Cold Girl Fever
Laughable Love
The cold crept up on her like a gradual onset disease, the symptoms showing up as routinely as she did when she clocked in for her part-time job at a record shop in Shinjuku. Every day — and it was always whenever she did something innocuous, like tap her train pass at the station or listen to her microeconomics professor drone on about consumer surplus or resource allocation — she felt a part of her go numb and turn to ice, and there was nothing that could be done about it except to mutter a sharp ‘fuck’ under her breath.
It started in October with her fingers, thanks to some stupid boy who had the same condition and passed it on to her the instant he hugged her, and then left her forever. Her fingers had been the first to go, and then her toes, and now half a year later she felt like all the outside parts of her body had turned to ice. Before long, her internal organs would start to go, too. The only way to combat it was to buy the terrible heated canned black coffee from the vending machines, which she cradled in her palms on her commutes from work at midnight. Artificial warmth to cure a perhaps not-so-imagined cold girl fever.
Despite this awful condition, she still managed to religiously follow her nightly ritual from Mondays to Thursdays: get off her lecture at 6:30, take the train to Shinjuku, grab a quick dinner at 7-Eleven, clock in at 7:30, and then sit for 4.5 hours ironically listening to music via Spotify that she’d blast through the Altec Lansing speakers her boss had put up maybe two-and-a-half decades ago, and that which he still wouldn’t stop going on and on about (These were high-end in ’93, he’d brag. Five whole years before you were born!).
Thankfully, there wasn’t that much to do at her job: just sort the vinyl and CDs alphabetically, assist the occasional customer who wanted to check out some obscure band or other, and then lock up and secure the safe when midnight hit. Somehow, she’d always find herself exhausted once she returned to her dorm.
But there were a few things that broke the monotony of her lonely, solitary daily routine, and one of them was seeing the super cute girl from her sociology of law class every Tuesday period 4–5. The super cute girl also happened to be super smart, and always asked interesting questions in class. She had a loud voice that commanded the room, and Yukiko was starstruck. Maybe the girl’s teacher’s pet antics were kind of annoying, but it shifted responsibility away from everyone else to fill in the awkward silences that followed whenever the professor asked questions about the readings. Also, none of that mattered, because she was cute.
Some part of her hoped against hope that something, someone, could help cure her cold girl fever. But. It was too much to risk having someone else catch it. And so she spoke to nobody. No-one from her university knew her too well, least of all the fact that she worked at the record shop, except the boy who gave her cold girl fever, who used to visit her there. She felt as if she was probably somehow supposed to feel sad that he no longer did, that going to the record shop every day should constantly remind her of him, and that it was supposed to hurt. And maybe it did, somewhere deep inside her. But the more she went to work, the more numb she felt.
Sometimes she wondered what the boy who gave her cold girl fever was doing. Once, she heard from someone who knew someone who knew him that he was dating some other girl now. Yukiko left the room before she could get a chance to hear the other person say any more.
Throughout the rest of the winter, whenever she felt parts of herself freezing over, she considered contacting him. Hey, fucker, she’d draft imaginary texts in her head. Thanks to you, my thighs are freezing, or, I’m cold all over and I’m suing you for damages, so lawyer up, asshole, or, even more melodramatically, Do you revel in knowing that you’re the one who caused my heart to freeze over?
Whenever she lay in bed before going to sleep, she could feel herself stiffening up and frosting over so much that it felt like some of her organs were developing permafrost. It felt as if she would burst into a million pieces if someone were to accidentally knock past her. Having kept mostly to herself in the winter had made interacting with others become painfully torturous.
She noticed her cold girl fever act up particularly badly in mid-April, when the new semester had just begun. It had been raining the whole week, and that evening, she was in a foul mood: having failed to check the weather forecast that day, she’d been cruelly rained on whilst on her commute from class to work. She had hoped that the coming of the spring would also mean a thawing out, both of her cold girl fever and the weather.
Instead, the frequent rain showers made everything icier than ever. The plum tree outside her dorm room had bloomed and grown some green leaves in late March, but these were promptly killed by the sudden arrival of cold weather in early April. The young leaves turned a deep golden ochre before they fell to the ground, like some cruel re-enactment of the past October.
Yukiko turned up the volume on her phone to drown out her thoughts, but couldn’t help thinking that the boy who gave her cold girl fever was probably somewhere with some other girl right now.
She then realised his birthday was coming up soon.
There hadn’t been much of a chance for her to get close enough to anyone else. University, to Yukiko, was a dry hell full of too-busy people she would never even consider dating, and her workplace didn’t provide much luck either.
