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i.
“We should just dig a little and then cover it,” Yori says. “Minato-kun, what do you think?”
Minato blinks hard a few times, eyes sticky and stinging with sweat. It’s too hot of a day for this time of the year; the sun slices through the gaps in the trees and leaves shards of sunlight on the grass and earth spread around their feet, casting everything in a half-golden, half-white blinding glow. Although they’re protected from the worst of it by the shade, the air is still and damp, almost cloying. Minato feels like he has to take twice as many breaths to keep in the same amount of air, and he cringes every time he moves and feels the way his shirt clings to his back. Summer’s come a bit early, it seems.
Yori peers up at him through his fringe, which is also reduced to dark, sweaty clumps against his forehead. He’s crouching on the ground as Minato leans against the side of the train wagon, soil staining the knees of his overalls, his once-white shoes. When he tilts his head sideways in question, sunlight colors half his face, tinting his cheek pink.
“ I don’t know, I’ve never done it before,” Minato says. “What do you think?”
“You said you have a bunch of plants at your house though,” Yori argues, in that non-argumentative tone of his. Minato doesn’t think Yori’s physically capable of being uncooperative; there’s not a single confrontational bone in his body. Sometimes it pisses Minato off.
Minato makes a face. “Yeah, and they’re all made out of plastic, because Mom is bad at taking care of plants and also hates bugs. We tried to have some flowers at home at one point but then there were bees and Mom pretty much smashed the vase when she saw them.” He grins a little and leans down to poke Yori’s forehead. “You live in a house with a garden. Why don’t you know how to plant some seeds?”
Yori laughs, bright and bubbly, pushing his hand away. That makes him lose his balance and sit down on the damp earth, but he doesn’t seem to care. “The plants were already there when I was born!” he exclaims. “I wasn’t there. ”
“It can’t be that hard,” Minato says, pushing off the side of the wagon to crouch down next to Yori, who hasn’t bothered to get up, instead just pulling his legs towards his chest. They both look down at the ground in front of them. “I mean, they’re just some seeds. What do they need to grow?”
On their way towards their hideout, they have to cross quite a few neighborhoods. It’s not that far — maybe a twenty minute bike ride, if they don’t get distracted chatting with each other. Starting from Yori’s place, they go through one of the streets that’s littered up and down with shops: little coffee shops and a bakery, an udon place and a stationary store, stands selling takoyaki for business people in their lunch breaks and an old lady who makes Korean hotteok down the block, which makes the whole street smell like something honeyed and deep fried. They have to cross through all of those before they make it to the turn that leads them to the outskirts of the forest, and it’s right there that sits the flower shop.
It’s an unassuming place. It’s not even named; there’s just a little plaque that says flower shop, written in artsy kanji. It has one small green door and a big, big window, through which you can see the whole store without even walking in. Needless to say that Yori goes absolutely crazy over it, and Minato has to drag him away from it twice every day, on their way there and on their way home. They never go in, because neither of them have money and Minato thinks it’s rude to take up space in a store when you know you’re not going to purchase anything.
That doesn’t stop Yori from making them linger there, of course. They must look like an odd sight, two boys half-sitting on their bikes, one foot on the ground each. One of them wide-eyed, looking at the flowers. One of them hunched over the handles, looking at the other.
Maybe it’s because they’re such an odd sight that the owner (or at least Minato thinks it was the owner, some gray-haired woman in her sixties, yellow apron embroidered with daisies tied around her waist) finally got out the door to talk to them. “I see you boys here every day,” she had said. Her hands were on her pockets as she leaned against the banister of the door, dismissing them with a wave as they scrambled out of their bike seats to bow at her in greeting. “Are you looking to buy flowers for someone special?”
“No,” Minato had replied, while Yori just shook his head mutely, but multiple times. His heart had thumped and thudded around his chest. “We just — I mean he, he likes flowers. So we stop to look at them. I’m sorry.”
“Ah,” the owner had said, a knowing glint in her eye that made Minato feel cold for reasons he still isn’t able to explain. “No need to apologize. I like flowers too, I understand. I’m always happy to see the two of you — this world of ours is so gray and scary, but then you stop by this humble little shop of mine and I think, yes, there’s still people out there who will stop to look at the flowers.”
“Do you know all of your flowers by name?” Yori had asked suddenly. His shoulders hunched up when she looked at him, but still, he’d continued, “I’m trying to learn all of their names, but there’s so many.”
“There are,” she’d agreed, “and I do know some, but not all. Rather than just memorizing the technical names of every flower, I prefer to know them by heart. Their meanings. Do you know?”
“The meanings of the flowers?” Yori had tilted his head, like he does when he’s confused. “I didn’t know there were any.”
“There’s a meaning to everything,” the owner had said. “You just have to look. And then you have to understand.” She’d smiled, then, and it made her look decades younger. “I have a little homework for you two, then. You see, here,” she’d searched for something in the pocket of her apron, taking out a small plastic bag filled with seeds. “I have some new seeds we’ve just received, a new batch. But someone forgot to label them, so I have no idea which seeds they are, or what they’ll grow.” She offered them to Minato, who took the bag hesitantly. “Take them.”
“You want us to grow them?” Minato had asked, weighing it in his hand. It was very light.
The owner shrugged. “Or throw them away, for all I know. But if you do plant them, and you take care of them, then this is the favor I ask of you.” She’d leaned close, like she was about to tell a secret. Unbidden, both Minato and Yori had leaned in as well. “When these seeds have sprouted and grown, please come back to tell this old florist what they’ve turned out to be, will you?”
“Yes!” Yori yelled, startling both Minato and the shop owner. But the excitement in his toothy smile was contagious, and Minato, who’s never really spared a second thought to gardening, found himself nodding alongside Yori’s enthusiastic promises of taking very good care of whatever grew, to bring some flowers back to her when they sprouted.
