Chapter Text
“It’s only for a month, Reki,” Langa reminds him. Again. He’s reminded Reki so many times that now he thinks he’s saying more for himself than for Reki. He tugs on the zipper of the suitcase, but it won’t budge. “Can you help me?”
Reki throws himself over the suitcase and trails his fingers through the carpet. “I meant sit on it, but okay,” Langa says, laughing and pulling on the zipper again. It moves, and he zips the suitcase closed, looping his hands under Reki to drag it all the way around.
“But it’s a summer month! Everyone knows summer is the best time of year!” Reki whines. “No school. What am I supposed to do without you here?”
“What did you do before you met me?”
“Skateboard and…” Reki hesitates. Langa thinks it’s cute, how sometimes Reki forgets what he did before Langa. Langa doesn’t remember what he did before, either. “I don’t remember.”
“You’ll find something to do,” Langa says, bending down to kiss him. “Now get off my suitcase.”
“Can’t you take me with you?” Reki pleads. “Put me in one of those plastic bags you vacuum all the air out of? Roll me up and put me in your carry-on bag?”
Langa frowns. “But my skateboard is my carry-on. Remember?”
Poking him, Reki says, “I know I should be offended you’d rather take your skateboard than me, but man, I’m so proud.”
“I’m sorry I’m leaving,” Langa says, double-checking the zipper on his other suitcase. “But I have to go see my grandparents. You know.”
Reki rolls over on the big suitcase and stares up at Langa. “I know why you have to go. I’ll just miss you.”
He already knows that, but Langa is glad to hear it anyway. “I’ll miss you too.”
“It’s just so far away, and you’re gonna be asleep when I’m awake, ‘cause of the time difference, and…ugh, this is dumb, but, what if you forget about me? When you’re having all your adventures in Canada, you’ll probably meet somebody else, way cooler than me, and you’ll want to date him instead and you’ll be like ‘Reki who?’ and I’ll still be here, just missing you and I’ll have no idea.”
It’s amazing, really, the scenarios that Reki comes up with. Langa can barely imagine going on an adventure, let alone meeting someone else and forgetting about Reki. Reki is the one who’s more likely to have crazy adventures and a sudden whirlwind romance. But Langa doesn’t say that. “You know I’m just going to be helping on their farm, right? No adventures.”
Reki wails. “That’s even worse! You’ll meet a hot farm hand!” He gestures to himself, his sweatpants and threadbare t-shirt Langa has threatened to throw away. “How am I supposed to compare to a hot farm hand?”
Langa smiles and shakes his hand. He places his hand on Reki’s forehead and says, “I won’t leave you for a hot farm hand. I won’t forget about you.”
“Promise?”
Langa glances at the window, and the first light of dawn sneaking in. His flight is soon. He doesn’t want to leave Reki, but the thought of missing his flight and losing the money he spent on the ticket is enough to make him leave. “Promise. We’ll talk every day, okay?”
“Every day?”
“Yeah,” Langa says. “Your sunrise, my sunset. Your sunset, my sunrise. Okay?”
“Okay,” Reki says, finally climbing off the suitcase. “Sunrise and sunset.”
***
Even though he’s done it before, Langa is not prepared for the jet lag. After hours folded into a cramped plane seat, listening to the flying playlist Reki made for him on repeat, he should be grateful to stretch and walk, but he is so tired he can barely move. It should be nighttime, his body tells him, but it is broad daylight and there are his grandparents, waiting to pick him up, his grandmother waving wildly and his grandfather standing beside her with an apologetic smile. The exhaustion departs for a brief moment, replaced with warm relief, and he rushes towards them, letting them wrap him in a hug.
He had forgotten how much he missed them.
In the car, feeling like a kid again in the back seat, Langa falls asleep, and when he wakes up, they’ve arrived. He hasn’t been to the farm in over a year, but he’d recognize the smell anywhere: hay and flowers mingled with manure. The smell will cling to his clothes, and soon enough he won’t smell it at all. He smiles to himself, thinking of what Reki will say when they’re together again. Probably something like:
Langa! You smell like a moose. I don’t know what a moose smells like but you smell like one. Oh, it’s not a moose farm? Reindeer, then?
