Archive of Our Own ^beta

“These subjects [ASIAN AMERICANS] live under a kind of historical amnesia, making it even more challenging to locate their sense of loss, which has become ‘dispersed,’ ambient. Rather than sharp pangs of guilt, there is simply constant anxiety. They feel ‘psychically “nowhere,”’ ill-equipped to deal with the subtler yet still existing barriers to assimilation.”

“What unites both generations [OF ASIAN AMERICANS], Eng and Han suggest, is a kind of linguistic lack, a missing vocabulary—a paucity of stories that they might tell themselves about where they are going, and what it would mean to feel whole.”

Kiyoomi Sakusa is not good at making gyoza. He’s seven years old when he first attempts the dish, which means he’s still winding up the Mister Donut toy car his parents received with a dozen crullers back in Tachikawa and still making racecar noises to go with it. 

It’s a just-cold Tuesday in early January. His father and older siblings are out of the house, and family dinner starts in thirty minutes. As a result, he and his mother have over sixty-five dumplings to fold.

Rie Sakusa wears a pastel yellow Tokyo Disney apron. Her long hair is pulled back with a large claw clip, and her nails gleam an inoffensive beige. The polish shade is strikingly similar to that of the gyoza wrappers she expertly folds. There is a level of artistry to her swift motions; Kiyoomi doesn’t know much at age seven, but he’s sure of that. 

“You need to make eight folds in each gyoza, Kiyoomi,” his mother instructs in Japanese, correcting his faulty crimping. “Eight.”

This, of course, is an outlandish request. Eight is a number larger than Kiyoomi’s lifespan. In fact, it’s a number he can barely count on his fingers! The gyoza beneath his hands tear under the slightest pressure, but he’s supposed to fold their tender skin eight times? Absurd. 

“I can’t do it, Mama,” he grouses, dropping his latest disaster and scrunching his nose. 

Rie’s reply is curt: “You just need to keep trying.”

“I am trying!” Kiyoomi gestures to the four gyoza he’s managed to make—all of which look like they were run over by a bus. “But it’s hard.” 

His mother hums. She hums for a long while, suspended in a world of jumping oil, ground pork, and wet scallions. Finally, with her lips bowed, she says:「石の上にも三年。」

While puncturing another gyoza wrapper, Kiyoomi asks what the phrase means.

“‘If you sit on a rock for three years, it will eventually get warm.’ An old proverb my grandmother once told me, meaning that perseverance eventually prevails.” Rie picks up one of her son’s failed gyoza and begins to seal the holes in it. “Things take time,” she continues, pinching the tired wonton skin. “Gyoza take time. Volleyball takes time. And look: even the snow falling outside took time.”

Kiyoomi blinks at his mother. She stares back at him, owlish. 

And then the two of them are racing to the sink to wash their hands—dumplings be damned—fighting over the half-empty bottle of hand soap and splashing suds across each other. And then they’re pressing their noses against the windows to watch their backyard frost over like something out of a movie, their hurried breaths the warmest thing the brittle glass has felt in days. And then Kiyoomi is trying to push the door open to get outside, and Rie is picking him up like a child because he is one, and that’s not a bad thing—no matter how much he’ll come to think it is over the years. And then they’re giggling, and snorting, and grinning, and then this is the part of the story where everything is—just for a moment—perfect. 

So then. The earth will continue to turn, whether one wants it to or not. Even the coldest stone will warm over time. 

Kiyoomi sits at a broken desk in the center of the film lab. He has, quite honestly, no clue how he got here. 

To clarify, Kiyoomi forecasted for Digital Filmmaking. In fact, he did the whole dance—talked with the course instructor, filled out the online request form, and argued plenty with his overworked counselor. It was a statistical improbability that Film would fit into his rigorous schedule, and without the caveat of dual enrollment (a lower circle of hell, in Kiyoomi’s humble opinion). But life has a strange way of working out, it seems, because he here is: waiting for his final Digital Filmmaking project to be announced. 

“And last but not least, one for Ki.” Celia Martin drops a scrap of paper on his desk. She smiles at him then—in that eerily perceptive way that only a 43-year-old White woman can—before circling back to the front of the classroom to introduce the assignment. 

“All of you should have a piece of paper in front of you,” she begins, gesturing to the white doves gracing her students’ desks. “These bad boys are a critical part of your final film! Whatever word you were given must be incorporated, in some shape or form, into your project.”

Kiyoomi lowers his glasses to make out the cursive script lazing on his paper: happiness.

From here on out, the details of the assignment solidify like bone-dry porcelain. They have eight weeks to film and edit. Assigned words are to be conveyed implicitly rather than explicitly spoken. As mentioned last week, all students will work with an assigned actor from another class. There is no minimum number of shots required for the film. 

Toward the end of her instruction, Celia starts pacing the classroom. (This is one of the brightest stars in the constellation of her specific brand of embarrassment.) “Now, I know I said we were going to pair up with students from the Advanced Acting course,” she acknowledges sheepishly, “but it turns out they’re booked with monologues. So, we got the next best thing: Byron’s strength training class!”

On cue, a swarm of unfamiliar students enter the film lab. 

Kiyoomi brings a nail to the cuticle of his thumb and scratches—hard. The drawn blood reeks of betrayal.

Because here’s the thing: it’s not the strength trainees themselves who bother him. On the contrary, he’s fine with jocks. He grew up eating and drinking and sleeping volleyball, after all, and varsity athletes—even if a little ditzy—have good hearts. (Most people do, when you really pay attention to them.) 

What bothers Kiyoomi is the sudden change in routine. He was promised something, and now that promise has fallen through—without explanation, without reparations. This is what terrifies.

“Welcome to our humble abode, strength trainees!” Celia does a mock curtsy in her chartreuse jumpsuit, her feet turning out ever so slightly. “After your partner from my class is announced, the two of you are good to leave and start your weekend early. We'll start off with Madison C. and Jane D.”

As names spill into the classroom, Kiyoomi’s heart jackrabbits in his chest. It shivers and shivers, and it does not stop. 

He examines his options for dealing with the anxiety:

1. Picking his skin.
1. PRO: It’s discreet.
2. CON: If he scratches at his hands anymore, he’ll need a bandage, and that means he’ll have to make a fuss of unzipping his backpack or walking up to Celia and asking her for one.
2. Jiggling a knee.
1. PRO: It’s discreet, and it doesn’t cause any harm.
2. CON: His father once referred to this as a poor person’s action, and Kiyoomi’s never really been able to shake that. 
3. Sketching.
1. PRO: It’s the most socially-acceptable way of clearing one’s head.
2. CON: His classmates will see his doodles.

In the end, Kiyoomi forgoes all of these options to focus on what’s in front of him: happiness. 

Happiness. The word is painfully off-center, spanning the left half of the scrap of paper while barely inching into the right. Its nine letters are crammed together like the cars on a freeway a quarter past five. A faint ink smear dusts across it. 

If Kiyoomi’s being honest, this scrap of paper doesn’t evoke much happiness in him. It actually makes his pulse pound in his throat, just a bit, because the longer he stares at it, the more he can’t shake the feeling that it’s an afterthought. Yes. Yes! Celia must have written this word, this happiness, at the very last minute and then handed it off to him. That’s the only plausible explanation for its chicken scratch appearance. 

But then again. Then again, maybe he’s just finding faults in something for no good reason, the way he always does.

When Kiyoomi was eight years old, his family visited the beach. Vacations only occurred for special occasions, you see, and an eldest son graduating from high school was about as special as things could get. Each Sakusa child received a stack of quarters to use as they pleased at the boardwalk. Kouta and Kotoko immediately spent theirs on arcade games, but Kiyoomi squirreled the bulk of his money away, save for twenty-five cents. With this quarter, he sought out a fortune.

The Zoltar Speaks genie machine looked straight out of the fifties, so Kiyoomi was pleased when the animatronic wizard actually whirred to life. It spewed some psychobabble, made a sound frighteningly similar to an electric mixer slicing through butter in a metal bowl, and then spit out a tangerine-colored fortune into his grubby hands. It read as follows:

ZOLTAR SPEAKS: YOUR FORTUNE

Recently you’ve been making many judgments and assumptions. Remember: a mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts… and the consequences of even the least of them are so far-reaching. The more we judge, the less we love. Patience and thought will show you the right way again.

PLAY AGAIN!

YOUR LUCKY NUMBERS: 14, 12, 03, 43, 09, 29

Kiyoomi’s never really forgotten about that fortune. He’s never really forgotten most things.

“Yo,” a voice like fool’s gold begins, “are you my partner for this project?” 

The hands of time yank Kiyoomi out of sore 2004 and pitch him back into the present. He surfaces in his too-small chair with a pounding backache and someone prattling, rather loudly, into his ear. 

He does not look up from his happiness. 

“I’m just askin’ cause everyone else already left,” the words continue, gilded, “and I came in late, so I didn’t hear Ms. Celia call my name, and, well, you’re the only one still here, so I assumed we’re paired but...” A cough—fake, obviously. “Hello? Anyone home, or are you empty up there, bud?”

At this blatant impertinence, Kiyoomi lifts his gaze. And before recognition occurs, before any comeback can crystallize in his mind, a single observation whipsaws through his head: the person in front of him is Asian.

Kiyoomi Sakusa is seventeen years old. He has gangly limbs that once made him stellar at volleyball and continue to make him awkward at everything else. His inky curls have made him doubt the legitimacy of his biological parents twice. He lives in a cookie-cutter beige house bookended by two other two-stories homes with the exact same open floor plan and rectangular front yard and driveway that is too large for two cars and too small for three, unless they’re all Mini Coopers.

His older brother graduated from Harvard University five years ago and now works in New York doing something with the stock market. His older sister is taking a gap month-turned-gap-year before starting at a prestigious grad school. Kiyoomi himself has never gotten below an A- minus in a class; he has never had an Asian teacher either. 

Kiyoomi Sakusa has spent the last seventeen years believing he is boring. He has never met anyone inclined to challenge this belief. 

“Oh, there you are.” The Asian boy in front of Kiyoomi beams. He thrusts out a calloused right hand. “So, yeah. I’m assuming we’re partners for your film project. I’m Atsumu Miya, by the way, if you didn’t know.”

When Kiyoomi thinks about it, he does know. He knows because everyone knows. Atsumu Miya is captain of the varsity basketball team, a predetermined member of every year’s homecoming court, and one of the only other Asian kids in their grade. His popularity flowered back when they were fifteen, and it’s somehow managed to stay in bloom over the past few years.

It is January of senior year, and Atsumu has outstretched his hand, waiting for Kiyoomi to shake it. Atsumu does not realize that Kiyoomi is not a shaker. How could he? No one’s told him. It is because of this fact—and this fact alone, mind you—that Kiyoomi doesn’t glare daggers into the offending hand. Instead, he merely studies its blunt nails. 

After a solid thirty seconds of suspension, Atsumu retracts his hand. This action is expected. What is not expected, however, is the way he lours at his fingers in deep thought. What is not expected is the frustrated wipe of his palm against the cotton of his t-shirt, the re-extension of his right hand and the suave smile that comes with it. 

Strange.

“Enchanted, Atsumu.” Hands folded in his lap, Kiyoomi introduces himself. “I’m Kiyoomi Sakusa, but everyone just calls me Ki.”

“I know. Samu—my brother—he’s told me about you before. S’nice to actually meet you, though.” Atsumu yanks his empty hand back and cards it through his tarnished gold leaf hair. “Not sure why you’re sitting down like a weirdo when I’m talking to you, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.” He scratches at his taper fade. “Anyways. When are we meeting up to work on this movie, weirdo?”

Kiyoomi immediately pushes in his chair. He marches to the door, looks over his shoulder, and sneers, “Oh, you’re real charming, you know that?” Then he leaves, Atsumu’s question still hanging between them.

The Problem begins shortly after. It goes like this: 

1. Kiyoomi heads to the restroom, and Atsumu follows suit. 
2. Kiyoomi sanitizes his hands at the nurse’s quarters, and Atsumu follows suit. 
3. Kiyoomi stops by the business office to submit his senior quote, returns an X-ACTO knife to the art studio, and knocks on Ms. Mullen’s door to pick up his test corrections, and the whole goddamn time, Atsumu follows suit.

He doesn’t say anything during these ten timeless minutes—merely busts out an occasional fake cough to keep his unwanted presence known. He merely plays the game. 

At the water fountain, Atsumu finally wins. 

“We can storyboard at my house on Monday,” Kiyoomi concedes, rolling his eyes. “It’s probably important to have your input on the film since you’ll be starring in it.” The screen in front of him flashes a number in the quadruple digits over and over again—how many single-use plastics it’s supposedly saved. 

The smile in Atsumu’s voice is evident. “Sounds good. I got practice at 5:30 on Mondays, but directly after school works for me.”

“That works for me too. I’m only a walking distance away from here anyway.” 

“Oh? I won’t drive that morning, then.”

“That’d be smart, yeah. Better for the environment too.”

“All right, cool.”

Kiyoomi caps his water bottle. “Cool.”

Three days later, he and Atsumu meet at the back doors by the ceramics room to walk home together. After a bit of arguing, they hop the chain link fence instead of skirting around the school’s perimeter (Atsumu’s choice), and then they amble on the tight sidewalk rather than in the empty street (Kiyoomi’s choice). During their short journey, he nods along to a retelling of a heated argument Atsumu had with Abdul, Alan, and Khalil. 

Kiyoomi can tie these names to faces for two reasons:

1. There is a poster of the Boys' Varsity Basketball Team tacked above the whiteboard of his AP Art class.
2. The population of people of color at their high school is about three percent on a good day. 

Against all odds, conversing with Atsumu comes easily. Kiyoomi keeps waiting for their dialogue to run dry—for the atmosphere to spiral fracture—but it doesn’t. It doesn’t, and he isn’t sure what to make of this. 

They arrive at the house after five minutes of idle chit-chat. Kiyoomi begins his usual routine of unlocking the door: shoving the wood like it owes him money, jiggling the doorknob, and then shoving again. Beside him, Atsumu drops his backpack and smacks his lips. Then, he does the strangest thing: he starts to untie his shoes. 

And as Kiyoomi watches his partner loosen the stiff laces of his Nike Dunks, he’s struck—rather stupidly—by the profound understanding that Atsumu Miya is Japanese. That’s why he’s used to taking off his shoes inside. That’s why he asked about it in the first place.

(The last time Kiyoomi really and truly noticed their shared ethnic identity was in sophomore year APUSH, when he had class with Atsumu—though they sat nowhere near one another. While teaching her World War II unit, Ms. Crandall asked the two of them how they felt about the bombing of Hiroshima because they were on “both sides of it” and it was “personal.”

Kiyoomi had given his most equivocal answer possible, tying in historical context and straying from subjective feelings.

Atsumu had said, “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”)

So Kiyoomi Sakusa and Atsumu Miya slide off their shoes without exchanging a word. They are Japanese American boys, both everything and nothing alike. 

They pad to the living room. This is where the greatest obstacle to Atsumu’s visit awaits: Kiyoomi’s mother. 

