BLUEBELL | Humility

Sho slammed his hands on the table as he yelled at Holly. “You cheater! How could you do this to me?!”

“What? You did it to me first!” she rebuked.

“Hey, hey. Let's all calm down.”

“But, Yuri—”

“Uno,” Tsubaki cuts in, reaching his arm out to the center of the table as he drops a playing card into the pile. “Also, draw four, Yuri.”

“That’s cold, Tsubaki.”

Once the last round of the chaotic card game came to an end, the round coffee table in Holly’s dorm was littered with empty cans of beer and various open snacks as the group of four friends surrounded it.

Tsubaki leans back on his hands as he sits on a floor cushion and takes notice of the single bed in the room.

“Holly, why don’t you have a roommate?”

“I did freshman year. She dropped out halfway through the following year.” She shrugged her shoulders, adding, “Never had a roommate since.”

“Tsubaki, you live off campus, right?" Sho chipped in. "You don’t live in the dorms?”

“No, I have a nearby studio.”

“A music studio?”

Holly rolls her eyes. “Not that kind of studio, idiot.”

“Oh..”

Yuri spits back into his drink, choking into a chuckle, and Tsubaki lightly punches at his side before turning back to Sho.

“Yuri told me you guys have been roommates ever since he started attending here.”

The two roommates throw an arm over each other in response. “That’s right,” Sho grins, and Yuri adds, “This is our third year together.”

Yuri then began to chuckle at the thought. “When I first met this guy, he was so intimidating, I didn’t think we’d ever get along.”

“Oh! I remember you telling me that,” Sho exclaimed.

“What? Intimidating?”

“No, really, Tsubaki.” Yuri closes his eyes as the memory plays in his head.

Yuri had just arrived in Kyoto after leaving his hometown in Nagoya, his freshman eyes sparkling when he stepped onto campus grounds. He’s just about skipping up the stairs on his way to his new dorm, smiling ear to ear at the new life of a university student.

When he puts the key in the lock and swings the door open, he’s met with someone already inside. His raven hair slicked back in a beanie as his head cocks back to look over at the doorway, his blue eyes frigid like ice, staring down at the entering freshman coldly.

Yuri still remembers the chill he felt go down his neck as he took another sip of his drink to mellow out his nerves. 

“It’s scary just remembering it. He’s completely different now, though.”

“I can’t imagine it at all,” Tsubaki comments. “Sho looks like he never gets angry.” 

“Well, no one would know better than Holly,” Yuri says, tipping his can toward the curly redhead, drowsy eyes closed and head leaning back on the edge of the bed.

Sho folds his arms over the table and looks over at her. “We’ve known each other since my first year of high school. She was a second year.”

“So it’s been six years?” Holly thinks aloud as she opens her eyes to the view of her ceiling.

“Seven,” he corrects.

She tilts her head in his direction. “Now that I think about it … back then, what Yuri said, that was....”

“Oh yeah,” Sho caught on. “That was our worst fight, wasn’t it?”

“Huh?!” Tsubaki and Yuri simultaneously spring forward, eyes wide and mouth dropped open.

Yuri’s palms slam onto the table. “You guys had a fight?”

“Well, that could happen between friends, too,” Tsubaki adds.

Holly sits up and lets out a laugh. Elbow propped on the table, and hand under her chin as she reminisced with Sho. “We didn’t talk to each other that whole term.”

“Yeah, I was being really stubborn,” he admits and buries his face into his arms.

Yuri and Tsubaki look back and forth between the two with large, curious eyes. “I really want to know....” is what reads off their face to Holly.

“You boys look so curious,” she says with a smirk. “Want to know?”

Eyes innocent like a doe, Tsubaki and Yuri nod their heads eagerly, and she thinks they look like puppies.

“Sho really doesn’t get upset easily,” she began. “But this was honestly the first time we ever fought like this. Can you believe he was giving me the silent treatment? It was so childish how he was back then....”

Sho tries to avoid her glaring side-eye as he looks down in shame. “Do you really have to tell them…?” He shudders just thinking about it.

“Oh, I’m not going to tell them,” she sneers at him. “You are.”

Holly throws her head back with another can of beer as her wicked laugh fills the room over Sho’s groans of misery, and the other two think the same thing: “Holly’s kind of scary....”

