Chapter Text
0
The baby is pink and squirming but she does not cry, and Gin looks at her and asks herself why.
Not why she isn’t crying. That, she chalks up to luck. Maybe some kind of mercy. No, it’s the why of her existence. Why she has this child. Why any of this is real. Why a girl named Gin had seen enough of value in a boy named Tae to let him call her Ji-eun, and why the Gin who was Ji-eun has a child, and why it is suddenly clear again that her name is Okamura Gin and this child feels like a disembodied reality she wants to wish away.
“Ma’am,” a nurse who has been speaking for far longer than Gin has been listening says, again, “a name?”
“Oh.”
She would let Tae do it, but Tae is looking at her, and that means – as it always does – deference. She looks at the squirming pink thing and wonders why it exists again and says, not thinking, “Eunha.”
The nurse will write it in characters that mean nothing, even though she knows the ones she wants. She knew a girl by that name once and she had liked how the hangul read and it pops into her head, pleasant in its suitability, but this nurse, of course, will not know that. This nurse will struggle with the katakana rendering of an unusual name and she probably won’t ever bother to wonder what it means.
In Japanese, it is Amanogawa – heaven’s river. It is nearly the same, but not quite, as her daughter’s name. She remembers the hangul of that other Eunha’s name in her neat, round handwriting, admiring them at the top of the page over her shoulder: silver river. Milky Way.
Maybe – she cracks a smile that she doesn’t really mean – this girl she wants to wish away will like that, too, when she is old enough to understand it.
“Song Eunha,” she says softly.
Okamura would hardly do. Nor would Shin, though her parents still use it. Eunha will not be a Shin and she doubts with a mother’s intuition that she will even remain long enough to pass on Okamura.
Song Tae was the one who wanted this child, anyways. He was the one who had sworn to drop out of college if that was what he needed to do, and the least he ought to get for that is naming rights.
Song Eunha. Silver river. Milky Way.
And maybe a mistake.
**
6
Kazuhiro squints at the music until he goes almost cross-eyed, and he still doesn’t get it.
Usually, violin is fun. The sound it makes is soothing instead of grating, and Mihara-sensei is good at explaining things in a way that Kazuhiro can understand. Most people, be that his father, his older sisters, the old people who glower at him when they go to family gatherings, or his new first-grade teacher, are incredibly bad at it, so he likes his lessons. Things make sense there. Everyone seems surprised at how much sense music makes to him, but they keep giving him lessons and sheet music for it, so he doesn’t bother to ask why people act that way.
But this one has him stumped.
It’s not the music itself. The melody is clear in his head, and he knows what pattern of fingerings will make it. Sometimes music is difficult when the bow stroke it requires is springy or bouncy, too demanding of his heavy, clumsy bow hand, but this piece isn’t like that.
And he knows he can play it in tune, so it can’t be that. Mihara-sensei always says his ear is good, and this raises more questions—he’s always wondered what makes one person’s ears better than the other, and whether she’s referring to his right ear or his left ear as a good ear—but she’s told him it means he’s good at playing in tune, so that can’t be the reason the music never comes out right.
“Hiro-kun?”
He is still squinting at his music in an attempt to make it confess when his mother approaches. She crouches behind him, resting her chin on his shoulder, and asks, “what are you doing, Ducky?”
“It doesn’t sound good,” he tells her, pouting.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hmm…you wanna play it for me?”
“No,” he says. “It doesn’t sound good.”
“Well.” She ruffles his hair. “Maybe I could help.”
“You don’t play the violin,” he protests, unable to see what good she could possibly do.
She laughs softly. “No, but I can sing.”
“But that’s different.”
“Not so different. I can read music, mmhm?”
He frowns; this explanation does not satisfy him much. Nevertheless, he trusts her, so he demonstrates a particularly tricky passage, then turns to her.
“Well, I think it sounds nice,” she tells him. “But I think I have an idea.”
“Mm?”
“Do you ever think about phrasing?”
“Phrasing?”
“Okay, well, one sec.” She pulls out her phone and types something, then looks back up at Kazuhiro. “Can you play me the beginning again? Just a few measures?”
He’s not sure what that has to do with whatever she’s doing on her phone, but he does, and she nods. “Listen to this now.”
