Chapter 2
It's a test day, but Megumi spends the rest of it weightless, walking on clouds and sunshine.
She laughs openly and smiles easily. She jokes and fools around with her friends, unveiling a buoyant and easygoing facet of her personality seldom seen outside of her tight circle.
It's bound to attract trouble, but Megumi doesn't care, Satoru-san is home.
"Ano, Fushiguro-san, do you have some spare time?"
It's lunch. They spent the last 15 minutes tussling, bitting, elbowing, shoving, and outright slapping a crowd of rowdy students for flavored bread. They appear harassed and disheveled, but there's laughter between them, offers to share portions of their food, and bartering and trading underway.
Megumi pretends not to hear him. Like she pretended not to notice the notes left on her desk and the letters in her shoe locker.
Tsumiki's graduated, moved onto to high school. The time of obliging alphas and upstart betas, playing the game of niceties, and extending courtesy to people who believe they are owed her time and energy is over. Though she and Tsumiki graduated from the same school of gentility, their master a jack of many trades but known as their nanny, Megumi and Tsumiki differed. Their roles, the woes and challenges of their primary and secondary genders were drilled into their heads. But that is where it ended; it wasn't a handicap but a fact of life, so how did they overcome it, how did they capitalize off it, how did it become a strength, a weapon?
Tsumiki stepped into the role with aplomb and became an exemplary student.
Megumi is obstinate and self-willed, she is a brute. She behaved because she wanted to please her sister and disappointed Tsumiki more times than not. So she removed herself from the equation and gave Tsumiki the junior high experience she craved. Their paths deviated and so Megumi decides to be true to herself.
"I'll trade you my melonpan for your curry."
"Fushiguro-san-"
"Let's split it," Ami proposes, her eyes sparkle with mirth.
Her friends participate.
"That works," Megumi looks at the queue. "Maybe we should get lunch; a balanced meal is important."
"Ugh, you sound like my mom," Kyouya complains.
"Chinen-"
"Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!"
"Fushiguro-san!"
Megumi ignores him. She doesn't have to entertain him, play by the rules of polite society, or oblige. She walks away and treats him like an unwanted gnat buzzing by her ear.
She shrugs expectation; she shrugs obligation.
There's no altercation.
It's freeing.
---
"Me-gu-mi!"
She hates when she does this.
She asked that she doesn't.
But at this moment, she doesn't care.
Megumi barely hears her friend's parting words; she sees Satoru-san leaning against the car and acts impulsively.
Acts instinctively.
The alpha meets her halfway.
She collides with Satoru-san; the alpha laughs breathlessly and steadies her. Megumi hugs her waist tight.
"I take it you missed me," Satoru-san teases.
Megumi doesn't respond, the answer is obvious.