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While he waited for the girls at the other middle school next door to all pass by on their ways home, Hifumi hoped the rain would stop.
It didn’t.
But at least all the girls left.
He didn’t have an umbrella today, so he lifted his bag over his head and set off. His home wasn’t too far. That didn’t make the trip through the downpour pleasant.
It became especially unpleasant when he heard footsteps just a short ways behind him. He glanced at the source, and-- oh, no. A girl. He recognized them -- they lived on his street, so of course the two would be walking the same way home. He sped up his pace and then ducked into the next sidestreet. He’d wait a while for them to pass and get a good distance away, and then he could walk home in peace. Why were they so late leaving, anyways? He was sure everyone from both the boys’ and girls’ schools had gone home or were in the middle of clubs right now. And why’d it have to be the one girl that lives on his street!?
He was pulled out of his panic briefly, only to panic even more, because they’d stopped, and they were just looking at him. Oh God, oh no. Please just leave, Hifumi willed. Please just leave. Please.
“Do you not have an umbrella…?” They asked instead of just reading Hifumi's mind and leaving like they should've.
“N-n-no, b-but I’m fine,” Hifumi barely managed to say. He was pressed up against the wall with his bag still stupidly over his head.
They held out their umbrella. “We’re going the same way. You can walk with me if you want.”
“I’m r-really, really fine, it’s okay!”
“Oh.” They pulled back. “You’re that kid that’s scared of girls. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize…”
Hifumi stared at them. Maybe if he just didn’t do anything, they'd leave. They already got the picture, right? It sucked to be gossiped about, but maybe that meant girls would leave him alone if they knew he couldn’t stand them.
They didn’t leave. “W-well,” they held out the umbrella once again, “m-maybe if you pretend I’m a boy, it’ll be fine?”
…That was something Hifumi hadn’t heard before. Was that even possible? It wasn’t like this was garden-variety shyness and he could pretend peoples’ heads were potatoes; girls were still girl potatoes. It was weirder to have someone request that. After all, who wanted to be seen as the wrong gender? Instead of voicing any of these concerns, Hifumi blurted out, “A boy with a skirt?”
Said beskirted person recoiled. “Sorry. You’re right. It’s silly. I’m probably making you so uncomfortable. That was so stupid to even suggest. I'm sorry, I'm sorry…”
Hifumi wasn’t listening to any of their endless apologies, because even after he’d made his objection, he kept thinking about the idea. It was actually interesting, because if he could think of one girl as if they were a boy, then he could think of others that way, and then maybe he wouldn’t be scared of girls at all. That would be pretty great, right? His biggest obstacle in life, erased, just like that. He cut off the apologies which, wow, those were still going, and said, “L-let’s try it!”
He forced himself under their-- under his umbrella. Hifumi stood half-out, his right side still getting wet. Baby steps, right? If he could do this walk home, that would be huge. And he’d get slightly less wet than he would’ve on his own. Once the other realized that he was going along with it, he moved the umbrella to cover both of them more evenly, and the two resumed their walk.
“I-I’m Hifumi Izanami. What’s your… name?” He asked with some difficulty.
“Kannonzaka,” he answered.
“Uh, no given name?”
“It’s… girly. And I don’t like it, anyways.”
“Oh. I guess I don’t need to know, then.”
Kannonzaka hummed in agreement. The rest of the walk, neither of them spoke, as much as part of Hifumi wanted to talk and talk and talk to this interesting person who was willing to abandon his own name to help him. Hifumi looked at him (because he realized he hadn’t actually done so except to consider how terrified he should be of him), and he noticed that the unkempt hair covering his face really did make him look gender-neutral, anyways. Maybe this would work. He just wouldn’t look down at the sailor-style uniform, and this would be fine!
When Hifumi arrived home, he wanted to congratulate himself on successfully spending an extended amount of time around a girl, but somehow, it didn’t feel like he had. Well, that was the point of it, right?
--
The next day was sunny. When Hifumi finally started his walk, after his usual routine of waiting for all the girls to leave, Kannonzaka was there again.
Being with him had gone okay yesterday, so today could only be better. He waved, and Kannonzaka came over. Hifumi managed a lopsided smile and a “H-how are you?” Already doing just as well as yesterday -- success!
“I’m fine,” he said. “Do you want to walk home together, Izanami?”
“Yeah. I’m not as scared of you now.” He hadn’t even stuttered at all with that one. Oh, this was going so great. “You can call me Hifumi.”
Kannonzaka hesitated. “But you can’t call me by my given name, though. That doesn’t seem fair.”
True. He didn’t really want to call him by whatever his feminine given name might be. That’d break the illusion. “I guess we should come up with a nickname for you, then!”
Kannonzaka looked dubious. After thinking about it for a moment, though, he said, “Alright. Something manly.”
“Obviously.”
Try as he might, though, Hifumi couldn’t come up with anything.
Kannonzaka had suggestions, but they were, in Hifumi’s opinion, all terrible. “Friedrich,” he'd said, the last in a list of things that were way too long to be good nicknames.
“I’m not gonna call you a weird foreign name,” Hifumi said.
“Like the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche,” Kannonzaka explained, like that made it better and not weirder. Who even was that? Were they learning really advanced stuff over at the girls’ school?