She clicks on something, and the recording of the piece that they’ve been listening to in the car begins to play. He looks at her for an explanation, but instead of giving one, she asks, “one more time?”
When he has, she hums the melody back at him.
“What?”
“That’s the way yours sounds,” she says, then repeats herself. Then, she plays the recording back and hums that, too. “Hear a difference?”
He nods, because he can, but he doesn’t know what exactly it is.
“Phrasing is why those sound different,” she says. “How in the recording, there’s…pauses.”
“Rests?” he asks, frowning.
“No, not rests. Not anything in the music. Just…think of it like a book.” She can tell he’s not getting it, but it doesn’t seem to frustrate her. “Books have periods, right? To show what belongs to the same sentence?”
“Yeah?”
“The way that they play it in the recording, it’s like that,” she says. “You can tell which notes go together.”
This time, when she plays the recording back, he can hear what she was talking about. Certain groups of measures seem to belong together, and he can tell when one group ends and another begins. He can’t put his finger on what technical choices they had made to do it, but somehow the violinist had been able to make those distinctions clear.
“But when you played it”—she hums back the same melody the way he’d played—“it was as all one big chunk, so it’s like if you were talking and you said something really long all at once with no pauses.”
“Oh.”
“I can see why that was tricky,” she says. “’Cause it’s not in the music.”
“Yeah.”
“This is pretty hard stuff, so I don’t think you have to worry about all of this yet, but if you don’t like the way it sounds-“
“No, I do,” he protests. “It doesn’t sound right.”
As such, he thinks about phrasing a lot these days. Parts of his mother’s words are still a confusing jumble in his head, but he stares at his music and wonders where the sentences begin and end. When he asks Mihara-sensei at his next lesson, she’s puzzled but delighted.
“That’s pretty high-level stuff,” she tells him, then smiles approvingly at Utahime, who always sits across the room to observe.
“I had to,” he says, as if he has to justify having acquired this knowledge too early. “It didn’t sound good.”
**
7
Eunha is not the world’s biggest fan of elementary school. She does not like sitting at a desk all day; she does not like that everyone insists that her name is Yuna when everybody who matters at all knows that it is Eunha, and that sounding similar doesn’t make Yuna her real name. She is also not fond of her teacher, who she privately thinks has a face like a pig’s, or her classmates, who are mostly annoying.
But there are exactly two reasons that it is endurable.
One is Sori. Sori does not sit next to Eunha, because the starting syllables of the last names don’t sit close enough together in the alphabet, but this is unimportant, because on virtually every other occasion they’re inseparable. They walk to school together, they eat conbini snacks together, they watch music videos in Sori’s living room. Eunha does not even really know where she came from, except that their grandparents are friends, but what she knows is this: Sori, who has been ‘Sora’ at school enough times to know better, never calls her Yuna; Sori knows what it is like to live in a home where people switch effortlessly in and out of two languages; Sori is on her side. Everyone at school knows that Yuna-who-is-not and Sora-who-is-not are inseparable, even if not the reasons why.
And the other is cello.
Music class is mandatory, and at Mishiura Elementary School, that means choosing an instrument to be stuck with for five more years. This is an inescapable requirement, but even so, it hadn’t been just everyone who was picked for the music performance at the culture festival last year. Most of the kids who were had been taking private lessons since they were four. But not Eunha.
Eunha had never even thought about music before elementary school, except for maybe the times Sori had told her they had to practice for the day their parents would let them move to Seoul to become idol trainees. (This, Eunha has made clear, is Sori’s pipe dream, not hers.) She hadn’t even chosen cello; it had been the last instrument left by the time the sign-up sheet reached her. At first, she had looked at the bulky instrument like it had fallen out of the sky. But then the teacher had handed her a bow, told her how to hold it and draw the sound out of the strings, and something had clicked into place.
For months now, she’s been dragging an instrument nearly as tall as she is home from school, playing in the innermost room of the tiny apartment she shares with her father so as not to disturb the neighbors. For months, cello has supplanted Sori and her idol talk as the thing at the forefront of Eunha’s mind. Her teacher says she has talent, the culture festival committee had chosen her to perform in her first year of elementary school, and it is the only thing people really know her for – but Eunha never really thinks about those things.