Sakusa Rie is reclined in her old sapphire wingback chair, prattling away on the landline telephone. Today she dons overalls, a crème-colored turtleneck, and ankle socks with ruffled edges. Her hair is down.

Atsumu, smooth as ever, coughs. 

Rie looks up from her lap, eyes widening. “I have to go now, Kaoru-san,” she whispers before deftly hanging up. She angles her knobby knees toward the boys in front of her, tries to compose herself. “Well, who is this new friend?”

Before Kiyoomi can summon the strength to speak, Atsumu introduces himself. And it’s impossible, really, not to jolt at the Japanese accent he squeezes his name through, the inverse order he presents it in: Miya Atsumu.

“My name is Miya Atsumu,” the boy beside Kiyoomi continues in flawless Japanese, “and it’s a pleasure to meet you, Sakusa-san.”

Rie’s smile rivals the eggshell-white walls. “Likewise.” 

Her subsequent self-introduction goes in one of Kiyoomi’s ears and out the other. Sure, he can identify a few phrases here and there, but it’s impossible to follow them all. The Japanese language is rooted in hunger, you see; context and nuance often get swallowed by its overwhelming musicality.

At one point during the crossfire, Rie turns to her son and asks, “Did you catch that, Ki? Atsumu-kun’s family is from the Kansai region! That’s why his Japanese sounds different from ours.”

Kiyoomi looks up from his angry hands and nods politely. “That makes sense.” 

What he really wants to say is he doesn’t even know what kind of Japanese their family speaks, that he hasn’t been following any of the the last five minutes, that he doesn’t understand why Japanese people are always in a hurry. But there may be some things better left unsaid. 

Eventually, the circus monkey in Atsumu’s head slows down the banging of its golden cymbals. Rie notices—because of course she does—and consequently ushers her son and his guest upstairs. “I’ll be down here, so just text me if either of you needs anything,” she assures in Japanese. Turning to Atsumu, she whispers, “American houses are just too big, huh?” 

Kiyoomi does not think about his mother’s clandestine question as he enters his bedroom. He does not think of it as he flips on the light switch, drops his backpack against the door, or peels off his disposable mask. He certainly does not think of it as he watches Atsumu Miya sprawl across the carpeted ground like he’s making a snow angel. 

His film partner, clearly raised in a barn, all but moans in relief. In the picture of relaxation, he poses a question that displaces the soft clay below their feet: “So, why’d your mom act like you don’t speak Japanese?” 

Blood pools inside Kiyoomi’s cheeks; he’s bitten his tongue. “Because I don’t.”

“Oh. Well, didn’t you go to, like, a Japanese school growing up? 

With great effort, Kiyoomi bridles the knee-jerk reply knocking against his teeth in favor of deliberating the question. If he answers no, his shitty Japanese will be more or less off the hook. On the other hand, if he answers yes, Atsumu is less likely to think of him as an outsider—as someone fundamentally faulty from childhood. 

So with fear in his mind, Kiyoomi conjures his ancient memories of the Japanese Baptist Church he attended from four to six. “I guess I was in a Japanese preschool program, but that’s about it.”

This admittance is an olive branch. Atsumu does not take it. 

“I mean, I can talk with my parents,” Kiyoomi continues, breath catching in his throat, “but I get kind of nervous when speaking in general. Hideki—my dad—says I’m not as bad as I think I am, though. Does that sound familiar at all?”

A shrug from Atsumu. “Not really. Japanese was my first language.”

Kiyoomi tries to find the words to explain that it was his, too, even if he can no longer hear the difference between 飴 and 雨 on his first try. He comes up short.

By some small mercy, Atsumu takes his silence as an initiative to change the topic, asking about the premise of their film—a welcome relief. Kiyoomi explains his basic ideas, pulling up his storyboard to reference individual shots and notable sequences. Flowers and a field here. Something with unique visual movement there. 

Once they reach the last thumbnail, Atsumu gives a small golf clap. “Okay, this all sounds great! One question, though: is there no dialogue?”

“Not a single word. It’ll be prettier that way, I promise.”

“Oh really?”

“Really.”

“Are you saying I talk too much?” 

“No, Atsumu,” Kiyoomi sighs, swiveling his head toward his partner, “I’m saying that—” 

—And all at once, he is intimately aware of how close he’s sitting to Atsumu. If he leaned forward a few inches, he could bump their noses together—

“—Yes, I’m saying you talk too much,” he finishes lamely.

Atsumu grins and shakes the baby hairs out of his eyes. “Well, can’t say it’s the first time I’ve heard that.”

They iron out the rest of the wrinkles in the storyboard, and that spectral sense of calm between them returns. Kiyoomi doesn’t trust their easy bantering—this milky atmosphere, the warm shapes it outlines—but he does enjoy it. He does take comfort in it.

5:15 PM makes its presence known by elongating the shadows of his bedroom. 

Team backpack tossed over one shoulder, Atsumu announces he should get going. Once he’s halfway out the door, though, he turns around and asks “if his fans have any last questions for him.”

“Not your fan,” Kiyoomi corrects, “But yeah, I do. Why’d you lie on the floor?” 

Atsumu cocks an eyebrow. “Well, I was tired when we first got here and wanted to lie down, but I figured you wouldn’t want me touching your bed with my outside clothes. Am I right?” His smile teeters on the edge of foolhardy.

Kiyoomi studies the elegant embroidery of his unruffled comforter. The sun bleeds yellow like an egg yolk, and Atsumu leaves.

That evening, Kiyoomi interrupts his mother’s nightly reading of the Japanese tabloids. This is a bold decision considering Rie consumes national news like it’s a sixth food group. She stays up late into the night watching documentaries on Japanese LPGA golfers and Kyoto monsoons. She can identify the latest geotechnical engineering failures in Hokkaido. She checks the weather in her hometown every morning.

Kiyoomi thinks that maybe his mother clings to Japan too much. He thinks that maybe that’s rubbed off on her children. 

“Hey, Mama?” 

Rie looks up from the family iPad, then down at her son over rectangular glasses. “What?”

For a moment, Kiyoomi considers dropping the question. It would be easy not to ask; he hasn’t in years, after all, and isn’t sure whether the answer has even changed with time. But ultimately, curiosity captures fear in a headlock. 

“Why didn’t you put me in Japanese school?”

His mother inhales sharply. She brings her pointer finger and thumb to her forehead and massages her brow bone. “Oh, not this again.”

Rie Sakusa is fifty-five years old. Her story goes like this: 

As the youngest girl in a family of all boys, she grew up fighting tooth and nail for respect. The divinities recognized her struggle, and at age fourteen, she passed the entrance exam to Ibaraki prefecture’s top STEM high school. Her parents were as astonished as they were proud. In public, they boasted about Rie’s accomplishment whenever they could: during mahjong nights, while hanging out their mattresses to dry, in line to buy mugicha at the corner store. 

In private, though, they cautioned her. Your academy won’t be as lax as your siblings’ high school, they said. Missing class, even for a day, might have irreparable consequences.

In the spring of her sophomore year, Rie slipped on a fallen handkerchief and tumbled down a flight of stairs. She was diagnosed with a fractured elbow and consequently missed five days of school. Upon returning to class the following week, her teachers offered no sympathy—no extensions, no waived assignments. The curriculum remained cut and dried, her arm remained aching, and before she knew it, she was miles behind her peers.

Rie learned something during that dreadful first week back: Life tends to move on, whether or not you move with it. 

Her parents, though disappointed, weren’t surprised. They resorted to the backup plan they conspired when their daughter first committed to the prestigious school: an exchange program. Within a month, Rie flew to Colorado Springs. There, she lived with a White American host family and finished the rest of her high school education. 

At age nineteen, she returned to Japan for university. She met Kiyoomi’s father in a Biological Anthropology lecture and fell in love. When a job offer arose for Hideki in the states years later, Rie followed him. And the rest is history. 

(Among the few stories Kiyoomi has heard from his grandfather, the one that really stuck him in his side was about his mother’s return after her time overseas:

“We were at Haneda Airport, where you guys always fly in from, and you wouldn’t believe it! As she walked out, I could barely recognize her. That’s how much weight she’d gained.”

Hard laughter. Tangerine embarrassment honeying his mother’s cheeks. 

“All of that Kentucky Fried Chicken must have done it to her. Didn’t you say that was the only thing your host family would let you eat, Rie?” One nod, two nods. “That’s right, that’s right. Your mom only got to eat Japanese food once a year, Kiyoomi: on her birthday. Imagine that!”

Kiyoomi did not.)

His mother sets down her iPad. “Don’t you remember, Kiyoomi? Your siblings cried so much during the four years we made them go to Japanese School. We didn’t want you to go through the same thing.” A pause. “I didn’t want to go through the same thing.”

Kiyoomi tucks his hands under his thighs. “What do you mean you didn’t want to go through the same thing?”

“Goodness, Kiyoomi.” Rie downs the mugicha in front of her like a shot of vodka. With liquid courage in her veins, she scoffs, “Do you know how hard it is to teach your kids Japanese while living in America?” (English.) “It was hard enough with Kouta and Kotoko, and they actually had an interest in learning Japanese. It would have been impossible with you, Kiyoomi!” (Japanese.) “Besides, you’ve always been the least talented at Japanese out of kids.” (English.)

As his mother gasps for air, Kiyoomi feels something behind his ribs tear. “Oh,” he exhales, studying the furrow in his mother’s brow. “Right.” And it is in this moment—stapled under Rie’s tired gaze, the puncture wound in his lung leaking like an infected chest tube—that Kiyoomi remembers why he does not ask about Japan. 

“Gosh, my elbow hurts now.” Rie rubs at the joint, adjusts her glasses, and clicks on the iPad again. The screen displays an article about new farming techniques in Shizuoka. As she scrolls through the pages, she returns to a world infinitely smaller than the dining room. 

The conversation has finished. 

From: Atsumu Miya

[8:27 PM]

hey, tell your mom i said thanks for letting us storyboard at your place. my house is a mess

[8:28 PM]

not cause i’m messy tho

[8:28 PM]

i’m not messy

[8:29 PM]

it’s just cause samu and i share a bedroom and like . everything else too so there isn’t a ton of space to put stuff and also sometimes it’s hard to remember whose stuff is whose especially for our mom cause she does our laundry and we’re the same size so most of the time she ends up just throwing our clothes on the floor between our beds

[8:33 PM]

d. does that make sense

From: Kiyoomi Sakusa

[9:41 PM]

you don’t do your own laundry?

[9:41 PM]

and i’ll be sure to inform my mother about your undying gratitude

From: Atsumu Miya

[9:46 PM]

thank god i wouldn’t have been able to sleep tonight if you didn’t

[9:48 PM]

wait kiyoomi you never told me if my explanation made sense or not :(

[9:48 PM]

kiyoomi!!!

From: Kiyoomi Sakusa

[9:50 PM]

i’ll see you on saturday

From: Atsumu Miya

[9:51 PM]

KIYOOMI

Saturday finds Kiyoomi in an eerily good mood. 

For starters, his chronic pain is absent. When Kiyoomi wakes without feeling like his lower back has been crushed in a waffle iron, he’s confused more than anything else. He’s used to being pulled apart from the inside out, you see; he’s grown accustomed to the feeling over the last decade. That’s what years of competitive sports will do to you. (Volleyball taught Kiyoomi about fragility. It made him acutely aware that his body wasn’t anything special until it stopped working.) 

The other reason for Kiyoomi’s glass-half-full attitude is the time. He rouses at just the perfect hour: after the birds have finished their morning songs but before sunrise. He has time to brush his teeth, make a cup of decaf tea, and haphazardly pop out the screen of his window. Crouching on the roof, he sips his drink. Conjures the acknowledgment: “For what it's worth, this little city can be real beautiful at times.”

As Kiyoomi observes his neighborhood at its calmest, he thinks of Atsumu Miya. The boy is coming over this afternoon for their second session of filming. He’ll be smiling like he’s happy. His hair will be gelled, because they never agreed on whether or not it should be, and Kiyoomi will have to card a gloved hand through it to get a more natural muss.  

They’ll walk to the local park together. Atsumu will insist on carrying the tripod under his arm, and Kiyoomi will wear the other equipment strapped across his chest like a diaper bag. He’ll screw the DSLR into the tripod and explain why they aren’t using autofocus for the film. (The clicking of the automatic lens is audible during footage, and a pain to edit out.) Atsumu will hear the rundown of how filming works—how there’s an order of operations that Kiyoomi likes to follow—and respond, “Oh, like PEMDAS?”

They’ll shoot for a few hours. They’ll laugh together (surprisingly) and poke fun at each other (unsurprisingly). They’ll agree to get together on Wednesday before Atsumu’s practice, and hopefully, as they wave goodbye to each other, Kiyoomi will feel that the day went well. 

And in the end, the day does go well. It goes better than Kiyoomi could have expected, minus the scrape to Atsumu’s left knee and his own bee sting that swells to the size of a plum. 

Once they’re back at the Sakusa household, lounging on the couch with bags of frozen peas on their respective injuries, Atsumu sputters into a giggling fit. He looks at Kiyoomi and says earnestly, “That was fun. Let’s do it again.” His eyes look like something out of a dream. 

Kiyoomi nods, his hands sweating below his nitrile gloves—the urge to pick stronger than ever. “Let’s,” he agrees.

Atsumu Miya is a natural charmer. He sweet-talks Rie every afternoon, asking about her high school days and her friends back in Japan. He compliments the length of her lashes. He quips that he can tell how much wakame she eats. (Kiyoomi doesn’t say that his mother’s been dying her hair since she was twenty-five.) He devours everything offered, helps put away the dishes, and always washes his hands for a full twenty seconds before eating. 

In short, he is perfect.

It doesn’t take long for Rie to adore him. “Is Atsumu coming over today?” she’ll ask, and the hope in her voice will be so thinly-veiled that it hurts. More often than not, Atsumu is not coming over, and Kiyoomi has to shake his head back and forth as if his skull isn’t pounding with shame. 

(That’s the other weird thing that comes with Atsumu’s introduction into his life: the shame. It’s gooey, clinging to Kiyoomi like an itchy sweater or an ache in his bones.)

With Atsumu, the days are wonderfully textured. His small waves at school are gritty sand, but his laughter undulates like stretching glass when their footage is blurry. He adds an element of unpredictability to Kiyoomi’s delightfully uninteresting life. He simpers too much, and he thinks too highly of himself, and he always raises more questions than answers. Always. 

“Why do you have an Asian name, but your brother doesn’t?”

Atsumu glances up from the English homework he’s been pretending to do for the last fifteen minutes. He cocks his head, confused for a second, before exploding into laughter. “Oh, no, man, we both have Japanese names! His is Osamu. ‘Sam’ was just pulled from the middle back in kindergarten, and it stuck.”

“But, you’ve never had an American nickname?” Kiyoomi clarifies as indifferently as he can. He wonders if Atsumu sees the question in his statement: “Haven’t you ever—just once in your bright, bright life—wanted to be like everyone else?”

“I thought about changing it for a while," Atsumu admits, "‘cause of Samu, you know. But my name made me grow into who I am. My parents chose it for a reason, right?”