The record shop she worked at was on the 2nd basement floor of a six-story building nestled somewhere in a back alley between Shin-Okubo and Kabukicho. The building, built sometime in the booming late 80s, was a motley assemblage of once-classic, but now obsolete, Tokyo haunts: a dermatologist’s clinic on the first basement floor; a Nepalese-Tibetan-Japanese fusion restaurant on the first; a dingy karaoke establishment on the second to third floors plus a liquor shop owned by the same guy on the floor above that; a secondhand book store on the fifth, and a horrible late-night bar/club that always smelled of vomit to top it all off.
None of these places were doing incredibly well — least of all the record shop — except for the dermatologist’s place and the liquor shop (which, really, only did well on Friday nights). In Tokyo, there is no shortage of people who want to look just like the clear-faced, porcelain-skinned Photoshopped deities plastered all over the Yamanote line ad spaces, and no shortage of drunkards looking to get hammered on a Friday night.
There was only one other worker during her shift, some guy her age who was, on one hand, moderately attractive, but, on the other hand, was also perpetually glued to his Nintendo DS. They never spoke to each other.
After the boy who gave her cold girl fever left her, Yukiko didn’t really feel like talking to anyone else much.
That Thursday evening in mid-April, just as she felt her lungs begin to turn to ice, she was interrupted in the middle of her microeconomics reading by a customer with a particularly loud, booming voice. Nintendo DS guy, unsurprisingly, didn’t budge.
‘It’s 2019 — isn’t it kinda superfluous to run a record shop?’
‘Huh?’
The word superfluous caught her off-guard — she didn’t typically interact with English-speaking customers, least of all people who spoke like they had just jumped out of one of her political science readings into real life.
‘Wasn’t Blade Runner basically set in Shinjuku 2019?’ The customer went on. The voice was painfully familiar. ‘And didn’t Ridley Scott show us how everybody would be too busy fucking robot prostitutes for them to have any time or desire to be looking for B-sides by The Chameleons or EPs by Bloc Party?’
She looked up and found the owner of the loud voice: a girl rifling through the section for motion picture soundtracks. She wore thick-rimmed nerd glasses, a grey hoodie that had To boldly go where no-one has gone before plastered at the front in shock-value yellow, a short navy blue tennis skirt, long white knee socks that reached the top of her knees, and ratty black Vans.
It was the super cute super smart girl from her sociology of law class last semester.
Fuck.
‘Uh.’ She tried to regain composure. ‘Can I help you?’
The girl looked up from a dusty crate of Japanese releases of musical soundtracks that included the likes of Mamma Mia! and The Sound of Music. ‘It’s a long shot, but do you happen to have the score for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan around here?’
‘S-sorry, no,’ she stammered, still dazed and trying incredibly hard not to show her embarrassment and, importantly, the fast-developing red blush blossoming on her cheeks.
‘Actually, you just missed the last one. It was sold to some grandpa two weeks ago.’ Nintendo DS guy, not as useless as he seemed, suddenly piped up, shooting Yukiko a knowing look before returning to his game.
The girl looked crestfallen for a split second, but perked up when she looked in Yukiko’s direction. She walked up to the counter, reached into her backpack, pulled out a worn blue Yankees cap, and beamed.
‘I’m not sure if you remember me, but I took sociology of law last semester,’ she said, putting the cap on, though Yukiko didn’t need the reminder. ‘Cristina from Mexico. Statistics major — the one who wouldn’t shut up in class. Always wearing this blue Yankees cap. You know.’
‘Oh, right!’ She chuckled nervously, and then awkwardly offered her right hand for Cristina to shake. For a split second, Cristina looked at the hand with a puzzled look before shaking it in return with an amiable smile.
Please kill me.
‘I’m Yukiko, by the way. Economics major.’
‘Yukiko? Like, snow-child Yukiko?’
‘That’s right. But I’m not actually Japanese though. I’m Chinese-Korean but my family’s been in Japan since forever and my parents just kind of gave me a Japanese first name.’ Yukiko knew she was rambling, but it was too late to take back any of the words that had already come tumbling out of her mouth. Fuck fuck fuck. She could feel her entire face turn beet-red.
‘Right,’ Cristina nodded, then hovered over to the ‘90s house/techno section. ‘Someone told me you worked here, so I figured I should come around. But ugh, Yukiko, how can you stand working at this place?’ She picked out a few ratty 100-yen records, clearly nigh-unplayable from the abuse they’d been subjected to by their previous ‘90s disc jockey owners.
