Sitting in front of a computer doing statistical analysis is really dull. So
is reading the CNN website for the hundredth time. That and I want to have a
new fanfic written by the next ACen if it kills me.
Here's the beginning of one. "From the Diary of Amy Bellette" is a working
title with implications that may or may not become clearer, depending on how
much I get written. Amy's a character in a book, that much I'll give you. Five
bonus points for identifying author and title. Okay, ten.
Comments will be awarded bonus points according to merit.
Paul Corrigan
corrig11@pilot.msu.edu
--
On Being Asked for a War Poem
I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.
W. B. Yeats
(Beloved of all good Irishmen, as well as Hotaru Tomoe, aka Sailor Saturn.
But that is another story, and shall be told another day. Once I think of a
plot.)
---
In the year 2003 AD the Babylonian Empire lay in ruins, mourned by none but
scoundrels and knaves. Foreigners roamed the streets, many from Crawford,
Texas...
Okay, I'm stopping that right there. It's silly. Even if it weren't, I'm not
qualified to write a story like that anyway. What do I know about war?
What do I know about much of anything else?
---
>From the Diary of Amy Bellette
---
A _Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo_ ("Karekano") fanfic by Paul Corrigan
---
_Karekano_ concept devised by Masami Tsuda
---
Mom and Dad were a match made in hell, in retrospect. I'd have been glad of
anything that kept them from drifting apart any more than they already have.
But did it have to be this they had in common?
He, the Communist who didn't think Kim Jong Il could be that bad a guy,
opposed the war because America was for it. Mom was against it because she was
a good Catholic and the pope was against it, and she wasn't about to second-
guess the pope. So of course on February 14, they both agreed they wanted to go
to an antiwar rally, out in Shibuya of all places. Kyo, being older and wiser,
had found an excuse to be elsewhere that evening, so Mom and Dad insisted I go
too.
"No."
"How can you be so self-centered at a time like this? The world's at the
mercy of a maniac and we have to stop..."
"I know, Dad. You've only told me the president of America's a religious
maniac a hundred times already. I don't know how standing in the cold in
Shibuya's gonna make him sane all of a sudden. I still have college exams to
take, and an article to write, and homework. I reckon if Dubya's determined to
blow us all to kingdom come, I don't want to die without getting into college,
so I think I'll stay home and get some real work done, okay?"
"Aya, I actually don't mind if you take a break for something like
this."
"Mom, I'll just be in the way. Nobody cares what schoolgirls think anyway.
Look, you two go and make yourselves heard, and I'll let you know if you get on
TV, okay? Heck, it's Valentine's. Don't you want some time to yourselves?"
"Suit yourself," said Mom. She actually seemed all right about it, but Dad
just gave me a look like he'd hold me personally responsible if Tokyo was
bombed that very night. I hate having a socially aware father.
So off they went, and as they went out the door I said, "Bye kids! Don't
you get yourselves arrested now!" Just to piss off Dad. Dad boasts about how he
got arrested at rallies back in the day, whenever anyone gives him an excuse,
or even when they don't. You ask him what he did at work, or about me going to
college, or something else that actually matters in real life now, and he
doesn't want to discuss it.
The rally did get on TV when I checked. About 6000. They sang Imagine and
Give Peace a Chance. Sounded like a John Lennon tribute out there. I didn't see
Mom and Dad on the TV; I didn't see a lot of people my age either, and the
report said it was mostly middle aged folks. I'd bet anything a lot of them
just wanted an excuse to feel young again. "You say you want a Revolution..."
They didn't come home that night; Dad called at an ungodly hour to say
they'd be getting a hotel in Shibuya. Sounded drunk to me. Figures. It was
Valentine's after all.
Tell you this, he didn't sound like someone who was terribly concerned
about this war he'd been ranting on about now for months. Nice to know I'm not
the only self-centered one out there.
---
Actually, it's not very nice, but at least I'm not the only one.
Still and all...(As Grandmother would say, may she rest in peace.)
(Hold that thought.)
---
So while Mom and Dad were off trying to save the world and relive the early
years of their relationship (not necessarily in that order) I was trying to
write my article. Speech, rather.
Okay, I can see why George W. Bush, President of the United States of
America, needs a speechwriter. He's got other stuff going on. Why Yukino
Miyazawa, president of the student body of Hokuei High School, Kawasaki,
Kanagawa, needs a speechwriter is a mystery to me.