“Right,” Kiyoomi replies, even though he wishes that were wrong.

Atsumu’s next question is logical, but it still catches him off guard.

“Why do you go by Ki?”

“Well, people have always had trouble pronouncing my name, I guess,” Kiyoomi begins, scratching a patch of scabbing skin on his thumb. “ Kiyomi is too much of a mouthful for White teachers and classmates. So I shortened it to ‘Ki’ in first grade.” 

(There is a longer story here, one about kindergarten and Ms. Coleman and sitting on the red shag rug during first-day introductions. About “Say that again?” and “Was that right?” and a dozen no-it’s-not’s that Kiyoomi swallowed down like fluoride pills. But he thinks it need not be told. He’d rather it not be told.)

First: a frown, which looks remarkably out of place on Atsumu. “Oh. Well, I think your full name is kinda lovely.” Second: a whistle of air through the teeth. “But you know you pronounce it wrong, right?”

It must be a trick of the light—the way Atsumu’s words shrink the walls around them.

“What?”

“Well, I mean, your name is Kiyoomi , not Kiyomi,” his partner continues matter-of-factly, hand drumming on his notebook. “That’s what your mom calls you, after all. But when we were talking just now, you said Kiyomi, which is wrong. You’re missing a vowel. You’re missing the other ‘o.’”

“Am I?” Kiyoomi asks, the shame returning, the pebble in his belly expanding into a stone.

“Yeah, you sure are.” Atsumu’s eyes are far away, but his voice reaches a hand down Kiyoomi’s throat and tugs. 

It comes up green. 

That Friday, the Sakusa household preps for the arrival of their eldest child and his small family. Rie buys fresh flowers to fill the lumpy vase that her daughter made in Ceramics II. Kiyoomi vacuums the stairs, seals the tiles, and wipes off the fine layer of dust that only he can see from the top of the refrigerator. Hideki Sakusa, for his part, stays in town instead of running off to Japan for business. His wife tries to make him help out in the bathroom, but he ends up leaning against the sink for the better part of the evening, watching cooking videos on the iPad and giving the toilet bowl an occasional scrub now and then. 

At a quarter to ten, Kiyoomi and his parents clamber into their dingy white minivan and drive to the airport. A quarter after ten, they pull out of the parking lot—two jet-lagged adults, one crying baby, and three bags heavier. 

The next half hour is full of broken English and wobbly translations. (Min-Thu, Kouta’s wife, doesn’t speak Japanese, though she is fluent in three languages.) Kiyoomi learns that his older brother is still working for Goldman Sachs. He’s happy with the pay but hopes to move to another firm within the next two years. 

Min-Thu mentions that she’s been helping at a friend’s daycare in Chinatown. Every morning, she straps baby Masaaki to her chest, takes the subway for thirty minutes, and then walks six additional blocks to get to the building. Daycare is a multilingual space, so Kiyoomi’s nephew hears about a dozen languages a day. 

“He’ll probably be a polyglot if we keep going at this rate!” Kouta boasts, rich and hearty. “We already speak to him in Japanese, English, and Vietnamese, after all.”

The whole family laughs in approval. Kiyoomi tries to sift the sediment out of his bloodstream.

The following morning, he wakes early to have extra time with his nephew. At 6:14 AM, he rolls a ball back and forth to Masaaki. At 7:03 AM, he feeds him crushed peas. At 8:52 AM, he hugs the boy close to his chest and whispers that nothing bad will ever happen to him. (This is a lie, of course, but it’s a good lie.) And finally, at 9:29 AM, with the entire family awake, Masaaki Minhan Sakusa officially turns a year old. 

The Sakusas celebrate with strawberry shortcake and a copious amount of Yakult. They sing happy birthday in three different languages, with at least one family member butchering a few words in each variation of the song. The house smells like lavender and baby powder.

When Kiyoomi finally gets a turn to hold his nephew again, he lifts the boy into the air. He rubs his forehead against Masaaki's soft sweater, and he pokes his wide nose, and he tells him he is real—over and over and over again. 

“Your name is Masaaki Minhan Sakusa—Ma-sa-a-ki Min-han Sa-ku-sa—and you are real."

Because a name means you are real. A name means you are real. 

Kiyoomi isn’t close friends with anyone in his Digital Filmmaking class. This isn’t all that abnormal; film is a relatively independent subject, and as an elective, it only happens every other day. But with that being said, Kiyoomi is well-acquainted with Maria Morales. 

Maria isn’t so much talkative as she is inquisitive. Whenever there’s a gap in lecturing, she sparks an interrogative conversation with the person closest to her. For the last few months, said person has just so happened to be Kiyoomi. Consequently, over the past few months, he’s managed to divulge his bad habits and favorite vegetables and irrational fears of having to name the thirteen colonies—all in one hour and fifteen-minute increments.

Today, though, Maria’s attention does not fall on him. Instead, it shifts to her second most common victim: their teacher. 

Celia Martin is taking a break from her analysis of Amélie (2001) to suck chamomile tea out of a metal straw. She drinks about two reusable cups of tea every class, and Kiyoomi has made it a habit to track the time by watching the smooth liquid disappear. 

Maria raises her hand. When finally called on, she asks, with all the grace of pulling a fire alarm, what the greatest loss Celia Martin has experienced is.

The classroom ebbs and flows, falling quiescent. There are a few chirps of disapproval, but most of Kiyoomi’s peers are used to Maria’s needling by now, and Celia herself has never minded it. 

Their teacher purses her lips in thought. “A loss of presence,” she concludes at last, voice soft. “A loss of presence, Maria.”

“What does that mean?” Kiyoomi wonders aloud, and he’s not embarrassed by the question because he doesn’t understand.

Celia taps her glass. “Think of it like this, Kiyoomi: we live in a visual culture. And that’s splendid, truly, because it’s helped us invent things like the internet—things that supplement human connection. I mean, even movies are a part of this!” She winks. “They extend our empathy, and they tell stories. They are a form of proof that yes, we were human, and yes , we were here. But what goes up must come down.”

“With the integration of technology, we have lost a degree of clarity. Back in middle school, if I wanted to see a friend, I’d have to call her house on my landline telephone multiple days in advance. And then I’d just have to hope that she’d actually show up the day of! There was no way to text that we were running late, running early, or needed a last-minute raincheck. There was just us and that moment. Us at that moment.”

“What are you getting at?” Maria asks, crossing her arms and leaning just a hair in. 

“What I’m getting at, Miss Maria,” their teacher answers, not unkindly, “is that when we didn’t have widespread technology, we were present—fully and truly. That’s a hard gift to come by.” (She pauses at her pun, gracefully bows to the smattering of applause she gets.) “But, my friends, we have lost that unique type of presence, and we have lost the joy that comes with it.” Celia clutches her stomach as if remembering an old joke, and her laugh pours over the class like cold tea—low, bluesy. “Those two things? They will never be coming back.”

Kiyoomi knows something’s wrong as soon as the car pulls up. To begin, Atsumu’s penchant for speeding in residential areas has vanished, his Fast and Furious driving replaced by a miserable crawl. Second, the windows of his car are up. This is rather uncharacteristic for someone who likes to stick his head out the window on the freeway—someone who generates winds strong enough to blow Kiyoomi into the back seat or a nearby road sign. But the most telltale sign of Atsumu’s foul mood is the web of duct tape crisscrossing the storage console of his car. It reminds him of train lines, of rice field canals. 

“Hi.” Kiyoomi gestures to the taped-off area between the driver and passenger’s seat. “Why’s the middle of your car like that?”

“‘S broken.” Atsumu averts his gaze as he unbuckles his seat belt, revealing uncheckable eye bags. “Punched it while driving back from practice, so I stopped at home to try and fix it, and that was as good as it would get.”

“Oh.” Kiyoomi walks around the front of the car and opens the door for Atsumu, if only so his partner can’t slam it shut. “Bad scrimmage?”

Atsumu buries his forehead in the heel of his palm. “My god, the worst!” he exclaims, right before launching into a play-by-play retelling of the practice game. As they walk to the park, he vilifies his co-captain for hogging the ball. While the camera screws into the neck of the tripod, he flames the two sophomores swinging varsity. As the shutter clicks open, he defaces his brother, and in between takes, he pantomimes Jakobe fumbling the ball. 

“Was it really that bad?” Kiyoomi asks, adjusting the lens of the DSLR.

“Oh, no, no, it wasn’t that bad,” Atsumu dismisses with a waving hand. “It was worse! None of those guys know how to play basketball. If they did, we’d be number one in the state.”

“Right.” 

Kiyoomi likes to think of himself as a reasonable person. He has a moral compass that always points north, and he can make hard decisions. By this nature, he understands that blinding frustration is something everyone has to experience at some point. He understands that’s why it hurts to witness. But understanding doesn’t mean blatant acceptance, and patience has to run dry at some point. 

An hour later, he and Atsumu huddle around the tripod to look over the few clips they’ve gotten. The footage is nauseating. Atsumu bounces between all four corners of the viewfinder like a ping-pong ball, angrily throwing his hands up whenever he thinks he’s out of frame. (He is not out of frame.) Frankly, it looks nothing like happiness. 

Clicking off the camera, an exasperated Kiyoomi asks for opinions.

Atsumu stares at him incredulously, then turns away to pace in circles. “It’s so shitty!”

“Okay,” Kiyoomi begins, hands crossing over his chest defensively, “you didn’t have to say it like that—”

“—I mean seriously: can you believe that Osamu said I wasn’t a team player? He needs to look at himself. There’s a reason he wasn’t chosen as captain!”

Here is where the needle drops and the record scratches. 

Kiyoomi can put up with many things: stacking silence, cardboard cafeteria meals, the endless questions about why he wears gloves every other day. Because of this, he prepared for plenty of different responses when he offered Atsumu a penny for his thoughts. He prepared for laughter; he prepared for cruelty. What he did not prepare for, though, was blatant disregard. 

It makes his blood boil. 

"What is wrong with you today?” he mutters to himself.

Atsumu turns around with the crack of a whip. “Huh? You wanna say that again? Maybe a bit louder this time?”

“Yeah, I do wanna say that louder,” Kiyoomi mocks, even though he really does not want to. “Why are you acting like such a dick today?”

A scoff. “Man, what the hell is your problem?”

“My problem,” Kiyoomi begins, encroaching on Atsumu’s personal space in a way that makes his ribs float, “is that we were supposed to have been working on my film for the last hour—which is something that actually affects my grade, mind you—and you’ve been on fucking Jupiter the whole time! You keep bitching about your teammates, which is all kinds of shitty when you consider that those people care about what you think of them, and really look up to you as their captain. And I bet you know that too! But you’re acting like you don’t give a damn, and that’s fucking confusing!” He grinds his teeth hard, flicks his partner in the forehead. “So what’s really going on up there, huh?”

At this, Atsumu stumbles backward a few steps. He appears bewildered more than anything else, but soon, his features are flirting with guilt. He takes a defeated seat on the ground. He does not answer.

“Come on, Atsumu, let me in.” The plea climbs out without Kiyoomi’s permission.

“I think I’m mad that I didn’t play as well as I could have,” Atsumu stammers, hands coming down to grip poky blades of grass. “And I’m mad that I blew up at my brother when it wasn’t his fault that our teammates weren’t passing the ball. And I’m mad that I made you feel bad, too.”

Kiyoomi considers all of the bugs wriggling around in this damp field. He imagines garter snakes and beetles and his embarrassing pollen allergy, and then he sits in the grass anyway. “Don’t be upset at yourself for getting angry earlier,” he begins, reaching out to pat Atsumu’s shoulder experimentally. “Anger is just—it’s just a tool to understand your sadness.”

His partner snorts, leaning into Kiyoomi’s touch just a bit. “Oh yeah? Says who?”

“My therapist.”

“Your what?” 

“My therapist,” Kiyoomi repeats, slower this time, wringing his hands in his lap. “My counselor. Shrink. Whatever you want to call it.” 

“Oh.” Atsumu squints like he’s doing mental gymnastics. “I don’t think I’ve ever met an Asian boy in therapy.”

“I haven’t either, when I think about it,” Kiyoomi admits. “I wonder what that means.” 

Atsumu scoots closer and leans his cheek against a tense shoulder. “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

Kiyoomi tilts his body so that his ear meets the crown of Atsumu’s head—so that stringy, straw-colored hair tickles his cheek. “Maybe it doesn’t,” he agrees, even though he knows it does. 

On the second day of Digital Filmmaking, Celia Martin told her class that the first videos they’d produce in the course would, almost inevitably, be awful. 

“Think about it!” she’d said, trying to talk over her students’ riotous laughter. “Every first thing you tried—whether it was walking, riding a bike, or using chopsticks—you miserably sucked at. You were terrible at first, because that’s the nature of humankind.” She smiled, then. “We have the ability to learn and evolve. We learn, and we get better.”

In the end, Celia was right. The first video that Kiyoomi submitted looked like it was taken on a paper towel, and the second wasn’t much better. But the third was digestible, and the fourth was palatable, and by his fifth film, Celia confessed that she saved his projects to grade last as a treat. Kiyoomi remembers the rush of heat he felt in his cheeks at this declaration—the unshakable understanding that he was human. It simmered in his stomach for a long, long time. 

Today is a test of his humanity, though. 

“The main problem with tracking shots,” Kiyoomi mutters, awkwardly propping the Ronin up on his knee, “is that they require clunky equipment for stabilization, like this gimbal."

Atsumu nods. “All right, that makes sense.” He’s sprawled across the couch, socked feet elevated on the right armrest. (This has become his spot over the last month.) “So is that gerbil thingy you’re using heavy or what?”

“Gimbal, not gerbil, and yes, it’s heavy.” Kiyoomi screws the DSLR into place. “And please don’t put your feet up on the furniture.”

“Same difference,” Atsumu shrugs, swinging down his long legs in a humble act.

“It’s really not.” 

“Man, you worry too much about the little things!” Atsumu drawls, sauntering over to where Kiyoomi sits in his mother’s wingback. “But I’ll tell you what.” With unfounded confidence, he curls his hands around the armrests, leans in, and grins. “I’ll make sure your filming gets done in one take.”

After weeks of accidentally brushing ankles and elbows and every other joint, Atsumu’s declaration shocks Kiyoomi more than his physical proximity. So he decides to humor his partner. “All right, I believe you.”

“Just one take, Kiyoomi,” Atsumu repeats.

“Okay.”

“I’m serious, man!”

Kiyoomi turns his head so that they’re nearly nose to nose. “I never said you weren’t,” he whispers into the barely-there space between them. 

Atsumu arches an unplucked brow in challenge. “You really trust me that much?”

“Of course,” Kiyoomi fibs easily. He’s already packed a replacement battery for the camera. “I have the utmost faith in you, Atsumu.”

A match has been falling through the air for quite some time now, but it’s finally hit the gasoline-drenched ground. It often goes like this with Atsumu Miya: the flight before the fall. 

Recognition haloing above his head, Atsumu scowls. “Man, you’re such a liar!”

