Miss You 8

"You didn't tell me you'd been seeing Roger again, Fuji." Brianna's tone was deceptively light, but Fujiko heard the reproach beneath the words. She might as well have just said, 'I can't believe you were dumb enough to take up with that skeezy loser again, but I can believe you'd hide the shame of it from your friends and co-workers.'

Fujiko finished stirring milk into the venti latte that Joe had ordered, trying to figure out what the hell Brianna was talking about, and why she'd decided to bring it up at work. Not that she really worried about the customer overhearing--Joe was a regular, he wouldn't mind catching a bit of their gossip. "I didn't tell you I was seeing Roger again because I'm not seeing Roger again. Not in the sense of dating, not in the sense of visually, not in the sense of even knowing where he's living right now." She handed Joe his coffee and collected money in exchange. "Roger and I are done. We've been done for a year now."

Brianna shot her a look as she restocked the napkins. "Uh-huh. And this squares with me seeing the two of you together last night how...?"

"I can only imagine that hallucinogenic drugs were involved, Bree. Or that you need an even newer, thicker, larger pair of glasses. What's your vision now, 20/googol?" Fujiko handed back Joe's change. "Thanks, Joe, have a great day." Joe smiled and went to sip his latte, leaving the two of them alone. Sunday nights tended to be a little quiet at the Black As Sin Coffeehouse.

"It was definitely you, Fuji." Brianna angrily moved on to the stirrers. "Not a lot of Asian girls in Duluth with red, purple and yellow hair and a Sex Pistols T-shirt on. And it was definitely Roger, too. He passed me on his way to the bathroom. I mean, I'm not going to judge you or anything," to which Fujiko mentally added, 'Because I've already judged you and found you guilty,' "But I just wondered why you hadn't said anything."

Fujiko put her hands on her hips in irritation. Old habit, one she'd never quite gotten rid of even though her friends told her that a 4'6" Japanese girl with her hands on her hips made them think she was about to launch into 'I'm a Little Teapot, Short and Stout'. "Because I wasn't out with Roger last night. I don't know who you thought you saw at wherever you thought you were, but I wasn't there."

"Oh, really? Where were you?"

It was really none of her business, but Fujiko decided to answer anyway, just to get the conversation behind them. "I was at home. Alone. Reading a book. I can understand how you might be confused, because like Roger, the book didn't have a job, didn't do anything around the house, and didn't take me anywhere nice. However, unlike Roger, the book didn't take money out of my purse, never pressured me for oral sex, and didn't wander off into the bedroom to download lesbian porn at any point during the evening, so you can use that as a handy checklist for telling the two apart."

"Uh-huh," Brianna said, folding her arms, "and that was the same thing I heard for two years every time you threw him out. And yet, miraculously, two weeks later I'd see the two of you together again and you'd give me that stupid little sheepish grin of yours." Fujiko had to admit, Roger had been good at the 'sincere' act. When he gave you the puppy-dog eyes and swore that this time would be different, this time he'd change, it was hard not to just...believe. She'd had to take a very hard line with herself to cut him out of her life for good.

But she had cut him out, and now Brianna wouldn't believe her. "Do you see a sheepish grin right now? No, you see a ticked-off frown. I am done with Roger. Finished. Ended. Our relationship is dead, buried, and I have convinced unsuspecting families to build housing developments on the graveyard. Can I make it any more clear to you? I am not dating Roger!"

"So, Fuji," Sharon said as she walked in, "why didn't you tell us you were dating Roger again? Oh, double espresso for me, thanks."

Fujiko threw her hands into the air. "Arrrrgh! I don't know what Brianna was telling you, but she's wrong! I was not anywhere last night!"

"Everyone's somewhere," Sharon said mildly as Brianna went around to prepare their friend's drink. "And last week, you were at the Bif Naked concert with Roger. The two of you walked by while I was buying a T-shirt. I said hello, but you didn't notice me. You kind of only had eyes for him."

"I missed the Bif Naked concert last week, remember? Bad case of flu, sick as dog, puking in own toilet?" The bell chimed as she was speaking, and Fujiko's expression went plastic just a moment too late. "Hi, folks, welcome to Black As Sin, how can I take your order?"

The conversation went silent for a moment as Fujiko whipped up a couple of hot chocolates for the slightly scandalized-looking elderly couple, then resumed as they left the shop. "We remember you saying you were sick," Brianna said. "But you did kind of insist that we not come over because you were contagious."