Sho raises his head with a sigh as his back hits the edge of the bed behind him. He then grabs another can of beer, cracks it open, and drains it in one go. He then slams the empty can down on the table with an exaggerated exhale, face flushed, and eyes staring with fire.

“It started my freshman year,” he begins. “There was this girl I was dating for a while. She never liked who I hung out with—especially Holly—for whatever reason, I don’t know. Anyway, she kept telling me to stay away from her.”

Holly sits hugging her legs, head leaning over her knees when she says, “We argued a lot about it back then, didn’t we?”

“Yeah. Well, it also didn’t help that you never had good things to say about her, either,” he let out a soft laugh.

✻ ✻ ✻

The summer of Sho’s freshman year started out in a blaze. As he holed himself up from the heat in his a/c ventilated dorm room, Holly made her arrival after sending him an odd text message earlier in the day.

She enters the room and looks around. “Your roommate isn’t here?”

“No, he’s out of town right now. Said he'd be visiting other grad schools.”

“Is that so?” Her eyes seemed to dart around the room as her feet shuffled beneath her.

“Uhm … are you going to sit down?”

“Right....”

She plops down beside him, leaving enough space in between them for another to sit. And with how nervous and fidgety she was acting, he couldn't help but think she was suddenly going to confess she had feelings for him—but he laughed at the notion in his head—as he knows, that will never happen.

“Hey, Sho.”

“Yeah?”

“When I … left my dorm this morning … I walked past Yumie’s dorm building.” Her words halt in her throat when she lifts her head and catches Sho’s stare.

“What about Yumie?” he asked, voice sharp. “If you’re here to say one more bad thing about my girlfriend, I swear—”

“Sho, she’s cheating on you!”

Holly had turned her whole chest towards him, inching close enough for him to count the three moles on her face. 

“Listen to me, Sho. You’re my best friend.” Her voice was sincere and almost desperate, but hearing those words stirred something different in him.

He balled his fists and gritted his teeth. “You’re the one who said I’m a university student now, I should let loose and have fun. So why can’t I just date whoever I want?”

“Well, sure. But someone else....”

“She is my someone else.”

“What?”

“Fuck—! Nothing, okay?!” he snapped, standing up from the bed. His blood was boiling, and his chest was pounding. He rips the hoodie off his body and throws it at the wall. He pulls his hair back out of his face as he turns his back on Holly.

“I could understand why you’re upset,” she voiced. “But why at me? Sho, I’m just trying to—”

He swats her extended hand away and yells, “Don’t touch me!”

Holly’s eyes widened as she stood there, almost not being able to recognize the enraged individual in front of her—the person she thought she knew the most. The arm that was swatted away, like pins and needles; her heart, like being slowly impaled by a dull blade. 

Her vision suddenly became a blur as tears filled within them, but his back was turned against her. So she bit down on her lip as she walked toward the door, each step heavier than the last. Her hand reached to the doorknob, and she spoke with a voice trying its best to stay present and unshaken.

“Then, don’t you dare show your face to me until the day you see it for yourself.”

The door swung open and slammed shut with her on the other side. With eyes that never looked back, refusing to take a glimpse of what could have been the last time she saw her best friend, and hiding the rushing stream of tears running down her face, she left.

From that day on, Sho continued to be in denial for several months. It wasn’t until the start of his sophomore year that he caught his girlfriend in the act. And not with just one, but with two guys at once.

✻ ✻ ✻

The atmosphere in Holly’s dorm went silent once Sho’s backstory finished. Tsubaki and Yuri’s bodies sat tensely as they stared down at the wooden tabletop in front of them.

Holly suddenly breaks the silence as she says, “He came back to me on his knees apologizing.” Her face wore a smug grin. “And that’s when I won.” 

The sound of Holly’s chuckling sends shivers down the backs of everyone in the room, and Sho cries out, “This is why I don’t bring it up! Just look at that smug face of hers—ugh!”

He throws his head down on the table, too embarrassed to raise it, as Holly just chugs down another can of beer to reacknowledge her victory. He then feels two hands drop down on his shoulders, and he turns his head to see two pitying faces.

“Sorry, man.” 

“Sorry…”

“Don’t apologize!”