(Oh, that's right--she's aiming for Tokyo University, along with her honey,
so she has more studying to do than me. Yukinon's got to be deluding herself if
she think's she's going to marry that guy. There's got to be plenty of other
guys at Todai or Waseda or Meiji or wherever the heck she goes that are just as
smart, well-connected and handsome as Soichiro Arima. And saner to boot. The
more I hear about the guy from Yukino, the more he scares me, no matter how
nice she spins it. A freaking obsessive. I actually think she's tired of him
too, not enough to dump him right now, maybe, but she'll try to shake him off as
soon as something of comparable quality comes along. I'll bet anything forty
years from now she'll be Prime Minister, elected just in time to lead Japan's
human beings in their civil war against their robot servants I shouldn't
wonder, and he'll still be stalking her and making her security guards earn
their paychecks.)
How our peerless leader suckered me into writing her commencement speech for
her is an even greater mystery.
Oh, that's right. All her New Year's money _and_ copies of her anally-
retentive notes, previously seen only by Arima (so she says). Not to mention I
do owe her a couple of favors. And it would be unprofessional to turn down
work, I guess.
I did ask her, though, "Why don't you sweettalk your husband into doing it,
if you really can't be bothered?" (Meaning Arima. They're not actually married,
of course, though I wouldn't be surprised if he'd proposed already.)
"He's in the same boat as me. Too much hard-core studying and his own speech
to write, which he's too proud to ask for help with..." (Him being student body
vice-president and all.)
"Refuse to have sex with him until he agrees to your demands. That ought to
work, right?"
"I'm not sure I could hold out long enough. I'm up for it more than he is..."
"Okay, Yukino, that was _way_ more information than I needed. Um. What about
Kano? I've taught her everything I know about writing."
And Yukino just smirked and said, "But you know it better, right, Aya?"
There was clearly no way out of this one alive.
---
Kano Miyazawa's a good kid. Yukino talks a good game about living as her
true self, but I think Kano actually manages it much better than Yukino ever
did. That was the topic I managed to hammer out with our peerless leader.
"Living as our true selves." When Yukino and Arima enrolled at Hokuei I guess
they were both real posers, pretending to be perfect students, then they caught
on to each other, I guess, and decided they didn't want to be about that any
more. (Though Arima hasn't changed all that much from when I knew him at
junior high.) Then they start dating and Tsubasa Shibahime'd claimed Arima for
himself long ago, so she gets pissed and starts hassling Yukino, and Maho
Isawa decides she wants to be queen of Hokuei too and makes the whole of
Yukino's class hassle her because she's dating Arima and they're jealous, and
me and Rika and Tsubaki Sakura had to rein in Tsubasa, so that's how I met
Yukino Miyazawa. She became my friend mostly because (back then) she had nowhere
else to turn.
Kano--first time I met _her_ was when she showed up on my doorstep, all
but offering to sell her soul so I could write a love poem to Hideaki Asaba, of
all people, because she didn't have a clue. For Valentine's, of course. I wrote
a book, you see. SF, pretty crappy SF at that. But she was absolutely over the
moon that Ayaki Sawai was a friend of her sister's. She really thought I was
God. I could tell by her face. You couldn't put on a pose like that. It was
frightening. Yukino--I dunno. I think she thinks acting real is acting weird,
or saying stuff nobody wanted to know, like how often your boyfriend wants it.
Seems like she's forcing it, like it's just another pose. Maybe Arima knows
Yukino's true self. Maybe.
How do you write SF? Or anything at all? Two ways. You can read a bunch of
SF books until you think you can fake it. That's the easy way, and reading back
my own book, it shows. First off you've got to make darn sure they're good
books you're faking. So, for instance, if you want to write SF that doesn't
suck, you don't read crappy books by Ayaki Sawai that she wrote so she could
buy a laptop with the advance, with which she'd write the Great Japanese Novel,
or so her mother was convinced.
Then there's the hard way--write about something you actually know something
about. I don't know anything about living as my true self. I know a bit about
what I can _do_: I can write, sorta. I don't know what I _am_. What am I, a
philosopher? Forget Prime Minister. Maybe Yukinon should be a cult leader,
with me ghostwriting all her self-help books with New Age covers.
I should have turned Yukino down. Same way I turned Kano down. I basically
told her to forget about Asaba, which she eventually did, because even the best
love poem wasn't going to make him like her back. Told her some cockin' bull
story about some guy I'd written love poems to. Couldn't tell her I didn't know
how to write about love because I'd never been in love. Nothing that wouldn't be
even worse crap than the stuff I actually do write.
