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There are many things Xiao hadn’t expected going into his final year of school.
First: the fact that he’d have to change classes due to some strange, unexplained—although not entirely surprising, given that his subject combination of choice isn’t the most standard—scheduling conflict.
It’s not that he minds, honestly. He hadn’t been the closest to his classmates or his teachers in the first place, and it’s not like there’s much to miss, not when their education journey is coming to an end in a measly year anyway. Making friends would just lead to unnecessarily painful goodbyes, and an unwanted distraction from their studies—not the best of plans, given the weightage of their final exams.
(Distantly, he contemplates the idea that his aversion to building bridges is because of the ones that already went up in smoke. He’s quick to dismiss that particular train of thought, though, because he buried the ashes a long time ago and it’s not good to disturb what’s been left for dead.)
Second: the fact that his father is moving overseas the year after his graduation, which inevitably lends itself to the notion that he’s going to be forced to move, too.
Again, not something that he cares about a lot. There’s nothing left for him here to look upon fondly in this small town but—figurative—flowers on the graves of the friends he’d lost and the searing grey hues of the winter dawn that reminded him a little too much of his life here: dreary, stripped of warmth, and less interesting than the soap dramas with the recurring scripts from five years back his father watched on television in the evening.
“Xiao!”
The legs of the chair scrape against the tiled floor, and he shifts in his seat, his gaze falling to the boy who makes himself at home on the chair beside him.
Third: the fact that a particular new classmate of his has, for some reason unknown, taken it upon himself to become Xiao’s seatmate.
“It’s nice to meet you, Xiao!” the boy with the braids says, sticking his hand out, and Xiao blinks. He remembers two years back when guys and girls alike had started growing their hair out and tying it in a similar fashion, all because of this guy. He’s popular and well-liked, and the startling antithesis to the type of people Xiao would envision himself being seatmates with. “Do you know who I am?”
It’s more surprising, Xiao thinks, that the boy knows who he is. It’s their first time being classmates, after all, and he doesn’t recall any instance of them interacting during their time in the school. “Yeah. Venti.”
He’s heard the name a copious number of times, but now that it’s actually rolling off his own tongue, it feels a little awkward. Venti would be the summer sun equivalent to his winter gloom; all warmth and (almost overbearing) friendliness and laughter shimmering between the syllables of his words.
“Oh, that’s a relief! I was afraid you wouldn’t,” Venti says, and Xiao resists the urge to roll his eyes and say who wouldn’t?, but he resists because Venti’s looking over at him with such a wide smile on his face and he doesn’t quite have the heart to shift it out of its place. Xiao’s just about to ask but how do you know me when Venti sticks his hand out again, more insistently this time, and Xiao comes to the belated realisation that he never quite shook it. “Then, let’s be friends.”
Xiao is halfway through shaking Venti’s hand by the time he processes the words.
“What?”
Venti gives his hand one last firm shake before lowering it, the overhead classroom light spilling gold like delight into his eyes. “We’re friends now!”
Xiao lowers his hand uncertainly, letting it fall back against the smooth plastic of the classroom chair. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to tell Venti—that the concept of friendship is long dead to him, that he doesn’t like having friends, that he doesn’t want a friend.
But Venti is still beaming over at him like he’s just conquered a world record of sorts, and Xiao feels the words burning his throat like a warning.
He decides to keep his mouth shut for the time being.
(Later that day, after Venti helps him memorise the names of all his new classmates and cuts the queue to get him the canteen’s bestseller bowl of noodles, he ponders over the meaning of the word friends.)
There’s always been some sort of space between, Xiao thinks while reflecting on his past few years of school, some sort of invisible social hierarchy. Those who were known would stay known, and the unknown unknown. He’d always preferred it that way, really, because it mostly meant he’d be left alone, as much as he felt sorry for those who tried to no avail to expand their friend circles.
But Venti seemed immune to all of that. He’s never cared much for friend circles, instead flitting around to spread his warmth in every corner of the school, and Xiao only comes to realise the extent of it several turbulent school days and stress-filled test weeks down the road.
