Koyamo picked her up last night after too many drinks. And she rubs at her hangover headache as she watches the singer pull on a pair of ripped, pleather jeggings and a cut-up tank top. Koyamo is fairly certain it used to be a T-shirt before its current incarnation as a loose rag worn over her lacy red bra.
The singer’s Swiss-Italian accent dances over her words, husky and melodic. “Would you like for me to put your name on the guest list?”
L’Grotte Noir is a popular club. Cool and trendy. Only the best bands play there.
“No, thank you,” Koyamo answers without even pausing to think about it.
The singer looks disappointed. And Koyamo has to fight her old Japanese instinct to say something polite to save her feelings.
“It is that kawaii girl still lurking inside of you, refusing to ever let me just be mad at you,” Nora once teased her.
That was why she picked the singer from the band in the first place. She had a bold spirit that reminded Koyamo of her ex. She’d screamed her songs directly into her audience’s faces, and she hadn’t seemed to care what others thought of her. Also, her sharp between-set rhetoric had been full of clever plays on words and scathing social commentary. At least on stage.
Offstage was another matter. The singer wasn’t nearly as cool as she had seemed. Or as smart.
She couldn’t expound much further upon any of the topics she had carried on about on stage. All of her politics seem to be pre-approved soundbites, more suitable for places like TikTok than in real life.
The singer also didn’t seem to have a clue as to how economics worked. She’d gone on for what felt like hours about not getting paid enough and how every other punk rock outfit in the city was trying to copy her band’s style.
When Koyamo asked her about her cut of the merch, the singer had just shrugged and dismissed it as “manager stuff.” As if her band’s business wasn’t, in fact, any of her business.
After a series of unfortunate events in Japan, Koyamo had somehow ended up teaching fashion and textile merchandising classes to business grad students at the Geneva Institute of Finance. So she was probably biased. But, come now, the singer couldn’t complain about how little musicians made in one breath and claim complete disinterest in the one extra income stream available to her in the next. Where was her curiosity? Her economic ambition?
No, she was nothing like Nora. Plus, she smelled like hashish and talked way too much for someone who had so little to say.
“Okay, then maybe lunch or dinner?” the singer suggests running a hand through her lank, jet-black hair. “I am not sure what people your age like to do, but we should see each other again. I would like this.”
People her age? Now Koyamo feels old.
It’s true she isn’t in her 20s anymore, more like the other side of thirty-five. Her parents had been lamenting her spinsterhood ever since she’d been dumped by Japan’s most eligible bachelor shortly after she blew the engagement meeting with his father for reasons she still doesn’t quite understand.
But she never actually felt old. Not until the young singer asked her what people her age like to do.
Nora had been around the same age when they met. In her early 20s. But the young Chinese woman had the confidence of a man twice her age. And ten times as much as Koyamo.
She had been a student in the Fashion Merchandising in Asia elective Koyamo taught to graduate and undergrad students alike. She turned in her final paper three weeks early and then had the audacity to come up after the last class to ask if Koyamo had graded it yet.
“It will be another two to three weeks,” Koyamo informed her as politely as possible.
And Nora leaned in to say not so politely at all, “Well, hurry up with mine. I want to ask you out after we’re done with this nonsense.”
Yes, Nora was fourteen years younger, but she dragged Koyamo to raves, music festivals, dumpling shops in the red district, all-night DJ sets—completely uncaring of her Japanese girlfriend’s age.
“I want to be here, and I want you with me. So that’s how it’s going to be with the two of us,” Nora told her the one time she tried to complain about not fitting in at some farm field rave in Liechtenstein.
By the end of their two years together, Koyamo learned to stop using her age as an excuse not to accompany Nora on her spontaneous trips.
“So then would you prefer brunch or maybe the cinema?” the singer asks, mistaking Koyamo’s silence for indecision.
Koyamo ends up rushing her out of her fourth-floor walk-up while spewing excuses.
She has papers to grade, she explains to the singer. Finals and all of that. Oh yes, sure, school was still in session despite it being August. Mm-hm, mm-hm, the summer students are even more terrible than the traditional students.