Roommate Wanted. No Betrayers.

Chapter 20

Nanashi Mumei had always been a weird kid growing up.

She knew this. She knew it very well. People were, frankly, too comfortable saying it directly to her face.

Like she didn't already know. Like nobody had told her that she liked weird stuff and dressed weird and so on. Like she couldn't already intuit it on her own. Like she needed weekly reminders from someone or other.

Eventually at some point in middle school she just stopped acknowledging the comments at all and, also most other social overtures, having convinced herself that they might too simply be some contrived machiavellian plot to expose her as the ridicule deserving weirdo she'd been labelled her entire life.

After a couple of months, her peers finally took the hint and she was finally left alone.

Very alone in fact. It became rare that she would ever really talk at school at all, and this continued into high school where her disposition as the weird kid who blanks you 95% of the time followed, even though the actual percentage had dropped.

A lot of people she found in high school simply assumed she was a teacher's pet, honour student type, and were shocked when they saw her in detention for not doing homework or learned that for the most part her grades were just a whisker above average outside of the subjects that personally interested her.

By the end of her first year of high school she'd pretty much given up on having any kind of social life.

That is, until she showed up. The transfer student from Japan. Takane Lui.

She'd immediately caught Mumei's teenage hormonal eye just because she was, frankly, astonishingly beautiful, tall and athletic with eyes like a clear summer sky and slightly tousled short pink hair.

It was jarring for her then, when Lui approached her at lunch time on her very first day with a broad smile. "Mumei! A teacher told me you speak some Japanese!"

"Er, yeah a little ." Mumei had responded in said language. "I'm hardly even conversational though."

"Okay! No problem!" Lui beamed, her toothy grin making her somehow even more stunning. "Maybe we can teach each other!"

"Oh, I mean. Yeah sure." Mumei stammered. "But I think your English is already pretty good, probably better than my Japanese is."

Lui just laughed that off. "It's a date!" She exclaimed after we had set a time and place, after school in a cafe a couple minutes away the next day.

Those words stuck with her for the rest of the day and all through the night and the next day too. "She's not fluent in english." Mumei told herself repeatedly. "She didn't mean a date date."

Over the course of that afternoon, Mumei maybe talked more to a peer than she had for the last several months of school. She and Lui seemed to click in a way she never had with anybody before.

"This was fun." She said as they left. "I'd love to do it again sometime."

Lui took her hand, smiled and nodded.

In less than two full days Mumei's life had been turned around. She had, at age 16, made maybe her first real friend. The two of them texted constantly outside of school and spent almost every moment in school together. Lui had even convinced every teacher that they needed to be seated next to each other so that Mumei could help her with any english words she didn't understand, though Mumei could count the number of times this was required on one hand.

They would continue to go on study dates too, perhaps most notable of which was their fourth, after which, as the setting May sun tinted the sky a beautiful pink, Lui had pulled Mumei close and the two had shared a tender first kiss.

Mumei's world changed yet again. Three months ago, she could barely imagine having a friend, let alone a girlfriend, let alone one as beautiful, witty and generous as Lui.

All that being said, things weren't exactly perfect. Lui had let it be known very early, before they had even started dating, that she intended to return to Japan once she'd graduated. It tinted their future with an uncertainty that gnawed at Mumei incessantly. She'd only just found somebody who understood, accepted and loved her, would she really have to give up in just two years?

Determined to follow Lui to Japan, Mumei threw herself into studying and took a part-time job to save up for the cost of moving. Her grades improved, though it was tough work and far from neutral in affect in her mental state.

To top it off, Lui worried about her incessantly. Back then, she'd thought her girlfriend was just being irresponsible, always trying to get her to take days off from studying to hang out, or go on dates. She would get mad, thinking that maybe Lui didn't really care about their relationship since she was so preoccupied with ruining Mumei's plans to save it.

With hindsight, Mumei understood, she was trying to save the relationship in her own way. Relationships sometimes need work to make work. But when a relationship becomes all work, that's when ties between people really start to break down.

Maybe if she'd studied less and enjoyed herself with Lui more their relationship could have survived that day. The day Mumei didn't get into Lui's university of choice.

She didn't remember that day, or much of what came after too clearly. She remembered feeling hollow when she read the letter of rejection, typed out in a language that just two years ago she was just barely conversational in. She remembered feeling the weight of all the work she'd put in. She remembered Lui's face, her features painted with a cocktail of emotions Mumei didn't understand.

They didn't break up that day, but it was the day their relationship was over.

They moved to different cities. Talked less and less.

Eventually Lui broke it off in a Skype call and Mumei couldn't even find it in herself to blame her.

Mumei's life returned to normal. She went to university. Studied hard. Put everything into her studies, to distract her from her loneliness.

At night sometimes she'd cry herself to sleep, pining fruitlessly for those halcyon days that had come and gone. She'd tasted a better life, one full of laughter and love and this consolation prize of a life she'd ended up with couldn't even compare.

But she had no idea how to get it back.

Over the course of three years she withdrew even further into herself.

Eventually she stopped studying.

Then one day, after university, she just didn't ever go back.

She took a job as a trucker.

She put everything that mattered to her into a box and put that box in the cab of a truck.

She spent her life always on the move. Always searching, though she didn't know what for.

Then, years later, she found it.

She'd had to take some residential streets, unsuitable for her truck. So she'd gotten out and looked for the place on foot, figuring that maybe they might have a smaller van which could come meet her halfway.

But instead, she found that gate.

That path.

That shrine.

She found something she never knew she was missing.

She found home.