled into the bathroom and rolled around on that stretch of ceiling, which was a little smoother. She found that if she stood up straight she could look at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, and so, stir-crazy, she hiked up her blouse and counted her ribs, drummed on them like a washboard, watched little nerves jump when she stretched. Ibuki stringbean, Ibuki rangey pea, Ibuki bolted radicchio. She imagined herself as a seed, curling into a ball. Then she shouted “Germination!” and sprung up and out into a jumping-jack X. Something to add to her stage show, she thought. But all this accomplished was tangling her hair in the hooks of the shower curtain.
Togami was late coming back and Ibuki briefly entertained the idea that he had forgotten about her, as she watched the sun dip below the sea through the cabin’s floor-to-ceiling sliding door. But then there was a knock at the door and Togami entered, carrying grocery bags.
“You brought Ibuki gifts?!” she said, bounding to her feet.
“Just dinner,” Togami said, unpacking his bags. “And snacks. The necessities. I didn’t know what you liked to eat, Mioda, so I chose things that rem—mm. I mean.” He held up a package of dried hibiscus flowers and another of star-shaped konpeito. “Well, spiky things.”
“Ibuki could live on these,” she said of the dried flowers, overjoyed. “Hmmmm. Pop quiz, what kind of bird would Byakuya-chan be if he was a bird? Ibuki’s been thinking about birds of paradise.”
“A very silly question.”
“It’s a getting-to-know-you question! Ibuki will start: she’d be a mynah!”
“The talkative ones, yes? Appropriate. Mm. Me, maybe a cuckoo.”
“Why? Ibuki was thinking peacock.”
“No reason,” he mumbled, looking down and away. “First...bird to come to mind. I have a very expensive Swiss clock at home with a…anyway, Byakuya Togami doesn’t have spare time to devote to frivolous thought exercises. Where’s your hot plate, Mioda?”
With his jacket off, and looking very good if Ibuki did say so herself, he made her dinner: defrosted chicken strips, rice, and powdered yellow curry. She insisted that he throw the chicken up to her strip by individual strip so she could catch them in her mouth like a trained seal, but he insisted that she eat her rice from the bowl. He finished eating before shе did and while she struggled to catch up, he noticed her skinned knees and fussed over her with peroxide and cotton swabs from the cabinet under the sink. Ibuki was made to stretch one leg at a time floorward so Togami could dab at her cuts. When the peroxide foamed over and stung, she yowled and kicked. Togami only narrowly avoided a blow to the chin.
“You know, this gives Ibuki a song idea: ‘If You Think Kitchen Countertops Are Bad, You Won’t Believe the Bacteria Right Above Your Head At All Times (Aaaaa! Don’t Look Up!)’”
After workshopping this song for a while, she took a shower. Togami made this possible by detaching the showerhead from its dock and handing it up to her on the bathroom ceiling, where she sat cross-legged beside the light fixture. “It’s gonna get the ceiling all wet. Ibuki hopes Bossman Usami doesn’t take a fee for water damage out of Ibuki’s salary,” she said.
“I would sue,” Togami assured her.
“For Ibuki? Byakuya-chan would bring the full force of the Togami Conglomerate’s legal team down on a stuffed rabbit for little ol’ Ibuki?”
“If that’s the price of your hygiene, then yes, Mioda, by all means.”
“Ibuki’s body can be cleaned but her mind will remain as filthy as ever!” Ibuki declared.
“Glad to hear it,” Togami replied, without affect. He handed her the soap and a washcloth, too, and left her to sing, as she washed, as best she could remember the words in English: “Buffalo gals won’tcha come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight...and the dish ran away with the spoon.”
When she had finished showering and had shaken all the leftover water out of her ears, she put on her red tartan briefs and her favorite recent purchase from the Rocketpunch Mart, a tee shirt printed all over with bats in flight. At close range one noticed that each of the bats had Monobear’s face. (After his defeat at the paws of his sister, he had contented himself with the manufacture and sale of his own brand of casualwear.)
“Does Byakuya-chan like it?” she asked Togami, when she walked out of the bathroom in her sleepwear.
