Chapter Text
CHAPTER 29
VIRAL, PT. 1
AKKO
The word document on her laptop feeds a blinding white reminder that Akko has once again failed to tackle the assignment that Professor Callistis has given her. To avoid facing the emptiness behind that blinking cursor, she has strategically turned her chair to face the opening of her room, giving her the perfect view of Angel practicing for the Parkour World Championships in the kitchen.
Otherwise, just like the blank document that shouts its barren page into Akko’s periphery, the dorm is empty. Akko is not sure which is worse. Actually, she is, and she hates that it makes her acknowledge her lack of dedication to her education. She knows she seriously needs to get back on the grind if she wants to keep her scholarship, because there's no way in hell she can afford tuition otherwise.
But Diana isn't there, and, right now, the loneliness that clouds the space around her is too heavy to bear.
“Classes start back Monday,” Diana had stated when she’d returned from Hannah’s room with the hotel voucher in her hand. “We both need to be able to get decent sleep.”
But Akko has reasonable suspicion to believe her decision had a lot to do with the tension that seemed to follow them home from Cherry Beach. Sifting, thick and heavy like a smoke-screen strangling their connection by weaving itself between, through, and around them.
As soon as their hands fell away that night, the awkward dance began. Apologies for crossing paths that have been crossed before in closer proximity, conversations that circle the subject with small talk and nervous laughter, as though they're skirting the edge of a minefield. Even the skating rink has not escaped the field of play: Don’t stare too long. Don’t smile without pretense. Don’t say hello in any way that could be interpreted as anything other than a friendly greeting.
Akko rests her thumb across the strings of her guitar, which has been sitting, just as ignored as her essay, across her lap. She closes her eyes, fingers splayed across steel, and lets herself recall the warmth of Diana’s hand in hers. The long fingers that wove through her own in a perfect fit. The warmth, inside and out, of being so close.
A heat blossoms in Akko’s chest, webs through muscle to linger, soothing and thrumming, beneath her ribs.
She lets her fingers begin to move. Slowly, at first, until she finds a pattern that matches the tempo of her heart. She can feel herself surging with emotion as neurons connect images that have not yet started to wear with time, touch that has not yet started to dull at her palm—all of which accompany a moment that has only just evolved into a memory.
She smiles. Sighs. Angel has ceased her play in the kitchen and come to the tune of Akko’s slow melody.
Akko opens her eyes, lets her left hand drift to test chords that match the way she feels. The way she has felt since that night. It’s only when Angel brushes against her calf that Akko’s mind drifts from the cloud of comfort she has found and she discovers, with some sense of confusion but without surprise, that she is keying in minors.
Akko lets out a long breath and gently lifts the guitar. She leans it against the side of her desk, its common resting spot, and turns her attention once more to her laptop. It’s then that she realizes her phone, silenced in her failed attempt to get work done, is blinking with a notification.
dcavendish: How’s the paper coming along?
Akko shuts her laptop and opens Instagram on her phone. Above what Diana has sent her is their conversation from when Diana was in England—the last time they spoke on this platform.
akkotako: what paper
dcavendish: Very funny. I suppose it’s not going well, then?
akkotako: you could say that :/
akkotako: why are you messaging here? are your texts not working?
dcavendish: No, they’re fine. I was just reading through our messages. I’m sorry if this isn’t your preferred method. I can switch.
The heat in Akko’s chest flares to life again like a network coming online. Her hands are frozen on her phone, any form of a response trapped by how open Diana’s admission is. Akko reads the messages a lot, too, but things between them have been so stupidly awkward that bringing it up feels like baiting a predator.
akkotako: gotcha. no, here is okay
She stares down at her phone as Angel hops into her lap, watching as Diana types, stops, types, stops. Angel digs her claws into Akko’s shorts before rising onto her hindlegs, smashing the side of her mouth against Akko’s chin in a plea for attention. When Akko finishes giving in to her cat’s demand, Diana has responded.
dcavendish: Did maintenance come by today?
Akko realizes she has walked right by a door that Diana left wide open for her and mentally scolds herself for being so dense.
akkotako: um, I don’t think so, but I didn’t come home between classes and practice. were they supposed to?
dcavendish: Yes. That’s alright. I’ll call in the morning.
dcavendish: I didn’t see you at practice tonight.
That’s because Akko had waited in the locker room, feigning issues with her padding until she knew the figure skating team would be gone.
But Diana had looked for her.
She clenches her jaw in regret.
akkotako: i had to fix my gear so i probably missed you
I definitely miss you, Akko wants, so badly, to say. She doesn’t. She watches Diana type, then stop. A few minutes go by. Angel rumbles in her lap, purring up a storm, her whiskers twitching against Akko’s elbow.
akkotako: see you tomorrow, though?