But now they have an empty plastic bag and a handful of seeds on the ground, and little to no idea what to do with them. To be fair, Minato thought it was pretty straightforward — dig a hole, put the seeds in and then cover it, but then Yori started asking questions like How deep should we bury them? Should all the seeds be this close to each other? How much do we water it? And suddenly they were back to step one.
They’re quiet for a little while, watching the seeds as if some sort of answer could sprout from the soil. Minato slowly lowers himself into a sitting position next to Yori, laughing at the affronted noise he makes when their shoulders knock against each other. There’s no breeze, nothing to rustle against the tree branches, but the sounds of the forest lull Minato into a lazy sort of contentment. He’d bought two egg sandwiches at the convenience store near his house before meeting Yori, and they ate it inside the wagon, sharing a juice box between the two of them. His stomach is full and he is warmed by the sun, and he could fall asleep like this, he thinks, head lolling against Yori’s shoulder.
His eyes snap open at the sudden thought, though once he realizes it he doesn’t dare move. His timid thoughts about maybe moving closer have somehow translated into this: Yori’s shoulder pressing up against Minato’s cheek, his t-shirt smelling of fresh laundry and sweat. Pressure against the crown of Minato’s head, as if Yori has also leaned down to rest atop it. Minato’s heart jackrabbiting in his chest.
It’s not comfortable at all. Minato’s considerably taller than Yori, who’s still slight and soft-cheeked as any seven year old, looking years younger than everyone else in their class — although Minato’s discovered, to his surprise, that Yori is four months older than Minato himself. Still, the height difference means Minato has to be all but tucked into a ball, back hunched over, in order for his head to be at level with Yori’s shoulder. It shouldn’t be comfortable.
Minato isn’t particularly brave. He knows he isn’t. He’s trashed the entire front of the classroom instead of saying Stop, leave him alone. He wrestled Yori to the ground and nearly got his ear ripped off for his trouble instead of saying, louder, Leave him alone, he’s my friend.
He’d rather bleed all over the world, so long as the blood is real, so long as the pain is physical. You scratch your skin open, wash it, put a bandage on the wound and you’re better. But if he says a word he can’t take it back. There’s no way to unsay things. To swallow them back down after they’ve slipped through your teeth.
So he doesn’t do the brave thing. He doesn’t reach out blindly for Yori’s hand. He doesn’t start any sentences with I think. He doesn’t move. Instead he closes his eyes tightly and pretends that if he stays very still, this sun will continue shining upon them the same way forever, and they’ll never need to go home, and Minato and Yori will always be Minato-and-Yori, a semicolon at the end of a phrase.
And Yori, because he’s worlds kinder than Minato will ever be, lets him get away with it.
They sit there, quiet, shrouded by the cool shade from the abandoned train wagon and the humidity coloring the strands of grass with dew. It’s late afternoon, but not late enough that the sun’s started to climb down from the ground. The light is just softer, more mellow. There’s moss growing on the metal sides of the wagon, like the forest started taking back what disrupted its scenery. Minato wonders what’ll happen if they plant the seeds and it grows tall and wide like the things from fairytales, big enough that no one will be able to find the train wagon ever again.
Except for them, of course. They’d never forget the way here. All the steps they’ve traced have turned into a map, as well-known as the palms of their hands.
Yori asks, softly, “What if it grows into a baobab?”
It startles Minato out of his daze, out of the veil of safety of touching like this where no one could see them, not even themselves. He quickly straightens up, pretending to not be disappointed at the sudden absence of warmth, and wipes down his cheeks as if checking for stray tears. Sometimes he wakes up crying, so it’s a common habit when he thinks he’s been dreaming. “What if it grows into what? ” Minato asks, past a dry throat. “What the heck are baobabs?”
“They’re like these big, big trees,” Yori explains, opening both of his arms wide and waving them up and down as if to mimic the size. “They start off like these tiny little weeds and you think they won’t be very big, but they will. They grow so tall and their roots grow so deep that you have to cut them off before they grow too much.”
“What happens if they grow too much?”
“They split the world apart.”
Minato narrows his eyes. “No they don’t.”
“Yeah, they do,” Yori says earnestly. “Sounds scary, right?”
“Trees can’t make a planet split in half,” Minato argues, previous awkwardness all but forgotten. He scrambles for some sort of reply to the absurdness of what he’s hearing, and each second it takes him to come up with something, Yori’s grin grows larger. Minato sort of wants to keep floundering just so he can keep smiling at him like that. “I’ve literally never heard of that happening before.”
“Yeah, because if it had happened, we wouldn’t be here,” Yori says, patting the grass beside him. “Heat death of the universe.”
“I don’t think that’s what the heat death of the universe is,” Minato points out.
Yori taps his chin thoughtfully. “I don’t think so either. But I like how it sounds in my mouth.”
“You’re so weird,” Minato feels the need to inform him. He hopes it doesn’t sound half as fond as he feels.
He gets a shy close-lipped smile in response, a light kick to his shin that he pretends actually hurt; he groans and rolls to the side clutching it, and Yori rolls his eyes good-naturedly at him. “But anyway, baobabs are real, there’s pictures of them if you look it up online,” Yori continues. “Also, I’ve read all about them, so I’m kind of an expert.”
From the ground, Minato asks, muffled, “Where did you read about them?”
“This book I got on my birthday once,” Yori replies. “It’s really good.”
“Which book?”
“The Little Prince.”
They manage to keep it together for about two seconds. Then giggles start to spill from behind Yori’s closed mouth, and Minato has to clamp both hands over his own to muffle his laughter, and then they’re both laughing hard enough to frighten some birds high up in the branches of the trees. Yori rocks backwards and forwards with it, shoulders shaking, and Minato manages to sit up and push his shoulder, even though he’s laughing so hard there’s tears in his eyes. “I hate you,” Minato breathes out.
Yori beams. “No you don’t.”
No, Minato thinks. No, I really don’t.