"Oh, I'm sorry!" Fujiko said, trying and failing not to put her hands on her hips again. "Next time, I'll just hack up a big old load of phlegm into your eyeball just to prove I'm not faking it!"

"Oh, come on, don't be that way," Sharon said, blowing on her espresso to cool it. "Look at it from our perspective. We saw you, Fuji. With our own eyes. Nobody's calling you a liar--"

No

, thought Fujiko.

You're just saying I lied.

"--but you understand how we're skeptical. We can't all have been mistaken, can we?"

"What do you mean, all? Who--"

The door opened. "Hi," Bryan said. "Sorry I'm late. So Fuj, when did you and Roger start dating again?"

Fujiko raised her eyebrows in astonishment. "What is this, an intervention?"

A long, awkward silence replaced the expected chuckles.

"Oh my GOD!" Fujiko shouted. "I can't believe this! Is this some kind of joke? Am I on 'Candid Camera' or something? Me! Roger! Not dating! Not now, not ever again!"

Bryan looked confused instead of annoyed, but his response was remarkably similar to that of the girls. "But I saw you two together, out at the Aquarium on Thursday! I was with Jen, or I'd have gone and said hello, but it was definitely you. You were wearing that Green Day T-shirt, remember, the one you wanted to be buried in?"

Fujiko felt like steam was about to pour out from her ears. "OK, really getting tired of repeating myself here, but it wasn't me! I didn't even leave the apartment on Thursday! I was..." She suddenly trailed off. "Nothing. I was just hanging out."

Brianna obviously sensed blood. "Oh, really? Hanging out doing what? I'm sure you can come up with something for all of us that sounds nice and convincing, right?"

Fujiko squirmed a little. "It's none of your business what I was doing, OK? But I promise you guys, I never left the apartment."

Sharon and Brianna exchanged glances. "We can rule out sex, because she's not shy about that," Sharon said.

"Unless it was sex with Roger," Brianna responded, holding up a finger to caution her friend.

"Right, right. Maybe that's where they went after they left the Aquarium."

Fujiko clenched her hands into fists. "I was not with Roger! I was completely alone, and I was..."

Brianna grinned like a velociraptor. "Yes?"

"Oh, fine! Fine, if it's that important to you, I'll tell you!" Fujiko took a deep breath. She looked down at her shoes. If she'd been a few generations closer to her Japanese immigrant roots, she'd probably be committing seppuku right now. "I was...bittorrentingthisseasonofAmericanIdol..." she mumbled.

Sharon blinked. "I'm sorry, you what?"

Fujiko grimaced. "I was bit-torrenting this season of 'American Idol', OK? Happy now?"

The three of them looked at each other. After a long moment, Brianna spoke. "Well, I have to agree, it is the sort of thing you wouldn't admit readily."

Fujiko gritted her teeth. "So you believe me, then?"

Sharon looked indecisive. "I dunno, it is a little hard to buy, all three of us being mistaken within a week..."

Fujiko shrugged. "Well, it's not like any of you actually talked to 'me', right?" She made sure to use airquotes. No point in giving them ammunition.

Bryan squirmed. "Well, no, but...come on, Fuj. You're a pretty distinctive girl. I think they can actually spot that hair of yours from orbit."

"Exactly!" Fujiko said. "You all saw the hair, said, 'There can't be two girls with that hair,' and assumed it was me. But what if..." She trailed off for a moment. "Ellen Reed!"

The other three all exchanged a look. "No," Brianna said. "The insanity defense is not going to work here."

"Oh, come on," Fujiko said. "I can't be the only one here who gets stoned and watches 'Nick at Nite', right?" There was a long pause. "And rather than dwell on that, I'll get to the point. On 'Family Ties', Michael J. Fox dates this girl, Ellen, for a year or two. They break up, I think because the actress left the show for some reason, but a few episodes later, he's trying to date again, and he gets the girl glasses and stuff because he's rebounding hard and trying to make the new girl act like Ellen."

"So that's your answer?" Sharon said skeptically. "'It was my evil twin'?"

"No," Fujiko said, rolling her eyes. "Roger's obviously found some new girl to sponge off of, and he's convinced her to dye her hair because 'it'd look so good that way', and went to Hot Topic and bought her a bunch of music T-shirts, probably with her credit card. Bingo, instant mistaken identity."

Brianna raised an eyebrow. "Sounds kinda, well..."

"Thin," Sharon finished.

