Meet-Hate
Max twisted, spine creaking as she sprawled atop her mattress, and opened her eyes to stare at the ceiling. The lights were off, and Kyoto was quieter than usual for a Friday night, but she still couldn't sleep. She heaved a sigh, turned to look at her speaker, and shifted as one of her limbs emerged from her back to grab her phone. Dialing her speaker down, she sat up, hair mussed, and swung her legs down over the side of her bed before kicking off towards the door. Her arms unspooled from behind, snapping out to grasp the tiny handholds scattered across her room, and that was how she made her way to the door, swinging from handhold to handhold, picking up a loose hoodie on her way out.
The apartment that she shared with Minnie was dead silent. Max bit her lip as she opened the door and slipped out into the lobby. A short elevator ride later, she was out on the street, head tipped back, hands shoved into her pockets. The stars twinkled overhead. It felt odd to be out and about alone, especially this late at night, but the feeling soon passed. Anyway, she was in the richest (and therefore safest) part of Kyoto. She could defend herself. There was nothing to be concerned about.
Max's head felt clouded with a heavy, thick fog. Scattered thoughts lurched in and out of focus as she passed by shopfront after shopfront, her pale, bare face reflected in the glass. So caught up was she in her own head that she almost tripped and fell when she came upon a brightly-lit storefront. On impulse, she entered the convenience store and drifted through the shelves. There was nothing in there that she particularly wanted, but she did grab an apple for the hell of it, tossing it in the air and catching it as she glanced around absently. The store was completely empty. There was even no one behind the counter.
Max frowned. No one behind the counter? Something wasn't right. She hesitated for a moment before climbing over the counter. Ignoring the ceiling-mounted cameras that were likely tracking her every move, she headed into the back of the store. Piles of merchandise loomed to either side of her as she squeezed through the cramped backroom before reaching the employee breakroom, where a lone outfit hung from a hook. She passed by that, and then out the back.
There was a boy smoking behind the convenience store. He turned to look at her, violet eyes flashing in the dim light, and Max tilted her chin up. "You work here?" she demanded.
"Who's asking?"
"Me. I wanna speak to your manager. I'm pretty sure there's a law against leaving a store unattended."
The boy returned to his original position - leaning against the air-conditioning unit, staring out at nothing. "I don't have a manager. There's a sensor by the door that's supposed to alert staff when a customer comes in. I think it's faulty." Tossing his half-smoked cigarette aside, he ground it to ashes beneath his foot and shrugged, accentuating the bagginess of his brightly-colored work uniform. Max sneered and followed him back into the store.
"Are you not getting paid enough to care? Seriously. This is, like, the wealthiest ward in Kyoto. You should be grateful that I caught you instead of, like, someone else who'd raise an actual fuss."
No answer. He held the Dutch door for her as she walked through it.
"And, like, shouldn't there be more people, even at this hour? It's the start of the weekend. Your service must not be very good. Or you're working for a sinking ship."
No answer. Max turned away from him and browsed the shelves, looking for the apple that she'd tossed. She kept talking.
"You're lucky I'm so civic-minded. Someone more unscrupulous could just pop in, grab what they wanted, and leave. I'm responsible. Unlike you."
Her apple grinned up at her from where it was nestled between two bottles of iced tea. Max pulled it out and tossed it in the air, nose scrunching up as she turned back to the counter.
"Aren't these stores supposed to be no-smoking zones?"
The guy behind the counter stared at her, dead-eyed. "I usually work in another store. That one allows smoking."
"Oh, that explains it. You don't know better. Well, I'm telling you that you shouldn't smoke inside a store. It might set off the sprinklers."
"I'd rather get drenched than listen to you keep going on and on and on."
Max stopped. The guy behind the counter glanced away. A thin trail of smoke wafted up towards the ceiling, then disappeared into a small vent installed in the corner. The ceiling-mounted sprinklers remained untriggered.
"Do you know who I am?" Max demanded, vibrating with outrage.
No answer.
"My father's the Permanent Secretary of the Vietnamese Ministry of Internal Affairs. Do you know what that means?" She didn't wait for a reply. "It means he has over five thousand trained killers at his command and the power of the state at his beck and call. My mother's family owns Indochina's largest department store company. I'm so important that I have a literal body double. I'm studying at one of Japan's best hero schools, and I didn't even need to sit the entrance exam. Who the fuck are you? You're nothing."
There was a long silence. The guy at the counter shrugged, but his shoulders had tensed, and he was doing an excellent job at keeping his breathing steady. Max took a few deep breaths, fists clenching and unclenching, and realized that she was shouting, and also that her face felt unusually hot. There was a shrillness to her voice that she didn't like. Still, she wasn't going to apologize. As if to punctuate her rant, she took a big, vicious bite out of her apple and tossed a ¥1000 note at the counter.
"Keep the change."
She pivoted on her heel, the squeal of her sneakers drowning out the hum of the overhead fluorescent lights, and stalked towards the entrance. Her ¥1000 note fluttered to the ground.
"I'd rather be nothing than go to the same school as you, bitch."
Max whipped around. A few bone-white pincers poked out the back of her hoodie. The guy at the counter hadn't shifted position, but the venom in his stare was impossible to miss. He took another long drag from his cigarette and blew the smoke right at her. Paralyzed by rage and more than a little bit of fear, Max cast around for a response and came up short. She settled on a reliable backstop:
"FUCK YOU!"
She burst out of the store and stormed off down the street, refusing to turn around or be otherwise distracted. She was breathing shallowly, the air coming in short bursts as she hurried home. Once she was back in her building, she tossed the otherwise intact apple into a dustbin and took the lift up to her apartment, pulling off her hoodie on the way up.
Max shut the door behind her and leaned against it, her bare back pressed to the cool wood, catching her breath. That had gone well. If her parents heard about what she'd done, she'd be screwed, but she wasn't going to think about that right now. To take her mind off the many, many possible repercussions of her stupid, idiotic loss of control, she thought of Soujyuuro again, running through her well-worn memories of the fight for the umpteenth time. And as she stood there, mind churning, mouth still filled with the sweet taste of apples, Max felt her pitch fall into place. The more she thought about it, the less concerned she felt. It wasn’t like Minnie would be unreceptive, anyway. Her mind thus made up, she reached her room, tossed her hoodie onto the bed, and opened Minnie’s door, causing the other girl to squirm as a shaft of light fell across her face.
“Minnie?”
Minnie squinted up at her. “What?”
Max’s arms slipped out, one by one, twitching as they clicked over the walls and the doorframe. Blearily, Minnie rubbed at her eyes. “I said,” she repeated, irritably, “what?”