She didn't get into fights with every person who pissed her off, Miyoko thought as she slumped a little lower in the chair. Just most of them. She pressed the ice pack a little harder to her forhead, ignoring the numbing of her fingers. Besides, that jerk deserved it, chasing around first-years like they were a pack of rambunctious puppies.
Her violet eyes drifted from one corner of the disciplinarian's cubicle to the other. Someone had put out a bowl of candy; Miyoko picked a red one out and twirled it in her fingers like a paintbrush. The bully she had beaten up side-eyed her, one hand still holding their nose. She raised her eyebrows, daring him to continue.
"Can I help you with something?" Miyoko said semi-angrily, her temper already kicking up a notch.
A woman with short dark-green hair entered the room, walking over and sitting in the chair. "So," Bella-sensei said without preamble. "Hatano-san, your file has a history of violence, but given the time period in between your violations, I won't be pushing for disciplinary action."
The teacher kept talking, using words that were familiar to Miyoko like the back of her hand. Disciplinary action, apology letter, anger management after school twice a week for the next four months. It was all part of a pattern that she had heard until it lost meaning.
People like Hoshi were the aggressors, the ones who hid children's erasers for fun or broke their only pencil in half just to watch them cry, yet she was the one who got the disciplinary violations for being the protector. It wasn't vigilantism, standing up for those who had been wronged, and yet the adults never saw it that way.
Hoshi kept staring at her, and Miyoko pointedly avoided looking at him. She took the lollipop and whacked it against the arm of the chair, where it broke into uneven pieces inside the flimsy protective casing. Not nearly as resolute as Miyoko's pride, which didn't seem capable of breaking. It only ever sported a nasty bruise, in moments such as this one. A little off kilter, perhaps, but never so broken. Never so glaringly wrong.
Weekdays cease to exist from 8:30 to 3. For seven hours, Miyoko exists outside of herself, an empty shell floating through tacky buildings of far too much stone. School never made sense except as a place where numbers and words matter more than colors and life.
A bit of her soul returned to the violet-haired student as she pushed the chair back. It screeched against the floor at the decibel of Miyoko's throat when her colored pencils were smashed. Four thousand yen, earned through shitty art commissions from girls too vain to look past their own noses, gone with a handful of nicks on a clock.
The chair squeaked as she stood up. Laughing and loving and feeling okay have been stolen from her ever since she was old enough to remember. She did have some sense of honor left, that's why Miyoko stepped in when Hoshi was bullying the younger kids, but none of that mattered. They only saw the spite which came out because she hated this place.
Miyoko tore open the cherry lollipop's flimsy plastic covering and leaned against the stone. Everything is present with the vestiges of learning; her foot hit a broken fragment of chalk, the tip gesturing toward colorful posters advertising tennis club and gardening club and a chance to find your people and make something of your experience. All of it addressed to daughters that had fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers. This last part boggled Miyoko's mind every time she thought about it. Were children more tolerable in concentrated doses? Did extended exposure to them almost make you go deaf, just like how Miyoko could no longer smell her spray paints when she removes their overly fluorescent caps?
She didn't care to know. Besides, Miyoko was already skipping class. She walked out past the track field, taking the largest fragment of solidified sugar and putting into her mouth with paint-stained fingers. In Miyoko's first year of middle school, a boy with ice-white hair had invited her to join the art club.
Added to the list of things the orphanage director didn't need to know: she gut-instinct punched that boy in the stomach.
Neat nails, neat shoes, undergarments that didn't have holes in them from being worn by too many children as they developed. Following her classmates to the bullet train but watching it roll away because Miyoko barely knew how to read a subway map.
She didn't know a life beside gazing at those little things from the outside. Maybe that was why Miyoko hated school so much; each person she saw, even those like Hoshi that were nothing more than bullying flesh sacks, had someone to go home to when 3 p.m. made itself known.
It all came back to the void in her chest, left there by the absence of a family. The cut threads, frayed at the edges from 14 years, had an end somewhere. Trailing out the windows, traces of Miyoko's "past" led in all directions over hallmarks.
If love could be found in a hopeless place, how many layers of dirt buried her family out of sight?
That night, she slept on a slanted roof, arms and legs scraped by the rough shingles. Light pollution was especially dense in the city center, but each was its own unique color. A different hue of the family she wished for, transferred onto Miyoko's secondhand sketchbook as it balanced against a single duffel bag with her possessions.
What was on the other pages of her own book that she would find away from the half-ass everyday life?
In the end, a cold life is best lit by the fires of a warm heart.
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