Takahashi Mikan

You'll find a glossy photo of Mikan next to it-girl in the dictionary; her eyes bright, her smile catlike in the corners of cupid's bow lips — as pink Dior Lip Glow conceals the bite of a razor-sharp tongue. All the telltale symptoms of a twenty-second century woman on a warpath.

A glowing academic transcript, multiple internships and part-time jobs, and Mikan's overall refusal to give anyone a reason to deny her all made it easy for her to secure a comfortable position in the administrative department of Tiger Lily Records. Though she's had her sights aimed even higher from the moment she was handed her employee ID — the much-coveted position of secratary for the company CEO himself.

For years, Mikan has curated her life with a level of surgical precision usually reserved one's Instagram feed; quick to cut out anything and anyone that skews its cohesion. Call her selfish, call her a user — you wouldn't be the first, and she'll meet each accusation head-on with candied, condescending laughter.

To be authentic leaves you kitten-like — a mewling, helpless thing, fatally dependent on the warmth of those around you. Too weak to even open your eyes. Mikan has always known better than to be this way.

Her name means tangerine, just as she herself plays allegory to the fruit borne of her own mother's tireless effort to claw herself uphill; a girl from an agricultural town in rural Japan who, forced to abandon schooling at age fourteen and take over for her ailing father in the family's rice paddy, refused to accept condemnation to a life of farming or blue-collar mediocrity as a result.

Mikan's mother ran away to Tokyo before she had even turned eighteen, armed with nothing but a suitcase of threadbare clothes and three-quarters of a junior high school education, knowing all too well that life is not a meritocracy, yet vowing to make something of herself just the same.

From there, it's a tale as old as time — years later, when a third pair of footsteps joined the middle-class existence she and her husband had toiled endlessly to carve out for themselves, Mikan's mother had long since decided that her daughter's life would be the one she had always deserved to live; Mikan would not be permitted to languish in the ways that circumstance had so cruelly forced upon her mother, once upon a time.

It should go without saying that this is perhaps not the best way to raise a daughter. Though Mikan never doubted her parents' love for her, neither could she go even a moment without the weight of her mother's world bearing down on her shoulders.

With each hurdle she faced, the stakes were amplified twofold; cram school, college exams, career fairs — Mikan stuck the landing for both herself and her mother each time and never slowed down to allow her body to shake from the impact. Six years of running track and field for the sake of her extracurricular transcript had very quickly taught Mikan that to slow down, to rest for even a moment, is a death knell.

You push on, no matter what — you put one foot in front of the other as many times as it takes, and you never give yourself the chance to realize how tired you truly are.