Kiyoomi brings an offended hand to his breastbone. “I am not.”

“Dude, your pants are literally on fire right now! I can see them!”

And then Atsumu is crouching down to poke at his sweats—the fabric wearing thin around the curve of his knee, the pilling at the seams—and Kiyoomi’s lanky limbs are flying out in half-hearted protest. And then Atsumu is dodging his uncoordinated smacks with too-long arms and too-long legs, and his eyes are folding into themself as he smiles, and his heart is bleeding on his sleeve. And then they’re laughing together, so hard that the vertebrae in their backs snap out of place and realign; and then here is the part of the story where—for the first time in his life—Kiyoomi feels comfortable in his own skin.

Ten minutes later, he and Atsumu stand at the mouth of his cul-de-sac. Their cheeks are ruddied, the gimbal is set up, and the wind is blowing at just the right intensity. It’s now or never. 

“You got that thing held steady?” Atsumu asks for the fifth time, swinging his leg over the bicycle.

Kiyoomi tightens his grip on the handlebars of the Ronin. “The answer is still yes. Are you ready for our first take?”

“You mean our only take,” Atsumu stubbornly corrects before knocking back the kick-stand of the bike and pedaling as hard as he can. 

Matching Atsumu’s speed is difficult, but not impossible. Kiyoomi has volleyball to thank for that. He hasn’t played the sport in years (tried once, at age fifteen, and couldn’t step foot in the gym), but his freak stamina hasn’t faded. It comes in handy at times like this. 

Of course, as soon as Kiyoomi thinks this, he trips on a stick and almost gets intimate with the concrete. 

The chuckle his partner lets out flutters like butterfly wings; it kisses him on the cheek. And just like that—all liquid gold and lavender—it dawns on Kiyoomi that Atsumu embodies happiness. Miya Atsumu is joy itself.

Tires screaming, a distracted Atsumu careens toward the curb. Kiyoomi gets the whole sequence on camera before bulldozing into the grass beside his partner. They pant. They snicker. They lie together for quite a while, just watching their breath pool white under the February sun. 

“How’s it look?” Atsumu eventually asks, standing up and propping the handlebar of his bike against his hip. 

Kiyoomi scrolls through the footage. It’s the right length and framed well, too. The exposure is a bit off, but color correction can remedy that. “It’s not too shabby,” he concedes. “Your acting was good.”

“Thanks.” Atsumu’s heel meets the bottom of the bike’s kickstand. “But fuck, I almost wish it were blurry. I wouldn’t have minded filming that again.”

The words feel like a spring thaw. Kiyoomi is melting. “What happened to all that talk earlier about only doing one take?” he needles, mask itching his nose.

Atsumu shrugs. “Maybe I was just joking.” He walks toward his partner then and—all teeth—adds, “Maybe that was just acting, Kiyoomi.”

On the fourth Monday of his sophomore year, Kiyoomi woke to find blood speckled across his sheets. It was wine-dark, dried, and everywhere. Bed bugs were his first thought, but there were no bites on his body. So he dismissed the stains as a freak occurrence. 

After stretching out his wrists, he walked into the bathroom. He splashed frozen water over his swollen eyes, flipped on the light switch while reaching for a towel, and promptly stopped in place—cheeks dripping wet, hand extended. 

The reason was simple: his entire face was clawed raw.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): A nebulous mental illness that manifests itself as ritualistic behaviors (“compulsions”) to alleviate intrusive thoughts (“obsessions”). Treated with cognitive therapy and medication but deemed virtually incurable.

Dr. Andrews’s diagnosis did little to comfort Kiyoomi, but it did offer clarity. It explained the bloody sheets, the bouts of anxiety, the taking-his-hands-off-the-steering-wheel-to-pick-at-his-face. It demystified the cloying paranoia. This disorder wasn’t fatal, but it was something Kiyoomi would have for the rest of his time on earth. It was something he’d have to learn to live with. And he has. He is. 

He’s overcome his most peculiar compulsion of lint rolling his bed. He no longer locks the door eight times. Seldom is he late to school because he had to take on and off his socks until they felt “just right.” This is a drastic improvement, and one he should be proud about. But Dr. Andrews’ thin lips still bunch into a frown whenever she examines his skin. 

Dermatillomania: Also known as excoriation. A mental disorder characterized by the compulsive picking of skin, ultimately resulting in soft tissue damage. 

It’s impossible to count how many times a day Kiyoomi picks. (He tried, once, during junior year, but quickly realized this was futile because it had barely been two hours, and the tally marks he dashed on his wrist were already running up his forearm like tire tracks.) The answer is a lot, though. A queasy feeling floods him if he thinks too hard about this, because he knows dermatillomania is a form of self-harm. He knows that, as Dr. Andrews says, this being his compulsion of choice says something. 

And so Kiyoomi’s gotten good at hiding his disorder over the years. Very good. Bandages huddle together in every nook of his backpack, and long sleeves conceal the scars along his upper arms. His most mangled body part is his ears, but his hair is grown out for a reason. Unless it’s pulled back for cooking or exercise, no one can see the kaleidoscope of scabs along the inner shell of it. 

In summary, the list of people who know about Kiyoomi’s illness is brief. Miya Atsumu is dangerously close to being added to this list. 

They’re discussing background music for their film. Atsumu is arguing for old-school Japanese pop, but he might as well be spouting Kansai-ben or Spanish because Kiyoomi isn’t following a word he’s saying. Instead, he’s trying not to scratch at his right ear. The skin of it had regrown last night, scaly and thick and perfect for picking. As Kiyoomi follows Atsumu’s flurrying hands, he thinks about how lovely it would feel to have those nails crooked against the tender skin of his ear. Yes.

(“That’s all part of the illness, Ki. Dermatillomania is a way for patients to exert control over their bodies, which I know you’ve struggled with in the past. And more importantly, this compulsion is a way for you to punish yourself.”)

What people without OCD often fail to comprehend is that resisting a compulsion is physically painful. This remains true even if the compulsion is self-harm, like dermatillomania. 

The irony of this isn’t lost on Kiyoomi. “I’m sorry,” he blurts at last, giving in to the sickness, “but I can’t listen to you right now.” He scuttles over to his desk and starts pawing through the middle drawer. “Just”—a breath—“just give me a minute, Atsumu.” 

Bandages. Lotion. Pimple patches. Brown liquid eyeliner (stolen from his mother) and a royal purple hair straightener (stolen from his sister). Pomade and baby powder. Pills. Chapstick. Hair ties. 

Just when all hope seems lost, something silver in the back catches the light. Bingo. 

Kiyoomi snatches the nail scissors like he’s playing a game of spoons. Then, with a precision that only rote memorization can yield, he brings the blades to his ear and tugs. The stiff skin rips cleanly. Blood pours from the wound, over the scissors, and onto his fingertips—coppery and cathartic. 

Somewhere in a nearby realm of consciousness, Atsumu inhales sharply. “Doesn’t—doesn’t it hurt?” His words are gentle but not soft.

Tearing open a new pack of disinfectant wipes, Kiyoomi starts to clean his hands. “Of course it does.”

Neither of them speaks for some time. Kiyoomi is good at awkward and better at silence, but when put together, he can’t stand them. So as he tosses his bloody wipes into the trash, he suggests they head downstairs. (This is the cowardly way of saying they should part ways. His partner reads through the lines.)

Per usual, Atsumu stops to say goodbye to Rie. She’s been baking in the kitchen for the better part of the evening—all dolled up in her Tokyo Disney apron and Minnie Mouse oven mitts. Ambient Japanese ballads play from the family iPad, disrupted by a YouTube ad now and then. Two trays of burnt poppyseed muffins rest on the counter in front of her.

Atsumu, ever the charmer, immediately gushes about the desserts. “Wow, these muffins smell great!” he exclaims, as if the kitchen isn’t smoky enough to set off the fire alarm. 

Rie waves an oven-mitt in mock bashfulness. She slides a Tupperware toward Atsumu—a silent offer readily accepted by his eager, packing hands. But upon realizing that only four muffins will fit in the container, her face blanches. “Oh, goodness, let me get a larger container!” 

“Thank you, Sakusa-san,” Atsumu exhales in relief, the tension in his shoulder dissipating.

Kiyoomi watches this entire exchange from the edge of the kitchen. His feet have grown roots, now bound to an underground city of fungi and alfalfa, and his back aches. Because this is how things should be: A boy and his mother chatting away in their native tongue, enveloped in a warm, private understanding of something too immense for words. This is how things should be. 

Rie laughs at a joke so hard she snorts. Atsumu bites into a charred muffin. Kiyoomi wonders what the Japanese word for forgiveness is. 

The great bathtub outside the window fills with black ink and stars. 

As soon as Kiyoomi wakes, he realizes it’s a Bad Day—the kind with a capital B and D. He knows from prior experience that Bad Days cannot be shaken off, but he tries anyway. He stands under the glacial spray of the shower. He stretches. He scribbles circles in his sketchbook, cuts his nails, and downs a glass of water, but all of these attempts are futile. 

In the end, a Bad Day is a splinter to skin. Such devotion is built to last. 

Rie sighs when she finds her son huddled in the corner of the couch. It is eight AM, fifteen minutes after school has started and thirty minutes before her shift begins. She forgoes making coffee to prepare a pot of decaffeinated ginger tea for Kiyoomi. As she slips the jade mug into his trembling hands, she murmurs the most intimate declaration of love she can: “You need to eat more.” Then she leaves the two of them—her son and his tea—alone.

Once the tea fades, Kiyoomi starts the inevitable process of collapsing into himself. Fortunately, he’s able to wash his mug and return it to the cupboard before the hurt settles in. Unfortunately, he doesn’t make it to his bed. His back liquidates like soft sediment halfway up the stairs, and he’s forced to army-crawl the rest of the way to his room as the brittle deformation sets in. 

Hauling himself into bed is an entirely different ordeal. It takes all of his strength just to get on top of the covers, and his limbs become sandbags shortly after completing this feat. After two hours of living like a corpse, even the act of rolling over makes his Kiyoomi’s back shriek. So he stays there, still as a statue, drifting in and out of a dreamless sleep. 

A loud ringing eventually rattles the room. Sleep-addled, Kiyoomi reaches for his phone. It’s only as he’s wincing under the strain of his spine that he remembers why he’d been so hesitant to move earlier.

From: Atsumu Miya

[2:12 PM]

hey, didn’t see you at lunch today

[2:19 PM]

did you visit martin in the film room?

[2:27 PM]

also 

[2:27 PM]

are we still filming after school? or

From: Atsumu Miya

[2:36 PM]

2 Missed Calls

On any other given day, Atsumu’s attentiveness might make him blush. But because Kiyoomi feels like the human equivalent of a totaled car this afternoon, it just makes his head pound. He elects to ignore Atsumu’s attempts at communication, burrowing back under the covers like an oversized mole. He stays there even as his phone vibrates a second time, and then a third, too. 

Just as a wave of nausea starts to pull on his ankles, the doorbell chimes. Truly despicable. 

Kiyoomi crawls out of bed like a wounded brown recluse. He makes it a point to stomp down the stairs, even though he’s the only one home, and then he yanks the front door open without regard for who’s behind it. 

“Oh. Hi, Kiyoomi.” 

Standing at the doorstep is a six-foot-something boy in basketball warmups and scuffed Nike Dunks, his fist still poised from knocking. His hair looks like concentrated urine. He’s smiling, the way beautiful people often are. 

Atsumu Miya is here. 

“What, what are you doing here?” Kiyoomi marvels, his shoulders unhunching against his will. 

Most people would bristle at such curtness, but Atsumu isn’t most people. The left corner of his mouth tugs upward. “Well, I assumed you were having a bad day since you didn’t respond to my texts or calls, so I thought I’d stop by and check-in.” 

Atsumu Miya is here. Kiyoomi is having a Bad Day, and Atsumu Miya is here.

“That’s ridiculous,” Kiyoomi all but hisses. “What if I’d been sick with something? What if I were contagious?”

“Well, you clearly aren’t contagious,” Atsumu retorts, already toeing off his shoes, “so I’m not gonna think about that. Now are you gonna just stand there, or are you gonna welcome me in like a proper host?”

Kiyoomi’s temper rears its head, but his manners get the best of it. He steps to the side. “Welcome in.”

From there, they fall into some semblance of their regular routine. Atsumu moseys into the house like he owns the place, cracking jokes and tapping the pads of his fingers on every available surface; Kiyoomi pretends to be annoyed by him. They rest their hips against the kitchen counter and debate whether to snack on fresh fruit or junk food. (When Rie is out of the house, the answer is almost always junk food. Today is no exception.) But then, instead of heading upstairs with frosted senbei spilling out of their arms, they linger in the kitchen—talking, cracking knuckles, scouring the pantry for nonexistent Calbee Potato Chips. 

And it’s easy, really, to just relax into the domesticity of all, but it’s jarring, too, because it’s not normal. It’s different, and different terrifies. 

Eventually, the uncertainty overwhelms Kiyoomi. He pads into the pantry to cross his arms behind Atsumu, who is attempting to grab the matcha cream wafers stashed away on the top shelf. Tactful as ever, he asks what the hell they’re doing.

“Well, Kiyoomi,” his partner strains, wiggling perfectly manicured fingertips to the sky, “I don’t know about you, but I’m trying to get these cookies down. Little help?”

Kiyoomi extends a sore arm, plucking down the package and crowding Atsumu in a way that makes his heartstrings knot. “I mean: what are we doing in the pantry? Why are we still down here?” 

Atsumu heaves a sigh. Then he pivots around—lightning-sharp—in a way that reminds Kiyoomi of his footwork on the court. “Kiyoomi,” he begins, voice like molten gold, “you ask too many questions.”

(And, ah, like this, they’re nose to nose. Like this, Kiyoomi can count every single one of Atsumu’s long eyelashes, spot the stray hairs in his thick brows and consequently resist the urge to pluck them. It’s quiet enough to hear a pin drop. The smell of Shiso Fumi Furikake is strong enough to concuss.)

“But because I’m an angel,” Atsumu continues, “I’ll let you in.” A grin. A confident hand encircling Kiyoomi’s thin wrist. “I wanted to find the perfect thing to snack on during our movie.”

As he’s pulled out of the pantry with force enough to yank his shoulder from its socket, Kiyoomi grumbles, “How many times do I have to tell you that we’re making a short film, not a movie?” 

Atsumu catapults them onto the living room couch. Nestling into his corner like a particularly spoiled house cat—the kind that makes sneezes fall from Kiyoomi like petals from roses—he grins. “Nope, I’m not talking about your video. I’m talking about the movie we’re gonna watch together now.”

The earth tilts off its axis. Rie’s sapphire wingback seems to slide two inches to the right. 

“You—you wanna watch a movie?” 

“Yeah.”

“You wanna watch a movie with me?” Kiyoomi repeats, just to be sure he’s hearing right.

“Yup,” Atsumu answers, in between pawing at the couch cushions for the television remote. “That’s right.”

“Really?”

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Atsumu smacks the armrest of the sofa—all bark, no bite. His cheeks burn a furious shade of crimson. “Yes, I’m being serious, you obnoxious motherfucker!”