She just wants to sound better every time she picks up her bow.
Playing makes her forget that nobody at school will call her by her real name, and how her father is always telling her to be careful what she calls herself in public. It doesn’t leave her any room to wonder about her mother, or think about the nagging hunger she sometimes feels between lunch and dinner on days when Sori’s allowance is gone and she can’t buy Eunha conbini snacks. She doesn’t think about the private lessons her teacher keeps recommending, even though Eunha has told her there’s no way. Sometimes, it even enables her to spend the afternoon at her grandparents’ house, where the kitchen cupboards are well-stocked and there are no neighbors to disturb through paper-thin walls.
But it makes her feel important, too. It’s not everyone who can pull hair across strings and make real music.
So even on the days when she would rather not get up for school, the weight of her cello case on her back reminds her that there are reasons it’s sort of worthwhile. Just after lunch, she’ll head to music class, and for forty-five minutes, all school will demand of her is that she play her cello.
And that is a very easy request to grant.
**
14
“These for a special lady?”
Kazuhiro nods, cheeks a little flushed. “Yeah. I guess.”
“Well.” The florist smiles at him. “She’s a pretty lucky girl, I’d say.”
“Oh, uh…thank you.”
He hopes that Kanami will think that. He an’t guarantee it, of course, and he’s not optimistic enough to really believe that she will, but…well. That would be nice, if she did.
“Yeah, this is a nice set,” she says, tying a neat white bow around the paper-wrapped base of the bouquet. “You’re really shellin’ out, huh?”
“I…don’t really know what’s considered enough.”
“Aww, trust me, this is nice.” She punches something into the cash register, then looks up at him expectedly. “Four thousand seventy yen.” He passes the money over the counter, and she goes on, “girlfriend?”
“No, uh…no.”
“Ooh, confession?”
“S…something like that.”
“Well, best of luck, sweet pea,” she says, laughing, and hands him his change. “She’s gonna love them.”
He hopes. He really does.
And there’s reason to think he’s not crazy for that hope. At least, he thinks there is. There are a lot of people in the Nishimaru International Junior High School’s orchestra club, but he’s the one Kanami always comes to when she wants to know how people have marked the fingering on a tricky passage. Once she ate with him and Tsubaki in the cafeteria, which had surprised him, because Kanami’s friends aren’t really from the orchestra club. But mostly, he’s hopeful because Kanami had given him chocolate last Valentine’s Day.
She hadn’t confessed with it, but at least it means she thought of him, and maybe that’s enough to make her want to give him a chance if he gets this right.
Tsubaki boards the train at the same stop she always does, waiting beneath the same sign to make sure that she makes it into the car that Kazuhiro always sits in, and gives him a wide-eyed you did it? look when she sees the flowers. He doesn’t so much as nod, but Tsubaki has known him so long that she doesn’t even take notice of that anymore.
“So,” she says. “Kanami, huh?”
“I…I’ve been practicing.”
“What, a speech?”
“You sound like you think that’s weird.”
“I mean, not a lot of people practice a confession speech.” She leans back against the seat with a heavy sigh. “But you’re not most people, so I guess I shoulda expected it.”
She should have. After five years of friendship consisting almost entirely of Tsubaki talking to fill the silence in between playing duets, she is an expert at predicting Kazuhiro’s behavior whether she would’ve chosen to be or not. Not, probably. It is a known fact that Tsubaki likes surprises. Too bad her closest friend is so utterly predictable.
“I researched examples,” he says, just to reassure her. This is not, he wants her to understand, a decision he takes lightly. “So I think I know what’s normal to say.”
“If she really likes you, why would she want you to act normal?”
“What?”
“You never act normal. ‘S not you.”
People say things like that all the time, and Kazuhiro has never really understood what they mean. Try as he might, he can’t figure out what about his behavior is so abnormal, and the people who are constantly giggling over his shoulder at the strange things he does never bother to tell him what those strange things are. Nevertheless, he’s heard it enough times that it’s a truth he accepts even without understanding.