Diana does not reply. Moments later, the green bubble next to her picture is gone. She’s offline.
“Shit,” Akko says to no one aside from herself and Angel, who is doing a convincing job faking sleep. Her fingers find the soft, downy fur behind her cat’s ear and work in circles that earn an appreciative chirp. “I screwed that up, didn’t I?”
The dorm is so quiet that Akko can hear the hum of the refrigerator, the creaking of windows bracing against a bitter winter’s wind that says a storm is imminent, distant laughter and footsteps drifting and fading in the hallway. Akko has been alone, lived alone, for more years than she can remember being with her family. But, here, with a roof over her head and a meal promised whenever she wants it, the absence of Diana—especially when Akko not only knows where she is but how she’s so, so close—brings a sobering version of “alone” that Akko is not acquainted with.
Akko closes Instagram and flips to their text conversation, fully intent on apologizing for coming across in such a disconnected way. She wants to go back to normal. To wit, to banter. To flirting, if she’s honest. To where she thought—no, knew—things were going, if she were to put her hand on a Bible and swear to it.
She re-reads the few messages they’d exchanged that day and sees that Diana did, in fact, tell her that maintenance was supposed to come between 2 and 3: an hour Akko was usually back from class and getting ready for hockey. Not only had Diana scheduled for maintenance to come, but she had been respectful enough to request an hour that Akko would be there, and Akko had either missed it or, more likely, didn’t process it in a neglectful oversight.
Akko turns off her screen without sending a message. She’s whiffed the puck enough for one day. No need to add to a pile of missed shots, especially when every single one of them matters more than anything.
When Akko agreed to sign up for Humanities 101 with Lotte as one of her mandatory introductory courses, she’d imagined she would love it. Surely their time would be focused on society and the world at large, their grades crutching on their ability to enact change, to provide where basic provisions were a luxury, to help people more or less like herself.
That's why she didn’t question the thickness of the previous-to-the-previous version of the textbook she’d bought secondhand online for $1.60 CAD. Well, to be honest, it was mostly because she tossed it in her pile of other books as soon as it came in the mail and didn’t bother to look at it, much less open it. It wasn’t until she looked at the syllabus on the first day of class (which had been posted online for weeks, but that was beside the point) that Akko realized she’d made a critical error.
“You’re thinking of Humanitarianism, Akko,” Lotte had explained on that first day when Akko was still staring in disbelief at the syllabus and assignments, few of which words she understood, and the sheer volume of weekly reading that was expected. “Humanities is Humanism. You know, the study of human culture. Philosophy, arts, literature, religion…”
“All things I hate,” Akko had moaned in response during, to her usual level of misfortune, one of those moments where silence decides to creep in. She earned glares from a handful of students seated nearby, but huffed and waved them off. Nobody could seriously like this stuff. “Lotte, I am going to fail.”
Lotte reminded her, then, that it was an introductory course. Surely it wouldn’t be too demanding. Okay, the syllabus looked a little daunting, and the amount of dedicated reading was a lot for somebody who didn’t usually read, but a 100-level course was meant to be the exposed part of the glacier to get people interested.
It would be fine, Lotte said. Akko might even like it.
Akko is failing, and more than that, Akko hates this fucking class.
“Wake up.” Lotte is nudging her in the side, adding a little extra to get through all the layers Akko is wearing. “You can’t be missing this stuff. It’ll be on the next exam.”
Akko grumbles in protest and sits up, arching her back in a stretch. She glances at her phone. Still half an hour left until she is free for the weekend.
She flips to her messages, which she has a million of for some reason, but ignores them and scrolls to the only conversation she's looking for. Nothing. Diana has not messaged her all day, even though Akko knows she’s okay because Lotte brought up seeing her getting tea with Hannah in the morning. A frown tugs at the corner of her mouth and she turns her screen off, letting everything else go unread because don't they know she's in class, and folds her arms across her chest.
Not that they should be in class, anyway. There's already a foot of snow outside and Akko can see how heavy the flurries are through the single tinted window at the side of the lecture hall. Weather like this calls for a lazy day in a warm blanket and ad-hoc naps.
Professor Pisces is a dull monotone below them, and Akko feels her brain numbing once more.
“Love!” Lotte blurts, loud and sudden.
Akko jumps and looks at her friend, nearly knocking over her open bottle of water in the process. Lotte is lowering her arm back to the table, index finger and thumb pinching at the corner of her notebook as she stares eagerly through thick lenses at Pisces.
“That is one of the most powerful and relatable themes, yes. The love between Orpheus and Eurydice, followed by loss in the form of Orpheus’s failure, resonates with many as it is a shared experience of humanity that most, if not all of us, will find familiar.”