Kiyoomi bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. (He’s been doing that more lately, and he swears that if a dentist were to look in his mouth, they’d see a shovel-shaped ring to prove it.) “You’re an asshole,” he scoffs, grabbing the remote from under his thigh and passing it to his partner.

Atsumu powers on the TV and navigates toward the movie catalog. “What can I say? It’s my best trait.”

“Oh, please. It’s your only trait.” 

The movie they settle on is uneventful. It’s the first in some middle-grade superhero trilogy—the kind that would be significantly better if the budget were a few million higher or Kiyoomi were five years younger. The plot is simple, if a little dull, and the special effects are abundant. It is what most people would call a “good family film.”

About halfway through their viewing, the Bad Day bares its teeth again. Just as the screen fades to black for the fifth time in a row, an ick pulses through Kiyoomi’s body, electric. It leaves him with a smarting so rancid he has to clutch his head in and count his breathing: in for four, out for four. In for four, out for four. Rinse and repeat. 

Once the venom flees his veins, time grows foreign. Kiyoomi’s eyelids grow heavy like overwatered primrose. He blinks to try and stay awake, but it’s a losing battle. 

“You can sleep, you know,” Atsumu murmurs to him, barely audible over the gunshot noises and sirens and general exaggerated violence that is most action movies. “S’okay. I don’t mind.”

Kiyoomi firmly believes it is better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. But this rule is erected on the grounds that no one has ever tried to give him permission in the first place. And against all odds, it’s a nice feeling—to have that reassurance. It doesn’t reek of pity the way he thought it would. So with the sound of the television already growing blurry, Kiyoomi nestles into his partner’s side, and he dreams a dream. 

The dream takes place somewhere star-washed and safe. Above him is a purpling sky. Below his feet are a dozen carnations, and across the field of pink flowers is an old Japanese house. Kiyoomi doesn’t enter it, but he has a feeling he knows what he’d see if he did:

A shin-height table / incense hanging from the ceiling / bamboo-green tatami mats / a narrow tokonoma / broken sliding doors / petal-white shouji / a bowl of tough ichijiku fruit / a stoneware teapot / an apology and / a woman with his face //

Yes, that’s it. That’s what he'd see. 

He rouses an hour later to a credits screen. The thundering in his skull has quieted, and his jaw is slack. A blanket from his bedroom has been tucked over him haphazardly. Charming. 

“I take it the movie wasn’t that good, huh?” Atsumu’s voice is gruff from disuse, and his chest is warm. 

“Not my style,” Kiyoomi admits, stifling a yawn, “but it was nice of you to choose something you thought I like.” He smiles before instinctively scratching at the peeling skin on his thumb. “A movie in general, I mean, not that atrocious title.”

Atsumu intertwines his fingers with Kiyoomi’s so they’re impossible to pick. “You make me out to be nicer than I am, but I’m happy you enjoyed your nap. Feelin’ up for dinner?”

Kiyoomi does not point out that inhibiting a self-harm compulsion is a very nice action. He is too preoccupied with trying to melt into his sweater—trying to replicate the process of caterpillars turning to goo within their cocoons. 

See, a movie is one thing; dinner is another. 

“It’s only five, Atsumu,” he objects steadily. “It’s not time to eat yet.”

His partner shrugs. “Time is a made-up concept. Plus, I know you’re hungry, dude. Your stomach was growling like crazy in your sleep.”

Kiyoomi scrambles for another excuse, ignoring the eggshells cracking beneath his feet. He gestures down at his Christmas pajama pants. “Well, I don’t want people to see me like this.”

“Oh, come on, you look the same as always!” Atsumu howls—before immediately flinging his hands up and back-tracking. “I mean, you always look good, Kiyoomi! Front cover-ready, my man.” He shoots an awkward pair of finger guns before giving that lopsided, shy smile that makes Kiyoomi’s stomach do full-twisting doubles. “Besides,” he continues, “I can read you well enough to know you’re not actually that against going. The place I’m thinking of is a hole-in-the-wall restaurant run by old family friends. Only our people go there, so I promise no one you know is gonna see you.” 

The credits finish rolling, and the screen fades to black. 

“Asians, I mean,” Atsumu clarifies, his words carving calligraphy on the living room walls. He squeezes Kiyoomi’s hand: once, twice. “Our people are Asians.” 

Kimura’s Palace is a twenty-minute drive from the house. They fill the time with Lo-Fi songs that Kiyoomi can’t tell apart and back and forth about Atsumu’s latest game. He learns that Jakobe and Alan were the clear MVPs, scoring the most points and rebounds, respectively. Khalil, one of their forwards, got shaken up during the third quarter and had trouble getting out of his head for the last. The sophomores swinging varsity need to work on their guarding a bit more. 

Just as Kiyoomi starts to flounder in basketball jargon, they pull into the parking lot of Kimura’s Palace. The restaurant is—for lack of a better phrase—a family affair. Behind the front counter stand three babbling aunties with matching manicures, and scurrying through the aisles are young twin waitresses. Affectionate shouts weave through the noren separating the kitchen from the small dining area. Preschool-age triplets sit at a child-sized table closest to the entrance; they roll scratched Mister Donut toy cars over napkin obstacle courses and make vrooming noises with their puckered mouths. 

There’s an unshakable sense of community in Kimura’s Palace. Kiyoomi is not a part of said community, but he takes comfort in it regardless. He takes comfort in it. 

Atsumu, unsurprisingly, has connections. He bows to the aunties in greeting (they wiggle their lacquered nails back at him) before skipping toward a faraway booth that practically has his name on it. 

One of the twins arrives a few minutes later with mugs of steaming tea. “How are you doing, Atsumu-kun? Two of your regular order?” Her Japanese is accented and weathered—Kansai ben. 

“Make that two, please, Mika-san, and I’m doing much better now that I’ve seen you.” Atsumu winks at the server, who rolls her eyes before walking away. Turning back to Kiyoomi, he says, “I hope you don’t mind that I ordered for you. Figured looking through a wholeass menu might make you a little anxious, and this is my go-to spot anyways.”

Kiyoomi shakes his head. “It’s okay. I trust your judgment,” he assures, then wonders to himself when that started happening. “You bring all your film partners around here?”

“Nah, it’s normally just Samu and me.” Atsumu gestures to the continuous strip of photos lining the restaurant’s walls. “Our picture’s up there somewhere. We used to come here a lot with our mom before she left, and then we never really stopped.”

“Left for where?” Kiyoomi asks, curling a hand around his mug. 

Atsumu blinks. “No, like, left in general. Left our family.”

“Oh.”

Kiyoomi thinks about his mother. He thinks about all the times he felt jealousy smolder in his palms when Atsumu spoke to her and all the times that feeling was overwhelmed by guilt. He thinks about making up for lost time, and my god, does he feel like an asshole. It’s akin to unsubscribing from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital emails, or making baby Masaaki cry.

“How—how old were you when your mom left?” 

Atsumu rests his elbows on the table, traces shapes in the ruby-red cloth. “I was nine, maybe ten. Old enough to know she wasn’t coming back, but young enough to still hope she would. She’s in Japan now. Her hometown’s somewhere in Osaka.”

“So she went back,” Kiyoomi marvels, mouth running dry.

“Yup, she went back.”

The dragging of Atsumu’s nails is the loudest thing Kiyoomi’s ever heard. “Do you miss her?” he asks, bringing his mug to his lips.

“Sometimes. When it rains real heavy, on my birthdays—that sort of thing. Most of the time I’m just angry with her though.” Atsumu frowns at the loose leaves eddying in the bottom of his tea. “Angry that I still think about her everyday, angry that Samu and I weren’t enough to make her stay, and so fucking angry that America wasn’t what she thought it’d be. Because, you know, this country just might’ve changed her life for the better.” Smiling sadly, he adds, “It just might have.”

When Kiyoomi was six years old, his mother confided that her dream was to walk through Machida, Tokyo with him. "Nothing is as beautiful as my city in August," she’d said, shelled and young in a way he didn't understand. “This American town is nothing compared to it!”

So that summer, the Sakusa family booked a two-month-long trip to Tokyo. 

Their stay did not go as intended. Kiyoomi caught lice on the flight to Haneda Airport, and within a week, he trapped the flu too. He was the only family member to do so. While his siblings attended school and made friends with local kids, he dry heaved into his grandparents’ bleach-clean toilet bowl and scratched at his scalp until it caked with blood. It was nothing short of miserable. 

One night, overcome with nausea, Kiyoomi stumbled out of bed toward the downstairs restroom. He barely made it to the hallway. Because there, just a few feet in front of him, was his mother: weeping on the stairs, wilting. Her sniffles sounded like glass shattering. Kiyoomi swallowed the bile rising in his throat, tiptoed back to his futon, and tried to go back to sleep. 

His family left Japan the following morning. They’ve never been back. 

Kiyoomi examines the face of the boy in front of him. He maps the rise of Atsumu’s cheekbones and the dip of his eye sockets. The brush-stroke hairs in his thick eyebrows. The scar below his left eye. 

With his heart in his hands, he says, “Maybe it’ll always come back to mothers.”

“Maybe it will,” Atsumu responds, instead of, "Why are you crying?"

Their waitress returns with two steaming plates of oyakodon and an apology that the orders took so long to come out. Kiyoomi and Atsumu shake their heads. It’s fine, the swishing of their frizzy hair promises. It gave us time to talk to each other.

They express their gratitude in Japanese for the food. They munch on metaphors. They drink their tea and hope it heals what they do not dare to speak of.

When the bill comes out and Atsumu insists on paying, Kiyoomi doesn’t object. He simply rests his chin in the palm of his sanitized hand and smiles below his mask, all loopy and longing. And when Atsumu walks him to his doorstep and asks to come inside for hot cocoa, Kiyoomi lets him. He lets him in. 

Sakusa Rie, upon seeing her honorary son, immediately puts a saucepan of milk on the stove. 

Ten minutes later, the three of them recline in the living room with mugs of hot chocolate in their scarred hands. They make smalltalk like they’re stacking clay coils. What did you learn at school today, Atsumu? Did you eat enough? The weather’s been nice lately, hasn’t it? How’s your brother doing?

Eventually, Rie sets her drink down and asks Kiyoomi—point-blank—how his day was. She’s smiling at him, soft and secretive in a way he can’t quite place, her cheeks coral. Only then does it hit him that today started off as a Bad Day. 

Kiyoomi doesn’t thank Atsumu for checking in on him. He doesn’t apologize for crying at the restaurant. He just listens to his body—free from its affliction for one bright, bright moment—and relaxes into the sofa. 

When Sakusa Rie first describes the phenomenon of falling in love to her youngest child, she uses the phrase: 恋に焦がれる。 Romanized, this reads koi ni ko-ga-re-ru.

The first component of the phrase is 恋 (koi), which translates to love. But there’s a nebulous nuance to the word. 恋 tends to be associated with young people and young love—that rare, radiant passion that disappears with age. 焦がれる (kogareru) is the second component of the phrase. As a form of the verb 焦げる, meaning to burn, it evokes the imagery of charring. To Sakusa Rie, falling for someone is akin to being burned by love. Being scalded by your raw desire, scarred by the very thing that promises salvation. 

Because, oh, the things we do when we are foolish and human—if there is even a difference between the two. 

According to numerous new sources, the four most mind-boggling cryptids are as follows:

1. The Lochness Monster
2. The Abominable Snowman
3. The Mokele-Mbembe
4. The Chupacabra

Kiyoomi does not believe in conspiracy theories, but he does believe his father should join this list at number five.

Sakusa Hideki has been in and out of the country since Kiyoomi was born. He’s gone from six hours to six months, often skipping town with no warning. These extended absences make sense considering his job as an international sales representative, but to this day, the entire family isn’t sure what exactly he sells. There were a few years where they theorized that the head of the household was a member of the Yakuza, harboring an opulent second family and collection of antique katana—but they abandoned this theory when Kotoko pointed out that he wasn’t smart enough for that. 

“Dad can’t even take out a loan by himself,” she guffawed, scrolling through her phone. “How is he supposed to be running an underground crime syndicate?”

Kiyoomi and his father do not have a troubled relationship. They do not have a troubled relationship because it is impossible for something that does not exist in the first place to be troubled or bad or anything at all. And this is okay, really, because maybe having Hideki around would’ve been worse. His siblings seem to think as much. 

(“You’re so lucky, Ki,” Kouta had sniveled once, ten shots into a bottle of Dulce Vida Grapefruit Tequila. “You’re so goddamn lucky. You have no idea what he’s like.”

The Sakusa siblings were lounging together in the living room, all present in the same space for the first time in years. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon dragged on in the background. 

Kiyoomi was fourteen at the time. Head pillowed in scrawny arms, he said to his maudlin brother, “Who are you even talking about?”

“Dad, obviously,” his sister interjected. Her cheeks were smoking, and when she spoke next, it was directly into her empty shot glass. “He was ruthless to us growing up. Crying only made it worse.”

“Kotoko almost passed out once,” Kouta added, eyes glassy. “I was sure Mom was gonna divorce him after that. But I guess that was expecting too much from both of them.” He sloshed together the contents of his latest cocktail and laughed aloud.

Kotoko threw her head back and joined him.)

So, Hideki and his son do not orbit each other. They are cohabitants more than they are family, and during the few times a year they talk, it’s awkward and floaty, like being lost in space.

Today is no exception to this rule. Rie has gone out to dinner with Kiyoomi’s former piano teacher, leaving the two of them to pretend like they know how to talk to each other. There is a plate of twenty microwaved gyoza between them and nothing else. To Hideki’s right rests the family iPad, which plays a YouTube video titled “THE TOP 100 JAPANESE LOVE SONGS!!!! 日本語 <3!” uploaded by User991238982102810. 

“So, Ki, how’s the college hunt going? Did you hear back from any of the big schools?” Hideki asks these questions in sky-blue English; as an Issei, he lets up on Japanese more often than his wife.

Kiyoomi shakes his head. “No. I should know in a few more weeks, though.”

“Okay.” His father takes a sip from his second Sapporo of the night, and the coughing fit he lets out afterward stirs the lunar dust below their feet. “Well, I’m sure you’ll do great. Both of your siblings did. 桜咲く and all, you know?”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

They eat their gyoza in silence. 

Kiyoomi drops his chopsticks to pick at a hangnail on his pointer finger. “Didn’t, didn’t you ever worry that Kouta and Kotoko wouldn’t get into good schools?” he asks, watching the thin line of blood trail from his cuticle. “Don’t you ever worry that every university will reject me and I’ll be stuck living at home forever? Doesn’t that scare you?”

“Of course, I worried about them! And, of course, I still worry. But my belief in you guys is bigger than my fear.”

“But”—and here his anxiety really dissolves into the room—“Why?” 

Hideki rolls up the sleeve of his sweater. He brings a leathery brown hand up to stroke his stubble and sighs. “Listen, Kiyoomi,” his father begins, “if your family is going to leave behind everything they know—their family, their geographic location, their culture—then you have to believe your kids will succeed. You have to. And once you do, you’ll realize that there’s nowhere else in the world as special as America. Nowhere.”