Weeks on, and Venti is still treating him—as a friend, Xiao supposes, although it’s been a long time since he’s properly had one. He’s starting to get used to grabbing cutlery for two, not one, when he heads down to the canteen, to having someone trailing by his side every time he walks to the bus stop, and he’s even started to get used to the stares that follow the two of them down the hallway as of recent.
He is still a little confused as to how he had managed to obtain this new friend (he uses the word loosely, because he is still unsure as to whether he can or should call Venti that, but there isn’t any other suitable word for it, either) who was just always unequivocally there for him somehow, walking with him to their next class, whining by his side during too-tough PE lessons, filling him on things he’d missed on days he skipped.
In all fairness, he’s been pulling his weight, too, for the most part so he doesn’t feel too guilty about all the things Venti is doing for him, seemingly without any sort of explanation. Or any reason he can hope to understand, at least. He’s gotten used to whispering the answer to Venti when the teacher catches him dozing off and he heads down to the canteen nearly every day now instead of spending the lunch period sleeping against his desk.
But it doesn’t make sense. Venti has no shortage of friends; if anything, at times it feels as though the entire cohort—and even some juniors—considers him a friend, what with the amount of greetings he’s had to overhear over the past few weeks. And Venti would, without a doubt, have no shortage of better friends than him: people who’d let him copy their homework, who would accompany him to lunch every day with as much enthusiasm as him, who would agree to his silly, reckless ideas, like hopping onto the train and going all the way to the last stop for no good reason.
It is with this lingering thought in mind that he blurts out, one day, sitting opposite Venti at the lunch table, “why me?”
Venti looks understandably bewildered at the question, his eyebrows furrowing as he looks up at Xiao. “Huh?” he manages to get out over a mouthful of noodles and soup, “what do you mean, why you?”
“As in.” Xiao gestures to himself and then to Venti, as though that’s supposed to explain anything. “Why did you become friends with me? And why are you—well—here?” He had expected Venti’s offer of friendship to be more like an acquaintanceship, a daily good morning here and there. Not someone almost permanently attached to his hip for the entirety of the school day.
Venti takes his time to swallow down his noodles, eyeing Xiao carefully.
And then he shrugs, and says it in such a casual tone it’s almost easy to believe he’s just talking about the weather, “I didn’t want you to be alone.”
Xiao’s chopsticks hover midair. “What?”
“What?”
Venti lowers his chopsticks and Xiao follows suit. “I like being alone,” he says.
“You don’t like having friends?”
Xiao presses his lips together. It’s the first time during the course of their somewhat-friendship that they’ve had a conversation like this; most of the time their chats entail Venti doing ninety-eight per cent of the chatting with an occasional response from Xiao here and there. “It’s nice to be alone sometimes.”
“That doesn’t answer the question,” Venti counters, and Xiao can feel a sigh bubbling in his throat. For all his lack of attention-paying and bubbly tone, the boy with braids sitting across from him is a lot more perceptive than his literature teachers would give him credence for.
And Xiao realises, staring down at the remainder of his noodles growing soggy in the clear of the soup, that he doesn’t know the answer to the question.
Maybe he’s afraid of building bridges. Maybe he’s afraid of the inevitability of seeing them crumble.
What’s the difference?
“I can stop,” Venti offers, snapping Xiao out of his thoughts, “if you’d like.”
Xiao shifts abruptly, his knee hitting the underside of the table. His spoon topples from its precariously-balanced position against the edge of the bowl and spills into the soup. No, he realises he was about to say, but he clamps down on the words with all the will he has left. He’s suddenly reminded of everything that had landed him here—the changing of his class, the changing of his father’s position at work, the odd but not completely unwelcome shift of his social circle.
In particular, the second fact, this time. While the third (Venti’s eagerness to befriend him) had been the most startling at the start, the reminder of his unavoidable need to move overseas is the cause of his agitation this time round.
It’ll be better to lose someone before they wind their way too deep into your heart, some part of his brain offers, and he clings onto that like it’s a lifeline and he’s drowning in a sea of his miseries. He’s no stranger to loss, after all, and call him a coward, but he doesn’t want to have to say another set of goodbyes. Not ones that would break his heart, anyway—he doesn’t think he’s even put all the pieces back together from the last time it all fell apart.
