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Ena had been doing it since she was three.
Since her father began drinking, when her mother argued with her father. Ena would let her vision grow slack; let her mind grow feet and walk away, outside of her; cast her focus inwards, send the shouting outside underwater. Ena would stare at her little brown Mary Janes and never look up.
Today, Ena has the perfect set up. An eraser end to nibble on; the teacher droning a needless review of the answers to yesterday’s test; the window seat, complete with a sunny view of Kagoshima’s skyscrapers. In the courtyard below, a bird sails from tree branch to another. Ena pretends she’s the bird, imagines flying away.
Not even the bell ringing and the laughter of her classmates fading down the hall bring her back. Ena would live inside the school walls, if the world would let her.
Footsteps. Ena blinks away sunlight.
A shadow. Sae tilts Ena’s head with a tender, terrifying touch and kisses her. Endorphins snap Ena into her body, into the experience of being kissed. The illusion of being loved.
Sae pulls away. Ena licks her lips. Tastes cherry chapstick.
“Fag,” Sae calls her with a smile.
***
Sae texts Ena to meet her in the girls’ bathroom on the third floor after school.
With each step Ena takes towards the bathroom door, Ena sheds flakes of herself like scales. There’s a shred of her on the floor and another bit in Kitano’s hair and a fleck of her on the window glass, stuck on the inside. By the time she’s in front of the door, the person that pushes the door open is not Ena. Merely a shadow turned corporeal.
She couldn’t miss Sae if she tried: all lovely teeth and pure, cherubic cruelty propped against the wall between the paper towel dispensers. Sae tilts her head towards the big stall in the corner. Through the mirrors over the bathroom sinks, Ena watches another girl enter the stall, let Sae lock the door behind her.
Ena does not stare at her Mary Janes. She is not a little girl anymore; she is too clever, too practiced. She takes the space between Sae’s heart hoop earring and her shoulder and imagines an ocean. Imagines herself as an orca, crushing sea lions with her jaw.
Sae slaps Ena. Ena hears the strike more than she feels its force. She would have the decency to feel embarrassed by how it echoes off the walls, if she were not alone with only Sae as an audience. Sae strikes her on the mouth, and this time, Ena feels the sting, too hot to touch.
Ena looks at Sae.
“I hate when you get that faraway look in your eye. You’re leaving me. Stay," Sae tells her, and presses her thumb hard against the blotted cherry of blood on Ena’s bottom lip.