Kiyoomi tries not to gape at the disappearance of his father’s trademark cultural amnesia. “You really believe that?”

“Oh, undeniably,” Hideki nods. “Being American is a gift! I grew up visiting friends in Osaka over the summers, and one way or another, we’d always end up talking about this country.” He pauses his YouTube video. “I remember when Top Gun came out, we all said we were gonna head to the academy together and become world-class pilots. And when we realized I was the only one who actually could, everyone pinned their hopes on me.” He brushes off his shoulders. “Lot of responsibility for just one guy to shoulder.”

What happens to the stories we never tell our children? What happens to the dreams our parents never pursued? Do these things just vaporize, or do they linger like matter—unable to be destroyed?

“This country is the land of opportunity, Kiyoomi,” his father finishes solemnly. “Don’t you forget that. People come to America to have their wishes granted.”

Kiyoomi watches the blood on his hand congeal. “What did your father wish for?” 

“An escape from the farm, obviously.”

“And your cousin?”

“Hah! An escape from her overbearing family.”

“Well,” Kiyoomi blurts before he can stop himself, “what did Mom wish for?”

Hideki smiles. In a rare gesture of affection, he reaches a hand up to ruffle his son’s unruly hair. “You, of course, Kiyoomi,” he says, as if remembering a dream. “Your siblings and you.”

The Sakusa family’s living room has a simple layout. Closest to the kitchen is the sofa. Across from it is the TV, and diagonal to that is Rie’s sapphire wingback. Windows wallow on the left side of the room; a chest of drawers snuggles up against the right. 

This drawer set is difficult to ignore. It’s the most cluttered piece of furniture in the house, decorated with assorted knick-knacks from the many lives they’ve lived: sports trophies, crinkled family photos, glass jars of colored sand. In the middle of its crowded display sits a small daruma. Its vermillion paint has begun to chip over the last decade, but it remains lucid and lucky. 

Only one of the daruma’s eyes is filled. To this day, Kiyoomi isn’t sure whether that’s because his parents’ wish never came true, or because they forgot about it entirely.

Because fate is a cruel mistress, Sakusa Kiyoomi and Miya Atsumu fight on a beautiful day. It goes like this:

“Did you know we went to elementary school together?”

Kiyoomi slices a clip of Atsumu laughing with the Premiere razor tool, then shuts his laptop. He frowns. “No, we didn’t.”

“I mean, yeah, not the whole time,” Atsumu acquiesces, scooching closer, “but Samu and I transferred to Willowside in third grade when we moved in with our dad. So we overlapped for about three years.” He takes the computer off Kiyoomi’s lap and places it on the floor beside them—no distractions. 

So, Atsumu wants to be humored. Kiyoomi can do that. “If you’d actually gone to Willowside,” he starts, “then you’d know it was a tiny school. I would’ve known if there were another Japanese kid, let alone two.”

“You sure about that?”

“Positive.”

In his blurry periphery, Atsumu shrugs. “Well, maybe you just didn’t pay enough attention.”

The socks on Kiyoomi’s feet suddenly feel too warm. He tries to bite up on words—on an objection, an excuse—but finds nothing to take between his teeth. Because maybe he was already getting trapped in his head at age eight. Perhaps he ought to remember there’s a difference between eyesight and perception.

“You know, the first time I ever heard about you was actually in fourth grade, Kiyoomi.” Atsumu reclines onto the covers, back flat, and presents his monologue to the ceiling. “We had to do that huge animal project for a quarter of our grade, and you did yours on the western screech owl. Our teacher showed yours at the end of the unit, even though you were in another class. It was just that good.” He barks a laugh. “Man, I was so pissed off about that.”

“You?” Kiyoomi asks, stretching his arms above his head before promptly collapsing beside his partner. “Thought you only cared about being the best in volleyball.”

Atsumu shimmies around so that they’re nose to nose. “Yeah, normally. But when you have to hear your teacher gush about some snot-nosed kid’s perfect score on a project you got a zero on... Well, it feels a bit like rubbing salt in the wound.”

“A zero?”

“A zero,” Atsumu confirms.

“How do you get a zero on an elementary school project?” Kiyoomi all but whispers, staring at the space between his partner’s clear brown eyes. “Did you just not do it?”

“Oh, no, I did it all right,” Atsumu replies, voice just as hushed. “I just did it on the chupacabra.”

Tamaki Kouji’s soulful ballads waft up the stairs and through the crack under the bedroom door. The rosy-hued afternoon glows softly at the edges like the blade of a knife.

In the most solemn voice he can manage, Kiyoomi says, “Atsumu, isn’t the chupacabra—”

“—made-up?” his partner interrupts, bolting upright. “Uhm, yeah, to Ms. Smith, I guess!”

“Why on earth would you choose to do the animal project on a cryptid?” Kiyoomi splutters, propping himself up against the headboard, his chest filled with light. 

“I have no idea! Literally no idea.” Atsumu cackles as he admits this, and the action has him throwing his head back to reveal a delectable strip of tanned neck. “I made a mask out of printer paper for the presentation and everything—mind you, no one else dressed up—and Ms. Smith ended up cutting me off less than halfway through. It took me years to realize what I did wrong.”

“Wow.” Kiyoomi props an elbow up on his knee, leans a pink cheek into the curve of his palm. He tries not to scowl at how fond his voice has gotten. “So you’ve always been this strange then, huh?”

“Guess so. But aren’t we all a little off?” Atsumu is looking at him through thick lashes now. His hand has extended to rest on Kiyoomi’s ankle, thumbing at the constellation of freckles. “At least a little bit?”

“Sure,” Kiyoomi agrees, twinkling, “but you’re allowed to be.”

Atsumu’s smile crooks up a bit higher, confused, and his left canine makes an appearance. “What’s that mean?”

Playfully smacking his partner, Kiyoomi scoffs, “You know what I mean.”

The only reply he gets is a shake of beach blond hair.

“It means you get away with things because you’re popular,” Kiyoomi announces matter-of-factly. “It’s not hard to come up with examples.” He holds up his non-dominant hand, dropping the thumb as he says his first point. “One: you can pretty much skip out on class whenever you want as long as you say you have a game coming up. Two: you get assignment extensions way easier than anybody else from December through March. Three: as a rule, our admin adore you because your team brings prestige to our sorry school. Four: our peers love you for the same reason, even if they’ve never talked to you! And five: you have a guaranteed A in any courses taught by coaches.” Kiyoomi snatches the pillow from behind his lower back and picks at its unraveling seam. The threads separate easily below his deft fingers. “And sure, these advantages are unfair, but that’s just the way our world works. The rest of us have learned to put up with them.”

During the last minute or so, Atsumu has remained silent. This is unusual for him—not because he’s a social butterfly, but because he relishes making jabs at Kiyoomi. But he didn’t. He isn’t. 

Instead, he’s wrinkling his brow like a suffering god, fiddling with Kiyoomi’s covers. Earth-torn, Atsumu says, “Are you implying that I don’t deserve the things I get?” 

The shutter speed of reality grows sluggish here, and the next few scenes pass by at an unbearably slow frame rate. 

“Oh, no, that’s not what I’m saying,” Kiyoomi tries to interject, but his icy words have become water in the blink of an eye. They dribble out from his slack mouth before he can say them. 

“No, no, I think I get what you’re saying. You’re saying I don’t have to work for shit.”

Desperately, Kiyoomi thinks, “No.”

“You’re implying my head can be empty—no, is empty—because I can throw a ball into a basket, right? You’re saying I’m popular for no good reason, right?”

“What? No. I’m just pointing out that some things are easier for people like you, Atsumu,” Kiyoomi finally snaps, and by this point, his nails have trailed from the soft flesh of his pillow to the hard skin of his cuticles. 

“‘People like you, Atsumu,’” his partner parrots, wrapping his own name in Kiyoomi’s American accent. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, Ki?”

Over the last hundred days they’ve spent together, Miya Atsumu has never once referred to Kiyoomi as just “Ki.” It strikes him then—awful and arid—that the nickname he’s grown so used to feels like othering when it falls from Atsumu’s chapped lips. 

So, Kiyoomi makes a logical choice: he spits Atsumu’s othering right back at him. 

“I mean people who can’t survive without attention,” he answers smoothly. “People who probably get a real kick out of getting to write that they’re the captain of their school’s varsity basketball team on college applications. People who just eat up praise from their peers!”

Atsumu’s snarling is a lovely thing. “Oh, I eat up praise, all right. I devour that shit because I’m comfortable in my skin—something you clearly aren’t—and I don’t mind how I look. I don’t mind who I am.” He jams a finger right into the center of Kiyoomi’s chest, just left of his pounding heart, then laughs. “That’s what all of this is really about, right? You’re just projecting your insecurities!”

“I—I don’t know! It’s not like I mean to!” 

A growl. “Then don’t!”

“What else am I supposed to do with my insecurities then?” Kiyoomi panics, lips going blue. His hands are no longer his hands; his teeth are no longer his teeth. “Should I just bottle them up until they spill over, Atsumu?” 

“No, fix them, my god! Stop throwing yourself a little pity party and stand in the student section for once. Talk to your mom more. Take a fucking Japanese class and change the things you’re so goddamn insecure about!”

A memory comes to Kiyoomi, spawning in his spleen like a parasite. He is six years old, standing in front of his preschool class in Tokyo and preparing to introduce himself. His attire consists of a hand-me-down jacket that is two sizes too small, blue shorts with an additional inch of fabric stitched to each pant leg, and uwabaki that squeak like field mice. He’s already caught lice, but doesn’t know it yet. He doesn’t know a lot of things yet.

“Don’t—shit. Don’t listen to that last part,” Atsumu backtracks. He is eighteen and beautiful and so, so fucking stupid. “I didn’t mean it like that. I know Japanese isn’t—doesn’t. Uhm. I know it doesn’t come naturally to you, Kiyoomi.”

Japanese doesn’t come naturally to him. Coiled in his DNA and sewn into the sinew of his muscle, Japanese doesn’t come naturally to him. 

A single tear splashes the dip of Kiyoomi’s collarbone. “Right.”

“Fuck, I didn’t mean that either.”

Kiyoomi’s hands are bleeding like knife wounds, the bedsheets blurring red. He feels inexplicably dirty, and this is not the kind of muck that will rinse away with a single shower. It will live under his nails. It will sleep under his pillow. “I need to lint roll my bed, Atsumu,” he says at last, instead of, “Please leave,” or, “What goes up must come down,” or, “I know you meant it. I know you meant every word.” 

Atsumu packs his bag and slips out the door. The sun continues to shine.

On Saturday, Atsumu does not come over to the Sakusa household. Rie is confused by this sudden change in routine, but she swallows her curiosity in order to tend to her son, who has coincidentally started to fiddle with his fingers like they’re joysticks. Kiyoomi’s ears are bleeding more than they have in the last six months, and he looks like a horror movie extra more and more each day. 

Rie does not wonder what this means. She does not wonder what this means because that would be a waste of time. Instead, she bandages her son’s body as if wrapping a gift in furoshiki. She simply acknowledges that life has moved on and moves with it.

Come mid-March, he learns about acculturative stress in AP Psychology. This phenomenon describes the pressure associated with maintaining one’s own culture while assimilating into a new culture. Kiyoomi thinks about his mother—imagines her being swallowed whole by this stress, this ouroboros incarnate. He thinks of Miya Atsumu, too, after some time. (The boy has become a ghost over the last week and a half. There’s a mundanity to his disappearance that makes Kiyoomi want to cry.) 

Later, Kiyoomi will think about his father, and much, much later, he will think about himself. Then he will stop thinking altogether. 

When Kiyoomi comes home from school, he's blindsided to find his mother smoking a cigarette. She’s draped across her worn wingback, skin sallow, staring at a water stain on the coffee table. Her hair is down. The living room smells like ash. 

This behavior is a clear indication that something is wrong. You see, Sakusa Rie is reserved. Sakusa Rie does not drink more than a glass of wine or drive faster than five under the speed limit. She does not speak out against her husband or complain about doing his laundry, even though he is a grown adult and probably not kind enough to her. Above all else, though, Sakusa Rie does not smoke. ("Kills your lips," she said to Kiyoomi growing up, adding, “And your lungs, too,” as an afterthought.)

Kiyoomi does not stutter as he calls out his usual tadaima. 

“Your grandmother is dead,” his mother replies, in place of her standard okaeri. Her gaze remains fixed on the table. 

Rie’s family is, for the most part, a mystery. Her parents only visited America once, and they left as soon as they arrived. So in response to his mother’s announcement, Kiyoomi says, “Oh.” He does not say that the death is unfortunate—or that he’s sorry for his mother’s loss—because he isn’t. He didn’t know his grandmother—not really, anyway; it’s impossible to overlook that truth. “How did your mother pass?” 

“Heart attack, stress, something like that.” Rie takes a long drag of her cigarette, coughs on the exhale. “And my real mother died when I was a baby, Kiyoomi. Machiko-san raised me, but she was by no means my mother.”

Kiyoomi hangs his backpack on a coat hook and speaks to the ground as he unties his shoes. “I didn’t know that.” 

“Well, it’s true. Machiko-san married my father straight out of college and never once used her degree.” 

“Oh.” Kiyoomi tries to imagine his grandmother-who-wasn’t-his-grandmother as a college student. He tries to wrap his head around the curious nature of freedom—how it can be taken away in just a moment’s notice by a condition as simple as love. “What did Machiko-san major in?” he asks, walking into the kitchen to brew a cup of tea. 

Rie stubs out her cigarette. “I don’t know,” she admits. “I never thought to ask.” 

Once the electric kettle starts to scream, Kiyoomi thumbs through the cupboard for his mother’s favorite glass. A tall, thin thing, it seems to glow as he pours the boiling water into it. 

Rie smiles when presented with her tea. She inhales the heady scent of sencha before smacking her lips. “You know, that woman worked her entire life for my father and his older brother, too. Machiko-san cooked for us, smacked our behinds, watched over the house, and cared for her in-laws. And now she’s dead. She died before your great-grandmother!”

Kiyoomi takes a seat on the couch. Thumbing at the crack between the cushions, he stumbles through his misplaced nostalgia. “Maybe, maybe things just don’t”—a breath—“always work out the way they should.”

His mother nods in quiet agreement. “You know, Kiyoomi, your father left his hometown when he was eighteen, and I ended up leaving mine the year after. Kouta and Kotoko are also gone. I bet it’s only a matter of time until you leave too.”

The living room stinks of ryokucha. Holding his breath, Kiyoomi reaches for the throw blanket draped over the couch and hobbles to his mother. He tucks the thin, woven fabric over her thin, woven frame, and he does not gasp for air. 

Rie snuggles into its fleeting warmth. “I wanted better for you, honey,” she mumbles, tired eyes falling closed. She smiles, sad some. “I wanted better for you.”

She’s out cold before Kiyoomi can tell her that he knows. That he knows monsters and martyrs are two sides of the same coin, that perhaps mothers are the closest thing humans will ever get to angels. 