And so, quietly, like a sentence falling upon an unwilling court, “yeah.”
Over the next few days, it changes again. Venti still sits next to him in class, because it’s too late in the term to swap seats out now, and besides, doing so would alert everyone to the fact that something’s not quite right between the two of them now. But he doesn’t whisper answers to Venti anymore, and Venti doesn’t sleep in class anymore. Xiao does it in his stead during lunch periods when Venti’s gone down to hang out with his old friends and the classroom is empty save for him.
There’s no one to talk to him during bus rides home, or anyone to drag him out to the nearest restaurant that opened up in the mall opposite school. He appreciates the silence, but, he thinks, breath fogging up the glass of the bus and masking his reflection, something’s not right anymore. He’d traded the company for some peace and quiet, but he’d never been one to mind not having company. Something’s wrong, he thinks, but he’s too tired to mull over it now.
Just before he closes his eyes to the slow movement of the bus along the road, he contemplates the meaning of the word friends again.
(The meaning is different each time.)
And something must have changed, unlike every other time he’s tried to cut someone off, because the silence that settles between them is more suffocating than any conversation could hope to be, and at some point it slips past the point of pretending that nothing’s wrong to the point of trying to hide the fact that something is.
When the rumours start following him down the hallway, he decides it’s time to take a break from school and the mess he’s unknowingly gotten himself into.
He doesn’t turn up for a week, and then the week after. His teachers come looking for him, but his father knows him better than to ask why he’s been holing himself up in his room, turning the adults away with some polite fabricated excuses about how he’s been fighting off some particularly stubborn illness.
He thinks it’s silly for him to be doing this over a ruined friendship—which may not be considered a friendship at all, and which he ruined himself—but there’s a part of him that can’t bring himself to care. It’s a familiar feeling, this one of loss, but he spends two weeks staring up at the blank of his ceiling and telling himself it’s for the better.
The first ever failed test he gets as a result of his hiatus doesn’t come as a surprise to him, but it’s rousing enough for him to come back to his senses, or at the very least enough for him to drag himself back to school. He’s not going to ruin his future over a bridge he burnt down with his own hands. Not now, anyway.
It’s still early in the morning when he comes, but he knows Venti will be here. It’s a habit of his to take a nap before the classes start for the day.
The boy who sits two seats in front of Venti sees him before Venti does. He looks a little like he’s seen a ghost, surprise flashing across his face before he manages to nod his head in greeting to Xiao. Xiao briefly wonders if they’d all assumed he’d transferred out after his half a month’s absence.
“Welcome back,” Venti says. He doesn’t lift his head, and Xiao looks anywhere but him as he lowers himself into his seat. The surface is cold and hard, but something about it feels more right than the soft warmth of the bus rides home. “How was your break?”
“It wasn’t a break,” he replies. Venti shrugs.
They don’t speak again until PE class ends and they’re dismissed for the day. The teacher grouped them in the same team today; it’s been a long time since they were in the same team. It takes Xiao till he’s two steps away from the school gates before he realises Venti has been following behind him.
“Was it a break?”
Xiao blinks, bringing his student pass out of his pocket to scan the gates open. Venti follows suit. “I said it wasn’t.”
“I don’t mean that,” Venti says, letting the gate slam shut behind him. “I meant our friendship.”
The sound of a sports car drowns out Venti’s voice and Xiao’s thoughts, leaving an asphyxiating scent of burnt fuel behind.
“I don’t know.” He opts to head towards the train station. Venti doesn’t take the train home. Xiao notices he follows anyway. “Do I have to answer that?”
It’s crowded in the train station, and all the conversations end up getting drowned out by other conversations, anyway, so they remain silent until the train comes. Xiao picks the row of seats at the very end of the carriage and Venti plops down one seat away from him, leaving a small space between.
“Not really,” Venti answers, gaze fixed on the window opposite them, “but I kind of wish you did.”
A smile curls the edges of Xiao’s lips; there’s no humour to it, and his voice comes out sounding half a sigh as he speaks. “So that you can know whether you should just stop wasting your time on me?”