And, oh, he misses Reki already. He misses him as he carries his suitcase into the farmhouse, declining his grandfather’s offer of help, and as he begins unpacking in the guest room, which was formerly his aunt’s bedroom. He misses Reki as he sits on the bed and runs a hand over the quilt with its tacky pink leopard print. Reki would laugh so much at this room, at the wallpaper lined with bunnies and the boyband posters tacked on the walls. Langa wonders why his grandparents left this room untouched. He wonders if they wished they’d converted this one to an office instead of his father’s. Or maybe it hurts less to look at the childhood belongings of the child they still have. He’s not sure what he would have done, if it had been his choice. It must have been an awful choice to face. He doesn’t envy them.
He longs to fall asleep, but he knows that will only make the jet lag worse. He’ll just have to fight through it. He at least has to stay awake until his sunset. Reki’s sunrise.
Langa stands up from the bed, so that he won’t be tempted by sleep. He checks the drawers again, makes sure he’s put all his stuff in the bathroom. A whole month here. A whole month without Reki. Time slips away so quickly when he’s with Reki. Will it grind to a halt while he’s away?
He wanders downstairs and finds his grandmother engrossed in a book at the kitchen table. He looks up when he enters, smiles. “Would you like some coffee, Langa dear? You look like you could use some.”
The mere mention of coffee gives Langa a headache, makes his stomach churn. “No, thank you,” he says.
“Tea, then?” she asks, already standing up and heading toward the stove.
“Tea is good.”
While she fixes a cup of tea for him and a cup of coffee for her, Langa picks up her book and reads the back. It’s a romance, and even the summary makes Langa squirm. He sets it down, but not before she turns and catches him looking. “Just a silly read,” she says, laughing. “Summer reads are meant to be light. And who doesn’t love a summertime romance?”
Langa glances at the cover again, at the rugged looking man and the swooning lady. They stand in front of a horse, who gazes at the reader with an expression that suggests it’s seen more than any horse should. Langa thinks again of Reki’s concern about hot farm hands and pushes the book across the table.
His grandmother smiles and says, “Ah, well, but I suppose you’re not interested in summertime romances, are you? Your mother tells me you’ve got something of a romance going on back in Japan.”
Back in Japan. Not back at home. “Has she?” Langa asks, slowly, stalling. He’s heard his mom talking about him on the phone with his grandparents, but he had no idea she’d mentioned Reki. Unless—oh, he hopes his mother didn’t fabricate a girlfriend in place of Reki, for his grandparents’ sake. Coming out to his mom had been easy enough, but he doesn’t know how to broach it with them. He should have come up with a plan. He should have expected this, he should have—
“Yes, I’ve heard all about your Reki,” his grandmother says, stirring her coffee. “He sounds like a lovely boy.”
A weight lifts from Langa’s chest and he allows himself to smile. “He is.”
“Go on, then, tell me everything. I want to hear all about your exciting life in Japan. I’m stuck here, and the cows are only so much company.”
“What about Granddad?”
She waves off the question. “Sometimes I’d rather talk to the cows.”
Langa tells her everything that’s happened since moving, although he leaves out key details like his and Reki’s trips to S, his fight with Reki, and his near-death experience racing against Adam. There are some things you just don’t tell your grandmother.
***
When the sun finally begins to set, Langa makes his way back to the bedroom and changes into pajamas. He sits on the edge of the bed and calls Reki with a strange knot of worry in his stomach. What if Reki doesn’t answer? He tries to calculate the time. What if he forgot to set an alarm?
But Reki answers immediately. “Morning,” he says. “It’s too early. I feel like I’ve been hit by a car. And that’s not an exaggeration! I’ve been hit by a car so I know what it feels like.”