“Yes, very becoming,” Togami said. “For such a cheap, readymade, ah, garment.”
“Rocketpunch Mart didn’t have any frilly negligees,” Ibuki said apologetically. Getting ready for bed, she removed each of the sharp studs in her ears and dropped them from her spot over the bed into the abalone shell on her bedside table. “Ibuki’s glad she got Byakuya-chan for to watch over her,” she added.
(What she wanted to say, but couldn’t, was that when around him she felt like a wobbly pencil drawing under a wash of diluted watercolor paint, like a dashed-off children’s book illustration. She loved him. She couldn’t tell him. One of the things she liked most about him was that her flirtations were never rejected, but received and sternly but gently set to one side, without comment. All of the others minded her overtures. Not Byakuya-chan. But an “Ibuki loves you” would be a bridge too far, she thought. Because it was so illicit, the phrase felt delicious in her mouth, like sour candy, so she mouthed it to herself: Ibuki loves you. Ibuki loves you. She had always looked down her nose at ephemeral high school romances, but this was different.)
“Byakuya-chan will stay, won’t he?” she asked.
“He will, if you’ll have him.”
“Heck, he can have the bed if he likes.”
“Well, it’s not much, frankly, but he’ll take it. But won’t you be cold up there, Mioda?”
“Maybe, but a blanket would fall right off.”
“Here,” he said, and started unbuttoning his shirt. Ibuki made a squeak, but saw that he had a tee on underneath. That didn’t stop her heart from pounding. He peeled off the buttondown and tossed it up to her. “Put that on.”
She caught it, barely. “Kyaaa, B-byakuya-chan’s quick thinking is unmatched…! But boy howdy, does he walk around in more layers than an onion.” This really was too much. She was wearing Byakuya-chan’s shirt to bed! In the morning she would wake up in it! “Man, Ibuki wishes that Byakuya-chan was a wall-crawler too,” she blurted out, in a panic. “She’s always wanted to do it like bats do. And Byakuya-chan would make a really sexy sexbat.”
He frowned, but it was the kind of Byakuya-chan frown that was meant to conceal a smile. “Why do you feel the need to say things like that?”
It was such a relief, when she poked at their relationship like this and nothing changed. “To make Byakuya-chan break, of course,” she said. She had sat down, with the shirt draped around her. It smelled like him, like clean, salty sweat and woody cologne.
“Break?” Togami repeated.
Ibuki rocked back and forth. “Yeah, like, actors? When actors break out of character and laugh during a serious scene?”
“A-huh.” Togami had sat down also, on the side of Ibuki’s bed she didn’t usually sleep on, which was a relief. It had occurred to her that some mildly filthy deeds had taken place on her side.
“Ibuki hates serious scenes. Gaggg.” She pointed a finger at her throat. “Would Byakuya-chan be Ibuki’s roadie? When we get back to the mainland? When Ibuki gets a set together and starts touring again, solo?”
“Roadie, hm? Rather below my station, I should think, Mioda.”
“Ibuki didn’t mean to insult you, but…it’s a very noble calling, the roadie. If Byakuya-chan would just try it once…and backstage, there’s no limit to what we could get up to—!”
“Goodnight, Mioda,” Togami said. “And however long this lasts, I, Byakuya Togami, will...will keep...well, you don’t have to worry.”
“Ibuki wasn’t going to worry,” she assured him. “Ibuki told you, stuff like this happens to her all the time. Like the time she got fleas! Or the time she got stuck at the very tippy-top of a roller coaster for an hour, and then from that vantage point she happened to see with her patented Ibuki Vision a Yakuza handoff going on down below her, and then one of the mobsters looked right up at her and made eye contact, and Ibuki was afraid they had put a hit out on her, because she’d seen too much! Ibuki’s feet, don’t fail her now! But it turned out it was just a—”
“Goodnight, Mioda,” Togami repeated, turning off the lamp.