Venti laughs, and Xiao startles. He hasn’t heard Venti laugh since that day at the lunch tables, but come to think of it, he once used to hear Venti laugh every day. Every few minutes, even. “No,” he says, “so I know how much effort I’ll have to put into getting you to change your mind.”
It’s a strange thing, Xiao thinks, Venti’s determination to keep him around, even though they haven’t known each other for long. But then again, everything about this has been considerably strange, after all, from the day they became seatmates to the days after. He still doesn’t know why Venti seems to have an odd fixation on him specifically, but he supposes it hasn’t died out yet.
“Why me?” he finds himself asking a second time, just like the last time, and for a moment of bated breath and questioning himself he briefly wonders if Venti will say the exact same thing as he had previously.
(He wonders if he’ll say the exact same thing as the last time.)
“Because it’s you,” Venti says simply, like it explains everything.
It doesn’t, but Xiao lets it slide anyway. From the corner of his eye, he catches Venti shooting him a quick glance before continuing to speak.
“I wasn’t lying about what I said that day. I didn’t want you to be alone, but you wanted to be left alone, so I backed off.” Xiao fights to maintain the impassiveness across his expression. “But you’re not going to lose me. So why are you acting like you are?”
Xiao straightens, his head jerking unevenly towards Venti. Venti is staring up and out of the train windows like there’s something to be found in the tunnel walls. “I’m no stranger to loss, you know,” he says, “and I know what it feels like.”
Venti sounds sincere enough to be believable, but he doesn’t know what to make of it. Venti doesn’t seem like the type, but he supposes they’ve all got things they don’t talk about. “You’re never alone, though. You know everyone.”
“I guess.” Venti picks at a loose thread on the hem of his uniform. “They’re not real, though.”
“Oh,” Xiao replies, because he doesn’t know what else to say. Is this—this odd, undefined relationship that’s somehow managed to last through the fire he put it through—real, then?
The train screeches to a halt, and Xiao squints up at the station name illuminated in green light. It’s the stop closest to Venti’s house. Venti doesn’t get off, and neither does he.
“I know it may not be what you want to hear.” Venti leans back against the hard of the seat and Xiao feels, all of a sudden, that the distance between them has become impossibly large. “But I won’t leave you, I promise, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
He comes to realise that while it had been what he had been afraid of all along, this time it is different. There is something, he realises, that draws his thoughts more to Venti than himself, and it is fascinating, if not a little unsettling.
“I’m not afraid of that,” he blurts, and in hindsight, he is glad for the general lack of people in the train, for his voice comes out sounding too loud and awkward in the quietude. “I’m going to be the one leaving.”
Venti’s gaze snaps to him, and he swallows. He hadn’t planned for this at all, but it’s too late to bury his words now.
“After we graduate,” he says, and in the back of his mind, he runs a mental countdown. They’ve known each other for about three months now, inclusive of their two week record of cold shoulder. Just another half-year to go to goodbye. “My father has a job offer in another city. I’ll… be going with him.”
He hates the way the words leave his mouth with such inevitability, like he’s been planning to leave this small town and Venti behind for dead all along.
But in a way, he reflects, he has. He watches Venti’s expression from the seat between them, waiting for a reaction—anger, confusion, sadness, anything.
Venti shows none of the above.
“Oh,” he replies instead, in a tone harbouring emotion that Xiao can’t seem to pinpoint. “Is that why you did that?”
He doesn’t have to specify that for Xiao to know what it means.
“Maybe.” He supposes they all have their foolish moments. In retrospect, running away from his problems may not have been the best way to solve them, but it’s been a long time since he’s dared to (or wanted to, really) navigate friendships. “... Sorry.”
He hadn’t expected himself to apologise, and judging by the look that flickers across Venti’s face, he hadn’t been expecting it, either. It’s oddly freeing in a way, though, like a spool of iron thread had unwound itself from his ribcage and lightened the load pressing knives into his heart.
Venti smiles a little. “That’s okay.”
The train comes to a stop, and Xiao listens to the announcement coming over the broadcast system. It’s the station he usually gets off at.
He doesn’t alight, and neither does Venti. For the rest of the train ride, they don’t speak. Venti’s still looking at the tunnel walls like there are answers to be found there, and Xiao is looking anywhere but him.
They end up taking the train all the way to the last stop.
