An Angel Once Kissed Meilan

In a remote little seaside town in Hokkaido, there was an old wall, flaking with age, painted with an angel spreading its wings. Long ago, it really did seem as if an angel had once passed through there. My name was Meilan. I had none of the courage of those heroines who share my syllables, none of the bright boldness people attach to beautiful names. I was the sort of girl people forgot. A camel-like creature with her head always buried, lonely by habit. A fossil-grade shut-in.

Makino Haruka Has Vanished

Everything I owned in the world fit inside a tiny room: a laptop, a black cat, a camera, and one whole wall covered in photographs. In those photographs, a brown-haired boy in a white school uniform never once looked toward the lens. He stood beneath the angel wall with an umbrella. He walked a dog in the park. He bent over a book in class. He turned his head in my direction. But Haruka Makino never saw me. Every time he turned, I only grew more flustered. I had to whip around at once, pull my white mask tighter and yank the brim of my cap lower, pretending I was busy reading ads pasted to the utility pole or crouching down to grin foolishly at some stray dog until Haruka finally turned back around, puzzled, and moved on. Loving Haruka Makino was my deepest secret. Maybe it began at the first-year assembly where I saw him speak. Maybe it began when he pulled me out of the pool after I fell in. Or maybe it began when he moved into the house across the street from mine. Every morning he took exactly one hundred and thirty-four steps to the bus stop, bought milk and steamed dumplings from the old woman there, sat in the second seat on the left on Route 14, and opened a book. I knew all of that. Yet one day, for all my careful knowing, I suddenly couldn't find him anywhere.

I Want a Super-Ultra-Gigantic Ice Cream Sundae

Every Saturday afternoon I sat in a corner of Left Bank Cafe with my laptop for hours. I always wore my white mask there. I didn't want to see people's contemptuous eyes skimming across my face before they leaned toward one another to whisper and point. I wanted to stay hidden forever inside the damp little world of my own breathing. That afternoon, slouched into the sofa, I opened Haruka Makino's blog. It always played the theme from A Scene at the Sea, and the page was all sky-blue ocean, sunlight, white clouds, tree shadows, clean sand, as if you could hear waves hitting shore and shells tumbling over the beach. I searched and searched for some clue about where he had gone that day, and found nothing, except one line in his latest entry: Today, I met the one I was destined for again. Something in my chest jolted. I knew I could never truly have a boy as lovely as Haruka, but my heart still hurt. His destined one had to be some dazzlingly beautiful girl. Then a voice asked what I wanted to drink. I looked up in shock and there he was, smiling at me with eight bright teeth, dressed in the cafe's uniform and tilting his head. My face flamed. I ducked at once, covering my mask with my hands as if I could hide behind it a second time. All I asked for was water. He came back a minute later, but before I could catch my breath, he suddenly returned to my table again and asked whether we'd met somewhere before. I denied it at once, but he kept trying to place me until, with immense relief, he decided I was the underclassman from school. Then he told me I should come often and he'd give me a discount. Giddy and terrified, I lifted one hand timidly and said, from behind the mask, "Then can I have a super-ultra-gigantic ice cream sundae?"

Summer Has Gone Missing

My black cat was called Summer, a name that suited her not at all. One morning she vanished along with my cap and mask. The milk dish on the floor had been licked clean. I guessed she was sprawled in some sunlit corner of the street, belly full, not caring in the least whether I lived or died. Still, I went out to find her, and for the first time in years I did it without my cap or mask. The fresh air felt strange against my skin. But the May sunlight was too sharp, and the old scar on the right side of my face began to sting, so I hurriedly pulled my hair down to cover it. As always, I passed by Haruka Makino's house. It looked like the palace of a fairy-tale prince, with its green lawn, stone path, and roses climbing over the fence. Every time I stepped out, I walked by there and whispered good morning to him in a voice so soft that only I could hear it. That morning, when I stopped outside his gate to say it, the gate opened. Haruka stood there with Summer in his arms while I froze like prey caught in the open. I went up to take the cat, but the ungrateful creature leapt out of his arms and back into the house, heading straight for his fish tank and pawing at the glass like a tiny demon. I fetched her, thanked him, and tried to slip out. At that exact moment, the warm sky darkened, thunder rolled, and rain crashed down. Haruka came out, caught my arm, lifted his red umbrella, and said he would walk me home. Beneath the umbrella, I bent over my cat like an old woman and didn't even dare steal a sideways glance at him. Along the way he handed me my missing cap and mask, asked my name, laughed when I mumbled Meilan and compared me to an ostrich, and then took my hand at a crossing because I was too busy staring at my own toes to notice the red light. I had spent so long pressing my palm against photographs and imagining what it might feel like to hold his hand, and now I was actually inside his warmth. At my building, over the hiss of rain and traffic, I heard him say very clearly, "I'm Haruka Makino from Class 3-1. Meilan the ostrich, will you be my girlfriend?" And I heard myself answer, "I'm sorry. I already like someone else." The rain stopped then, but inside me the storm only grew worse. Haruka held my shoulders and searched my face with clear eyes wet enough to seem about to spill. The answer I had given shocked even me. I smiled, turned, and ran upstairs with tears burning in my eyes and the scar on my cheek hurting so fiercely it felt alive. Princes do not know that a Cinderella who has lost both feet can never put on the glass slipper. Haruka Makino had played a cruel, sorrowful joke on me. He couldn't possibly know that stupid me might actually believe it.