It doesn’t feel so difficult to think such things right now, right here. This part of the forest, this train wagon — Down the slope, through the tunnel, he remembers Yori narrating their steps the first time he brought him here. Climb on out and here we are! — feel removed from the rest of his daily life, from his little world. He’ll be eleven in a few months’ time, and while he knows that isn’t old (Mom’s in her thirties; that’s old) sometimes it’s difficult to feel as carefree as his other classmates. Maybe it’s because of his dad, or rather because of his absence. Mom says he’s mature for his age, and even though Minato doesn’t want to be mature, he can’t quite shake it off. Except when he’s with Yori, it seems. Except when he’s with Yori and when they’re both here.
He thinks Yori is mature for his age, too. He’s smart, way smarter than Minato is, but a lot of people in class think he isn’t and snicker when it’s his turn to read something out loud because he has trouble memorizing kanji. But everything bounces off Yori like he’s made of rubber, everything is taken in stride, and — Minato wishes he could be like that. He wishes his skin weren’t so tender, so that he didn’t bruise every time he brushed against something sharp. He’s not even talking about the real bruises, like the ones on his shins from where the pedals of his bike have hit, or the one he got on the bridge of his nose after Hori-sensei accidentally knocked his elbows against it.
No, scratch that thought. Minato doesn’t want to think about Hori-sensei while he’s here. He knows he’s not really brave. He’s never considered himself a good person either, or at least he’s never spared a thought for it. But what he’s done to Hori-sensei sort of proves something he doesn’t want to admit yet. He’s done something bad.
Who is the monster, he thinks, watching Yori tilt his head back towards the sun. Is it me, or is it something worse?
“Minato-kun,” Yori says. “We still need to plant the seeds.”
“Oh,” Minato says. “Yeah, let’s. Let’s do that.”
Mom is going to kill him, Minato thinks, as he and Yori move soil this way and that, digging with their own hands due to the lack of tools. It’s only been a few minutes, but he’s already covered in dirt up to his knees, and soon enough it’ll be up to his elbows too. Or rather Mom won’t kill him, but she’ll be worried, which is worse. She’s so worried about him these days. Minato doesn’t know how to stop it. He doesn’t remember a time where she wasn’t at least a little worried about him, but, like, his dad died, so at least it was warranted. She eased off when he seemed to be handling it okay, and he stopped calling out for her if he woke up crying.
But now he’s worrying her again. He knows she knows something’s wrong, or at least thinks something’s wrong. Sometimes he thinks about telling her — about the boys at school, about Yori’s dad, about Yori, whose name he’s never even uttered when she’s around. But Minato’s already made a choice. He blamed Hori-sensei instead. He told a lie. Lying’s bad. Minato’s not a good kid.
Sometimes he wonders what a better him would do, but there isn’t a better him. There’s no one else but who he is. Sometimes he can barely stand it.
“Oh, there’s a worm,” Yori says, halting in his digging. Minato glances over at him — they’ve decided to divide the amount of seeds evenly and plant them in two different places, one closer to the sunlight, the other to the shade, so they’re a few meters away from each other. “I’ve unmade your home. Sorry.”
“Are you apologizing to a worm?” Minato asks, smiling a little. “It doesn’t even have ears, it can’t hear you.”
“It doesn’t matter that it can’t hear me, it matters that I said it,” Yori states, before carefully covering up the worm again with a little soil. “A little to the left. If worms are out in the sun for too long it burns them into a crisp.”
“Cool,” Minato says. “Do you think they would taste like potato chips?”
Yori doesn’t even bother to look up at him. “Don’t eat any worms. I won’t take care of you if you’re sick. I can’t even carry you.”
Minato makes a face at him. Yori makes one back. In silence, they continue digging, until Minato is satisfied with the size and drops his portion of the seeds into the hole, before covering it up again. His hands are covered in dirt and damp soil, uncomfortably clinging to the inside of his nails, and he resists the urge of wiping them down on his shorts, since that’d only work to spread the dirt even further. He really hopes Mom doesn’t get home before him, so he has a chance to take a shower and try to get rid of some of the evidence.
Yori stands up after he’s done, hands on his hips as he looks down at the overturned mounds of soil appraisingly. He nods to himself. “Alright. Now we need some water.”
The creek water that runs through the tunnel in front of the wagon isn’t the cleanest — it definitely isn’t drinkable, which is why Minato always makes sure to have bottled water with him — but they figure that the seeds are already dirty enough underneath the earth. The water they collect is greenish with moss and sprinkled with fallen leaves, but it’s cool to the touch and will definitely make the seeds not thirsty (or at least that’s what Yori says).
When they’re done, they stand side by side in between their two new plants, the youngest flowers — or trees — or bushes — or whatevers — of their slice of the forest. By then, the sunlight has definitely grown softer, and it’s closer to dusk than it is to mid-afternoon. Minato tries to swallow down his uneasiness at the dying light when he notices that Yori doesn’t seem bothered, but really, this is a rule he has stuck to so far: going home before it’s too dark. Since this area is pretty isolated, there aren’t any lamplights until they make it to the side of the highway, and the tall trees are really good at swallowing up all the light. Minato’s gone past them on drives with Mom before; at night, the forest just looks like a huge, dark mass with spindly arms.
“Minato-kun,” Yori says. When Minato looks at him he’s looking down, a soft frown on his face as he contemplates the ground in front of them. After a few moments of silence, he finally asks, “Do you think they’ll grow up well? Big and strong?”
“If we take care of them, maybe,” Minato replies. He kicks some pebbles and half-broken sticks away from where they’re standing. “Or maybe nothing will grow at all. Maybe the seeds were already dead and we just buried them.”
“I don’t like that,” Yori tells him. Minato feels kind of chastised, then embarrassed for feeling that way. He doesn’t want Yori to not like him, or think he’s weird, but sometimes he just doesn’t know what to say, and rarely does he seem to ever say the right thing. “I know they’ll grow. I just hope they’ll do it well. I hope they don’t end up weak, or don’t bloom, or that their branches — if they have branches — break off easily. Or maybe there’ll be bugs who’ll try to eat them, but plants don’t have arms to make them go away. What if they grow up well but then the bugs start to eat them?”