"Then there's clearly only one way to convince you," Fujiko said. "I will find Roger, I will find this skanky-ass new girlfriend of his, I will drag them both down here by the ears, and I will exonerate my good name!" She strode out boldly from behind the bar, only to have Brianna hook her arm.

"But first," Brianna said, "you will finish your shift, because I am

so

not closing alone."

*****

It took more than a few days to find Roger, though. Duluth wasn't that big of a city, but it was big enough, and most of the mutual acquaintances she and Roger had shared had stopped talking to either one or the other of them over the last couple of years. (More Roger than her, of course, because she didn't make a habit of borrowing money, clothes, cigarettes, weed, books, DVDs, and on one memorable occasion a car and then failing to return it for some elaborate reason.) Fujiko got a lot of blank looks, several utterances of "Dunno, but I saw him the other day--say, I didn't know you two had gotten back together!", and one or two offers to help her do grievous bodily harm to Roger when she finally found him.

Which she did, Thursday after work. She talked to a guy who knew a girl who was Roger's cousin, and when asked over the phone, that girl mentioned that her mom had talked to Roger's dad and he'd said that he'd shacked up with Fujiko again, but that she'd moved. All of which would have been another great big dead end, except that she mentioned that her mom mentioned that his dad mentioned that he was living over in the Palace Hills apartments.

All of which meant that by the time she got to the apartment building, and knocked on thirty-seven doors, one after another after another, asking each time, "Hi, does Roger Wilding live here?" and hearing "No" thirty-seven times in varying tones of indifference and hostility, Fujiko was a little bit pissed. She wanted to give up and go home, but she'd spent four days of effort getting this far, and she wasn't going to quit now that she'd found at least the right building. (Or complex of buildings. She was trying not to think about the other three identical sets of apartments next door.)

All that frustration, irritation, and simmering anger finally came to a boil when she knocked on the thirty-eighth door...

And she also answered.

It was almost like looking into a mirror. There was maybe a half-inch difference in their heights, the other girl had slightly higher cheekbones and perhaps a little bit bigger boobs (OK, definitely bigger boobs), but she dressed like Fujiko, she did her hair like Fujiko, and Fujiko even noticed a little bit of a tattoo sticking out from under the other girl's shirt sleeve. Without even seeing it, she knew that it would be a unicorn, rampant, facing to the dexter, the legacy of a teenage infatuation with Roger Zelazny.

Or, that's what it was in Fujiko's case. In this other girl's case, it was fucking creepy, that's what it was. "The fuck?" she said, before she could think of anything more polite.

It was even creepier that the other girl said the same thing at the same time. It deepened the illusion of looking into a mirror. She said something, and someone else's lips moved. Fujiko felt like she'd just walked into an episode of 'The Twilight Zone'. She asked, "Who are you?" and got that same sense of weird stereo hearing as the other girl asked the same exact question.

Fujiko had just about had enough of this shit. The other girl was saying the same thing she was every time and it was freaking her out. So when Fujiko answered her question, she answered, "I'm Roger's ex-girlfriend," heavily emphasizing the 'ex'.

And the other girl answered, "I'm Fujiko." That was actually creepier than if she'd said the exact same thing.

Fujiko put her hands on her hips. The other girl (Fujiko refused to believe that they shared a name) did the exact same thing.

Oh, man,

Fujiko thought.

Everyone's right. That does make me look like a five-year-old girl.

Self-conscious, she let her hands fall to her sides. The other girl duplicated the motion. Fujiko shivered.

Both girls shouted at the same time. "Roger!"

After a few moments, Roger came running out of the bedroom. Still the same old Roger she remembered. Two days of blond stubble, unkempt blond hair kept under a baseball cap to hide the fact that he hadn't washed it or combed it, clothes that didn't match each other or themselves, and those same deep brown eyes with that slightly cross-eyed look that always made him seem like he'd just been hit with a fish. What had she ever seen in him, anyway?

He looked at her with a weird mixture of panic and delight. "Fuji!" he said. "Oh my God, I can't believe--after what you said a year ago, I really thought I was never going to see you again!"

"I can tell," she said icily. "What the hell did you do, clone me?"

The other Fujiko shot her a glare. "Excuse me, lady, but dressing up like me and coming to my apartment--"

"Dressing up like you? I was into the Ramones when you were still in the test tube, 'Fujiko'. You couldn't be less original if you had 'Xerox' tattooed on your ass!" Fujiko was amazed at how angry she was. She felt like the other girl had taken something personal and precious and made it somehow less valuable by copying it. Because, well...she

had

.

