Love All

A lover of love, everything Momo does is designed to give her the advantage.

They pretty much spent their days sifting through the freckles, moles, and pimples that filled the tennis court. It was so pointless, so petty. The girls were always lugging their hearts around like they had killer whales on their backs when in reality they just had goldfish in their pockets, not that it ever stopped them from burning with passion as they sizzled under the sun. All ten of them were in their final year of middle school, and the time they’d spent on the team had given them the ability to squeeze someone supertight—at least with their dominant arm. Since they only had one court to practice on, six of them would have to wait, congregating by the gates to talk: a game of its own, kind of like Old Maid, but where gossip about who was hooking up with who was the joker.

As the shot comes into focus, the spotlight falls on the third-shortest member of the team: Momo. That’s her, crouching down and lacing up. It rained yesterday, so when Momo sees a puddle near the edge of the court, she grabs a twig and dips it in to gauge how deep the water is. Getting back on her feet, she brushes the sand off her knees and stretches her calves along with the others before completing the rest of their usual pregame routine: a spritz of eau du soleil and a splash of sunscreen.

Momo’s behind the ad court, waiting next to two other girls. With every swoosh of the ponytail on the girl playing in front of them, the neon ball makes its way back over the net. The court’s overflowing with loose balls waiting for Momo to step into the game. She has three more balls in her skort pocket, too—kinda like that girl who stuffed her shirt with dodgeballs that time and went around yelling “boobalicious!”

The winter wind wraps itself around Momo, clinging to her bare legs. On her morning walk to school, she’d stepped on a discarded ice cream cup and a couple of braille blocks, but now her feet were planted firmly on the court’s rubber surface.

When Momo says, “I got zero sleep last night,” the other girls turn to look at her.

“For real? How are you even on your feet right now?” “What happened?”

“My mom and dad were at each other’s throats,” Momo says.

One of the girls squints, like she’s throwing a comma into the conversation, and the other one opens her eyes wide, punctuating Momo’s story with a period.

One of the girls squints, like she’s throwing a comma into the conversation, and the other one opens her eyes wide, punctuating Momo’s story with a period.

Just then the ponytail girl came out, so Momo stepped in and took her place, lobbing one last line over her shoulder like a water balloon as she went: “My mom was like, I’m gonna kill you, and my dad was like, I wish you’d die—I guess somebody’s gonna end up dead either way.”

Then Momo picked up a ball, tossed it into the air, and sent it flying across the court.

The sun had sunk completely—and so had the shoulders on most of the passengers on the 10 p.m. train. Momo blinks three times, deliberately. Her own secret ritual to end the day.

On her walk back from the station, some streetlights flicker while others look like they’re out for good. As Momo rounds the final corner home, she looks up and her heart goes off like an assault rifle—b-bam, b-ba-bam—one shot for each star in the sky. Her knees go weak, like she’s been tugging on some giant turnip and it just came loose. Momo stops in her tracks and feels the joy as it oozes out of her in smiles, blown away to find the night sky making her feel so in love. All these fireworks over Hoshino? But wait, who was she trying to fool? Momo knew exactly how this worked: every time she fell in love with somebody, she found more to love in the world. Yeah, starry skies made her think about ☆Hoshino☆—so did any star-studded outfit, or the American flag. Everywhere she turned, Momo had stars in her eyes.

Stars darted through the darkness overhead like sperm under a microscope.

The world’s bursting with life all around me, Momo tells herself, and it makes me feel like my heart’s completely out of room . . . like my eyeballs are getting yanked in a thousand different directions. Momo pulls her cheeks back, feels the air on her teeth, and lifts her face again. She feels like, on a night like this, she could climb into the cab of the biggest bulldozer on the street, rev it up, and start the revolution to end all revolutions.

I mean, I’ve seen the way you eat fried shrimp, she thinks, the way you leave literally nothing on your plate. Well, that’s how I want you to love me, every single part of me. I want you to swallow all the bogus stories I feed you, right down to the tail. In my next life, I’m gonna go for it—I wanna fall for everybody, for every human being on the planet. And that’s why, in this life, I need you to love me and only me. If you can’t do that, then fine, suit yourself. I’m not about to wander the whole wide world trying to find out where you keep your heart. You’ll just have to slice off your ear, right here and now, so we can call it even.

Whenever people talk about Momo, they’re quick to call her a lover of love, but she’s actually a whole tier above that. If romance is a layer cake, then Momo has to be the strawberry sitting on top of the whole thing. She’s into lots of guys—Guy 1, Guy 2, Guy 3, Guy n—and she expects them all to give her pride of place, but Momo’s always got her eyes on an even bigger prize.

In life and in love, everything she does is designed to give her the advantage. Even happiness is a lethal weapon, one that can be pointed at someone like a gun. The way Momo sees it, somebody else’s pleasure can only mean her pain. . . . Nothing but a full-frontal attack meant to bring her down.

Even now, Momo can’t forget the sheer terror she felt last year when the sports committee had their monthly lunchtime meetings in the gym. This particular committee had always been made up of the chosen ones—two untouchable boys and two girls from each homeroom—but her second-year class was such a bust that this great responsibility fell to Momo (even though her place on the social ladder wasn’t anywhere near the top). In other words, she found herself on a committee whose membership was literally identical to the worst-case scenario class roster that filled her with dread at the start of every new school year: a dazzling and jagged collection of rock-candy kids.

 After those meetings, on the walk back from the gym to the main building, the committee reps would huddle together, chatting and laughing the whole time, trampling all over the meticulously manicured hedges that were supposed to keep the classes divided. Just imagining the possibility of making that long walk solo made Momo feel like she might ralph on her Laurens.

Just imagining the possibility of making that long walk solo made Momo feel like she might ralph on her Laurens.

A handful of times, Momo found a way to stay home on those blue Wednesdays when the committee met. She’d gone to the nurse a few times, too. Once she’d exhausted those options, Momo went to her homeroom teacher and told him there was something urgent she needed to talk to him about—and she had to do it at lunch. Then, she turned around and told her friend from the committee: “Sorry, but Mr. Z needs to talk to me at lunch. . . . I can’t make it today.” It didn’t matter what Momo said to her teacher, as long as it kept her busy until the meeting was finished, so she made up some story about one of her classmates being bullied.

For Momo, those Wednesdays were a wrecking ball, annihilating the safety she normally felt at school. She’d stay up the night before, repeatedly running through every scenario in her head. What if M and N started talking to each other? What if X and Y walked off on their own? Then she’d be left out in the cold for sure. . . .

But Momo was out of lies she could feed her teacher now. She had run all the calculations, over and over, and the results were unimpeachable: this week’s meeting was a bullet she wasn’t going to be able to dodge.

So, that Wednesday, after fourth period, Momo walked straight up to Mineo and asked him out, taking advantage of the classroom chaos that descended as soon as the bell rang. “Sure,” Mineo said, “but you know Aimoto told me she likes me last week, right? So I—” “Yeah, I know, I won’t tell anyone,” Momo said, cutting him off. Then, the second the committee meeting was over, Momo turned to her friend and said: “Hey, guess what? Mineo and I are going out.”

Instantly, her friend gasped in disbelief, then started freaking out like the planet was on fire. That day, Momo made it back to her homeroom safely surrounded by the rest of the reps, easily maintaining her spot at the center of the conversation every step of the way.

Translation from the Japanese