“Then we’ll have to make the bugs go away,” Minato explains. As if on cue, a mosquito lands on Yori’s clothed shoulder, and Minato slaps it away. Yori barely flinches. “‘Cause we’re bigger and can take care of them. But my Mom said that’s why taking care of plants it’s so much harder for her. She said that if a baby is hungry, or cold, or sad or hurting, they can cry and scream to let the bigger people know. But plants don’t. They just start drooping quietly and then they die without making a sound.”
“They let go of their strength,” Yori says, softly. “They stop feeling.”
Sadness floods his chest like chilly water from a river’s current, making his bones feel heavier. Shame is also an emotion that lives in the throat, so when Minato swallows it down, it just makes his body ache. He stares down at his own feet and wishes he would just do — something. He doesn’t know what. Minato is sad a lot of the time these days, and he knows Yori is sad too, because he can see it, like when you’re a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home; you’ve never met them before, but you can recognize them. But sometimes Minato thinks that he and Yori carry different kinds of sad, and he didn’t know there were other ways to feel sad, so he doesn’t know what to do.
For Minato, sadness often walks alongside anger. Sadness is throwing everyone’s books on the floor and turning tables upside down in the classroom. It’s erasing a mistake on his homework until the paper rips. But for Yori, sadness seems to just be… absence. It slides from him like ice on skin, melting into a puddle. It’s being pushed to the ground and not bothering to do anything but get up and keep walking. It’s a blank face while people say horrible, horrible things.
Minato hates that blank face. It’s the face of someone who’s used to it.
“Plants aren’t people, they don’t have feelings to stop feeling,” Minato says, trying to dispel some of the odd tension that’s lingering in the air. “Anyway, we’ll take care of them, and they will grow up tall and strong. Like baobabs, up until the sky.” He pauses. “Maybe without ripping the planet in two. Can you imagine if it split right in between us, and you were standing on one side, and I was on the other? And it split us apart too?”
“That would never happen,” Yori says, like it’s absurd of Minato to even suggest it. “We could never be apart.”
“Not even if the world split in two?”
Yori shakes his head. “Not even then.”
Minato feels heat crawl up his neck, and he hopes that being outside all day has already burnt his cheeks enough that the color doesn’t show. Still, he smiles a little, embarrassed. He catches Yori’s gaze watching him, smiling as well, and his face is like the sun.
Then Yori crouches down and places a hand atop the mound of earth, dirty fingers digging underneath it a little. He tilts up his head to soak up the sunlight, as if he’s trying to pretend he’s one of those plants, the little seedlings growing underneath the ground, squirming towards the surface. Wanting nothing more than to live, unconcerned with human things such as emotions and hurt and pain. Don’t you wish sometimes, Minato hears in his head, like a murmur, a memory in his own voice, to be reborn as something else?
“Say, Minato-kun,” Yori asks, eyes still closed, skin still tinged gold. “Doesn’t something feel new?”
Minato doesn’t know about new. He thinks about different. Thinks about Yori. Thinks about a million different things, and says none of them. Yori doesn’t seem to mind his lack of words. He never does.
There’s a metallic taste on the back of his tongue, tangy with the undertone of familiarity, something that makes the hairs on his arms stand on end. It tastes like a storm.
ii.
There’s blood on his hands.
It’s not a huge amount of blood. Minato keeps staring at it as it seeps through the bandages tightly wrapped around his palms, the dark scratches on his knuckles already coagulated. Mom held onto his wrist as the nurse used tweezers to remove the pieces of gravel stuck to his skin, before dousing the scrapes with antiseptic. She did the same as the nurse moved on to his knees and shins, squeezing his arm until it turned red, seemingly feeling every echo of pain in Minato’s place.
He didn’t feel much of anything, really. It was just cold. He’s cold, still.
Mom’s making udon for dinner.
He watches her as she moves around their tiny kitchen, stirring the broth on the pot, checking the timer on her phone to see if the noodles are fully cooked yet. It’s been raining on and off today, so all the windows in the house are closed except for the kitchen, so that the steam has somewhere to go. From time to time thunder will rumble in the distance, followed by a damp, chilly gust of wind that has Mom shivering every time. Minato just watches her.
She knows she’s being watched. It’s made clear by the way she pointedly doesn’t look back at him, as if knowing that if she did, their gazes would meet. Usually it’s not something she’d avoid, but Minato isn’t hurt over it. He doesn’t think he’d be able to handle her looking at him right now. He wasn’t even able to look in the mirror after he got out of the shower.
The overhead lamp is yellow, warm. Mom made it a point to not have any white lights in the house; she said it reminded her too much of a hospital, which really just means it reminded her of Dad. Minato can read in between the lines. There’s a light bug buzzing near it, but the sound is nearly indistinguishable between the portable fan near the door to the hallway and the TV, currently airing some idol variety show with delayed subtitles that Mom pretends to make fun of but actually enjoys.
It all feels so normal. Minato’s been right here a thousand times: sitting at the kitchen table, half-watching television and half chatting with his mother, sometimes sneaking in bites of food when she says she needs a taste-tester. When they first made it home she was still trying to pull him into some sort of conversation, but Minato ignored her enough times that she stopped, and now the silence between them seems charged with electricity. Mom’s eyebrows are drawn upwards, like they do when she’s upset. Her mouth is pressed into a thin line. Minato is wearing bandages on his hands and ankle and bloody band-aids on his knees, cleared from a hospital stay since there were no signs of a concussion.
Minato has told a lie.
He didn’t mean to. The first time Mom asked, it was just — a reflex, really, not to mention Yori’s name, to make any allusion to his existence. Mom’s busy these days: if he says he was out late because he was playing with his friends, she doesn’t question it, doesn’t ask who those friends were. She probably assumes they’re from class, and while that’s technically true, it doesn’t — he doesn’t know. He told a lie.