Through his exhaustion, Langa manages a smile. It’s so good to hear Reki’s voice. And no matter what Reki says about it being too early, he already has far more energy than Langa does. “I actually woke up ten minutes ago! Are you proud? I almost fell back asleep but then I watched some videos. You called in the middle of my fourth time watching that one of Adam wiping out in the mud.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” Langa says. He’s genuinely sorry—it’s a great video.
“Nah, don’t be sorry! It’s good to see you. But you look terrible, you know.” Langa stares at his own video in the corner. It’s true—his eyes are only half open, and the circles beneath them are grey.
“So do you,” Langa says, stifling a yawn. “At least I have an excuse.”
“I just woke up!”
“I’ve been awake for over a day,” Langa replies.
“Okay, you win,” Reki says. “How’s Canada? Can I see the snow?” Reki’s face comes close to the camera, like he’s trying to break through it. Langa wishes he could.
“It’s not snowing. It’s pretty warm.”
Reki frowns thoughtfully. “Really? I thought it was always cold.”
“Not in summer.”
“Huh. But how will you snowboard?”
Langa scratches his head. “There’s places to go. But they’re kinda far. Probably will just stay here.”
“How big is Canada, anyway?”
“Pretty big.”
“So if I meet someone else from Canada, will they know you?”
“Probably not.”
“They should,” Reki says, adamantly. “All right, so, what’s happened so far? How was your flight?”
Reki listens as Langa describes the woman who sat beside him and clicked her nails on the tray table the entire flight, even when she was asleep. He sympathizes when Langa complains about the plane food and lack of leg room.
Eventually, Reki interrupts. “Sorry, but I have to address the elephant in the room, or actually, the leopard in the room? Explain?”
Langa drops the quilt, which he had unconsciously pulled up to his chin. “It was my aunt’s,” Langa says. He flips the camera and pans around the room, and Reki laughs. “They left everything the same.”
“I like your boy band posters,” Reki says. “Don’t go falling in love with any of them.”
“Those guys are middle-aged now, probably.”
“Still. Any hot farm hands?”
“Not yet. You find a new skateboarding student?”
Reki grins wryly. “What, jealous that someone else might benefit from my incredible teaching? Worried they might steal your reputation at S?”
“No one else would let you teach them,” Langa says. “Not if they value intact bones.” He holds up his right hand, with its one slightly crooked finger.
Reki gives him a look of mock-offense. “’Scuse me, I’m a great teacher. And you only broke one bone.”
Langa tries to say something else but yawns instead. “Sorry. I’m so tired.”
“Do you want to go to sleep?”
“It’s too early. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night.”
“Want me to just talk, then? Keep you awake?”
“Yeah.”
So Reki talks, telling Langa everything that’s already happened since he flew out, which isn’t much, but Reki stretches each little event into a full story. Langa gradually sinks down, the camera angle getting worse as he falls asleep, and by the time Reki finishes telling him what he ate for dinner, Langa’s face is half-buried in a pillow. Reki probably can’t see anything more than a close up of his nose, but he knows Reki doesn’t care. Langa falls asleep without ending the call.
***
The summer passes more quickly than Langa would have thought, and he calls Reki twice every day, no matter how tired he is from working on the farm. But it’s not the same as being there with him. He desperately wants to hold Reki’s hand, or have Reki beside him in the bed, whispering stories into his ear instead of into a tiny microphone. Sometimes he reaches for the screen, as if to fix a wayward strand of Reki’s hair, or wipe a crumb from his face, before he remembers that it’s not possible. The calls are good, but they’re not enough. One of them is always tired, fading in or fading out, and Langa longs to return to Japan, to Reki’s time.
He begins to imagine that he and Reki are like two ghosts, one who can only appear during the day, one who can only appear at night, and they find each other at sunrise and sunset, but neither of them is every fully whole. They’re cursed, like characters in a fairy tale, but there’s no magic spell he can say or witch he can visit to reverse the curse. He thinks about it so often that one night, after hanging up with Reki, he dreams it.
They meet on a hillside at sunset. They don’t have long.