The Violin Is About to Break

When I was little I believed clouds were made from sheep and the sun from a giant glowing sunflower, that the sky was a pure pasture full of blue lakes and flying angels. I once drew that picture in crayons, only for my drunken father to tear it to pieces. The scraps flew through the air and my heart shattered with them. I gathered them up in my tiny hands, but a whole corner was missing and I couldn't put the picture back together. While I crawled on the floor looking for it, Father struck me across the face. That afternoon, in the last class of the day, I sat dozing in the back row with my mask strings looped around my ears and old memories circling in my head. They no longer made me sad. The man rotting in prison had long since forfeited the right to be called my father. I slipped out through the back of the classroom and wandered down the silent corridor until I came to the music room. Then a sharp slap cracked through the stillness. I looked through the window and saw Ka Yuki shrieking at Haruka Makino while smashing his violin. I knew that violin. It was the one I had bought him for his birthday with the money I earned delivering milk for twenty-eight days and cleaning my landlady's rooms for a month. It wasn't expensive, but it was the only gift I had ever given him. Now Haruka's girlfriend was tearing at its strings and trying to smash it against the wall. I wanted to become that violin and let her break me instead. I couldn't bear to watch something I loved fly apart again the way things had in childhood, but all I could do was cover my eyes in terror. Then Ka Yuki cried out in surprise. When I looked again, the violin was intact, but Haruka was on the floor clutching his arm in pain. He had taken the blow meant for it. His arm was broken and wrapped in thick plaster. The violin lay beside him like a dejected old man, one string still snapped. As he stroked the bow with heartbreak on his face, my own mood lifted strangely, because seeing him treasure that violin so much felt as though he were treasuring me without knowing it. When he discovered I had been outside watching everything, he told me that as compensation for seeing him dumped and humiliated, I now owed him. So I told him I would take care of him.

From This Second On, I Will Grieve Beside Haruka

After that I became the newest waitress at Left Bank Cafe, Haruka Makino's cook, and his cleaning woman. In his beautiful house I was forever rushing around, making sweet-and-sour ribs and fish-fragrant pork, buying milk and dried little fish for Summer, and hanging his absurd strawberry-print comforter out in the sun while he lounged on the sofa and held my cat in his arms. Around him I was always clumsy and breathless, but when I found a dusty old planter box in a corner of his house with several thin letters inside, everything changed. They had been sent from overseas between 1997 and 2003, all of them carrying some variation of the same sentence: Siyuan, we're sorry. We still can't come back this year. The last wasn't even from his parents. It was from the police in California, informing him that both of them had died in a car accident at 12:11 a.m. on May 26, 2003. The letter was wrinkled as though it had once been soaked through. I couldn't begin to imagine the sorrow he had felt. His parents had gone somewhere even farther away than distance, somewhere past even the reach of resentment. That night, after the cafe closed at midnight and Summer had curled up sleeping on the counter, Haruka dragged me to a karaoke room. He ordered too much alcohol for two people and one cat, and then stood under the white light and told me that from 12:11 onward I was going to mourn with him. So I sat in the darkest corner, took off my mask, and drank with him until we both choked and cried. He told me he was afraid time was eating away even the memory of his parents, that when he went to their graves at the equinox he no longer knew what to say, that what remained clearest to him was only the memory of them walking away and of himself left behind. In my mind Haruka had always been the white-shirted boy with a violin or a cat in his arms, smiling brightly. I had never thought of his childhood as a one-person stage show endlessly replaying inside an empty cinema of grief. That made me think of my own father in prison, stripped of alcohol and full of remorse. He remembered throwing a stool at my mother. He remembered pushing me into the sharp corner of the cabinet. He remembered flinging scalding water into my face while trying to hit her. When I went to see him, apologies covered his face like dust, but forgiveness never once came to mind. Haruka drank more and more, then slumped against me and told me I was his Summer. When I protested that I couldn't possibly be his lazy cat, he brushed aside the hair covering the scar on my right cheek, rested his head in the hollow of my neck, and kissed the scar gently, smelling of wine. Half asleep, he whispered that ostriches didn't have to keep burying their heads in the sand forever. They had beautiful wings. They could fly too.