You really hate bein’ hugged that much? He remembers his father asking, and how sincerely confused he’d looked. I woulda thought hugs were pretty normal. And Kimie: you’re like a little alien, she says fondly, never change. Tsubaki likes to inform him that she enjoys that he’s “a little weird.” And his father would never want to hurt him, nor his sister, nor Tsubaki, so it must just be a fact. They’re not saying it because they think it’s wrong, just because it’s true. There’s a measure of comfort in that. But he can’t understand what about anything he’s just said would prompt Tsubaki to warn him about this.
(And it is a warning. That, he knows well.)
“I’m doing my best to…to look like I have experience.”
“Dude, don’t.”
“But I don’t want to present myself in-”
“Can you just…be yourself?”
“How do you mean?”
“I dunno, just say whatever pops into your head.”
“That sounds like a horrible idea.”
“What? It’s genuine that way!”
“It’s also completely unplanned and I might blurt out anything.”
“Yeah, but that’s the point! Y’know, just, go with the flow, right?”
Violists.
Kazuhiro tries very hard not to exhibit prejudice, because apparently (his mother had told him this) he has a stronger tendency than most to dislike people who don’t act like he thinks they ought to on principle, and this is not a good quality to have. Still, it is hard sometimes not to blame his best friend’s odd behavior and seeming lack of need for healthy structure on her choice of instruments.
Playing the viola just makes you weird. Everybody knows that.
“Tsubaki,” he says, “I’m not doing that.”
“Your funeral, dude.”
He frowns. “Besides, I’m not confessing to you.”
“Eh?”
“So I don’t think that what you think about confessing is very relevant.”
“Harsh, but sure, I guess.”
Then Tsubaki takes out her phone, which Kazuhiro knows to mean she doesn’t want to talk anymore. She had had to tell him that once; he’s never forgotten the embarrassment of having to be told. Now he’s made a rule of it: as soon as he sees a phone come out of a pocket or a purse, he’s silent until it goes away.
So he’s silent when they arrive at school.
Silent when he drops off his backpack in the Class C room.
Silent carrying a bundle of white roses in silver tissue paper and cellophane down the hall to Class A, even though he can hear a few voices tittering as he passes by.
Silent in the doorway of the Class A room, scanning for Kanami, and then - he sights her, her hair is tied back in pigtails today, his heart stutters uncomfortably - waiting until she meets his eyes after what feels like five minutes of staring. He offers her a silent smile when she finally does. The one she offers him in return is strained, but she comes to the classroom door and asks, “Gojo…?”
He clears his throat. “Kan- um. Takemura-san.”
She looks down at the flowers; her cheeks flush; her eyes widen. “Did you come here to…?”
Again, he clears his throat. “I, um, you…gave me chocolates,” he says. “For Valentine’s Day. And according to social conventions, I need to give you a return gift that costs three times more than-”
“Right,” she says, smiling tightly. “But really, you didn’t have to do that.”
“Technically, no. Social conventions are all made up and there aren’t any tangible consequences for-”
“You really didn’t have to do that.”
“But.”
This is going less smoothly than Kazuhiro had expected; she wasn’t supposed to interrupt. He was supposed to be able to say what he practiced uninterrupted. She could at least grant him that much.
“I…was happy that you gave me chocolate,” he tells her. “On Valentine’s Day.”
“Oh, I…wow. I’m…I didn’t know that-”
“Because I admire you.” Researching last night, he had thought that was a good word for it. It’s less shallow than most of the alternatives, and it properly conveys what he thinks of Kanami without any unnecessary theatrics. (He doesn’t care what his genes say. He refuses to have unnecessary theatrics in his life.) “And I wasn’t expecting to be acknowledged by you because we inhabit different social strata-”
“There you go again.”
“What?”
Kanami’s smile falls. The expression that replaces it is hard for Kazuhiro to interpret, but he doesn’t like it.
“Gojo,” she says, “the flowers are nice, but you know that was obligation chocolate, right?”
“Well, yes, of course. I had assumed-”
“You know,” she says, “the kind that doesn’t mean anything.”
“But it’s still polite to-”
“Are you actually this dense?”
“Dense…?”
“I gave you chocolate because you sit behind me in orchestra and I felt bad for you, okay?”
Kazuhiro doesn’t really follow, but the sting in his cheeks still makes him feel like a biting gust of wind is passing through the hall. “I’m…sorry?”
“Because who else was going to give you chocolate?”
Oh.