Yukiko didn’t know whether it was Cristina’s unabashed exuberance or her blatant nerd gear that she found oddly comforting. Perhaps both. Either way, it made her want to open up to her.
‘I don’t know, actually. I mean, the pay’s decent. But only around three people tops would actually buy anything during my shifts. It’s always a bunch of strange creepy dudes, the types who probably would happily fuck robot prostitutes given the chance.’
Nintendo DS guy gave an audible cough, his face still glued to his game.
Cristina laughed, a deep, hearty laugh that almost sounded like a man’s. Yukiko smiled meekly, her face turning redder than ever.
‘I mean, things could be worse,’ Cristina said. ‘You could be working at Akiba in a maid cafe. Think of that whenever you wanna complain about the next middle-aged, trench-coat-and-fedora-donning gentleman who approaches you at the counter. Akiba, on the other hand, is filled to the brim with real creeps.’ Cristina moved over to the ‘90s/2000s indie rock section. ‘Trust me, I’ve part-timed at a toy shop there once. Brr,’ she mock-shivered.
‘I don’t think I’d prefer either type of creep over the other.’
Cristina shrugged. ‘At least the creeps here have fairly decent music taste.’ She was right — they at least didn’t listen nonstop to weird idol girl group music. Though, Yukiko thought, it’s probably not that much worse than the guys playing Alien Sex Fiend on repeat. ‘And they aren’t actually fucking robot prostitutes, unlike the creeps in Akiba, who I’m sure all congregate to some kind of robot sex dungeon on Thursday evenings like this.’
‘Clearly, Ridley Scott was right,’ Yukiko said, giggling. ‘What are you doing here looking for the film score of The Wrath of Khan, anyway?’
‘Oh,’ Cristina placed a tattered copy of Remain In Light by Talking Heads back into the crate. ‘It’s for my boyfriend. Actually, he was the one who told me you worked here.’
Yukiko felt all the blood escape from her face.
‘I didn’t know you had a boyfriend,’ was all she could manage to say.
‘His birthday’s this weekend and he loves Star Wars but hates Star Trek, and I thought it’d be a funny joke to give him something Star Trek-related.’
Yukiko felt an intense coldness creep up her fingertips.
‘Who did you say your boyfriend was?’
‘Ah, you probably know him,’ Cristina said, then mentioned his name. Yukiko immediately stopped breathing. She felt a deep, ice-cold pit open up in her stomach the instant she heard the name. The pit seemed to spread outward throughout the rest of her body, until she felt like she had turned completely into ice.
‘He goes to our university too, though you probably know that already. Said he knew someone who worked here, and told me it was you!’
‘Well, we don’t have any more Star Trek,’ Yukiko cut her off curtly. ‘Sorry. Try another record shop.’
Whether or not Cristina noticed the sudden sharp change in Yukiko’s voice didn’t matter, because Yukiko no longer cared. Not when her insides had turned to ice. ‘Alright, cool,’ said Cristina. ‘See you on campus, yeah?’
‘Mm-hmm,’ Yukiko hummed, glancing back down to her microeconomics reading that she felt she had been so rudely interrupted from completing.
‘Bye!’ Cristina yelled out cheerfully.
Yukiko didn’t reply. Cristina exited the shop and closed the door with a subtle, yet — to Yukiko — damning final click.
On the way back home, Yukiko didn’t bother buying a can of heated black coffee from the vending machine.
The following evening — another rainy Friday night — she went to her favourite bar in Shibuya. There was a string of five indie rock bands playing that night. She ambled over to the bar and downed a couple shots of vodka before she headed over towards the stage.
When she reached the front, she found herself standing next to a very tall and potentially very attractive girl wearing a black leather jacket that smelled faintly of Drakkar Noir. Yukiko and the tall girl stood next to each other the whole night, throughout all five sets, their shoulders touching, but without speaking a single word to each other. Occasionally the girl would look at Yukiko’s face, looking like she wanted to say something, but never mustering up the courage to do so. But Yukiko stood wordless, an ice statue.
She was sure she must have been a really nice girl, a warm being who deserved someone who’d hug them and never let go.
But.
When the last band finished their set, Yukiko walked away, out of the bar, and into the cold, rainy spring night. The girl tried to chase after her, but lost her in the crowd. Yukiko’s hands were freezing; she wanted to reach the train station, quick. She didn’t glance back, not even once.
This piece was inspired by the song ‘Cold Girl Fever’ by The National, off their self-titled 2001 album.