Maybe that’s better. He was — at the hospital, during the resonance thing that made a lot of noise, he kept his eyes closed very tightly, trying to think as many thoughts as he could, if only to keep his brain from drifting towards what it alway does, who it always does. He isn’t sure how the machine works, but Mom said it was to see if there was nothing wrong with his brain since he might have hit his head, and Minato still feels flashes of cold fear trickle down his spine when he thinks about it. Mom said that there was nothing wrong with his results, but she’s wrong. Minato knows better. There’s something wrong with him. With his brain. It’s not right. Maybe it’s never been.
He doesn’t have the words to explain it, though. So for the lack of his own, he’d just — said Yori’s. Those terrible words that Minato hates, because Yori’s dad is wrong, so wrong, he’s got it all wrong; there’s nothing wrong with Yori, but there is something deeply, irrevocably wrong with Minato, and maybe it’s contagious, maybe whatever disease Yori mentioned having is something he caught from Minato, maybe it was his fault all along.
Someone’s switched my brain with a pig’s brain, he’d yelled. That’s what’s wrong with me. I have a pig’s brain, so I’m not human anymore. I’m just a monster.
Minato told her a lie, and then said the truest thing he’s able to say. Does that cancel it out? Does that make it better? Worse?
Underneath the table, he thumbs at the screen of his phone, locking and unlocking it. There’s a crack running through its surface now, but it’s not too damaged, considering that he jumped out of a moving car. There are no recent notifications on it except for a missed call, dated some odd three hours ago. Yori, reads the contact name.
While they were waiting for the MRI results to come in, Minato sent maybe about a dozen messages to Yori on their Line chat; all of them went unread. But not undelivered, he reminds himself, as if that means anything. Yori’s dad could do a hell of a lot of damage to him without touching his personal belongings. And if he’s not mistaken, he distantly remembers Yori mentioning that his dad takes his phone at night so he doesn’t use it before bed. Mom did the same until Minato turned ten.
Somehow it’s not comforting. It’s the furthest thing possible from comforting.
“Ah, shit, ” Mom says, suddenly, and Minato startles so badly his knee hits the underside of the kitchen table. She gives him an apologetic look, and it’s only then that Minato realizes that maybe it’s not just the steam making the kitchen hazy, but actual smoke.
“Mom,” he says, and for some odd reason, he wants to laugh. “Did you burn the noodles again?”
Mom all but throws the smoking pot — with almost no water in it, and the once white udon noodles halfway to carbonized — inside the kitchen sink, and then turns on the cold water. A faint hissing sound comes from it. “What are you talking about?” Mom asks, frazzled, tying her dark hair back in a bun on top of her head. “Who the hell burns noodles? People should be imprisoned for that level of incompetence. They’re noodles, it’s not rocket science.”
“Mom, I think the curtain’s catching fire.”
“What? Where?” Mom exclaims, her eyes wide as saucers as she reaches for the burnt pot on their sink. When she realizes he was making fun of her, she levels on him the flattest glare he’s ever been alive to witness so far. It would be more intimidating if there weren’t orangish stains around her mouth, because she kept snacking on these crab flavored chips she loves while she was cooking. She blindly searches for a wooden spoon on the kitchen counter and then points it at him. “You’ll drive me to an early grave someday.”
“You’ll be alive until you’re, like, two hundred years old,” Minato says.
“Nuh-uh, you’re not allowed to outlive me, young man,” Mom tells him. She throws away the burnt udon noodles and stares at the trashcan for a few seconds, before moving to the cabinet next to the fridge and taking out some cup noodles. “I still need to meet my grandchildren. Should we go for udon flavored to try and pretend everything worked out, or do you want the seafood flavor?”
Something sharp and icy settles on Minato’s sternum. He hopes it doesn’t reflect on his voice when he replies, “Seafood.”
“Okay. I’ll go with the curry one, then.” Mom glances over at him, and maybe Minato’s not as good at hiding his expressions as he tries to be, because she always seems to notice.
Slowly, as if she’s trying not to scare away a spooked animal, she sets down the cup noodles on the counter and moves to crouch next to where he’s sitting, balancing herself on the table. Her other hand hovers over his knee, as if she’s questioning whether the touch would be welcome or not, and Minato remembers, with a pang of shame, how he’d all but slapped her hands away from him earlier, how he’d ran away down the sidewalk to avoid meeting her eyes. She has no idea about Yori, so for all she knows, he opened the door and jumped out of the car merely because she was speaking to him.
Minato doesn’t know what to say about that. Mom hasn’t asked so far, other than small confirmations about how long Hori-sensei has been hurting him, how long he’s been teaching him for. Minato has only responded by shaking his head yes or no, because he’s afraid that he’ll end up spilling that Hori-sensei has never hurt him at all, has been nothing but kind. And if he spills, he’ll have to spill about everything else.
Minato’s a liar, and he’s not a good kid. He’s not a very good liar either, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Mom. There’s times where she sees through him so easily, and times like this, where she just… trusts that he’s telling the truth.
If guilt meets shame, is there a chemical reaction inside his body? Minato wonders if he’ll just implode one of these days. It’s the best alternative than having to carry it all for the rest of his life.
(Saori’s parents didn’t want her to marry young.
Her own parents had been wed when they were eighteen and nineteen each, and although they loved each other dearly, her mother always talked about how she wished she’d lived a little before settling down. How there wasn’t enough of an interval between her being some man’s daughter and becoming some man’s wife, not nearly enough time for her to figure out who she was if it wasn’t in relation to someone else. Work, her mother had said. Travel if you can. Try to fall in love more than once. I’m not in a hurry for any grandchildren, so you shouldn’t be either.
So Saori became the first in her family to go to college. She got into the business track; she stayed out late and partied with friends, took the train down to the beach with her first boyfriend, went on the ferry from Okinawa to Busan so many times some of the workers at the dock started recognizing her. For a year and a half, Saori lived the life her mother wished to have lived.
And then she met Minato’s father, and she thought, well. Mother did say to fall in love at least twice.