Lotte smiles the same smile that takes over when Amanda speaks to her. Akko has noticed a difference between this smile and her regular smile, because this one makes the bridge of her nose wrinkle in a way that skews her glasses to the right. She wants to be happy for her, whatever the hell she’s saying, but she can’t share in the glory of Lotte’s moment of praise because Professor Pisces has found her eyes and locked in like a hunter finding prey.
“Miss Kagari,” she calls. Akko has never heard her target anybody directly, at least not during her brief moments of attentiveness, and, as if in tandem, the entirety of the lecture hall turns to her.
“Uh—” Akko has stood in front of crowds, has sung her heart out in front of crowds, and suddenly she feels like a monkey in a zoo. “What?”
“Orpheus and Eurydice,” Lotte whispers at the same time Professor Pisces, her voice raising an octave, says, “Orpheus.”
Akko can hear people whispering. She feels her ears burning and knows, full well, that her embarrassment is on display. She tries to shrink into her Luna Nova Women’s Hockey hoodie. It was once as soft as Angel was when she was a kitten, but now, under the scrutiny of the entire class, Akko notices how much the inside has pilled and how it grates against her skin like sand. She doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know the answer, doesn’t recognize the names being thrown at her because she hates history and hates philosophy and hates this class. So, all she can think to say is a lame, useless, “Who?”
There is a sharp intake of breath to her left, followed by a whispered, “Oh my God,” and Akko glances over to see a girl staring at her. Instantly, the girl’s eyes soften with recognition. She whirls to the two girls at her side, whispering something in an urgent voice and pointing to a phone. The other two twist in their seats, their stares intensifying.
The middle one, a brunette that Akko recognizes from another class of hers but can’t pin which one, instantly averts her eyes when she sees that Akko is looking their way, as though embarrassed to be caught. Akko wonders why anybody but her should be embarrassed. After all, Pisces is calling her out for not doing any of the reading, not them.
The other girl stares longer, her eyes roving Akko in a way that makes her more self-conscious than she already is. Akko expects laughing, mocking, or whispering to her friends. Instead, the corner of the girl’s mouth pulls into a smile, the hand clutching the back of the chair to balance her turned torso rises in a tiny wave, and her cheeks color with the faint dusting of a blush.
Akko’s eyebrows pull together. She’s vaguely aware of Lotte looking at her phone and gently tugging at the sleeve of her sweatshirt, but too much is going on because Professor Pisces is speaking again and this blonde girl that Akko knows she doesn’t know is still smiling at her and, behind her, somebody else has started whispering something. Akko can hear clips of it.
Video.
That’s her.
Sure?
Did — see —You — link — night?
“—care to help Miss Kagari, since you seem so keen on speaking?” Pisces is saying, her voice loud over the din, her attention now focused on the trio of girls.
Akko expects the first girl to speak, to prove her value to the class in the same way Akko has proven her worthlessness, but instead the blonde girl—who is pretty cute, but definitely straight, which makes Akko wonder why she is coming across as so flirty—answers. She doesn’t look at Pisces. Instead, her eyes remain trained on Akko.
“The power to induce change or influence others.” Her voice is loud, confident, with an accent that sounds like she was raised in the country somewhere but Akko has no idea because there’s country everywhere. “Through art. Like Orpheus did with his song.” Her emphasis fell on the last word, her smile widening at Akko.
Akko breaks the gaze, her brow still tight with confusion, and turns her attention back to the front of the lecture hall. Lotte has stopped tugging her sleeve and is staring down at her phone, completely engrossed in something that is probably Amanda, but Akko doesn’t look over.
“For those who are also attempting to sleep their way through this course with the vain hope of passing by sheer luck,” Pisces says, her eyes leaving the girls and glancing only briefly at Akko before addressing the rest of the room, “We have just read a story from one of the earliest and most profoundly influential works in this field of study.” She pauses, then speaks again with a passion that seems too big for a woman so small. “Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 10. Orpheus and Eurydice.”
She steps to her podium, empty save for the same neglected textbook (except the new version) that Akko assumes is under a pile of wear-again clothes in her room. She wets the paper-thin skin of her index finger and begins leafing through the pages.
This time, when her voice rises, Akko is enraptured. She sits back in her chair, back rigid, tuning out the whispers that still fill space around her. For the first time, she realizes that Professor Pisces does not, in fact, have a monotone at all. Akko had only assigned her one out of drowsiness, disinterest, or distraction. But, now that she is dialed in, color begins to trickle into what was once black and white. Plus, there is something about it that is vaguely familiar. Lyrics to a song, maybe.