When Kiyoomi was ten years, six months, and five days old, he made a birthday card for his grandfather. In preparation for this, he asked his father a question about Japanese linguistics. His question was a simple one: How do you say “I miss you” in Japanese?

“That’s a great question, Kiyoomi,” his father had mumbled, patting the breast pocket of his button-up for a company ballpoint pen. “And the short answer is: you can’t. There’s no word for ‘miss’ in Japanese; that doushi doesn’t exist.” Hideki wrote down two phrases on the napkin underneath his coffee mug. “There are similar terms to it, though. 懐かしい, for example, means how nostalgic, and 会いたい means—”

“—I want to see you again,” Kiyoomi finishes for him.

“Right. But there is no way to really, truly say, ‘I miss you.’” Hideki capped the pen and brought his mug up to his lips. “There is a difference between experiencing nostalgia and missing something, Kiyoomi. You can miss someone and not want to see them again.”

A list of things wrong with Westside High School:

1. It is sorely underfunded.
2. The psychologist and social worker are never in their office. 
3. The art studios haven’t been deep-cleaned in thirty years.
4. An offensively ugly brown carpet covers the floors and perpetually smells like Kool-Aid.
5. Most of the lockers are literally falling off their hinges.

This is an abridged list; public schools never have been and never will be paradise after all. But some issues simply cannot be overlooked. The worst of these at Westside—worse than the pungent scent of marijuana and the enormous squirrel raised in the second-floor boys' bathroom—is the cafeteria.

The cafeteria is a pretty thing, really. It’s cylindrical and composed of glass, somewhat reminiscent of a butterfly garden. On sunny days, the grand skylights make it glisten like silver leaf. But it falls miserably short in the realm of size. On a good day, about half the kids at lunch can find a seat in the cafeteria. On a bad day—a day where most of the student body actually comes to school—about a quarter of them fit. As a result, teenagers tend to sling themselves around any and all nearby structures. These include the football bleachers, the track, and the picnic benches outside the rec center across the street. 

Kiyoomi seeks refuge on the wall lining the long jump pit. It’s about knee-high and decorated with ancient track plaques from the days when their school was good at sports. He tends to eat alone at lunch—not because people won’t sit with him, but simply because he can. (This is a distinction he doesn’t think his mother wouldn’t understand, hence why he doesn’t tell her.)

Once fourth period comes to a close, Kiyoomi slings on his backpack and prepares to shove through the cafeteria like he’s catching a Tokyo train at rush hour. He’s halfway through the crowd when someone shouts his name. 

“Hey, Ki!”

He stills in his tracks.

“Yeah, I’m talking to you, Kiyoomi!” the voice bellows again, a bit more confident. It falters, though, when Kiyoomi keeps elbowing through the crowd. “Come on, man, please. Wait up for me!”

Against all logic, Kiyoomi does—sort of, at least. 

What he does is pause in place to contemplate the best course of action. On the one hand, he could ignore the shouting. He could ignore the shouts and then, if need be, give an excuse that the cafeteria was too loud, and no one would be able to call bullshit. But on the other hand, there’s something desperate about that voice. It grates against his ears like nails on a chalkboard or a particularly tough patch of skin. It herniates the discs in his back.

So he waits.

Ten seconds later, a familiar figure is parting the seas of people to wave at him eagerly. “Oh, I’m glad you stopped! It’s Kiyoomi, right?”

In place of an answer, Kiyoomi says, somewhat uncertainly, “You’re Alan, right? You play with Atsumu.”

Alan nods so rapidly that his twists bounce. “Yeah, point guard! And that’s what I’m here to talk about, actually,” he finishes, tugging at the fettuccine-shaped chain around his neck.

“I’ve never touched a basketball in my life.”

“No, no, not about me being a point guard!” Alan splutters, calloused palms coming up in a defensive stance. He stands up a bit straighter. “The other part. I’m here to talk to you about the Atsumu part.”

“Oh.” This information is both pleasing and displeasing to Kiyoomi; he briefly worries that this will show on his face before deciding he doesn’t care much either way. “What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything, but I am hoping you’ll come and sit with me so we can chat.”

Kiyoomi kneads his gloved hands together. He feels every muscle in his body clench, and then he follows Alan across the cafeteria.

Part of high school etiquette is discerning the appropriate lunch table. Freshmen sit closest to the bathrooms and business office: the first quadrant. Sophomores sit by the lunch lines: in the second quadrant. Juniors sit by the doors leading to the field, and seniors sit by the hallways—the third and fourth quadrants, respectively. During the past five months of senior year, Kiyoomi has never once sat in the designated senior section. He’s always sat on the long jump wall or stayed in the film lab on particularly icky days. As he weaves through the cramped cafeteria and its crude noise, he remembers there’s a first time for everything. 

Alan’s area is popular, to say the least. It’s so popular that it isn’t even two lunch tables like what most groups use, but rather five separate tables shoved together like a Venn diagram on steroids, or a particularly lucky clover, studded with familiar faces from sports teams. As Alan slides into a bench, the three boys sitting at the table scoot over to a neighboring one. 

Kiyoomi sits down across from him. He contemplates taking out his lunch, then decides that eating in front of all these people would be akin to streaking across the football field. He sips from his water bottle instead. “So, why do we need to talk about Atsumu?”

“Oh shit!” a boy from the table beside them shouts, effectively wedging himself into the conversation. He scooches toward Alan, swings a bulky arm around his shoulder, and then sits nearly half on his lap. “We’re talkin’ about Atsumu? Did we figure out what’s been going on with him?” 

Alan gives his friend a pointed look before turning back to Kiyoomi and offering a pained smile. “This is Kofi.” 

“Kofi Farah!” the boy—Kofi—tacks on, beaming like he’s found what’s at the end of the rainbow. “I play football, have all four years, and I’m the quarterback, which you… probably don’t care about,” he finishes awkwardly, grin falling as recognition fails to flash in Kiyoomi’s features. 

“I haven’t gone to any games,” Kiyoomi confesses, strangely salt-soaked and sorry. He gulps down a mouthful of water hard enough to hurt. “The only sport I’ve ever played is volleyball, and I gave that up after freshman year.” 

“Oh. Was it because of an injury?” Alan asks, unscrewing a newly procured thermos and fishing a spoon from his lunchbox. 

Yes and no. Kiyoomi settles on: “Kind of.”

“Was it chronic pain?” 

Kofi’s intuition is as frightening as it is comforting.  

Kiyoomi examines the boy’s round eyes and wonders what secrets he’s sealed away. “Yeah,” he answers at last, “chronic pain. My back.”

“Ah, backs are bitches aren’t they?” Kofi buries his hands in his afro. “Busted mine real good sophomore year, but it’s a lot better now. Still hurts though, sometimes, when I push myself too hard.”

“I get the feeling,” Kiyoomi replies, because he does. “Backs are bitches indeed.”

Alan swallows a spoonful of rice. Clears his throat. “So, speaking of bitches: Atsumu.”

Kofi groans. “Oh, god, don’t get me started on him, man! He’s been so bad these past few weeks. Shitting on the team, shitting on all of his friends, and picking fights when he doesn’t need to. And the worst part is, sometimes he gets all mopey and stares off into the distance with his chin in the palm of his hands.” He mimics the pose, forlorn and mocking. “Then, as if that isn’t bad enough, he mutters something in Japanese to himself and shakes his head like a kicked puppy. You don’t hear me muttering in Amharic!”

Kiyoomi hasn’t spoken with Atsumu in nearly a month. As Kofi complains about his awful behavior, he has the strange urge to imbibe these stories about him—to engrave them in his skin or keep them tucked within the marrow of his bones for safekeeping. 

He plucks at the strap of his mask instead. “I’m sorry to hear that’s happening, but I don’t understand why you’re telling me.” Pluck, pluck. “In case you didn’t know, I haven’t been talking with Atsumu much lately.”

“Yeah, we figured,” Alan sighs, crossing his arms. “That’s why we decided to stage this intervention.”

Before Kiyoomi has time to attest that he’s following the conversation like a moth follows darkness, Kofi clarifies for him. 

“We need you to talk to him.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m ninety percent sure his shitty attitude has got something to do with you,” Alan responds, not unkindly, “and I’m tired of dealing with it.”

“I can’t talk to him.” Kiyoomi looks up at the skylights, gloved hands tight. Long, wispy clouds float by. “I mean, we got into a disagreement a while back and never really resolved it. So, I don’t think he wants to hear from me.”

“Okay, well, I’m willing to bet, like, all of the money in my wallet that Atsumu does want to hear from you,” Kofi interjects. He pulls his wallet out and thumbs the few bills between sticky fingers. “And granted, that’s only twelve dollars, but I’m pretty confident regardless.” 

Alan jerks a thumb toward his friend’s chest. “This guy’s wrong about a lot of things, but he’s right about this.”

“I don’t know about that,” Kiyoomi says. 

“Okay, I hear you, and I raise you this: You know how when you spill red wine on a shirt, you can use white wine to get it out?”

“No,” Kiyoomi responds; at the exact same time, Kofi snarks, “Oh, so you’re a wine connoisseur now?” 

Alan blinks to hide his embarrassment. (He does not hide his embarrassment well.) “Well, you can. So I think it’s like that, Ki. I think you need to talk to Atsumu if you’re ever gonna sort stuff out with him.”

To his right, Kofi nods eagerly. 

“I don’t understand,” Kiyoomi pants, humility bleeding across the table like spilled milk. 

“Really?” Alan asks, screwing the lid of his thermos back on. “I thought that wine analogy was pretty good.”

“No, I get that part. I just—I mean, I don’t understand why you’re helping me. I don’t even know you guys.” 

Two things Kiyoomi does know:

1. Kindness is not a guarantee in life. 
2. People have every right to be less than charitable. 

Alan shrugs, putting his thermos away. “Because I want to see Atsumu happy again, and you make him happy.” He winks. “Plus, I always gotta help a brother out.”

Kiyoomi asks—very, very intelligently—“What?” 

At this, Kofi’s sides split. Bright teeth shining, he claps Aran on the shoulder and exclaims, “Man, I know bro looks like he’s straight out of Africa, but Alan was born and raised in Japan!”

“Osaka,” Alan tacks on, his smile somewhere between wistful and bashful. “My dad’s Japanese. I moved here at the start of high school.”

Kiyoomi remembers Atsumu’s comment from a month ago—the one about how maybe he doesn’t pay enough attention. “I didn’t know there were other Japanese kids in our grade,” he marvels. “That’s... nice."

“It is, isn’t it?” Alan taps the table in front of Kiyoomi, almost as if he's aware not to try for a fist bump. “The four of us should all hang sometime. Oh, my dad could make us snacks! His specialty is shio onigiri.”

“His specialty is plain salt?” Kiyoomi asks, positive he's mistranslated the Japanese word. 

“Plain salt,” Alan confirms, running a hand through his twists. “Those fucking rice balls will change your life.”

Kiyoomi looks at the two boys across from him, who are beginning to bicker about their favorite foods and play tug of war with Alan’s lunchbox. They look really, truly happy. 

“Shio onigiri, huh?” he says, feeling like he’s just stepped out of a warm shower. “Guess I’ll have to try it before I knock it.”

Consider the following tableau: an early afternoon in mid-March. It’s a Thursday, seventh period, and the film lab is set to a toasty seventy-two degrees. Students click-clack away at their keyboards, anxiety bleeding into the noise. All in all, the room is reminiscent of a great monsoon. Sitting in the eye of the storm, Kiyoomi rewatches his final film.

Maria tries to watch it, too. She's crossing her legs in his direction, craning her neck toward his screen as she sips iced coffee through a swirly straw. (Kiyoomi knows Maria’s Starbucks order by heart: an iced caramel macchiato with oat milk and light caramel drizzle. He learned this during the first day of Digital Filmmaking, when she spilled her entire drink on him. For the following four class periods, Maria brought an extra for him as an apology; he didn’t didn’t have the heart to tell her that caffeine gives him jitters.)

As a general rule, Kiyoomi doesn’t show people his films. He doesn’t show his broken English-wielding mother, and he doesn’t show his chronically aloof father. He most certainly doesn’t text his talented older sister a link to his mediocre passion projects. Even Miya Atsumu never saw any of his films. But something about Maria Morales today has Kiyoomi’s rules growing legs and walking away, because he turns toward his table mate and asks if she’d like to see his final film of high school.

Maria blinks. Then she smiles—quiet, comfortable. “I would love to, Ki. What approach did you take?”

“I was assigned an emotion, so I wanted my actor to portray that,” Kiyoomi answers, clicking Premiere Pro into full screen. “I wanted the viewer to feel like the recipient of that emotion, to feel like they were a part of something, I guess.”

With that nebulous explanation out in the air, he presses play.

Anyone who believes five minutes is shorter than a day has not lived Kiyoomi’s life. As Maria watches his film, he’s acutely aware of its many imperfections. The mundanity of the establishing shot and the overexposure in the tracking one. His unsteady hands, the crawling nature of some pans. Atsumu’s grin turning a little too maniacal at times. The sun shining just a bit too brightly.

But even with these faults, Kiyoomi’s film isn’t bad. It’s his best one from a technical standpoint, and it’s arguably the one he’s most proud of, too. That has to mean something. 

By the time the rolling credits hit the screen, Maria’s staring like Kiyoomi hung the stars in the sky. “Wow, I did not know Atsumu Miya was your partner,” she says at last, shaking her head as she pulls up the script for her film. “Definitely didn’t know you guys were close like that. What word were you assigned for the project again?”

Kiyoomi starts exporting his video. “Happiness,” he says before adding, “And we’re not—close, I mean.”

Maria takes a sip of her macchiato and talks around the chewed straw. “Well, all right then.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“Nothing.” A wave of a hand. “It’s nothing.”

Kiyoomi takes a look at the room around him. In every corner, students drape over their desktops like ivy. Some seem ecstatic, some appear queasy, and some look like they haven’t slept in seventy-two hours. But there’s a sense of kinship among them nonetheless. There is community in the filmmaking lab—a shared appreciation of making something out of nothing. In this room, identity becomes liminal. Here, Kiyoomi is just a person. He is just an artist. 

What does it mean to be just?

“Love,” Maria states, then, seemingly out of the blue.

Kiyoomi clears his throat. “What?” he asks, turning toward his table mate. 

“Love,” Maria repeats, her eyes still glued to her true-tone screen. She’s rereading her script one last time, checking for spelling errors before she submits it. “I thought your word was love.”

On the first day of the school year, every high school senior in Kiyoomi’s school district has to fill out an annual “graduating student survey.” The questions on this survey are relatively straightforward: Did you have a reliable method of transportation to and from school over the last three years? Did you have stable internet access at home? Were you raised by a single parent or guardian? Did you consume more than a sip of alcohol? Were you ever on food stamps?

Kiyoomi is willing to bet the majority of seniors lie on this survey. After all, no one wants to go around admitting to the higher-ups that they’ve smoked a joint, or downed a couple of shots of Pink Whitney, or done whatever other stupid, illegal thing it is that teenagers do in the dark—even if the survey is anonymous. No one wants to flaunt that they didn’t have a lot of friends or that their family struggled with paying rent, either. 

