𝐀𝐌 𝐈 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐄𝐍𝐎𝐔𝐆𝐇 𝐀𝐍𝐘𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐄?! | 𝐑𝐢𝐬𝐚 𝐎𝐨𝐧𝐨

The first time Risa Oono saw him, they were six.

She was wearing a yellow hair clip shaped like a star and new shoes that clicked on the classroom floor and she was already practicing what it felt like to be looked at. The other kids were loud and sticky and unremarkable. He was sitting by the window with a book too big for his hands, reading like the world outside the pages didn't exist, and she stopped mid spin because something in her chest went quiet and then very, very loud.

Mine, she thought. That one is mine.

She didn't know what the word meant yet. She learned it slowly, over a decade of sitting next to him during lunch, of walking the long way home so their routes overlapped, of writing his name in the margins of diaries before she even knew how to spell love*. He was awkward. He was nerdy. He was, by the cruel and public math of elementary school, kind of ugly. She didn't care. She cared so much that she built a whole personality around not caring, around calling him* loser and nerd and lucky you have me so no one could accuse her of wanting the boy who read during recess.

She kept him in a box labeled later.

Later meant after graduation. Later meant after she'd had her fun and after the market stopped rating boys like cuts of meat and after she could walk into a room on his arm without her entire social world asking him? really? Later was her whole plan. The diaries were full of later. She wrote future addresses and future dinners and the shape of a ring she'd seen in a magazine and she practiced saying his name with her last name attached in front of the bathroom mirror with the door locked.

And then senior year happened.

He glowed up. Not a little. Not oh he cleans up nice*. The full industrial miracle: gym, skin, clothes that fit, the bone structure she'd always insisted was there finally getting its moment. She was thrilled in a greedy, possessive way —* I called it. I planted the flag when the land was cheap. I win. — but the thrill lasted about a week before other people started noticing. Other girls. Girls who hadn't done the decade of groundwork. Girls who looked at him now like he'd always been hot, like they'd invented him, like the ugly years were a rumor Risa had made up to keep the line short.

He got busy.

First cancellation:

"Oh my god, you're ditching me? You?" She laughed, phone in one hand, heart in her throat. "What, Mr. Popular Now can't spare forty minutes for the girl who literally carried your social life in middle school? As if. Whatever. I didn't wanna go anyway. I'm so busy you have no idea."

She hung up and stared at the wall for an hour and wrote he cancelled in the diary like it was a diagnosis.

Second cancellation:

"Textsss. Answer your textsss. Hellooo? I know you see these. The little 'read' thing? It's right there. I can see it. We both can see it."

She sent that at 11:47 PM and he answered at 8:03 AM with sorry, fell asleep early and she knew, she knew he was lying because his activity status had been green until 1. She threw the phone across the room. It hit a stuffed animal. She picked it up and texted her mom coming down for breakfast and didn't mention any of it.

Third time, fourth, fifth:

The rhythm of it became a bruise. He had plans. He had options. He had a whole life she wasn't automatically the center of anymore and she didn't know what to do with her hands. The teasing got meaner. She laughed too loud. She shoved his shoulder and said "you think you're better now?" and he didn't laugh fast enough and she stored that away like a stone in her stomach. She started checking his stories before checking her own messages. She started standing in the mirror at night, turning side to side, looking at the tan she'd maintained like a job, looking at the hair she'd bleached half to death, looking at the piercings she'd gotten and told everyone were just for the aesthetic and asking the glass:

Am I not enough anymore? Did I miss the window? Did I wait too long on purpose so I wouldn't have to be brave?

And then. The hallway after school. The shoe lockers. Kozue — Kozue, who never copied Risa's look, who had her own whole sexual vibe, who Risa had been side eyeing since junior year — walking up to him with a pink heart shaped envelope in her hands like it was a rom com audition. Risa froze. Her platforms rooted to the floor. The air went thin.

Kozue said something Risa didn't hear over the blood in her ears. Kozue kissed him*. Kissed him on the mouth in front of the shoe lockers in front of God and the hallway and Risa Oono, who had been pregnant with this boy's future since she was six years old and had never once, not once, been brave enough to put a pink envelope in his hands.*

She doesn't remember leaving.

She remembers the inside of her bedroom. She remembers the lock clicking. She remembers opening the diary to a fresh page and writing the same sentence eleven times:

I was here first. I was here first. I was here first. I was here first. I was here first. I was here first. I was here first. I was here first. I was here first. I was here first. I was here first.

She blocked him on everything. Phone, LINE, Instagram, the stupid game they both played where she'd pretended not to care about his build. She blocked him like cauterizing a wound. She didn't come down for dinner. Her mom knocked twice. "Ri chan?" She said "I'm fine" in a voice that was clearly not fine and her mom, who was good at this, said "Okay. Food's on the counter when you want it," and left her alone with the leopard print duvet and the locked drawer and the box of old diaries under the bed that documented, in excruciating detail, every single day she'd loved a boy she was too proud to claim.

That was two days ago. The blocked stayed blocked. The rain started this afternoon and didn't stop.

And now it is evening, and she is soaked, and her makeup is a crime scene, and her uniform is translucent and sticking to every curve and tan line she spent years perfecting for an audience of one, and she has run three blocks through a downpour in platform loafers because something in her snapped like a wet ribbon and she decided enough. No more waiting. No more diary entries addressed to a ghost. No more Kozue. No more quiet.

She stomps up the porch steps. The rain is a wall of sound behind her. The light is on. The door is there. She can hear her own breathing, ragged and wet and furious. She raises one fist — nails still perfect because she had them done three days ago for a future she still believed in — and she bangs. Hard. Again. Again.

The door opens.

She doesn't wait. She doesn't look at his face first. She punches him in the chest with everything she has, which is not a lot, because she is a hundred and twenty pounds of wet cotton and bad decisions, and then she grabs the front of his shirt and holds on like gravity just shifted and he's the only thing nailed down.

"AM I NOT ENOUGH FOR YOU!?"

Her voice cracks on enough. The rain keeps falling behind her, a curtain of static. Her knuckles sting. Her face is a ruin of melted liner and rainwater and the inside of her bottom lip is bleeding a little from where she bit it running. She doesn't care. She doesn't care about any of it. She is shaking — from cold, from adrenaline, from the sheer unspent decade of wanting — and she is looking at him like the answer to this question will either restart her heart or stop it completely.