Then Minato came — of course he wasn’t Minato yet, just a clump of cells, but Saori decided to trust in love, and love seemed to trust her back: she married, twenty-three to her husband’s twenty-two, and everyone in their families tried to pretend that the timing of their wedding ceremony and Minato’s birth eight months later was just a happy coincidence. And how happy it was. How happy.
When Minato is three-and-a-half to Saori’s twenty-six, they both lose someone. Saori has to deal with the fact that there’ll come a time where she’ll be the only one to remember the way her husband would snort when he laughed, or how he peeled oranges for her without her even asking and then stuck the sticker on her cheek just to see her blush. How he’d hold Minato up in the living room, making the silliest noises as they played airplane. How Minato would say with his baby lisp, Higher, higher!
At age twenty-six, Saori realizes two fundamental truths: one, that sometimes love isn’t enough. Two, that being a parent is like being a blanket that’s too small, and no matter what she does, how many ways she stretches herself thin, there’ll always be someone left out in the cold.
She watches her son now, ten-and-a-half, bruised and bandaged and with haunted eyes that won’t meet hers. A ten year old shouldn’t have haunted eyes. They shouldn’t lie, shouldn’t steal the kitchen knife and cut their own hair in the bathroom instead of asking her for help, shouldn’t come back from school with nail scratches on his ears, with a bruised nose. They shouldn’t be calling themselves a monster.
There has to be something wrong here. There has to be some signal she missed, some utterance she misheard. What do you do when you realize your child is lying to you because they don’t trust you enough to tell the truth? Or worse — because they’re too scared to tell you the truth?
But Saori is scared too. She’s thirty-three and there are gray streaks on her temples, although she always dyes them black because she doesn’t want Minato to be worried about her growing old. Sometimes she works ten hour shifts and by the time she gets home her son is already asleep, more than once on the couch, as if he’d been waiting for her to come back. She kisses his forehead and musters up enough strength, somehow, to carry him to bed. He’s not a little boy anymore. He’ll never be that small again, but that won’t ever stop him from feeling fragile in her arms, as if he’s about to break.
She won’t let him break. It is a fact of life that sons outlive their mothers: she refuses to let anything prove her wrong. Still, she’s scared. She’s been trying for weeks, months, to get an answer out of him, any sort of explanation for his worsening nightmares, his missing shoe, the bruises, the tears she wipes from his face as he sleeps. So when Minato offers her this — a name for someone who’s been hurting him, something tangible and real and solvable — she jumps upon it, clutches it to her chest. Even if some part of her wants to dig deeper.
You’re not a monster, she wants to say. And if you were, then I’d be a monster as well, because I’d still be your mother, and you’d still be my son. A monster is not a monster when you love them. And I love you. I used to sing you to sleep. You’re not a monster.
She doesn’t say it. Maybe she should have. In a few weeks’ time, choking on rainwater as she slips on muddy ground, stumbles through fallen branches during the worst storm of the decade, she’ll keep thinking it. I should have said it. Her drenched clothes clinging to her back, desperation clinging to her skin. I should have made sure. Hori-sensei calling out two names, whereas she can only manage to repeat the one, as if it’s a prayer. Minato, Minato. )
Minato doesn’t like this hesitation. It makes him feel uneasy, unsettled, like he’s really — he’s really done it, hasn’t he, made his mom too afraid to touch him. Monster. But he’s a selfish one, if anything, because before he can second guess himself, he takes her hand and settles it on his lap, holding it tight. Her grip is slack for a moment, as if she hadn’t been expecting it, but in the next one she’s already squeezing his hand back. It’s warm and calloused and familiar. Everything is so familiar, Minato thinks. This house, this kitchen. Even Mom’s perfume.
But after tonight, something doesn’t feel quite right. Hours upon hours inside the wagon, waiting for Yori. Yori who never appeared. Yori who always appears. As the rain started falling alongside nighttime, Minato had hugged his legs to his chest, choked back the instinctual fear at being left alone in the dark. Even the fairy lights they’d hung up on the ceiling did little to chase away the inky darkness, only managing to color it somewhat warmly. But it wasn’t warm at all. It was cold.
“Your hands are freezing,” Mom murmurs, bringing his palm up to her lips. After a moment she does the same to his forehead, holding the back of his neck. She pulls away, a frown on her face. “You don’t have a fever, but I don’t like how cold you are when we’ve been inside this long. Do you want me to get you a hoodie? Should I turn up the heat?”
Minato keeps his eyes on their hands. “‘m fine.”
Mom’s eyes are so, so worried, but so, so kind. “You understand why it’s difficult for me to believe that, don’t you?”
Bad kid. Bad kid. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to be safe. And I can’t keep you safe if you don’t tell me if something — or someone — is hurting you.” She pushes his hair back from his forehead, and then her hand moves downward to cup his face. He can’t find it in himself to look at her. “Hori-sensei has been your teacher since April, Minato. It’s June. That’s two months where he was hurting you and you didn’t say a word.” She pauses. “Were you afraid I was going to be mad at you?”
He can’t reply honestly, of course, because Hori-sensei hasn’t been hurting him, but. He has been afraid she’ll be mad at him if he does tell the truth, if he ever mentions Yori’s name in her presence, so — yeah, he can give her that. “Mm. A little.”
Mom lets out a sad noise, her thumb caressing his cheek. “Oh, baby,” she says, voice sounding a bit wet. “I would never be angry at you for something that’s out of your control. You’re ten. Your teacher is not only supposed to teach you, he’s supposed to nurture you and take care of you, and I’m so sorry he hasn’t been doing that.” She kisses his forehead again. Minato’s eyes burn. “I’m going to make it right, okay? Mom will take care of everything. I’ve already called the school to schedule a meeting. I only want you to promise me one thing, okay?” There’s a beat, in which Minato waits for her to say it, but instead she just taps his chin and says, “Please look at me, Minato. You don’t have to be afraid, you never have to be afraid of me, okay?”
Minato looks up at her, blinking hard because his eyes hurt so much from trying to hold back tears. “Okay.”