“Do you plan on going home anytime soon?” Venti asks once they’re a distance away from the station. Xiao can feel the uneven pavement under his feet as he walks, kicking the little pebbles in his way away until they arrive at a playground. It’s empty save for them, and as Venti heads over to sit on one of the swings, he follows.
It’s a nostalgic feeling—he hasn’t been to a playground in years, but he still remembers it all. Sunset evenings, ice cream dripping down their palms from when they hadn’t finished it before it melted, chatter and laughter intermixing with the wind as they swung themselves till their arms hurt from holding on.
Friendship. It’s a funny word, so simple and so hard to understand all at once.
“I don’t know,” he responds, feeling the wind around his ankles as he kicks himself off the ground. There’s not much waiting for him at home, anyways, although he wonders if there’s anything waiting for him anywhere.
“Then we can stay.” Venti’s sneakers scuff the ground as he slows himself to a halt on the swings, the fading sunset glow catching lilac light through the tips of his hair. “I’ll stay.”
Xiao gets the distinct feeling that he’s not talking about right now.
Venti turns to face him, and Xiao forces himself to meet his gaze, his knuckles turning white against the cold metal of the swing handles. The evening sky is a melange of colour and illuminates Venti’s face in pale swathes of purple, his eyes burning with the golden flecks of artfully-spun chandelier glass.
“You’re afraid,” Venti comments, and it sounds less like a question and more like a statement, said with so much finality it’s as though he’s speaking from his own heart instead. “Afraid of goodbyes.”
Xiao kicks at the ground. A stray pebble dislodges itself from its spot against the ground and rolls away from them. Suspended in the air, he feels weightless, the breeze catching through his clothes and running a cold warmth against his skin. Maybe the speed at which he’s swinging himself through the air is making him foolish, or maybe the way the wind swallows up his words makes him more willing to say them aloud.
“Yeah,” he says, and then a little louder, half-hoping it falls upon Venti’s ears, “yeah.”
It’s never been something he’s admitted to anyone—not even himself, he thinks—before, but now that he’s said it, the weightlessness spreads from his body to that place within his ribcage where his heart is lodged, waiting to be heard.
“I’m afraid,” he confesses breathlessly, swinging harder than before. The adrenaline shoots through his veins like liquid fire at the movement and his heart rate spikes in his chest. He can’t tell if it’s because of how fast he’s moving through the air or because of the words leaving his mouth. “I’m afraid of having to watch people leave and I’m tired of everyone I meet eventually disappearing from my life.”
The memories leave a bitter taste on his tongue following the trail of his words. Old grudges, unfulfilled dreams—he remembers them all. How they’d been so young and filled with laughter in the playground light, shouting wishes to the wind and sitting together in the kiss of sunset; how they’d made promises and then broken them, grown up and then apart, how he’d spent his days wrestling with only the solitude flooding the scars they’d left.
“Do you think you’re leaving me?” Venti’s question comes so suddenly that Xiao loses his footing, his sneakers skidding the ground and the swing jarring to a halt. The vertigo takes over and he stumbles out of his seat, barely keeping himself upright as the world spins around him in a blur of green-brown-dusk-grey.
Venti catches him.
He looks up to see Venti’s smile, soft in the post-evening light; the last slivers of the sun pool in the depths of his eyes like magic in the darkening sky, and his voice is barely above a whisper and impossibly tender as he speaks. “You’ll never build the right bridges if you’re waiting for them to crumble, you know. You don’t make a promise for the purpose of breaking it.”
The strange, racing feeling in his chest burns a little brighter.
That day, in the playground just a distance away from the last station, Venti vows that there won’t be any goodbyes between the two of them.
And maybe it’s the lullaby of the wind, caressing their still frames in the after-sunset light, or maybe it’s the roaring of his own heartbeat in his chest, but Xiao thinks that maybe just this time, he’ll believe in a promise.
“You’re sure?” he finds himself asking.
Venti’s pinky finger comes up to wrap around his, small and slender but brimming with a quiet warmth. It feels a little like mending what wasn’t meant to be broken, like starting over, like new chapters written in better days.
“I’ll be by your side like a flower to a butterfly,” he says.