When Kiyoomi took the survey, he stretched the truth on more than a few questions. But there was one he couldn’t bring himself to fib about: “Is there at least one staff member at this school you feel comfortable sharing mental health issues with if necessary?” 

He clicked no, then yes, and then no again. Then he submitted his survey. A day later, he met Celia Martin in Digital Filmmaking. 

Celia extended the invitation as soon as she noticed his scabbing hands, mentioning that she, too, had OCD. “If you ever need to talk to someone about it, or about anything at all,” she said to him after class, her words coral against the blue walls of the film lab, “I’m here for you. Just head down to the ceramics room at lunch. I keep it unlocked for a reason, Ki.” 

And so here he is now, taking up Celia’s offer for the first time in seven months, just shy of turning eighteen and just shy of graduating. The door groans when Kiyoomi pushes it open.

Celia sits at a potter’s wheel, centering her form. Her elbows dig into her inner thighs, and her tongue peeks out between two rows of crooked teeth. She looks beautiful, the way artists often do. “I started to think you’d never accept my offer,” she says, gaze flitting up from her clay. 

Kiyoomi takes a seat on the stool of the wheel adjacent to hers. “Me too,” he admits, squeezing his hands together. 

His teacher hums. She squeezes a spongeful of water into the center of her form and opens it as if pitting a peach. “So, what changed?”

Nothing, Kiyoomi thinks, Nothing changed, and everything changed. “I need advice,” he says, looking at the rising moons in his tall nails. “I’ve started seeing things I didn’t see months ago, and now I can’t unsee them.”

“Okay. Is that all?” 

“I also pushed away someone important to me—someone who helped me notice the things I can’t unnotice. And now things feel weird without them by me, and I don’t know how to handle these feelings.”

Celia raises the walls of her vessel, starts to shape it into something like the ochawan Kiyoomi’s mother uses with every meal. As she wets her hands again to ease the growing friction from the wheel, she asks, “Is it the feelings you don’t know how to deal with, or just change in general?”

“Both. Or—or neither.” Kiyoomi winces, inhaling the scent of fine clay dust. “I don’t know, Celia. Things just… aren’t making sense lately.”

“Of course they aren’t!” his teacher responds, lifting her hands off the wheel to gesticulate. “We live in a world where we can make stuff with our hands. I spend ten hours a week teaching teenagers how to play with fancy mud!” She brings her hands back to her form, her touch feather-light. “And besides, Ki: you’re seventeen. Of course, things don’t make sense.” 

He inhales for four, holds for four, and exhales for four. “Does it get easier?”

“I wish I could say that it does, Kiyoomi, but no. No, life only gets stranger.” Celia takes her foot off the pedal; the mechanical whirring of her wheel stops. “And more beautiful, too.” She wipes the mud on her hands onto her apron before walking away. “Wait there, Ki, and close your eyes.” 

Kiyoomi does. He opens them only when a heavy, glazed form presses into his lap. It’s a bowl of some sort, he realizes, brown and black and covered with small indentations—subtractive elements. It reminds him of rich soil. 

“I thought of you as I held that bowl,” his teacher confesses, sitting back down on her stool. “It’s a multi-faceted piece—shiny and earthy, rough and smooth. Most importantly, though, it’s cracked. Warped in the kiln when I fired it.” Celia extends a long finger to trace the vertical fissure running through its side. “But this imperfection is what makes it unique. It’s where the most beauty and meaning shines through because it’s a testament to all the piece has survived.” She smiles. “Ceramics, glass—these things break. That’s why they’re valuable.”

A cramp mounts Kiyoomi’s back and burrows in beside his spine. He knows right away that it’s the kind that will stick with him long into the small hours of the night, but as he flexes his toes in his sneakers, he reminds himself that the pain will eventually pass. All things—even the miserable things—have an ending. 

“Right,” he says.

Celia thrusts the bowl into his hands. “It’s yours.” After a beat: “Don’t try to argue with me on that, all right?”

Kiyoomi doesn’t. He simply tucks his present to his chest, hikes up his backpack, and walks to the exit. At the last second, though, he turns around. “Hey, Celia?” he asks, voice coming out small. 

“Yeah?” His teacher is thinning out the lip of her rice bowl with a throwing sponge. “What’s up?”

Kiyoomi summons Atsumu’s confidence and his parents’ sacrifice. He cradles them in his hands and asks, barely audibly, “Do you think you could start calling me by my name? Kiyoomi, I mean, not just Ki. I might hate it after going by a nickname for so long, but I still want to try.”

“Of course, I can,” Celia assures, taking her foot off the pedal. She tries to twist her tongue around his full name, hands clasping together in concentration. “Was that right?”

Kiyoomi swallows the part of himself that wants to nod. “A longer ‘o’ sound,” he corrects, the stone in his stomach shrinking. “Like this: Kiyoomi. ”

“Okay, let me try again. Your name is Kiyoomi,” Celia says, trying to mirror the movements of his mouth. “Kiyoomi. Kiyoomi. Kiyoomi.” She smiles—in that eerily perceptive way that only a 43-year-old White woman can. “All right. I’ll see you on Monday, then, Kiyoomi.”

Saturday sunset finds Kiyoomi scrolling through the movie catalog. Celia gave out a list of her favorite films about two months ago, and he’s been trying to cross off titles here and there ever since. So far, he’s seen Y Tu Mamá También (2001), part one and part two of The Godfather (1972; 1974), and Orlando (1992). As he scans Celia’s list for the third time, Kiyoomi decides that today seems like the day he’ll finally tackle Do the Right Thing (1989). It’s available for free through some streaming service bundle his family happens to have, which means his mother won’t be on his case about spending money, and it’s directed by Spike Lee—another bonus. 

Kiyoomi is about to click purchase when knuckles rap against the front door. He drops the remote between two couch cushions, walks to the foyer, and doesn’t look through the peephole before swinging the front door open. 

Standing at the doorstep is a six-foot-something boy who is barely a boy—fist still raised from knocking. He’s donning a loose basketball championship sweatshirt and Black Nike shorts. His hair is dripping wet. He’s not smiling; he’s beautiful nonetheless. 

“Atsumu?” Kiyoomi begins, voice wavering. “Why, why are you here? And why is your hair so wet?” 

Miya Atsumu is here. Miya Atsumu is everything that Kiyoomi will ever want and never be, and he’s here.

“Well, I stayed late to talk with coach and then walked home to take my usual shower,” Atsumu explains, starting to pace, “but when I got there, Samu was already in the bathroom singing’ away, which meant I had to wait for him to finish his concert before I could clean off. And then, when I finally got in, I realized we were out of shampoo, and the bastard didn’t even bother to restock it! So I had to walk across multiple feet of tile while soaking wet to open up the sticky cabinet and get a new bottle to use. And then the rest of my shower felt weird, and I ended up barely having time to towel off my body before getting here, let alone my hair.” He gestures to the wet bangs plastered against his forehead, then cards a dry hand through them. “So, yeah.”

The rambling is so familiar that it makes Kiyoomi’s wrists pulse. He takes his bottom lip between his teeth. “Okay, well, that explains the wet hair, but why are you here? Why did you come?”

It’s not fair—it’s not fair—how Atsumu’s eyes start to prick with tears at the questions. “Because,” he pleads, launching forward into Kiyoomi’s personal space in a way he’s never done before, grabbing him by the front of his shirt and tugging hard, “because I miss you, Kiyoomi!” 

Ah, there it is: that godforsaken word. 

“I miss you, Sakusa Kiyoomi,” Atsumu repeats, his warm breath fanning across Kiyoomi’s rouging nose bridge. “I miss you so fucking much, and it’s killing me.” He releases the collar of Kiyoomi’s shirt and stumbles back a few steps back like a puppet on loose strings. His chin has tucked into his chest. 

There is a difference between missing someone and wanting to see them again; every nihonjin and nikkeijin knows this. But these phenomena aren’t mutually exclusive. Miya Atsumu misses Kiyoomi, and he wants to see him, too. This is why he’s standing at his doorstep, soaked in shitty suburban sunshine and the remnants of a lukewarm shower, heaving like the distance between them caused physical hurt. 

Kiyoomi says, rather quietly, “Why do you miss me?” 

“Because—god, I don’t know,” Atsumu responds, the heel of his palm colliding with his wet bangs. “I don’t know, man.”

“Thanks.”

“No, I mean…” The unfinished sentence eddies in the air, lilac-black. Atsumu brings a hand to his stomach, focuses on his breathing with a pattern that’s all too familiar. “It’s because I like you.”

Kiyoomi blinks slowly. The machinery of his body all but short-circuits. “What?”

“I like you,” Atsumu stammers again, taking the silence as a sign to reiterate his feelings. “I’m attracted to you, I’m interested in you, or however you want to describe it, but the bottom line is I like you.”

“How?” Kiyoomi asks, trying and failing not to project his world onto Atsumu’s. “Why? What on earth are you talking about?”

“I—look.” His partner unsuccessfully blows a strand of wet hair out of his eyes. “When we started working on your film, I thought you were just a reclusive art kid. But then you started joking with me and calling me out on my bullshit, and that felt good, which was weird, cause when does being put in your place feel good? As if that weren’t enough, though, you also talked to me about my feelings, and somehow, even though that was even weirder, it made me feel safe. Before I knew it, I really, really liked you, Kiyoomi.” Atsumu’s fingers stretch toward Kiyoomi ever so slightly, then retract in shame. “And then I fucked up,” he admits, examining the blisters mottling his palm. “I brought up one of the things you’re most insecure about on purpose because I was scared of being seen, and it made me feel bigger than you for a moment, and that was so, so shitty of me.” He swallows a gulp of air. “So I’m apologizing for that, and hoping you’ll forgive me.” 

Kiyoomi fiddles with the zippers of his pockets. Head pounding, he mutters, “I don’t follow.”

“'M saying that I’m sorry for being shitty to you about Japanese.”

“No, no, I get that part,” he dismisses with a flinch, “and I appreciate your apology. But I don’t understand the other things.” Kiyoomi tucks his hands into his pockets to suppress the urge to pick. “The liking me part.”

“Oh, right. Uhm. Let me try to explain it differently.” Atsumu squeezes his eyes shut and inhales. Holds for four seconds, exhales after another four. “So, when I was a kid, my ADHD used to be super bad,” he starts, trying to laugh. “Like, so bad that when I’d go to school in Japan over the summers, my homeroom teacher would literally tie me to my chair using a jump rope so that I couldn't scurry away into a neighboring classroom to chat with the kids.” He takes a seat on the porch steps, stretching his legs out. 

Kiyoomi sits beside him. 

“And now?” Atsumu continues, gazing out at the twin houses lining the cul-de-sac. “Now I’m medicated for ADHD and stuff, yeah, and I’m way better than I was back then, duh, but—but it’s still hard. I mean, I need to take drugs to get my fucking laundry folded!" Atsumu pantomimes hanging up a sheet to dry before letting his face relax. “But when I’m with you, that all fades away. Like watercolor or some shit, man, like clouds.” He presents Kiyoomi with a shaky smile. “So I guess the entire point of what I’m trying to say is: my brain can never do just one thing—except for when I’m looking at you, Kiyoomi. Except for when I’m with you.”

Overhead, a flock of geese flaps their wings in a perfect V-formation. They look like dancers. 

Kiyoomi thinks about something long and beautiful here. “Oh,” he says, uncrossing his legs.

“Kiyoomi,” Atsumu begins, his voice awfully soft, “I just poured my heart out to you, and all I get in reply is an oh ?” He throws his hands up in the air, overdramatic and underwhelmed and right at home.

“Sorry, sorry,” Kiyoomi mutters, largely to himself, fluttering his eyes shut and thinking about the situation. As usual, he makes a list.

A list of things Kiyoomi knows for sure:

1. A boy who makes him feel alive has walked to his house to apologize.
2. A boy his mother adores has ripped his heart off his sleeve and shoved it into his scabbed hands. 
3. A boy-who-is-barely-a-boy has declared that he is something worth protecting.

The facts all point in one direction, so—desperate and disbelieving—Kiyoomi asks, “Are you serious?”

Atsumu’s left hand finds a way into his right. “I’m serious,” he affirms, squeezing lightly. “I’m beyond serious, and it scares the shit out of me.”

Miya Atsumu has the softest hands Kiyoomi has ever touched. A boy with the softest hands Kiyoomi has ever touched is telling him he’s serious. 

“Okay,” Kiyoomi answers at last, squeezing Atsumu’s hand back. “Okay, I believe you.”

“Great!” Atsumu leans in so that they’re nose to nose. In what sounds like the quietest voice he can manage, he asks, “Can I kiss you now?”

And then Kiyoomi is nodding emphatically, so hard that his neck pops with a frightening crack, his hands coming up to fist Atsumu’s damp shirt and his mouth falling open. And then Atsumu is laughing—laughing hard enough that he snorts, hard enough that his eyes crinkle into crescent moons—asking why on earth Kiyoomi’s mouth is open if they’re about to kiss. And then Kiyoomi is gulping like a fish out of water, rubbing his cheek into Atsumu’s broad shoulder, and then Atsumu is tilting his chin upward with a finger, and then this is the part of the story where all of the Health 1 lectures about how consent should be both enthusiastic and natural finally make sense. Things finally make sense.

Here are Miya Atsumu and Sakusa Kiyoomi. They are Japanese American boys, both everything and nothing alike. They are unpaid, overworked translators, dear friends of liminal spaces, and the culmination of their parents’ barely-beating dreams. They are still learning how to forgive their families, and themselves too. But they will learn. 

They will learn. 

That night, Kiyoomi takes Atsumu’s advice to heart and asks his mother to sit with him for a film. Rie is evidently startled, but she agrees, selecting 火垂るの墓 (1988). It is the first movie they have seen together in years. Kiyoomi thinks his mother is conscious of this because she chooses to sit on the couch beside him rather than in her usual wingback. 

火垂るの墓 is a slow, syrupy story, so the hurt it evokes is quiet. This is the kind of hurt that wraps itself around bones, that festers in a parent’s scolding of their child. This is the kind of hurt that has framed Kiyoomi’s devastatingly interesting seventeen years of life. 

By the time the credits roll, his face is hot with tears. Rie, who has always been perceptive beyond her own good, notices his heart-rending grief and smiles. She pats the space beside her. So Kiyoomi bends his long limbs into a less offensive shape and crawls into his mother’s lap like he is her child—because he is and always will be. And then they cry together for different reasons, and stay like that for a very long time. 

Brave and braver. Small and smaller. 

“I used to imagine that history had infused my parents’ lives with the dust of a cataclysmic explosion. That it had seeped through their skin and became part of their blood. […] But maybe being their child simply means that I will always feel the weight of their past.”

“What has worried me since having my own child was whether I would pass along some gene for sorrow, or unintentionally inflict damage I could never undo. But when I look at my son, now ten years old, I don’t see war and loss [...]. I see a new life—bound with mine quite by coincidence—and I think maybe he can be free.”