The professor’s knuckles are tight on the podium as she begins to read, her voice echoing through Akko’s head.
“Then, they say, for the first time, the faces of the Furies were wet with tears, won over by his song—”
“Akko.”
“—and the king of the deep, and his royal bride, could not bear to refuse his prayer—”
“Akko.”
“—and called for Eurydice.”
A sharp elbow snaps Akko back to the here and now and she turns to Lotte, irritated to be broken from the first time she’s managed to concentrate in this damn class.
The whispers around her seem louder, and a glance tells her that people are still looking at her and she wants to yell at them that she's going to start charging a fee.
Lotte’s lips are parted as she tilts her phone to Akko. It’s a message from Amanda.
AO: have you seen this
AO: lotte
AO: lotte
AO: strawberry shortcake
AO: baby girl
AO: fairytale princess in the tower
AO: LOTTE
AO: HELLO
And, beneath the rapid fire texts that Amanda has fired off in a matter of seconds, is a link to an Instagram reel with a preview image.
A preview image that is Akko, a while-ago Akko, against the backdrop of Avery’s boring white bedroom walls with her guitar in her hand and her face wet with tears.
She can’t believe what she’s looking at.
She deleted it.
There is—was—only one copy, and there is no way that somebody got their hands on it. It isn’t possible. It had been well over a year ago that she tossed that stupid bottle into the lake in a drunken stupor and the odds of it not getting run over by a boat or swallowed by a whale (if there are whales in the lake, Akko has no idea) are completely—
Her phone is vibrating again. Akko grabs it, taking in the sheer volume of notifications that she ignored earlier like it was a normal thing, and begins scrolling through. Each one has a link to her video on a different platform: YouTube. Reddit. Tik Tok. Instagram. Facebook.
AO: bro is this serious or did you plan this
AO: either way this is genius marketing
SM: Why does this not surprise me? It’s so sappy I think I threw up in my mouth.
WI: omg mate did you know youre going viral?? so many people sent me this!! have you read the comments? i’m sharing it everywhere its adORRRRBS
Akko can feel each successive breath rising in volume as she reads each message, a steady drum beat that builds in tempo until she can hear nothing else.
JA: HOLY SHIT AKKO THIS IS SO CUTE?! IS THIS ABOUT DIANA? LIKE OUR DIANA?
Constanze has shared a link to a Reddit post with a simple “...?” underneath.
AH: This is you, right? Avery is here going wild that her bedroom is in this video, and I’d be under the belief that you had a long lost twin somewhere except for the fact that you mentioned Diana…
AH: It’s probably a good thing you didn’t say her last name. Internet sleuths are wild.
AH: … Nevermind. Somebody just commented: “This has to be about my best friend, Diana Cavendish!” and, uh, it was Hannah.
The messages go on and on, people she’s friends with and people she knows and people she barely knows and people she’s not friends with on social media tagging her everywhere and it’s only a matter of time before somebody finds that profile with no posts that only follows her and tags that, too—
Akko lowers her phone, forces her lungs to hold a breath, and the world comes rushing back in.
Pisces is monotone again. The whispers rise around her, with them pulling a shoved-away memory in with the tide, and her pilled sweater feels more than ever like sand against her arms because she can feel the sand between her toes, too. A grinding sound shrieks around her and she realizes too late that it’s her chair, pushed hastily away as she rushes to stand. The bottle hits the surface of the lake in a splash. Water hits her leg. She looks down, realizes she’s knocked over her water bottle in her rush to get away. She stares at it. This is not the same bottle, this is not the same water, but there was a bottle and there was water and the message—
“This is not possible,” Akko thinks and accidentally says aloud at the same time with the rush of an exhale, wishing it was true but knowing damn well that it’s not.
Her mind is hazy and disoriented with disbelief, with embarrassment, with wine that she drank so long ago but still tinges the bile that rises in her throat as she whirls and, somehow thinking to grab her bag and her stupid phone that is flashing with the million notifications she hasn’t gotten to, and makes for the doors of the lecture hall.
“Leaving early, Miss Kagari?”
The voice is still monotone, but louder. She ignores Professor Pisces. Ignores the urgent chatter and the stares that crash into her again and again, but, unlike the waves of Cherry Beach they rise higher than her ankles and envelop her completely.
“Akko,” she hears Lotte saying.
She is panicking, and she knows it. She’s over-reacting. It’s really, truly not a big deal. It's probably not even real. Maybe she's still sleeping. She pinches herself. She isn’t sleeping. It is a big deal. It is a big, huge, massive fucking deal that has not only herself but Diana on broadcast.
Diana.
Diana will see this.
Diana might have already seen this.
