Chapter Text
It started as a rumor.
The way all things started at that school — not with an announcement, not with a decision, but with something someone said to someone else in a corridor, and that person said it to someone else, and the someone else repeated it slightly differently, and by the time the word completed its first full circuit of the building it had already acquired the quality of established fact.
The Seven Wonders.
Nobody claimed authorship. Nobody came forward to say: I said it first, I started this. It simply arrived in the building's vocabulary the way certain words arrived — from the pressure of reality against language until language gave way. There were seven of them. They were girls. And the school, which had been watching them for a year now with the helpless fascination of a building that had been entered by a weather system it had no framework for, finally gave them a name.
Takemichi, Chifuyu, Kisaki. Emma, Hina. Yuzuha, Senju.
Seven girls in a school that had learned, over the preceding months, that the presence of these seven in any given space changed the texture of that space in ways that were difficult to categorize but impossible to ignore. The cafeteria table that had started as three had become five had become seven and the table had remained the same size so the geography of the school had simply adjusted around it. The second-floor bathroom was theirs in a way that wasn't enforced but was understood. The room that certain 1st Division members had claimed at the end of last year — the one with the graffiti on the wall and the view of the parking lot — had become, through a process of gradual occupation that nobody had explicitly approved, the Seven Wonders' skip-class headquarters.
The name stuck. It stuck the way good names stuck: because it was accurate.
—
The September morning when Senju arrived at the table with McDonald's was a Tuesday that had not distinguished itself in any other way.
She put the bag down with the particular satisfaction of someone who had achieved something. She had the hash brown. She had the coffee. She had, tucked under her arm, the fries that she was about to be very protective of.
"Jeez, McDonald's," Emma said.
Chifuyu looked up from the flash cards she'd been reviewing — she still carried them, still used them, she had simply expanded the curriculum from Baji's handwriting remediation to include several 1st Division members who had found themselves adjacent to her tutoring orbit whether they'd sought it or not. "Senju. Where'd you get McDonald's?"
"McDonald's," Senju said.
"McDonald's?" Hina said, from the other side of the table.
"Bitch," Chifuyu said, leaning forward with the energy of someone who had identified a resource and was proceeding toward it, "give me a fry."
Senju pulled the fries back approximately three inches. "Is that how you ask?"
The pause. The recalibration. The application of social technology. "Bitch," Chifuyu said, with enormous and genuine politeness, "please give me a fry."
Senju gave her a fry.
This was Tuesday.
—
They were the Seven Wonders. They had started, by September, to behave accordingly.
The monopoly pajama party happened at Emma's, which was the biggest living room and also the house where Shinichiro would make exactly one attempt to impose order before assessing the situation and going to his room with the dignity of a man who had chosen his battles wisely. Mikey was there because Mikey went where he wanted. Draken was there because Mikey was there. Several other Toman members were there because the invitation had been extended in the casual way that invitations extended when the girls issued them — not formally, just: there's a thing, come if you want, said to enough people that the living room filled to capacity.
The monopoly board came out. This was a mistake in the way that introducing monopoly into any social situation involving more than four people was always a mistake, and this situation involved approximately fourteen people, several of whom had actual financial assets that gave them opinions about property ownership that were more vivid than average.
Mikey went to jail within the first ten minutes. Not in the game — in the game he went to jail four times and each time the situation around it became louder. The image of it was: Mikey, cross-legged on the floor, his face doing the thing where he was genuinely having the most fun he'd had in weeks and was barely containing it, making a case for why the jail rule was unconstitutional that somehow lasted seven minutes and convinced nobody but entertained everyone.
Takemichi was the one who put him there the last time. She rolled the dice, moved his piece, looked at him with the complete serenity of someone delivering a just verdict, and said: "Jail."
"I was just there."
"You keep doing crimes, Mikey."
"I didn't do any crimes."
"The property tax situation you created on Mediterranean Avenue is a crime against the community."
"That's strategy."
"That's crime," she said, and pointed at the jail square, and the table lost its composure entirely.
Draken had the board half-controlled by midnight. Senju had been quietly accumulating properties with the focused patience of someone who had been underestimated by the situation and was going to let the results speak for themselves. Kisaki had Boardwalk and Park Place by ten thirty and Hanma, sitting behind her, had been giving her no advice because she didn't need any and he understood that completely.
The game ended at two in the morning when Takemichi landed on Park Place with four hotels on it and quietly placed her piece facedown on the board like a little funeral and said, "Acabou," and lay back on the floor, and the game was over, and everyone agreed the game was over, and they transitioned into the part of the night that came after games which was: horizontal, too tired to move, talking.
—