The Warmth in a Palm Can Melt Snowflakes of Happiness

I believed him. I put away my cap and mask, bought a whole bag of bright hair ties, began wearing vivid dresses, and pulled my hair into a clean ponytail that left the scar on my cheek exposed. Everyone pointed and whispered, and whenever I started to lower my head Haruka patted my back and pulled me along until we were both laughing. For the first time, I no longer had to be alone with myself. The rest of the world was only scenery. I needed only to be Haruka Makino's princess. His arm healed. He fixed the violin. One day in the music room, with A Scene at the Sea floating from his instrument, he stopped mid-phrase, came over, and asked whether I liked him. I smiled and said nothing, because I thought my love for him had already been sweet enough while it was still mine alone. Haruka puffed out his cheeks and threatened never to take me on the Ferris wheel or to the sea or into the mountains again, and I had to surrender and promise I would be the one taking him from then on. He pulled my head down onto his shoulder and shoved a spoonful of ice cream into my mouth. The green light filtered through the ivy-covered window and fine dust floated in it like tiny spirits dancing. I prayed silently to those little spirits to let this shredded happiness stay present tense forever. But the music-room door flew open and happiness began melting like snowflakes in a warm hand. My mother stood there with perfect makeup, a glittering diamond on her finger, and all the force of a victor. Seeing her, I remembered how wild and disheveled she had been when Father used to chase us through the house, how I once wiped her tears with my dirty sleeve and promised that someday I would make her happy. Now that Father was in prison, she really had found a different kind of happiness, one so polished it made her almost unrecognizable. She dragged me away from Haruka and told him coldly to find someone else to play with. The dean beside her chimed in that Haruka and Ka Yuki were both excellent students in a critical year and mustn't lose the chance for the violin competition that could recommend him straight into the music department of Tokyo University of the Arts. Between them they shoved me out before Haruka could speak. Over the dean's shoulder, I saw Haruka struggling to break past him, shouting that he wouldn't give me up. Mother told me she was taking me to America for plastic surgery. I touched the scar on my cheek and refused. It was an imperfection, yes, but it had been with me too long; it was part of me. Mother cried then, her makeup washing away, and said she wanted to make up for everything. I told her quietly that I no longer cared enough to weigh right and wrong, and that after all those years, I still loved her. I thought I had convinced her. I thought I could still stay with Haruka. But Haruka gave up the competition and the recommendation because of me, Ka Yuki tried to kill herself, and when I looked through the hospital window and saw Haruka clutching Ka's hand beside her bed with agony on his face, I stopped being able to imagine any future for us. I remembered the entry on his blog, the one about his destined one. Back then he had not even known I existed. Perhaps the beautiful girl in those words had been Ka all along. School leaders sat around me in a ring and accused me of ruining two students who should have brought the school glory. They suspended me and sent me home to reflect. Outside the gate, Ka Yuki's parents slapped me hard and called me the ugliest home-wrecking fox spirit in the world while the other students gathered to stare. Their words cut like needles. I went home in a daze, and while Mother began arranging my transfer to some elite school elsewhere, I stopped her and said, trembling, that I didn't want to go away to school. I wanted to go to America with her.

Only Summer Can Stay Beside Haruka Now

At the airport, sitting beside Mother in the VIP lounge and listening to the footsteps and aircraft beyond the glass, I leaned on her like the child I had once been and felt an enormous hole opening inside me. After forcing myself to tell Haruka the biggest lie of my life, I had no energy left at all. At Ka Yuki's hospital room I told him I was sick of being burdened by him, that I was going to America to fix my face and find a blond foreign boyfriend. He was so shocked he couldn't speak at first, and I had to keep saying worse and worse things because stopping would have killed me. I told him I had only stayed with him out of pity and that the girl in the hospital bed suited him better. I told him boys no one had wanted since childhood were destined to become my lifelong burden. Then I turned and fled before I could see his face. The smell of disinfectant was so strong that tears came instantly. He ran after me and seized my wrist, his eyes bloodshot. I laughed and told him those were tears of joy because I was finally getting what I wanted and could learn to fly. I shook him off and walked away again, but he caught my hand one last time, tears sliding off his nose. He begged me, if I really had to go to America, to write more than once a year and never to go to California or out onto a highway after midnight, because he was afraid of losing me the way he had lost his parents. A year later I sat at home in America with the same blue sea as his old blog set as my desktop background and clicked back into the world I had once watched from the shadows. The blue of the sea and A Scene at the Sea were still there. I had thought time might swallow me whole, but the sorrow in Haruka Makino's dark eyes only came into sharper focus. In his most recent post, he wrote that he had gone into my little room and seen the wall full of photographs and the diary on the desk, and with them all my secrets. He wrote that he had held Summer in his arms and finally understood that the girl called Meilan had moved into his heart long ago, that I was the one he had meant when he wrote about destiny. Only then did I understand that I really had been Haruka Makino's destined one. Destiny had decreed our meeting, and also the absence of an ending. I believe now that an angel really did once kiss Meilan, because it brought me Haruka Makino and a magnificent dream. The bubble of the fairy tale burst in the end, yes, but those shining hours will stay forever in Meilan's heart.