“Do not look back, Miss Kagari.” There is a touch of glee to her voice, like she is using Akko as a teaching point, but Akko has no idea what it fucking means and she also doesn’t fucking care because there’s an entire other thing going on and she knows what that means and she cares a whole lot.
With her duct-taped Jansport slung over her shoulder and her heartbeat punishing her ribs in a rapid-fire time signature that not even a composer would touch, she slams her shoulder into the lecture hall door.
She does not look back.
She hates this fucking class.
Professor Pisces’s voice follows her.
“If Orpheus had maintained the same resolve,” she says to Akko’s back, the shutting door doing little to mute the last words that follow her through the closing gap, “his story might have been called a comedy.”
Avery was at a soccer game across the city. Her parents had gone to watch. They’d invited Akko, but she’d declined as politely as she could, saying that she had cramps and was just going to rest them off. It wasn’t wholly an untruth. She was on her period and did have cramps, only they were gone now thanks to Ibuprofen.
They wouldn’t be back for a while, at least.
Akko didn’t have a laptop, but Avery let her use hers. Well, that wasn’t wholly the truth. Akko had to ask and Avery wouldn’t let her see the password, so the fact that she was using it right now wouldn’t bode well if she didn’t cover her tracks.
But Akko needed to do this, needed to write an ending that made sense to her. And, besides, Avery was predictable. Her favorite show was Supernatural and she had a massive, never-shut-up-about-it crush on Jensen Ackles. Her jersey number was 11. The first time Akko had typed jensen11 (which was only her third try) and logged straight in, she laughed.
She didn't feel like laughing now. She felt like crawling into her cot and crying until sleep took her and she dreamed the time away.
Akko sniffed, swiping away a stray tear with her bicep and adjusting the strap of her guitar. The video recorder on the laptop was pretty decent, but the microphone sucked, so Akko had gone out and spent an entire paycheck on a good one, plus a cheap noise filter, and kept the box hidden behind Angel’s litterbox in the laundry room, knowing full well nobody would see it because nobody changed Angel’s litter but her.
A creature who had crawled back from Hell stared back at her when she turned on the recorder. It was clear she had been crying—her eyes were dark and puffy—and her hair hung limp from having gone unwashed for two days. It didn’t matter. But a single strum of the guitar, played back, was clear and crisp.
She didn’t care too much if the video wasn’t the best, but she wanted to sound good. As best as she could, anyway. It was the music and her voice that mattered the most.
Akko chewed her lip and checked the tuning on her guitar, pulling up the sheet of chords that she’d mapped out, revised, erased, and re-mapped over a dozen times. Remembering the basic strumming patterns to fan-favorite songs with the same five chords was one thing, but hearing a tune in another instrument and translating it was something new, something foreign, and something she wasn’t altogether sure she excelled at. Relative pitch, she'd learned it was called in her research, and she definitely wasn't a natural.
She was an okay player, and an okay singer, but it wasn’t something she would claim she was good at—performing for strangers on the freezing streets of Toronto for a loonie required more personality than skill—but she was determined to get it right for this.
She’d practiced a thousand times. Running the tempo through her head, rotating her fingers against her palms during class to memorize the chord progression, picturing the words of the song she chose (after picking and trashing over a hundred more) between conjured images of the last time she saw Diana smile—a memory that blackened at the edges and blurred the details more and more each day.
She could do a million things wrong in the world and that was okay. But when it came to Diana, it had to be perfect.
Akko took a long breath, forcing air into her lungs. She held it, moved her capo, let it out in one long, shuddering exhale, and let her finger hover on the mouse over the bold red ‘RECORD’ button. She’d have one take—two would be pushing the time she had, especially considering she had to transfer this, hide it, and leave no trace on Avery's Jensen Ackles picture machine—and she had to get this right.
She hit the button and drew back, letting her eyes settle briefly on the camera. The guitar hummed as her hand settled just above the bridge.
“I know that the chance of you ever seeing this is pretty much zero,” she said, her mind straining to focus on the few things she wanted to say, but refused to write down for fear of it sounding scripted. “Just like I know the chance of ever seeing you again is pretty much zero.”
She felt a tear linger on her eyelashes and blinked it down, letting it slide, uninterrupted, down cheeks already starting to itch from salt. Her gaze lowered to her guitar, which hummed once more beneath her fingers as she settled on the first chord.
“I’ve written you every day. I don’t know if you’ve ever read a single letter, or if maybe you’ve forgotten me altogether, but I wanted to write you one last time.”
She paused. Breathed deep.
“This is the last time.”
Akko closed her eyes, let that fading memory of Diana smiling at her at the end of her parents’ driveway, fuzzy and dark and repeating in a brainwave’s highlight reel of once-upon-a-time, and began to strum.