Xiao isn’t anywhere near the top of his class for literature (the honour belongs to Venti alone) and he doesn’t quite know what to make of the metaphor, so he offers Venti a half-smile and replies with, “goodnight, Venti.”
The corners of Venti’s eyes crinkle. “See you tomorrow, Xiao.”
“See you tomorrow,” he echoes. It’s been a long time since he’s said that.
Later that night, after Xiao finds his way home and endures a long, worried scolding by his father about staying out late, a singular, coherent thought crystallises in the after-dark hours:
I’ll be by your side like a flower to a butterfly.
Quietly, naturally, and waiting unchangingly for his return.
From that day on, everything begins again. They don’t talk about the inevitability of the parting that’s awaiting them come graduation day, and they don’t talk about the invisible countdown that’s at the back of their minds with each passing day, each concluded test, each semester’s end. “Only the good things,” Venti had pledged, and Xiao had been willing to listen.
If popularity had been associated to Venti like a first skin, Xiao would come in a close second now: lunches together, seatmates that wouldn’t split apart even at the teacher’s request, train rides to the last stop until the sun sinks beyond the horizon. Venti is the human embodiment of live while you’re young and over the next few months he takes Xiao by the hand and brings him everywhere he’s never been before—arcades, abandoned alleys coated with graffiti and ghosts of the past, ice skating rinks and coffee shops.
The days pass in a blur of laughter and tripping over their own footsteps and rushing out the door at the sound of the last bell, and the days are long and filled with tears and cramming for papers, but this time, Xiao thinks, they are not alone and there is something about this that feels—for lack of a better word—impossibly real .
The days pass in a blur all the way until the day of their graduation. This time, however, squinting at Venti under the bright of the stage lights with the certificate clutched tight in his hands, Xiao no longer has to contemplate the meaning of the word friends .
Venti had already gotten an admission offer from the college in this small town of theirs before they’d even finished their finals, a course in creative writing, because he’d rather spin dreams out of poetry than chase the corporate ladder up and away into the city, and Xiao thinks it suits him. They’ve learned to swallow down the inexorability of their parting like bitter medicine—a few complaints here and there, and an aftertaste that takes a while to fade, but they’ve come to accept that sometimes you have to put up with the bad in a bid for the better.
It’s not about being by each other’s sides through every moment, after all. It’s about leaving a piece of them behind with each other and waiting for their paths to align again. Sometimes goodbyes can’t be avoided, Xiao knows, but as he crosses the stage to fall into Venti’s embrace and the sound of his laughter, he thinks that maybe this time it’ll be more of a see you again than a goodbye.
“I’ll see you around,” Venti says, like he’s reading Xiao’s mind, and Xiao nods into his shoulder.
Maybe it’ll take him one year, or maybe it’ll take him five; maybe after he’s finished his science course in some prestigious university his father had managed to get him enrolled in, or maybe halfway through, when he’s grown tired of all the friendships that pale in comparison to theirs (he hasn’t experienced them yet, but he’s already certain of that fact).
But he’ll come back, like a butterfly to a flower, after the rain and in the blooming of the sun.
“I’ll see you around,” he echoes, and Venti’s pinky finger locks around his one more time.
This time, they’ll keep the promises they made.
“Xiao!” He hears his father calling his name, and his parting with Venti is over with the untangling of their fingers, a final hug, a smile reflected in the bright of their eyes. Venti doesn’t get him a farewell gift, and he doesn’t say anything that makes it sound like a goodbye, and Xiao is glad for that.
He holds the certificate to his chest and steps towards where his father is waiting for him, suitcases in tow and airport limousine waiting to take them away from the place they’d once called home. This time, there are no ashes to scatter, and no graves to weep by, and the summer light that spreads across his frame is warm, not burning.
This time, he gazes at the buildings of their neighbourhood that pass in blurs of brown and dusk-grey from within the windows of the car and commits it to memory like a vow, from the streets lined with fallen leaves to the arcades he’d skipped school for to the libraries they’d spent time in after-dark studying desperately for the last of their papers.
And maybe this time, he thinks, watching as they pass the train station and the empty playground by, there's something to be found in this small town after all, waiting for him to come home.