The Excitement Of The Do Re Mi Fa Girl -1985 - ... — Safe & Genuine
The screen went to static. Then, a test pattern. The Do Re Mi Fa Girl was gone. Cancelled by the next commercial break.
Leo didn't cry. He felt something stranger: a wild, giddy, terrifying excitement. The spell was broken, yes. But in its place was something real. A seventeen-year-old girl, terrified and brave, dismantling her own kingdom. That was a better show than any rainbow cloud.
"I'm sorry," she said, her real voice thin and reedy. "They told me not to tell you. But my name isn't Yumi. It's Hanako. And I'm very tired. They want me to record twelve new songs by Friday, but I haven't slept in two days." The Excitement of the Do Re Mi Fa Girl -1985 - ...
The little girls in the lobby began to cry. Some ran away. One threw her autograph book at the screen.
The next day, he didn't watch. He stared at the blank screen. The cicadas were deafening. The pickled plums smelled of defeat. At 4:17, he couldn't take it anymore. He flicked the TV on, just in time for the lobby feed. The screen went to static
That evening, Leo didn't practice his math homework. He took the five-string koto, tuned it to a broken, lopsided scale—Do, Mi, Fa, La, Ti—and wrote his first song. It had no major chords. No happy rainbows. It was about a girl inside a fake ladybug, crying real tears.
That is, until 4:00 PM.
And if you listen very closely to the static between channels, you can still hear it: a koto with a missing string, playing a song about the beautiful, heartbreaking excitement of finding out the magic was only human all along.
One sweltering Thursday, his cousin Kenji, a cynical high schooler with a bleached streak in his hair, caught him watching. "You're pathetic," Kenji said, grabbing the remote. "It's all fake. The songs are written by a committee of old men. The ladybug is a guy in a suit. And that laugh? She practices it in a mirror." Cancelled by the next commercial break
That laugh was Leo’s secret fuel.
He called it "The Excitement of the Do Re Mi Fa Girl -1985 - ..."