The range of emotions that course through her body are so quick, so fleeting, that Akko doesn’t understand how she can be feeling them all at the same time. There is confusion, fear, embarrassment, sadness, curiosity, stress, helplessness. They spin and spin in her head, each time coming back to the one she can identify as resonating the strongest among them:
Anxiety.
Angel must be able to feel it in the air. She met Akko at the door and let herself be held for longer than she ever has, and even now she sits, purring, in Akko’s lap as she stares with blank resolve at the video of herself. The video she had assumed no one would ever find
The video that somebody had posted on YouTube and already made it to Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook reels everywhere with one question bringing them all together:
“Who is Diana?”
The original was posted last night. Not even 24 hours had gone by.
It already had close to two million views.
She didn’t watch it. She couldn’t watch it. She knew if she did, her ribcage would fracture under the weight of her own words, of a song she remembered but hadn’t listened to or sung a word of since. She just sat there, staring into the eyes of her younger self, into the eyes of a girl who was still bone thin and street-worn, still cold and hungry and tired from the inside out, and felt herself hollow.
The wind is picking up outside again and screams through and around the buildings on campus, bringing with it snow that is sideways, rattling Akko's window until a slight draft squeezes its way inside. She shivers, goosebumps prickling across her arms, and holds Angel tighter. She sees her phone light up where she’s tossed it on her bed, but ignores it. All day long there has been nothing but messages, social media tags, calls. From everybody except Diana.
Akko scrolls down, letting the image of herself disappear into the thousands of comments that have already accumulated.
“This is so obviously fake for views.”
“honestly one of the best covers i’ve heard of this song, fake or not.”
“If she wanted to find Diana so bad the least she could have done was give us a last name”
“lol there is no way you found this in a bottle on the beach unless you put it there yourself”
Reply to Comment: OP: “bet. here’s a link to us finding it.”
Curiosity links its fingers with the tight grip of anxiety and Akko finds herself clicking the link, dated for yesterday. The user’s profile says Rochester, New York. She doesn’t know where that is. New York is a different country and a million kilometers away (probably) and for the life of her she can’t think of a way her video made its way there.
Before she can think herself out of it, she maxes out the volume on her laptop and hits play.
The wind is shrill and rising in pitch outside, but she can just make out what they’re saying without having to use headphones.
There are two guys on a relatively filthy beach—three of them altogether including the one behind the phone—and the one in the foreground is holding a bottle.
A wine bottle.
The wind is shrill and rising in pitch outside, but at max volume she can make out what they’re saying.
“The hell is that?” the guy holding the phone asks, his question ending in a chuckle. “Did you just find some pirate treasure or something?”
“If I did, I’m not sharing any money with y’all.”
The light-skinned guy holding the bottle has long, curly brown hair that whips across his face as a breeze off the lake hits him. He's wearing basketball shorts and a t-shirt, which seems stupid to Akko because it's clearly cold there, too. He's fighting with the bottle, one hand on the neck the other tugging hard at a cork that has become swollen in place from being in the water for so long.
“Bro, give me that.”
The other guy, dark-skinned and actually dressed for the cold, snatches the bottle from his friend’s hands and smashes it against a rock on the shore.
“Dude!”
“You almost hit me with that glass, man!”
“That was probably worth thousands!”
“It’s a fucking bottle of Boone’s, bro,” the new owner of the bottle says as he squats and delicately picks through the glass to get to the piece of paper Akko has shoved inside. “Ain’t worth shit.”
The breeze in the video seems to match the wind raging outside—relative pitch, Akko thinks, even in nature—as the guy with the camera steps forward, the sound of his clothing brushing together momentarily blocking out the conversation.
“—something inside it.”
“What is it?”
The guy holding the message lifts it, curled tight and crisp with time and age and elements, over his other palm. A small item slides out.
“A flash drive? That's what this is, right?”
He looks at the camera, brows furrowing together, puzzled.
“The hell?” Long Hair says, creeping up. “What’s written on the paper?”
The camera guy reaches out his hand as the message is offered to him, the sound of fingers unwrinkling crisp paper grating the phone’s speakers.
“Dunno,” he says after a second. “Looks like water got in or something and the ink is all melted together.”
Akko remembers what it said.
The one thing she had never said.
The camera pans down and lingers, showing how the ink has bled or washed out entirely. In it, Akko can still make out the only two words that remain of her loopy penmanship:
scared and
Her fingers are cold against her lips. Tears have built in her eyes and she stares, transfixed, at the message. She barely processes when the trio has moved on to banter between the sounds of crunching glass, of crumpling paper, of excitement mixing with disdain in the voices that fill a video that is now only capturing sand and rocks and moving sneakers.