That’s what that means.
“I don’t know why you’re offended by somebody giving you flowers,” is what he says, because everything else gets stuck at the back of his throat.
“I’m not offended, Gojo, I just really don’t want them.”
“Because you…feel bad for me…?”
“Because I don’t see you that way, okay? And I’m not going to, so I’m glad you liked the chocolate, but it really didn’t mean anything except I feel bad for the guy everyone thinks is weird!”
And then, to Kazuhiro’s consternation, she turns on her heel and stalks off.
He looks down at his flowers.
Four thousand and seventy yen is good money.
Kanami does not, evidently, feel lucky.
Oh.
He tells Tsubaki, hours later, to tell the supervisor of the orchestra club that he’s not feeling well, even though she definitely won’t believe that, and with wilted white roses in one hand and the handle of his violin case in the other, he boards a line he almost never takes at this hour, out into the mountains near the outskirts of the city. He doesn’t do anything on the way, only stares blankly out the window. He doesn’t remember how long it takes to get to his stop and wouldn’t if he tried.
Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical College’s back entrance is an extra half-mile from the stop compared to the front, but it’s worth the walk to remain unseen. And even though the gardener gives him an odd look as he passes by, nobody else sees him on the way to the dormitories. Good. He passes through the empty common room, then turns left into the girls’ hall, and three doors down, and - because he knows it will be answered at this hour - knocks.
“Who?”
That voice chips away a little at the startling numbness in his chest, but he doesn’t think that’s really a good thing.
“Hiro.”
Reika opens her door, looks down at the roses in his hands, and asks, “what?”
He thrusts them into her hands. “Kanami.”
She puts the pieces together as fast as a good older sister should.
“Do you need me to kill her?”
Kazuhiro frowns. “Being rude isn’t a criminal offense.”
Reika’s eyes narrow. “What did she do besides not take your flowers?”
“That’s all.”
“What kind of bitch-”
“Don’t call her that.”
“How much did you spend on those?”
“Four thousand.”
Reika clutches the roses to her chest with a ferocity that almost crushes them. “And she didn’t-”
“She says she felt bad for me.”
“I’m gonna kill her.”
“Don’t.”
“I am.”
“Oneechan-”
“How could she-”
“Plenty of people-”
“Dammit, Hiro, why aren’t you mad?”
“I’m just not.”
Except that now it’s out and somebody knows and his whole body feels a little bit tremory, and it sinks in, why someone like Kanami wouldn’t even want to be seen accepting flowers from somebody like him, and why those girls from Class A were looking over at him and giggling in the lunchroom, and the fact that he could not have been more wrong, and when he lifts his hand to rub at his eyes, it comes away wet.
“I’m just not, okay?”
Wet?
“Oh,” he says quietly, really only to himself. “That’s weird.”
Reika looks at him like her heart is going to break, and he doesn’t like that, but he doesn’t really know what to do with it, either, not on top of the fact that he’s crying and doesn’t know why.
“Hiro-kun…”
“What?”
“I’m so sorry.”
He wonders, later, why hearing that feels worse than anything, and he never really figures out why.
**
13
“When are we gonna talk about the elephant in the room?”
“What, Chaewoo leaving SPLICE?”
Kang Sori will always be the first to admit that she does not possess a great deal of talents, but glaring is one of them. She has a stare that could put someone in the hospital down to a science. “I’m talking about how you’re cheating on me.”
Eunha, impassive, bites into her Famichiki and pretends not to have heard this.
“With”—Sori pokes her finger into the carbon-fiber case of Eunha’s cello, propped up against the wall outside her apartment building—“that.”
“I have to practice,” she says flatly. “It isn’t my fault that you aren’t good at having priorities.”
“Yeah, but it made you so boring,” Sori complains. “All you ever do is go hide in the music room now.”
Eunha swallows hard and hopes Sori won’t notice. “It’s just until auditions.”
“Yeah, and when is that, next winter?”
January eleventh. It’s still July, but Eunha is counting down the days. “Yeah, but Tennoji Arts is competitive.”
“It can’t be that competitive.”
“Trust me, it is.”
Sori kicks at a can that’s fallen out of a nearby trash bin, but her foot can’t quite reach it. “Is this about the stuff with Kawajima?”