"Oh, really? So this isn't you deciding to come crawling back to Roger and dressing up the way he likes so he'll take you back? Because I gotta tell you, he's already got me, I don't think he needs the flat-chested bargain basement version."

"Flat-chested?" Absolutely true, but it wasn't like the other girl was packing D-cups or anything. "Listen, you skanky--"

"Girls!" Roger said in pleading tones. "Please, just...be cool for a second, OK? The neighbors can hear you. I don't want the cops coming in or something. Just come on inside, sit down on the couch, and I will explain everything."

Fujiko shot a foul glare at the other girl, and received one in return. "Alright," she said, stomping into the living room, "but this better be good."

She sat down on the couch. Roger gestured to the other girl. "You too, Fuji." The other girl rolled her eyes in disdain, but sat down on the other end of the couch, as far away from Fujiko as she could possibly get. "OK. Now, Fujiko, press your hands together."

Fujiko looked at him like he'd totally lost it (and the evidence seemed to back her up on this), but the other girl cheerfully put her hands together, palms facing, and pressed as tightly as she could. "Good girl," Roger said in a condescending tone that made the real Fujiko want to slap him. "And what happens when you press your hands together?"

The girl looked down at her own hands in an expression of astonishment. "They get stuck," she said in a slightly dazed tone. Fujiko looked at her. Was she stoned?

"And what happens when you try to move them?"

"I try to pull them apart," she said, her voice strained with effort as she looked down at her hands, "but I can't move them. And I get tired from pulling. And that makes me pull harder." Her voice got sleepier, and she began to smile gently. "And that makes me more tired. And then I remember..."

"That's right," Roger said softly. Fujiko was starting to get seriously creeped out here. "You remember that the only way to get them to come apart is to relax them completely." The other girl let out a little sigh, and her eyes rolled back into her head and closed as she leaned back into the couch. Her hands fell apart to rest bonelessly at her sides. "Good girl," Roger said. "Now just stay relaxed for a while, not hearing anything until I touch your forehead." He looked back over at Fujiko. "Sorry about that," he said. "Now we can talk."

Fujiko looked at the apparently comatose girl sitting on the couch with her. She tried to compose her thoughts. "OK. In order. Who the fuck is she, what the fuck did you do to her just now, what the fuck is going on here, and what the FUCK is going on here?"

Roger grabbed a folding chair and sat down across from her. "It's a long story, Fuji. I..." He smiled. "Wow, it's good to see you. You have no idea how much I missed you."

Fujiko looked over at the girl with the multi-colored hair. "No, actually I think I do. Cut the bullshit, Roger, and tell me what the fuck is going on." Because this wasn't just 'Hey, dye your hair, it'll look really cute that way', or 'Hey, I bought you a new wardrobe'. This girl, whoever she really was, she had bought totally into being Fujiko. Even took the name. Fujiko shivered.

Roger steepled his hands together. "Well, it all starts a year ago. I was kind of a wreck after you dumped me, Fuj. I just couldn't think of anything but you, and how stupid I'd been, and how I just let the best thing in my life slip through my fingers because I was dumb and lazy and...worthless. I just felt totally worthless. I wanted to find you and beg you to take me back, but...you were right. All those things you said about me that night were true. I didn't feel like I deserved you."

And I moved without leaving a forwarding address and threatened you with a restraining order if you ever tried to find me again,

Fujiko thought. But she didn't interrupt him.

"And I was a wreck, like I said. Just an absolute shambles. I was crashing over at Doug's place on his couch, just hanging around watching TV and feeling sorry for myself."

Sort of like our relationship

, Fujiko thought.

Except that you probably never asked Doug if he'd be interested in a threesome with Brianna.

"And they had this ad for a seminar on hypnotherapy. Talked about all the things you could do with it, mentioned that you could have a good career as a hypnotherapist, and I thought, hey, maybe I could do that. Because I mean, I know I've always been a pretty persuasive guy. I think that's why I never really tried to make anything of myself. I could just always get people to take care of me."

Tell me about it,

Fujiko added, but only in her head.

"And I think maybe in the back of my head I had this stupid idea that if I learned how to hypnotize people really well, I could maybe...I don't know, hypnotize you into loving me again." Roger held up his hands defensively on seeing the expression on her face. "I know, I know. But I was really messed up back then, and I missed you so bad..." Fujiko tried hard not to look at the other Fujiko, still slumped back onto the couch cushions not hearing anything they said.

'Messed up back then.' And now you're a poster child for sanity.