“Oooh! Look at this, K-chan!” Aria breathed, putting a magazine down in front of me on the table. The tennis bracelet was definitely breathtaking. Gold with stunning diamonds inlaid that simply screamed gloriously ostentatious. As much as I felt I was throwing Aria a subtle mental diss, the bracelet did seem to fit her personality.

                “That’s incredible!” I admitted.

                “Right?” OMG! I sooo want it!” She was practically drooling as she stared at the picture hungrily. I glanced down at the price and my soul fled toward the ether, a lonely ghost wandering amidst a sea of zeroes.

                “That’s a lot of money…” I mumbled. While, admittedly, math wasn’t my strong suit but at my current wage, assuming I spent money on nothing else it would take me nearly 6 months to buy.

                “Maybe I could get a job or something,” Aria muttered to herself.

                “You really want it, huh?” I asked, though she plainly had passed the point of wanting and gone straight to absolute need. Aria nodded wistfully before sighing.

                “It’s so expensive, though.”        

“Do you see this?” Emi smacked her hand down on the table in front of us, causing me to wrench my eyes from the bracelet. The paper under her hand was a pajama advertisement, the dashing man dressed in a gaudy plaid pair of bottoms beamed at us with impossibly white teeth. She looked at each of us in turn as if we all had knowledge of some deep conspiracy the pajama man couldn’t possibly conceive of.

                “Oh! He’s attractive!” Mizuki gushed. My infantile glee at Yuto’s crestfallen expression quickly vanished when Aria chimed in.

                “Yeah, he is!” I glanced at her sharply and she winked conspiratorially. Ah, yes, I thought. All part of the plan, I supposed. If I was honest, the entire concept rubbed me the wrong way. I was aware we couldn’t simply come out and start holding hands and making out in public, but her pretending caused my heart to ache painfully, as if crushed in a vice. It was agonizing but, realistically, I had no better idea, so the ruse played out each day while we took whatever opportunity presented to hold hands and kiss and do things couples did. Well, most things, I corrected myself.

                One barrier remained unbroken. The intimacy best experienced without clothes. It had only been five weeks, I thought, but I wasn’t sure how long one should wait before taking the final plunge or, as they often put it in manga, ‘climb the stairs to adulthood.’ Despite my rather impressive (if I did say so myself) skill at pleasuring myself I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the notion of pleasuring someone else. We were, after all, still virgins. I’d read losing one’s virginity hurt and I certainly didn’t want to hurt her. Well, not too much anyway. By the same token, however, I wanted to both give and take that one part of us no one else would ever have.

                We’d spoken of it, of course. But only in the most arbitrary of ways. I’d read as much as I possible online but, as with most things found there, the suggestions varied from “right after you meet” to “wait until marriage” to the more outlandish conspiracy theories about how the hymen was a government conspiracy designed to release the control nodule hidden in the hymen making both parties into killing drones. I shook my head slightly. There was some seriously weird shit out there.

                “I’m not talking about his looks!” Emi snapped, banging her hand onto the advertisement loudly several times, drawing the attention of most of the other people eating lunch in our room to our table and snapping me out of my reverie. “He’s not wearing a shirt.” We glanced at each other uncertainly.

                “I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, Emi-senpai,” Saki finally acted as the sacrificial lamb and spoke up.

                “Point? The point, dear, misled, and naïve young Saki-chan is this: why is it ok for this photoshopped human set of teeth to not wear a shirt in an ad but if women don’t wear a shirt it’s porn?” She was working herself up, so we waited for the Emi bomb to drop. We didn’t have to wait long. “I’d say 95% of the males in this school have bigger boobs than I do but if I take off my shirt, I’ve committed a crime. If they take theirs off it’s fine. Look at Yuto! He’s easily a C cup, but if he took his shirt off people’d be fine with it. I mean, grossed out, but still fine. How is that ok?”  I nearly threw up at the mere thought of Yuto without a shirt, bringing my hand up to my mouth quickly to stifle the gag building in my throat.

                “I don’t have a C cup,” Yuto pouted, self-consciously covering his chest with his arm. I smirked at him from behind my hand. Mizuki patted his hand reassuringly before answering.

                “Women have the duty to be mothers and caregivers,” Mizuki sounded disturbingly like some kind of brain washed Stepford wife all of a sudden and I cocked an eyebrow at her disdainfully.

                “What’s that got to do with anything?” Emi demanded, clearly giving Mizuki the side eye. “What is this, the Edo period?”

                “It’s not like that,” Mizuki replied defensively. “I just mean it would be shameful to show off what you’ll use to nurture new life, don’t you think?”

                “These,” Emi proclaimed, cupping her small globes over her uniform, “wouldn’t provide enough nourishment to keep an amoeba alive for more than ten minutes.” We giggled at the visual while Yuto began to take on the hue of a beet. “Besides, I don’t want children and I won’t be having sex with my significant other in the dark like a 2X4, so they won’t see my boobies.” By now Emi’s outburst was garnering quite a bit of attention. People’s eyes had begun to turn to us. Well, I thought, it wouldn’t be the first time. “So, I should be able to show my boobs if I want without getting arrested.”

                “Just move to a nudist colony,” I shrugged. With one hand I picked at my bento while the other hand clutched Aria’s beneath the desk. It sent a thrill through me like we were breaking every rule ever written. I had to confess; I really liked the feeling. Emi shook her head and sighed as if I’d just disappointed not only her but every single one of her ancestors as well.

                “You’re missing my point,” Emi laced her fingers together on the desk in front of her and leaned forward. “Why is it perfectly fine for some guy to flash his hairy nipples but isn’t ok for me to do the same if I want? I have no interest in getting pregnant any time soon, so my boobs are just as useless as his are so how come he gets to walk around with no shirt, but I get to go to jail if I do?”