Eunha snorts in annoyance. “Of course it’s not.”
“You know you’re allowed to say you’re mad.”
“Of course I’m mad. That’s not why I’m practicing.”
“Eun-haaaa.”
“She’s an idiot.”
“No duh she’s an idiot.”
“I’m not avoiding you.”
“No, you’re avoiding everyone.” Sori pokes Eunha’s arm with the butt of her soda bottle. “Why are you avoiding everyone if she’s really just an idiot?”
“I’m not avoiding anyone!”
“Well, I know you’re not practicing when you sneak into the music room to eat your lunch.”
Eunha’s stomach drops. She’s always so careful not to be seen when she does that.
“It’s…just so I don’t have to walk over there when I finish eating.”
“Or you’re scared of Kawajima.”
“I’m not!”
“Eunha-yah.”
“You never call me that anymore.”
Sori, who is almost always annoyingly impossible to stop from talking, is quiet for a moment after that.
“Kawajima and whoever would just get worse if I did.”
Eunha knows that perfectly well, but hearing the nickname anyway makes her eyes sting. So rarely these days does anyone call her Eunha at all, let alone with the diminutive her father used to use when she was little and hasn’t in a while now.
“I’m not scared,” she mumbles. “I really am practicing.”
“But it looks like you’re scared when you hide in the music room all the time.”
“It looks like you’re scared when you pretend your name is Sora.”
“I’m not scared,” she echoes. “It’s just what everyone wants to call me. I don’t care.”
She used to, back when they were children and her parents still thought it was safe for her to be Kang Sori and not Kanagawa Sora. Eunha, too. Only Sori got used to it.
Eunha never has.
“I’m just saying.”
“You’re the one who’s scared.”
“Can’t I just not like it and not be scared?”
“It’s not like it’s bad if you are.”
“But I’m-“
“It’s smart to be scared,” Sori says, examining a spot on her middle fingernail where the blue polish she applied last week is chipping off. “Otherwise you might get beat up or something.”
“By Kawajima? She’s shorter than me!”
“Dunno, Kawajima’s dumb boyfriend or something.” Sori exhales showily through her mouth and declares, “the world is full of idiots, Eunha-yah.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So I can’t blame you for-“
“All she does is talk, Sori. I don’t need to hide from that.”
“Then why do you?”
Eunha, briefly, considers telling her the truth: that the world is quieter and more sensible in the music room, that she sometimes needs to remind herself what she’s good at. That it’s infinitely better than being caught at a vending machine with Kawajima Emiko, handing her a crisp thousand-yen note because she looks underfed, and can’t really help that everyone is starving in North Korea, and the spy agency might call you back any minute anyways so you should enjoy it here while it lasts. That she can know that people are idiots, even the ones who are friendly and overzealous and ask her a thousand questions about K-pop that their sole Zainichi classmate is no more capable of answering than they are, and still not like to sit around and listen to their million reasons she’s less than they are.
But Sori has already decided that the best way to hide is in plain sight, so Eunha doesn’t think she’d understand.
“I already told you,” she says. “I have to be on top of auditions or there’s no way I’m getting in.”
“Eunha-yah.”
“Mm?”
“Is it gonna make a difference?”
A question only a non-musician would ask, surely. “What…?”
“Eunha, you’re better than everyone already.”
“It’s…that’s…no.”
Except she knows. Even her teacher says so: that if she would just be Okamura Yuna for a little while she would be accepted anywhere, no questions asked. That it’s not her playing that lacks merit but her parentage.
She can’t put the why of it into words, but those well-meaning warnings make her stomach turn with anger. Without them, she will later think, maybe she would’ve reached the same conclusion on their own, that Song Eunha wouldn’t get very far with a name like that, broadcasting her sole glaring flaw of failing to have been born Japanese, but they had made her stubborn. Thirteen is a tender age; it’s not one at which anyone, Eunha least of all, heeds well-intentioned advice well.
And it’s just old enough for a girl who has always been restless and searching to become attuned to the world’s insistence that there’s something wrong with her. It is old enough to be aware that her mother had left an infant with a man whose only source of income came from delivering pizzas, and that her grandmother pays for cello lessons when she hadn’t paid for diapers or the rest of her father’s aborted university degree or food for her growing granddaughter, and to start to be upset about it.
