explosion
“I get why you take the long way home.”
Mai looks up from her English textbook, stone-faced. Was she to pretend that she didn’t hear Azula vomit her guts out in her bathroom just moments ago?
Now wearing a spare sleeping dress that she had grown out of, Azula joins her on her bed. She sighs, stretching her thin legs out before her, all pale bruised skin and knobby knees. “I think I prefer having an absentee mother over an overbearing one like yours.”
“You have toothpaste on your face,” Mai says after a pregnant pause. Azula’s hand comes up, feeling around blindly. Putting her book aside, she reaches out to wipe it off the younger girl’s chin with her thumb.
“Thanks. Oh—” Azula springs out of the bed, grabbing some sheet masks from atop her dresser. “Your mom brought these earlier. Do you mind?”
She shrugs.
“Perfect,” Azula smiles. Mai thinks it loses some of its unsettling effect without the red lipstick. “We can be just like normal teenage girls.”
Settling cross-legged across each other, Mai sits still as Azula tears open the plastic packet, pulling out the moist cotton inside. She closes her eyes, letting the younger girl lean in to position the sheet on her face.
“Why did you come here?” she chances the question once again.
“God,” Azula groans irately. “Fine, if you hate me so much, I’ll go.”
“I was just asking,” Mai snaps. “You don’t need to blow up at me every time you want to avoid the question.”
“Fine, I just wanted some company.”
“And I was your only option?”
“Yeah, I think you’re the only one I have right now,” Azula says, uncharacteristically soft, after a pause so long that Mai had opened her eyes.
“What about Ty Lee?”
“That’s different.” Azula’s mouth sets in a straight line. “She doesn’t deserve this.”
Deserve what? Mai ponders. Letting her eyes close again, she quips in her deadpan tone, “And I do?”
Azula allows a small huff of amusement escape her lips.
“You look like your mom,” she observes thoughtfully, smoothing the edges of the mask along Mai’s jawline with her fingertips. “Same bone structure.”
“I get that a lot.”
“Me too. With my own mother, I mean. I don’t really see it,” she says nonchalantly, rubbing her hands together as she withdraws and straightens her back.
Mai’s eyes flutter open. “Do you have a picture?”
“No.” Azula picks up the other mask. “Here, do mine.”
“Seriously?” Mai asks, accepting the packet.
Azula gives her a wooden look. “It doesn’t exactly bring me great joy looking at the woman who gave me emotional trauma.”
“Oh.”
“You could ask Zuzu,” she yields peevishly. “He probably does.”
Mai rips open the plastic, gingerly pulling out the mask inside. “Do they live together?”
“To my knowledge, no. He lives with our kooky uncle.” Azula’s eyes fall shut as Mai places the cold cotton sheet on her skin and begins to even it out. “But they were close. He was always her favorite.”
“So why don’t they?”
“I don’t know,” Azula shrugs one bony shoulder. “He probably still doesn’t know where she is.”
Mai’s eyebrows knit in confusion.
“Done?” Azula prompts before she could ask any more questions, eyes open.
“Uh-huh.”
“Great.” She picks up her phone. “Well, we have fifteen minutes to wait.”
Mai retracts to her original position, rubbing the remaining serum on her hands into her skin. After an internal debate, she decides to bring up her earlier concern. “I heard you.”
“What?”
“In the bathroom after dinner.” Mai gestures to the en suite with a tilt of her head. “Why do you do that?”
“Why do you cut yourself?” Azula returns darkly after a moment of consideration. She smiles at Mai’s narrow-eyed glare, lowering her voice as she leans in conspiratorially. “Yeah, I saw your disgusting little blade collection. Where do you do it? Your stomach?” Her hand is hot to the touch when it settles on Mai’s knee, creeping up slowly. “Your thighs?”
“What the fuck are you doing?” Mai jerks her leg sharply, sending Azula’s hand falling away. “You’re sick, Azula.”
“So are you,” Azula says matter-of-factly as she draws back to a comfortable distance. “My mother makes me miserable too. We’re all just doing whatever we need to do to cope.”
“What do you mean?” Mai asks cautiously.
“Nothing,” Azula huffs. “Forget it, I’m not telling you.”
“Why not?” Mai retorts. “I thought I was your friend.”
Azula’s haughty posture falls, the hard countenance of her face softening. “It started way before this, but she got into an accident when I was eight.”
“Shit,” Mai says, feeling bad, and in part regretting she had asked. She wants to say they don’t have to talk about it but Azula speaks before she could.
“Yeah. The head trauma caused temporary memory loss, so during that time she completely forgot about us.” Azula pulls her knees to her chest. “One day she went missing. She left everything and just… vanished. Father hired some private investigators and they eventually found her, but he said she didn’t want to go back. She’d started a new life away from us. The bitch went and got herself a new man.”
“That must have been hard for you and your dad,” Mai says sympathetically. And Zuko.
“Me? Please,” Azula scoffs, waving a hand dismissively. “And don’t feel sorry for him. He’s a piece of shit. I might hate her, but she had the spine to leave him, so I’ll give credit where credit is due.”
“I see.”
“She never loved him, anyway,” she continues as if Mai hadn’t spoken. “Their marriage was all for political power and status. God, I don’t even know if she loved anyone but herself and Zuko. But I guess Father did love her… at one point. In any case, he started to put his hands on her. So when she got the chance, she took it and ran.”
Azula has a skewed perception of love if she was convinced that her father truly loved her mother, Mai thinks, but she chooses not to voice the thought and stay silent, hanging on to her every word.