“—see what’s on—”
“—kiddie porn or some—”
“—dude, we’re not using my—”
“—the Epstein files?—”
“—your dad’s laptop—”
“—idea, bro—”
The video ends. Akko pulls the slider to the left, pausing on the paper that she barely remembers shoving, a haphazard enclosure for the flash drive she tucked inside, into the bottle of wine she’d just polished off.
scared and
Akko sniffed, swiping at her nose with her sleeve as she leaned over one of Avery's art composition books. It was late, and Avery was already long asleep, but the dim red light of her cheap headlamp offered some sense of obscurity. She choked down emotion, swallowing it deep inside her, as she penned her final letter to Diana on the thick, off-white paper. It was brief, but the crux of the letter was the flash drive.
The day you told me is the day I will always remember as the worst day of my life. That day I had you and I lost you and that short amount of time that I had you in my arms will haunt me for the rest of my life. I wish I had made you go back downstairs. I wish I had stopped you. I wish I had put my fingers on your lips before you said it.
But you told me you love me. Loved me.
I was so scared, Diana. I was scared and overwhelmed and I knew I felt the same way for so long but when the moment came, I couldn’t say it back, and I wish I had told you. I wish I had let you know that I loved you, too, because then you would've known and maybe you’d have come back for me.
I know you aren’t coming back for me.
And I wish I could forget the worst day of my life, but I never want to. I never want to forget hearing you say those words to me. So I relive my most painful memory every single day for that small piece of it, and even though I’m saying goodbye now and I know I need to move on, I’ll keep doing it.
I didn’t say it then, but I will save those words, because if life repeats itself or I meet you in another life and know it’s you, and whoever you are I know I’ll know it’s you, I’ll say them then.
Until then, goodbye.
“We’re going to have to book bigger venues,” Amanda is saying from the loveseat, where her legs are haphazardly thrown over the armrest, arms crossed behind her head as she alternates her gaze between Akko and a water-stained ceiling. “No more bars or breweries. All we gotta do is say our lead singer is Message in a Bottle Girl.”
“Can we not?”
Akko chops the carrot she’s holding harder, letting the harshness of the knife striking the cutting board voice her irritation. She wants to be alone. Alone to bury her head under her pillow and sleep this away, or pretend it isn’t happening altogether. Amanda, who had dropped by unannounced—well, announced, really, but Akko isn’t checking her phone at all—with a six pack and a grocery bag of ingredients, ending those plans altogether.
“You’re making me your yakisoba,” Amanda had told a resisting and pouting Akko as she kicked snow off her boots in the hallway and barged in, tracking more along the way. “No ifs, ands, or buts.”
So now Akko is cooking yakisoba, a beer opened and ignored in front of her, with Amanda relaxing on her couch and acting like everything is not only okay but this whole thing has Hollywood written all over it.
Amanda rises up on her elbows, blowing a strand of ginger hair out of her eyes, and watches Akko chop. “You’ve got to relax, dude. People will forget about this in a week. But, for real, it is not as embarrassing as you think it is. Everybody I’ve talked to thinks it’s cute. Even Hannah told me on the way off the ice she thinks it’s, and I quote, ‘Like, the sweetest and saddest thing I have ever seen’.”
Hearing that brings a fresh pull of heat into Akko’s cheeks. If Hannah has seen it, there is no possible way that Diana hasn’t. Diana might be oblivious to most aspects of social media, but her friends aren’t, and the odds of her having seen it by now—especially with most people, Akko realizes with a wave of nausea, knowing that she is the Diana everybody on the internet is searching for—are leagues beyond that stupid bottle ever being found, and that longshot brought it home.
Her feelings for Diana—feelings that have somehow not managed to dull over time—being watched by other people is somehow worse than coming out, and that got her kicked out of her house.
“Not embarrassing? It’s humiliating, Amanda.” Akko tries to laugh but chokes instead and finally has to take a sip of her beer. “Imagine having one of the most personal moments of your life broadcast to the world,” she says when she finishes coughing, using the knife in her hand to throw the carrots into a plastic bowl before addressing the mushrooms. “And the subject of that moment being your current roommate.”
“You’re the one that put it in a bottle and threw it into Lake Ontario,” Amanda points out. Akko wants to throw her knife across the dorm and pin her stupid friend to the wall with it, but instead she grits her teeth, washes the mushrooms, and slaps them down on the cutting board. The chicken is slowly cooking behind her and she wishes she could say it smells good, but the thought of eating right now makes her stomach turn.
“Like I fucking knew how big the lake was or, I don’t know, that anybody would ever find it,” Akko blurts through her teeth. “Imagine if somebody found your phone and read you and Lotte’s conversation on the evening news.”