She comes over quite often these days. Kano. Reads my drafts. C&Cs. I guess
she thinks of me as her sensei, or some darn thing. Yukino made me read
something Kano'd written--I didn't want to, but she forced me to. About lost
love. It actually wasn't bad. So one thing led to another and we started
collaborating. Eventually she began to realize I wasn't God and she might
actually have more talent than me, really.
---
Okay. I can do this.
One angle. Living in truth. Vaclav Havel. Make it sound a lot more
interesting than it is.
"Vaclav Havel, the former President of the Czech Republic, during his long
years of dissent in communist Czechoslovakia, wrote most of his political works
while in jail for offenses against the state. He used to joke, when he showed
up somewhere unprepared to make a speech, that he'd had no time to prepare
remarks because he hadn't spent the previous night in prison. Anybody who's
spent the last three years studying for college entrance exams will know what
he means."
Crap. Even Dad wouldn't find that funny. Erase, start again.
Another angle. More personal.
"When I first enrolled at Hokuei High three years ago, I was far more
perfect than I had ever been or ever would be again..."
Crap. Why rehash how she met Arima? Folks don't care to know about her love
affairs. No more than they already know, anyway. Erase.
I don't know about living as my true self. I don't know about love, either.
Or about war.
I haven't lived through a war. Or fought in one. I've only seen pictures on
TV, like they were pics fom the latest action movie. How the hell would I
_know_ that it was hell? How would Dad? More like an excuse to have a party
than anything else to him.
[Amy Bellette goes here, along with Aya's grandmother in Nagasaki]
When somebody really has something important to say that somebody else might
need to know, they keep it to themselves. So when I've had something important
to tell Rika, I kept it to myself.
My brain's in overdrive. I haven't written a word of the sermon, and already
I need a cigarette.
---
Ah. To my smoking position. Tobacco. Chilly evening to be smoking outside.
I can hear Yukino already. "Tobacco's bad news, tobacco's bad news, tobacco's
bad news!" Tell it to your husband, Yukinon. Ah, but he doesn't smoke, right?
Good little rich boy.
"Aya?"
I looked to my right.
"Are you smoking again?"
I looked at Rika in the electric lamplight. Usually she'd bring me food and
make me eat it while she watched adoringly. She didn't tonight; she was
standing ramrod straight in her overalls, empty-handed, her hands clasped
together. She hadn't even her barrettes in. Made her look very different. More
grown-up. Prettier. She'd spoken a bit nervously, and she was smiling at me,
not beaming madly like she usually did. Wanly. Blushing just a bit.
Was she trembling?
I put the cigarette out.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"Why didn't you say you were coming over? We could have gone to a movie.
Didn't feel like hanging around here anyway. Told my folks I had work to do so
I wouldn't have to go with them."
"May I come in?"
"Sure."
---
She came in, and she sat on the couch, and I made some tea for Rika and put
it front of her. She didn't touch it.
I sat beside her. "We could watch a movie. Got to be something on..."
"No. Leave it off."
"Oh. Okay."
So we sat on the couch together, and she seemed to settle down a bit, not
fidgeting with her hands as much. I'd forgotten about the cigarette completely.
"Is everything all right?"
"Is nobody else here?"
"They all went out. Mom and Dad to Shibuya. Kyo to...wherever Kyo goes. I
dunno..."
"Hm."
"So, yeah, there's just boring old me here. Is something wrong?"
She smiled more broadly, and giggled nervously. "No."
"Then..."
Then she leaned into me, and shut her eyes.
"No, nothing's wrong. I don't think I really had the courage anyway..."
"Courage? To do what?"
"It's a secret. You won't tell will you?"
"Why would I do that?" I whispered that, whispering because she was
whispering. In the theater, when I'd drag her to a dull movie and she'd fall
asleep she'd lean her head against mine, but it was different without her
barrette poking into my arm.
All my previous agitation was gone. I'd never felt quite this peaceful.
Ever.
She looked lovely without the barrettes.
"I like this."
She looked up at me, all smiles. "You do?"
"I do."
She nestled back down on my shoulder, giggling, not so nervously now.
Happily. That's it. I was happy.
"We should do it more often then."
I was happy.
"Aya?"
"Yes?"
"Have you ever been in love?"
---
All fangirls must die
---
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