The two got to Hifumi’s house, so he invited Kannonzaka inside. He had to figure out this nickname thing, because now he was thinking about it and if he didn’t get closure he’d explode. He pulled a kanji dictionary down from the shelf and started flipping through it. “I’m gonna give you a really cool name.”
Kannonzaka awkwardly stood and watched. “You’re really gung-ho about this…”
“Well, I have a cool name that I like. So everyone should get to,” he reasoned. He scribbled down a character that stood out and kept flipping through the dictionary. When he’d decided on something that he was sure Kannonzaka would like, too, he showed him. “Doppo! Spelled like solitary path.”
Kannonzaka started laughing.
“Eh? Is it no good?” Hifumi asked.
“No, no, I’m sorry, It’s fine--” he collected himself-- “it’s just that I think you put more thought into naming me than my parents did. Oh, sorry, that’s rude to them…”
Hifumi started laughing, too. “I guess I did get carried away.”
“It’s okay, though,” Kannonzaka said. “I like the name. ...But I have to get home.” He hadn’t gone beyond the entryway, so he just turned around and left. “Bye, Hifumi.”
“Bye, Doppo!” He called after him. He waved back as he walked down the street. If he was responding to the name already, then it must’ve been a good pick.
Only once Hifumi had gotten up to his room did he realize that he’d had Kannonzaka-- no, Doppo, in his house, alone with him, and he hadn’t been scared at all. Huh.
--
The two of them walked home together after school every day after that, after everyone else had gone. Hifumi had tried leaving at the normal time, once, but the crowds of girls’ school students still terrified him. Being unafraid of Doppo did not seem to translate to being okay around anyone else. They were friends now, though, so he wasn’t about to stop hanging out with him just because the plan to desensitize himself to girls hadn’t worked. Doppo was just different, somehow. Hifumi didn’t have that many friends in general, but he’d just clicked with Doppo, even though the two were total opposites.
They started hanging out together, and he learned that Doppo actually did read dense European philosophy for fun (Hifumi tried some, but he didn’t get it at all). He liked flowers, which Hifumi also liked, and he even knew the flower-language meanings of everything. Hifumi just thought flowers were pretty. They both liked video games, at least, except Doppo’s tastes ran into the weird and dark, his collection full of horror and indie games that he insisted were totally full of hidden meaning if you just looked past the surface level. Hifumi preferred Mario Kart. It was unfair that of the two of them, Doppo was way better at Mario Kart.
Today they’d gone to the riverbank after school. Well, they’d still gone home together, first, because Doppo always changed out of his uniform whenever they did anything together. In the baggy hoodies and pants he preferred, one would be hard-pressed to tell him from any boy their age.
At the moment, they'd taken a break from the normal teenage boy activity of chucking rocks into the water to lie on the grassy slope of the bank.
Doppo spoke up, soft and serious. “Can I confess something to you?”
“Confess away,” Hifumi said. “But if it’s gossip, I can’t guarantee any secrecy.”
Doppo snorted. “I would never expect secrecy from you when it comes to gossip. No, it, uh, it only really concerns you.”
Intrigued, Hifumi sat up to pay attention.
“When we met, that day it was raining, I, um, I already knew you were scared of girls. I just thought that… Well, I was thinking, uh, it’s kind of silly, but I was thinking that maybe I wasn’t a girl, and I thought that maybe if you weren’t scared of me, that would, somehow, confirm it. ...That’s stupid, isn’t it?”
“No!” Hifumi was quick to assure. “It’s not stupid! I mean, I’m not scared of you, right? But I’m still scared of every other girl. Er, well-- not every other…” He wasn’t really sure how to correct himself, so he just asked, “So, did it work? Did you confirm it?”
Doppo smiled at him. “Yeah. Thanks.”
--
There was a ton of paperwork that they needed to fill out before being involved in the division rap battles. You’d think that they could just get their microphones and go, but apparently it was all, like, official and stuff. Hifumi didn’t get it, and he didn’t want to. Jakurai was there to help them through it, at least.
“You’ll want to pick a stage name,” Jakurai explained. “It’s more of a hold-over from the days of informal street battles than anything else, but it’s become something used to differentiate one from other rappers in an official capacity. They’re typically in English.”
Hifumi had to think about his. “Gigolo…?” He eventually suggested. “Yeah, Gigolo. That makes sense, right?”
“Okay. M.C. Gigolo. It’s fitting.” He jotted it down. “How about you, Doppo?”
He didn’t need to think at all. “Just Doppo is fine.”
“Just your given name? Are you sure? It’s a chance to put some extra thought into how you’ll be perceived.”
He shrugged. “It’s my name. I don’t need any other. Hifumi already put plenty of thought into it, anyways.”
“Aww,” Hifumi cried, “Doppo, you’re so sweet! You really like the name I picked for you that much?” He leaned over to hug him tight.
The squeezing hold was choking him. “Ack, Hifumi, too tight, I can’t breathe.” He pushed Hifumi, dejected, away. “Didn’t we already go over this when I legally changed it?”
“Yeah, and I still can’t believe you let a middle schooler name you.”
Doppo covered his face with his hand and sighed.
It was his own fault for offering his umbrella that day. He was stuck with Hifumi forever now.