Amanda’s face wrinkles with confusion. “Why would that be embarrassing? What’s Lotte got to do with this?”
“You’re dense,” Akko mutters. She slices the mushrooms, avoiding nicking her finger like she did last time when everything got covered in blood and she had to throw it out. “You can’t even see what’s right in front of you.”
“I’m dense?” Amanda laughs. She sits up, turning down the volume on whatever show Amanda picked for background noise that they’ve both been ignoring. “You can’t seriously think Diana actually came to this school for the skating program. There’s tons better in other countries. Hell, she could be standing right in front of you telling you she loves you and you’d find some way to gaslight yourself into believing she’s telling you she hates you.”
“No, Akko,” Diana had said. “I love you.”
Amanda was wrong, there. Akko believed her.
The chirp of a key card brings Akko’s world to a halting still.
She freezes, eyes locked down where she is mid-slice into a mushroom, listening to the door slowly creak open, bringing with it a fresh wave of cold air, and close. Out of the corner of her eye she can see the edge of Diana’s boots, still caked with snow and beginning to melt onto the floor. Amanda has gone quiet, her torso twisted to look at Diana. The only sound is the television on low volume. Akko recognizes Guy Fieri's voice.
“Akko.”
Akko flinches before realizing that Diana’s voice is soft, quiet. There is no hint of anger, no hint of malice, no hint of even a scold lacing into the way she has said her name. Akko looks up, her breath heavy and loud in her skull, to find Diana staring at her. It’s clear she did not bundle up enough for the blizzard that is barreling through Toronto tonight—her fingers are white, her nose and cheeks a wind-scorned red—and she’s shivering enough to cause a barely perceptible twitch in her jaw. Her hair is wild beneath her winter hat, a few flakes of snow caught in the tangles and slowly beginning to melt. Her leg, too, is stiff with a hitching limp when she takes a tentative step forward.
“Hey, Diana.” Akko can barely hear her own voice. She turns to face her, a nervous laugh betraying how anxiety has taken a firm grip on her entire body. “Weird day, huh?” she adds, realizing how lame it is but unable to stop herself.
“Something like that.” Diana’s laugh is as forced and as jarring as Akko’s. She nibbles at a chapped bit of skin on her lips, one hand clenching as she rubs feeling back into her fingers and palm. “I, uh—”
She steps forward. Akko steps back.
Diana freezes.
“Hey, Akko. Could you, uh, put down the knife?”
Akko looks down and sees that the knife she is slicing mushrooms with is still clutched in her right hand. “Oh. Right. Uh, yakisoba.” She motions to the counter, where all the vegetables are sitting, and in a heartbeat Akko realizes she has gestured with the knife because Diana is closing the distance between them and closing a frozen hand around hers.
Akko lets her fingers go slack, lets Diana take the knife and gently set it down next to the mushrooms that she still hasn’t finished slicing. Her gaze travels to Diana’s hand, gentle but ice on her own, to Diana’s eyes, ice but warm as they search Akko’s face.
“Diana, I—”
Diana is shivering as her other hand reaches up, cups Akko’s cheek, and Akko now knows she wasn’t rubbing her hand to warm it for herself but for this, like she anticipated this, planned this. Akko takes a gulp of air, her eyes refusing to leave Diana’s.
“You were worth the walk.”
The words are quiet. Whispered. Akko closes her eyes, feeling Diana’s thumb gently drag across her cheekbone, and hears her own voice. No video, no Instagram reel, just the memory of a song heard by an empty house but meant for the girl standing in front of her.
Was it worth the walk
Just far enough
To hold me in your eyes?
“Akko.”
Akko opens her eyes.
“Can you do the rest for me?” Her voice wavers. “I’m not—I mean, I’m…” Diana hesitates, the corners of her lips tugging into a nervous smile. “I’m scared.”
The past echoes. Akko is scared, too. Her blood is surging hot in her veins as her heart thrashes against her chest. She is more than scared. She is terrified.
But, this time, she won’t admit it. Diana has asked her for courage, and life has taught Akko she has plenty to share.
“Gladly,” Akko says instead. She forgets about Amanda, about dinner, about her video, about everything except for the girl who finally came back for her.
She reaches up, sliding her fingers across the side and back of Diana’s neck, weaving through thick, wavy blonde strands, and gently pulls. She leads Diana across the chasm where her bravery has ended and, shoving her own self-restraint off the ledge, presses her lips hard against Diana’s with an exhale that feels like finally.
Or, Akko thinks as Diana takes her in her arms and kisses her back like she is relieving the gnawing hunger of a five-year famine: final.