In Ibuki’s dream, she was strapped into a carnival ride that went around and around so fast that it lifted off from the earth and flew through space, a sort of chalk-on-a-blackboard outer space with stars like the crude asterisk stars that little kids draw. Then Ibuki was at a party, maybe an extraterrestrial party, but anyway she was searching for Togami. She knew he was there, but she didn’t know where exactly. There was a crowd gathered in an auditorium. She peered on her tiptoes over a shoulder to see a magician preparing to pull a tablecloth off of a banquet table without disturbing the place-settings, and felt a cold dread in her stomach, and ran into the next room, where she abruptly dropped down into a blackness. But there in the blackness was Byakuya-chan. She couldn’t tell whether they were falling or floating, the two of them, but they were together. She swam weightlessly toward him and, oriented the wrong way, left a snail-trail of lip gloss on his brow and cheek and collar as she floated headfirst past him. But she spun and righted herself that way, locked her wiry bare legs around him, tangled one hand in the hair on the nape of his neck, and used the other to guide one of his hands to one of her small breasts.
“That’s quite enough, Mioda,” he told her, matter-of-factly, but with affection.
Ibuki woke up (thinking “Ibuki has needs, dammit!”) to find herself hovering halfway between the ceiling and a sleeping Togami. He was on his back, with his arms crossed and his brow furrowed, in exactly his default pose when awake but snoring softly. Ibuki stifled a laugh with a palm to her mouth, delighted with this new discovery. So consistent, Byakuya-chan. Then she remembered that she was floating in midair, and realized that she was also descending, slowly. She thrashed and flailed, trying to steer herself to the side so she wouldn’t touch down right on top of him. She succeeded, but only barely, and landed curled on her side only inches to his right. He woke with a start—a light sleeper?—and she saw him search the ceiling above him for her before he found her beside him.
“I meant to stay up,” he said softly.
“Ibuki made it down okay. Ta-daaa.”
“You slept in your makeup. I forgot to tell you to—”
“Ya, it’s extra-dodextra waterproof, and Ibuki didn’t have her special cleanser in the shower. It’s okay, she’s used to it. The lifestyles of the rich-ish and famous.”
“Here, I have…” He rolled over onto his side and rummaged on her bedside table. “Makeup wipes.”
“Why?”
“Hm? No reason. Free sample at the Rocketpunch Mart. Here.” He started to hand her one, but she caught his wrist and guided it to her face to dab at her eyeliner.
“Roadie practice, Byakuya-chan,” she said, closing both eyes. “You’d better learn now how to remove makeup, ’cuz Ibuki’s gonna make you her personal dresser.”
“Mm. Don’t count on it.” Nevertheless, he took the wipe and did as told, starting at her right eyebrow. She was shaking so hard herself that she couldn’t tell if he was shaking too, but she thought that he was. She clasped her hands together under her chin as if in prayer and squeezed: please, let this be real. He was very gentle, but her eyes stung when he dabbed at her waterline. “Mioda, you’re crying,” he said, alarmed.
“No, Ibuki’s eyes are just watering.” She opened them, and found herself looking into his eyes. He hadn’t put on his glasses yet. This was the first time she had seen him without them. She realized in an instant that she didn’t want to kiss him, not right at this moment. “What is Ibuki doing, Byakuya-chan?”
“I confess I have no idea, Mioda.”
“Neither does Ibuki. Hey, will Byakuya-chan take Ibuki to the ocean today? Now that her personal gravity has been restored?”
“Yes, but we had better take things slowly. I don’t want to lose you.” They kept looking at each other, until Togami rose and put his glasses back on. And then everything was back to normal.
“Speaking of floating, Ibuki can tread water forever,” Ibuki said, rolling up onto her feet in one movement and bouncing on the bed. She felt Togami’s shirt whipping around her as she twirled. “Forever! Gonna challenge Ibuki to back that claim up?”
“No,” Togami said. “I won’t have you swimming. Do you know, Mioda, exactly how fast undertow can carry an insubstantial person like yourself out to sea?”
Byakuya-chan and I poked around in a tidepool. It’s hard for Ibuki to tell, of course, buuuuuut—he looked like he had a really good time.
(Heart get!)