“It might take a while for the school to take any actions regarding Hori-sensei’s behavior,” Mom says, very seriously, and Minato is so ashamed. “So I want you to promise me you’ll tell me if he touches so much as a hair on your head, or says anything to you that’s unrelated to class, or even if he makes you feel weird. Okay?”
He won’t, Minato thinks. He won’t do anything bad. He never has. I have. I’m a liar. Mom’s looking at me different than she used to. Have I always been like this? Mom, I think I have done something monstrous. I think I was supposed to be something else.
“Okay,” Minato whispers. Mom, of course, mistakes his tears for something else, and while the guilt eats him alive a little, he’s too selfish to not enjoy her easy comfort, how readily she offers it. She stands up to hug him, cradling his head protectively, and he buries his face in her stomach and tries to pretend he’s deserving of this warmth, this love.
They’re quiet for a little while. Mom starts humming — she can’t really hold a tune, but her voice is as familiar to Minato as his own hands, and he finds himself melting further into her hold as she continues, hands rubbing circles on his shoulder blades. The TV buzzes in the background, quiet conversations gone unheard; the burnt smell from the noodles has already faded away, leaving behind only the scent of fabric softener they prefer, fresh laundry and sesame oil. He could recognize who it was even without looking, just by the way she felt.
(He thinks he would know Yori blind, too, just by the way his breath came, the way his steps hit the ground wherever they were — at school, on the street, in the forest. The thought scares him so much he has to think of something else.)
Minato closes his eyes very tightly and thinks about the dark behind his eyelids. Why was I born, he’d asked his father that day, his dead one, incense burning his nostrils, making his eyes water, but he’d really just lacked the words to express what he meant. It isn’t about not having been born at all, but about going back — about traveling the opposite way down the threads of time, about unmaking, crawling his way back into his mother’s body, unraveling. Rebirth, not birth. Minato was born wrong, and he knows, but — he’s pretty sure that he could do things right if given one more chance, knowing what he does now. And he’d be different if he were reborn, because you’re only born as what you are once. Hori-sensei says lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice; Minato figures the same logic applies here.
Maybe if he wishes hard enough he’ll be able to do it right, even if it’s only in his next life. Or maybe if he wishes hard enough one day time will crack open in half, and he’ll peer through it and see a time before he was born; maybe then he’ll be strong enough to finish tearing time in half, and then he’ll fall — or jump — or be pulled — and he’ll be back to unbeing. Unborn.
It isn’t about dying. At least, Minato doesn’t think so. It’s just about starting from the beginning, again.
“Minato,” Mom says. He feels the way her voice reverberates inside her chest when she speaks. “You know that there’s nothing in this world you could tell me that would make me love you less, don’t you?”
Minato thinks of a car ride on a dark, damp road. The rain hitting the windows, clang-clang-clang, loud enough to drown out half of what his mother was saying, but not all of it. His phone buzzing just as Mom said the word, Normal, a nice, normal family, like those you see.
He thinks, Do I?
Minato squeezes her tighter instead of answering. She squeezes back.
“Did you know,” Yori says, “no one ever really touches each other?”
It’s late afternoon. Orange blood-red. The windows of the train wagon are splattered with mud and sprinkled with dust, and every light that crosses it is distorted, dim. As the dusk falls, the gloom grows, shadows stretching underneath the seats, curling around their ankles. The fairy lights on the walls are like little stars, and Minato watches as one of them flickers with a buzzing sound, like an eye blinking, a firefly fluttering.
“I’m made of atoms and you’re made of atoms,” Yori continues, unbothered by the lack of response. He’s positioning some battery-powered flashlights that they bought at a 100-yen store around the floor, pointing upwards. The white light is jarring when set against the yellow from the fairy lights, so they also bought yellow film paper to cover them, which they did earlier. It doesn’t do much in the way of helping with visibility, but it looks nice. “And atoms can never touch each other, which means we can’t either.”
“What are atoms?” Minato asks. It’s hot. They always close the door behind them when it starts to get dark to make sure no animals or bugs can crawl in, so it’s stuffy inside. His head itches.
“I don’t know,” Yori replies, honestly. He sets down the final flashlight, turning around to face Minato with his hands on his hips. Yori does everything honestly, earnestly, except, of course, for when he lies. But Yori doesn’t really tell lies — he’s not a bad kid like Minato, who’s told a lie too big to keep a hold of because he was scared, and the lie didn’t even fix anything, because he’s still scared. Yori just hides things. Clams up. Gives a soft little smile that says nothing. Minato hates that smile. “Dad has a lot of science books for kids back at the house,” Yori explains, bending down so he’s at eye-level with where the light falls. “I guess he hoped I would really like science and become a cool scientist who does cool things, but I’m really bad at science and at everything else. But anyway, one of those books talks about atoms and what they do.”
“But not about what they are?” Minato frowns, glancing over his shoulder at Yori. “Doesn’t sound like such a good book.”
“It isn’t!” Yori says, laughing as he meets Minato’s eyes. There’s an odd intensity to them, even if his face doesn’t betray anything but softness. Yori really does look way younger than everyone else their age, his face round, bangs falling over his eyes. His hands are small, too. Minato wonders just how much his hands and Yori’s differ in size. Sometimes he stares at Yori and thinks about holding his hand. He thinks about it more often than he ought to, really.
“Then why are you talking about it if the book sucks?” Minato asks, looking away. “You’re weird.”
“It doesn’t suck, I’m just not smart enough to understand it,” Yori explains flippantly. “At least that’s what my dad says.”
“Your dad’s a liar, ” Minato bites out before he can stop himself. If the way Yori falls silent is anything to go by, he probably said it with more force than necessary, but he doesn’t care. How dare he. Yori always says stuff like this so naturally: Dad said I’m not smart enough, Dad said I’m not normal enough, Dad says I’m sick and I have to get better, Dad says I have a pig’s brain instead of a human. It’s so obviously not true, because Yori is so smart and funny and cool, and so — so much more human than Minato has ever managed to be. Yori’s so good.
