Cupids Arrow

Cupids Arrow: Chapter 2

-Friday Morning-

Shoko prodded the tiny marshmallows with the tip of her spoon, sending them in slow circles across the small wave of milk the disruption created, and waited intently for them to still.

It was 5:23 in the morning and she was looking for answers in her cereal. It wasn't like she could find them elsewhere, and after a fairly sleepless night, her mind was not quite in perfect order.

The many little pieces of cereal began to slow, the final current disappearing.

"Show me the way," she muttered. "Tell me what to do. I completely give my fate over to you."

They stopped, quivering, and she leaned closer towards the bowl, trying to open her mind to the message that must surely be there. An oval blob with a straight line coming from it, then another, sparser line going down from the tip of that to a bobbing circle.

She frowned. It looked like someone fishing.

"Go fish?" she wondered aloud. What was that supposed to mean?

She considered this for a few more moments, and decided that the good-for-nothing cereal was playing games with her. She took a bite with a small measure of vengeance, startling the picture into disarray.

It had gone soggy. Lovely. But maybe that was the message. 'You are soggy. Soggy Shoko.' She didn't like the sound of that. Shoggy Shoko? It flowed better, but left her wondering what Shoggy could mean. Nothing good, by the sound of it. She might as well just be soggy. Though how could a person be soggy?

She pushed the bowl of cereal, a favored breakfast food she had used what little force she possessed in order to acquire on a regular basis, away from her, towards the center of the table. The bowl looked a little lonely, she thought. Her mother usually arranged some flowers for the centerpiece, but she was away with Father on a trip to see some eccentric friend in Brazil. The ones she'd left behind had wilted and been thrown away, leaving the table empty.

But then she decided that was fine with her. The cereal deserved to be lonely. As lonely as Shoko was. Nonetheless, that irrational part of her, the product of sleep-deprivation and emotional desperation, made her fetch the salt and pepper from the counter and put them in a companionable position next to the bowl. Better, but she knew the housekeeper would be down moments after Shoko left to rinse the bowl and stick it in the dishwasher.

She suddenly felt very depressed. 'At least the salt and pepper still have each other,' she thought, and her spirits lifted a little as she went to go shower and try to make it look like she hadn't spent the night wide awake and the morning talking to cereal.

-Friday Afternoon-

After a long day, despite having been clumsily lost in thought for most of it, Shoko emerged from the confines of the music school in mostly working order, considering the past twenty four hours. There had been a couple of times when she'd been called upon in class and it had taken her longer than it should have to supply an answer, but as per usual, no one had tried to talk to her. She had been mercifully spared the sight of Len, and her mind was perfectly clear and free to tie itself in knots over her impending doom. Her stomach turning over in a jelloid dance, she felt unusually lightheaded and anxious. She knew she should probably walk faster, lest she make Kahoko wait a long time, but her feet were stalling, certain this was all going to go disastrously awry.

'You should have thought of that before you said yes,' she chastised herself grimly, but the self-reprimand was unnecessary. She had thought of it - to be honest, she always thought things were going to go disastrously awry - but the problem was that for once, she'd ignored it. Because for some crazy reason she thought it might go well.