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Yui is a quick tide standing at the street corner--she rises to the balls of her feet, she sinks again. She centers herself around the pinch of new school shoes, she treads her mind over and over her route.
She’s going a new way, this morning. She is going, bag in her hand and heart under her tongue, to high school.
It’s hard not to let it feel like the first day of her life. It is harder not to let it feel like the first day of Daichi’s.
Daichi, once her teammate, now a boy. Or perhaps always a boy--Yui doesn’t fully understand.
What she knows is this: Daichi severed his own hair with office scissors, and his mother ran damage control at the kitchen table, and now his strong jaw shows. Now his breast is hidden and his walk is tall, it finally shows all his stalwart.
What Yui knows is that she is the first person to have ever heard Daichi speak his name. Late after practice, he told it to her, he tore all the stale air and silence out of the dim equipment room.
What Yui knows is that she is Daichi’s friend. And this morning, in this unseasonable hot haze, she has something to show for it.
Stiff-starched black fabric rings the sinew of her neck, her wrists. Her chest and shoulders, though it doesn’t fit right around either, to say nothing of the hips. This uniform was made for a boy, and she knows that it doesn’t look hers.
It is, though, Yui reminds herself. It is.
She can feel herself seeping into it, from the weather or from nerve, but she has sweated with Daichi before.
Yui chews her lip, she glances around the unfamiliar crossroad. She thinks of things that are the same. Sweating with Daichi, being with Daichi.
Waiting for Daichi, in the mornings before school. So much depends, Yui knows, on the eldest son of a lonely threadbare mother. She has seen him haul his siblings from bed, watched him breakfast them and fix their buttons, march them out with all of their reluctance and a neat packed lunch.
She hopes that she can make something easier for him.
Here he comes, now, up the hill with his palm on the back of his neck. He is weary, Yui can tell.
Exhaustion, though, is only the beginning of his stamina. He raises that hand to her, he calls out her name.
Yui, he calls her. It hasn’t always been that way, but it may as well have been--it is a thing forged in the crucible of seventh grade, when the same court shook under their shoes, when their arms hung rangy from the same uniform. When they perspired and wept together, and dabbed the same match-losers’ tears from each others’ hungry eyes.
There was something inexorable about them together, they scratched it into the dirt. Flexed new strength, bounding toward it.
There is something inexorable about Daichi, a shield that Yui hasn’t quite yet raised. Daichi is fine. He is fine this morning, his dull eyes clear, he is fine as he approaches her. Claps her on the shoulder, works up a steady smile.
So much depends upon that square jaw, that eldest son. She doesn’t know how he manages.
She knows that she can help.
He tells her it’s a good morning--it is not an opinion. It is not a question, it just is. It has to be.
It’s his first time in a boys’ uniform, too.
The way he says it, though, Yui knows what claws at him. The rest of today is still hanging. The rest of high school, he probably can’t help thinking. The rest of my life.
Still, Daichi walks tall. Yui keeps up, though her shoes pinch.
“What are you wearing that for?” he asks, and he won’t meet her eye. He’s watching her shoulder, the crisp seam that she doesn’t half fill out. “It doesn’t fit you right.”
Yui laughs, a little thing swirled with anxiety. “I know,” she says, as bright as the day--part sun. “But I--you’re wearing one!”
There’s a little breath from Daichi, then, something that only Yui knows is a laugh.
“I am,” says Daichi, and there is a chill in it like water after practice, like the wash of a hot hoarse throat.
Yui can’t help but smile, with teeth. “You are, and I wanted to wear one, too! I wanted… I wanted to say that I think you’re brave, and you always taught me to be brave. So I’m being brave with you.”
If you really need my help, but I think you do. I know you do.
“Plus,” she says, lilting toward cheer, “there’ll be half as many people staring at you, because the rest of them will be looking at me!”
A huff. “I think they’ll all be looking at you,” says Daichi, “since mine actually fits.” He pauses, steadies his stride. Sighs.
“You don’t have to do this for me, Yui.” And Yui knows, somewhere deep and warm in her, the space that Daichi nestles into--she knows that this means ‘thank you.’
She begs, regardless, to differ. “I do!” she insists, with verve like smacking her own cheeks. “I owe you one for...”
He always tells her not to mention it, when she clasps his hand and thanks him. That she doesn’t owe him anything. Yui will never have it. They argue, back and forth, sweet and scripted and slapstick. Daichi wins, always.
Yui hems. “What’s the worst thing I’ve ever done to you?”
Daichi opens his mouth as if to speak, but Yui heads him off before he can tease. “Second year of middle school,” she declares. “When I--”
It’s not something girls are supposed to talk about in public. It’s not something girls are supposed to talk about at all.
But she finds she doesn’t care so much, what girls are meant to do.
“When I got my period,” she says, decisively. “For the first time, and there was blood running down my leg during practice, and I cried and cried and cried. And you,” Yui tells him, as if he was not there. As if he did not know, as if it wasn’t Daichi’s old name she was sobbing.
“You held my hand and you took me to the bathroom and you gave me a tampon? And I didn’t know how to use one, so you stood outside the stall and talked me through it, and--and you told me everything would be okay, and you w-wouldn’t let me sit out of practice and feel gross. And we had fun, together, with the team.”
She sighs, wistful with the memory. Of Daichi’s warm hand on her back, between tense shoulder blades. Of forging through the ache, and nailing a spike just before the end of practice that made everything worthwhile.
“It was a weird day,” Yui says. “You’re having a weird day right now.”
A breath. “So I--I want you to know that there’s somebody there with you, today. And I want you to know that everything’s going to turn out fine!”
Daichi raises a brow, verges on skepticism. Yui won’t have that, either.
“And if it’s not fine, I’ll make it fine!”
She is fierce when she says this, she is the terror she knows a girl can be. She is what she’s always wanted to become, for a fraction of a second.
And how could it be anything but right, that she’s doing it, that she’s being this for Daichi?
“I’ll shout at anyone who gets in your face,” says Yui, with all the makings of a snarl. She nearly expects to be scolded for it--a little chiding, c’mon, Yui, I don’t want any trouble.
Daichi is silent, he is just almost smiling. It is a glorying feel, knowing that she makes the right sort of trouble.
Yui presses on, perhaps a half-step farther than she ought to.
“And I’ll--I’ll make them let you on the boys’ team!” She hurls it to the ground like a gauntlet, a glove. She dares the petty world. She knows, at every level of herself, that this is Daichi’s highest-looming fear.
He sighs--how does he do it? He is a rangy fifteen, sounding world-wearied already. Like someone’s father. Crestfallen.
Yui reaches for his hand, she curls her fingers at the weak part of his wrist. She smiles, and it is as doggedly lit as the sun in winter, it insists.
“It’s gonna be alright,” she says, in the cadence of her friend’s own voice.
Daichi’s face schools itself back into a smile. A nascent thing, a small thing, but it’s there. It could just be that he wants to take his own advice, he never could stand hypocrites.
But maybe--Yui hopes--maybe he believes her. Maybe he believes her so much that it straightens his back, that it lengthens his stride, makes him look proud. Makes him walk on with all his purpose, leaves her just scarcely keeping up.
Maybe he believes enough for it to feel like knowing.