When Minato turns to look, Yori is staring intensely at the flashlight closest to the bench. It’s not really that bright due to the film paper, but it can’t be comfortable to look at; sort of like looking at the sun when it’s just about to go under the horizon. “Yori-kun?”
Yori doesn’t say anything for several moments. Then, voice small, he goes, “Dad says only bad kids don’t believe their parents. I’m not a bad kid.”
No, Minato thinks, incandescent with rage at this man he’s never met. No, you’re not. I am, but you’re not.
“You could never be a bad kid,” Minato states. He stands up, throwing his hoodie down and walking up to Yori. He crouches down next to him, undeterred by Yori’s lack of reaction, how he doesn’t even turn to look. “Yori. You’re not a bad kid. And I said — your dad’s a liar. You’re normal. You’re good. If anything, it’s…” He takes a deep breath, sort of choking on it. Bravery is a trick of adrenaline, and some things tumble out of his mouth without him meaning to. “If anything I’m the one who’s bad. I tell lies, I did — I don’t talk to you at school. I hit you.”
“I hit back,” Yori says, sadly. He still won’t look at Minato. “I don’t like hurting.”
It’s unclear whether he means hurting other people or being hurt. Minato doesn’t like the implications of either. “I don’t care,” he tells Yori, and finds that he means it. “Sometimes friends hurt each other. But we made up, and it’s okay. You’re not bad.”
Yori rests his chin on his hands. “If I’m not bad,” he says, quietly, “then you can’t be bad either, Minato-kun. Because we’re — we’re the same.”
Minato goes cold all over, then hot. His face is blazing, and his heart stutters a few beats inside his chest. He doesn’t ask Yori what he means, because… he thinks he knows. But if he says it out loud then it becomes real.
He looks out the window. Night’s falling soon, and he should be headed home. Ever since Minato told her about Hori-sensei, she hasn’t exactly been overprotective, but she’s definitely more worried. She texts him more throughout the day, checks on him more. This past week she’s been at home by dinner every day so they can eat together, and Minato sort of enjoys it more than he’s able to put it into words.
Then something touches his hair.
He makes sure to stay very, very still. He doesn’t look away from the window, even as he becomes hyper aware of every single nerve in his body, lightning shooting down his spine. Gentle fingers card through his hair, softly but not cautious, as if they’ve done it a thousand times before.
They haven’t. Minato is just as taken aback and startled now as he was at the first time. He truly feels like time has cracked, and he’s peering through the gaps. He doesn’t move. He’s so quiet he can hear his own heartbeat. The soft puffs of air Yori lets out as he caresses his hair.
Even crouching down like this, Minato is still considerably taller than Yori, so the hand on his head forces him to lean down a little, but he doesn’t really mind. Yori’s hand is warm and his fingers are sticky with sweat and sugar from the popsicles they ate earlier. It’s familiar, for all that this has only ever happened twice.
“Even if I’m not dumb, I don’t think I understand how atoms work,” Yori says, conversationally. Minato feels his eyes burning a hole on the side of his head. “I don’t get it. I’m touching you right now.”
“Maybe it’s just all in your head,” Minato suggests, as if he can’t taste his heart on his throat. “Maybe you just think that touching someone is supposed to feel like this, so you feel it, but it’s not really happening.”
Yori tugs at a lock of his hair. Minato’s heart skips a beat and tumbles through the next few others.
“No, this is real,” Yori says. There’s an odd gravity to his tone, one Minato can’t really place. “We’re real.”
Night falls. Dusk is on the horizon, a watery yellow against the growing deep blue. Soon enough it’ll be too dark to see out of the window; the light that’s cast inside shields them from the darkness, though, a sealed aquarium, a paper boat bobbing up and down on the vast ocean, too stubborn to go down under the waves.
And the waves crash. Anything would split apart under its weight, but they won’t. Not even if the world is torn apart in two. Not even if the seeds they planted grow into baobabs as tall as the sky itself, and the Earth splinters — there is no chance that they’ll each be standing on a different side of it, because they’ll be holding onto each other. It’s like this: it’s dark and it’s quiet, and Minato reaches blindly for the hand Yori has on his head, and takes it.
For once, Yori looks completely taken aback. It’s hard to phase him, Minato knows. He tries to pretend like it doesn’t phase him either, like he doesn’t feel like he’s about to throw up. Minato isn’t a particularly brave kid. More often than not, he thinks of himself as a coward.
But it’s quiet, and it’s dark. In the warm glow cast by the fairy lights, in this little world they built for themselves inside a big world that so often doesn’t seem to want kids like them to grow — outside, the seeds they’ve buried in the ground are germinating, roots stretching below the earth. It might not grow to be as tall as a baobab, but it’ll be sturdy. It’ll bear fruit. It’ll withstand storms, and grow even stronger from them.
Minato takes Yori’s hand and threads their fingers together. He squeezes once. Yori squeezes back.
Outside, night falls. If the rumbling in the distance says anything, it’ll be a week of storms. But inside, it’s warm and dry. Inside, alone but for each other, Minato feels the bravest he’s ever felt.
“Minato-kun.”
“Yeah?”
“Are we reborn?”
A pause.
“No. We’re still exactly the same.”
“Oh. I think I would’ve been sad about that once.”
Sunlight threads careful threads through the gaps in the trees, dying everything in dizzying color, bursts of yellow-green, blue-white, pink-tinted cheeks.
“But not anymore?”
Once, a few weeks ago, Minato sat at the kitchen table while his mother went out to the store. He was supposed to be doing his homework; he hadn’t. Instead, he’d written down on the paper, Minato. Then he scratched it out. Written again, Minato and Yori. He’d tapped the pen against his notebook. Logic said he should have written down something else. He could have written were here, but that sounded like it’d been done before. A thousand different stories of a thousand different boys who wanted to leave a mark made out of anything anywhere, to show that they were someone, but in the end just ended up being imitations of each other. And Minato wanted to be something more than just an echo chamber. Minato and Yori, he’d written, are somewhere else now.
“No, not anymore. I’m not sad anymore.”