Reki sits with his knees drawn up, picking dandelions. Langa watches for a moment before sitting next to Reki. He examines his slightly insubstantial hand and says, “Hi.”
Reki wraps the stem of a dandelion around his finger like a ring. “Hey,” he says.
“What did I miss today?” Langa asks. It’s the same question he always asks. He knows Reki loathes the question ‘how was your day?’ because it’s hard to condense a whole day into one adjective, and nobody really wants to know how your days was when they ask that question. And ‘what did you do today?’ is no good because it only focuses on Reki, and Reki loves to tell stories about other people.
“Too much,” Reki says.
Reki has given Langa many answers, never the same one twice, often unexpected, but Langa never imagined he would hear this one. Reki always tells him as much as he can, elaborating on slow days and abbreviating on busy ones, but never before has he said there was too much to tell. “Too much?” Langa echoes.
“You’re missing everything,” Reki says, tearing at the dandelion stem, then the petals. Langa watches as the wind carries them off. “I’m…I’m tired of you missing everything.”
“You miss things, too,” Langa says.
“Not as much as you. So much happens during the day. Life happens during the day. What happens at night? You never actually tell me.”
It’s true, Langa doesn’t tell Reki nearly as much as Reki tells him. “A lot,” Langa says, keeping his eyes on the horizon and the rapidly sinking sun. “A lot happens at night.” He searches for the words, but none come. It is impossible to describe the beauty of the night to someone who only sees the day.
“I want to see,” Reki says.
“I want to show you,” Langa replies. He reaches for Reki’s hand, but Reki is fading now, fading like the sun on the horizon. The dandelion passes through his hand and Reki is gone.
Langa picks up the dandelion and curses the moon.
When he wakes, it is still the middle of the night. Without calculating the time, Langa scrambles for his phone and calls Reki. It rings longer than usual, but Reki picks up, and Langa is relieved to see that he’s not translucent.
“Langa?” Reki squints at the sun. “It’s early, isn’t it?”
“I had a bad dream,” Langa tells him.
“Aw, dude, that sucks. Are you okay?”
Langa takes a deep breath and looks at his hand. It’s solid. “I think so.”
Reki squints again—there must be a glare on his screen. “I’m at the park with my sisters, see?” He flips the camera and Langa watches as Chihiro and Nanaka pump their little legs on the swings, going nowhere. “Hold on, gotta give them a push.” The video jumps around as Reki goes over to the swingset, pushes each of his sisters, and says, “Go on, you can do it! No, Nanaka, no jumping!” The screen goes black for a moment and Langa hears indistinct scolding. When Reki appears again, his headband is gone and he has twigs in his hair. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay.”
“It feels wrong to talk to you this early,” Reki says. “Sometimes it feels like you live in a whole other world while I’m asleep, and our calls are like, this weird middle space.”
Langa’s dream creeps back into the corner of his mind. “Like purgatory,” he says.
“A good purgatory, though,” Reki replies. “If I had to pick one that’s what I’d pick.” He yells something to his sisters again, then turns his face back to the screen. “When are you coming home?”
Home. His grandparents keep saying they’re so glad he’s home, but this house was never his home, and Langa is no longer sure that Canada is, either. He counts the days in his head. “One more week.”
Reki grins. “Trick question. I know. I have it marked it my calendar.”
“But you don’t write anything in your calendar.”
“That’s the only event on it right now.”
“I miss you,” Langa whispers. He wishes the words could transport him back home, back to Reki.
“I miss you, too,” Reki says. “Now go on, go back to sleep. I don’t want you coming home all sleep-deprived beyond saving.” Reki turns so that the sun is behind him, casting a glow around his head. Langa has never seen anything brighter.
“When I get home,” Langa says, “Let’s stay up all day and night. Sunrise to sunset.”
Reki doesn’t ask why. Reki just smiles and says, “Okay. Go back to sleep, Langa. I’ll see you at sunset.”
“Mine or yours?
“Both.”
Langa hangs up, and this time when he falls asleep, he dreams of the sun, stretching its rays far enough to touch the moon.