“After she said she wasn’t coming back, he was a wreck. He was so angry. He took that out on her precious son. I was eleven when I watched him burn Zuko one day. That’s why he has that ugly scar on his face.” Azula pauses when she catches Mai’s horror-struck expression. “He hasn’t told you?”
“What did he do?” Mai asks, trying to think of anything Zuko could have done to deserve such a terrible deed and coming up blank.
“Spoke out of turn,” Azula answers easily.
“Are you serious?”
She shrugs. “I wasn’t there, but what everyone said was that he interrupted one of Father’s investors during a big business meeting. I remember when they got home that day, though—Father was shouting and Uncle was trying to calm him down. I thought it was just the same old shit. Father said something about teaching Zuko a lesson and dragged him to the kitchen. Then I heard the screaming and begging… I ran in just in time to see him push my brother’s face right into the stove.”
“I’ll never forget the sound. And god, the smell…” Azula mutters, rubbing her hands up and down on her arms as they prickled with goosebumps. “Luckily for Zuzu, Uncle was there. He was taken to hospital right away, so he didn’t go blind in that eye. He missed school for a year. Recovery didn’t take that long, but I guess he was humiliated. I know if it were me, I’d sooner kill myself than show my face to anyone ever again.”
“Nothing happened to your father?”
Azula’s lip curls. “You can get away with anything when your pockets are deep enough.”
“I guess that’s true,” Mai says dispiritedly, feeling as if she had just watched a hit and run upon hearing about such injustice.
“You know what’s strange? Even after what he did, Zuzu’s still trying to win him over. He’s like a little puppy.” Azula shakes her head. “Apparently he still sends birthday presents and some other stupid shit to our address. It’s pathetic, really. But it’s funny.”
“That’s sad,” Mai says ruefully, feeling a slight twinge in her chest at the mental image; Zuko, alone, thoughtfully putting his all into his gifts only for them to meet whatever wretched destiny awaits them at the place he used to call home.
“It’s pretty amusing to me,” Azula chuckles belligerently.
Mai scowls at her attitude. “Seriously? He’s your brother.”
“So?”
“How could you say that?” Mai asks in disbelief.
Azula turns her gaze at her, eyes blazing with barely contained rage. She rips the mask off of her face and balls it up in her hand. “You see, Mai, it’s pretty fucking hard to feel sorry for him when he always gets whatever he wants. He had our mother’s attention all to himself. She thought I was a monster, while in her eyes he could never do anything wrong. Our stupid fatso uncle, too. He has his stupid fucking friends. He’s got everything. Even Ty Lee and you.” The watery substance from the mask runs down from her fist to her elbow, dripping onto her borrowed nightdress. “So forgive me if I find his desperation for our father's approval laughable. Did I answer all your questions, Mai?”
Mai hesitates. “Are things okay at home? With your dad?”
Azula’s brow twitches, agitated. “That’s a stupid thing to ask.”
Her words hang in the air for an uncomfortable spell as Mai tries and fails to find which words to say except, “Sorry.”
“Whatever,” Azula says apathetically. Mai gets an eerie feeling watching her expression shift quickly from anger to nothingness in the blink of an eye. “You can take that off, you look stupid.”
After the previous night’s restless and awkward sleeping arrangement, Mai finally breaks the tense silence between the two of them as they strolled along the sidewalk, the school building looming over them a short distance away.
“I want to apologize about last night,” she forces the words out. She steals a glance at Azula, who gives no indication of having heard her, stone-faced with her eyes fixed straight ahead.
“I’m sorry for digging all that up,” she says in reference to last night’s sensitive subjects, although she feels that it might have done some good, that Azula did need to get her feelings about them out of her system somehow. “I should have minded my business.”
Azula sighs. “It’s only fair after I showed up at your house out of the blue, so it’s fine. Sorry for snapping at you, I guess.”
Mai smiles weakly, looking at the ground.
“Did I get you in trouble with your parents?”
“It’s fine.”
“I can get my father to endorse yours, if you want,” Azula offers, no emotion in her voice.
“Doesn’t matter to me either way,” Mai says unaffectedly.
Azula concedes with a shrug, electing to walk quietly as they pass the school gates, approaching the shoe lockers.
“Well, now we both have dirt on each other,” she says after a stretch of companionable silence - as companionable as can be for the two of them, at least. “I guess we are officially friends.”
Mai rolls her eyes. “It’s not about having something to hold over each other’s heads.”
“But it is,” Azula counters, cocking her head in mock confusion. “How else would I keep you?”
“You could try being nice.”
“Ha. As if.”
“Morning!” Ty Lee says radiantly, bounding over with sprightly steps as soon as she spots them. She looks between the two, brows furrowing and mouth pulling into a frown. “You guys look tired.”
“Aren’t you observant,” Azula drawls. Mai lours at her disapprovingly as Ty Lee laughs uneasily.
“She decided to show up at my house last night and overstay her welcome,” Mai says in explanation. Azula ignores the jab, preoccupied with slipping her shoes on.
“Ooh, you had a sleepover?” Ty Lee asks with a sideways glance at Azula. For a split-second, her smile falters and Mai thinks there was a quick flash of hurt across her face.
“Trust me, it was anything but fun,” she deadpans, starting to switch into her shoes. She straightens up afterwards and breaks the awkward silence that had fallen over them, offering her friend a small smile. “I’ll see you guys later.”
Ty Lee smiles back, so forced that it looks like a grimace. “Yeah.”