Eunha remembers a time when she was always laughing, and her kindergarten teacher had ruffled her hair and called her “a darling,” and she hadn’t minded being Yuna all that much. She thinks most people wonder why she changed. She wonders why they can’t tell that all she does these days is play to an invisible audience in a quiet, cavernous classroom and try to keep her anger contained.
It's not really fear that makes her eat in the music room, nor shame, nor sadness. Really, if she is more honest than a middle-schooler is usually given to being, she hides away because the closer she is to the outside, the more unbearable it becomes to restrain her anger.
“If I can’t get in the way I am,” she says, clenching her fist so tightly that her nails dig painfully into her palm, “I don’t wanna be there at all.”
**
15
Kazuhiro is honestly surprised that they’re letting him do this.
His parents don’t know the half of things. He hasn’t told them anything about the way things changed after he tried to give flowers to Kanami, the snickers that followed him everywhere, the friends of Tsubaki’s who had disappeared one by one when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to stop being seen with him. He also does not bother to inform them that even the teachers give him odd looks, or that he had tried to talk to his English teacher about why he so consistently received worse marks than his classmates for essays of similar quality and had been told that if he didn’t want to be marked off for machine-translating, he ought not to write like a machine. So they don’t really know that this has been the year of point-and-laugh-at-Kazuhiro at Nishimura International Junior High School. But they’re still never the types to forget that their son is…odd.
And they’re definitely not the types to let him go off to school in Osaka, where they can’t watch him.
He thinks his talent for hiding things is probably the only reason that they have. Thus, he’s grateful for it. It’s a useful talent, and it enables him to pack his life into boxes and move out and be somewhere where all that will matter – at least he hopes – is how well he plays.
But before that, he has one night left to spend in his childhood bedroom, beneath the constellation stickers Reika had carefully placed on the ceiling when he was six and she was ten, across from a bed that’s been empty since she left for school. One more night, he can’t help but think, in relative safety.
Maybe his parents are embarrassed by him, or they think that the ways he doesn’t fit in make him less competent than he desperately wants them to believe he is, but at least they’re safe. They’re used to him; they know how he works. The last thing they would ever want is to hurt him, no matter how many times everyone he loves has done it by accident. He’s always going to be all right under this roof.
Tomorrow, there won’t be any constellations on his ceiling, no empty bed across from his, and while he’d wanted that, he isn’t upset when he hears a soft knock at his door.
“Hiro-kyun.”
His father, then. “Come in.”
Satoru enters the room more quietly than Kazuhiro has ever seen him do anything. Then he sits on the bed, cross-legged. “Tomorrow, huh.”
“Mm.”
He reaches across and ruffles Kazuhiro’s hair. “Can’t believe you all left me. Little traitors.”
“Otousan,” he says earnestly, “we don’t exist for your gratification.”
Satoru smiles sadly. “I know, kid. Just sayin’.” He leans back on his hands. “It’s weird thinking about how tomorrow I’m not going to have any kids left.”
“You see Kimie and Rei-chan every day.”
“And then I come home to a sad, empty house with none of my babies-“
“Kaa-chan.”
“That’s not what I meant by ‘my babies.’”
Kazuhiro scrunches his face. “I just meant the house isn’t really empty.”
“Look, kid, you get used to bein’ a dad.”
“Oh.”
“I’m just saying I’m gonna miss you.”
“Why?”
He tilts his head. “What do you mean, why?”
“Our interactions at home are minimal and I have a lot of deficiencies.”
Kazuhiro can see his father swallow; his expression shifts briefly into vexation before it evens out again. “You’re my son, Hiro.”
“I know.”
“I made you.” He ruffles Kazuhiro’s hair again. “And I honestly think you’re pretty neat.”
“You think I’m weird.”
“I think all the best people are weird.” He taps Kazuhiro’s forehead. “And I like people who do their own thing.”
Kazuhiro doesn’t protest. That, at very least, is something he can be sure is true.
“So, uh, I got you something.”
He perks up – Kazuhiro loves presents. “You did?”
“Not too useful, y’know, pretty much just symbolic, but, I mean, if anyone’s into symbols and crap, it’s you, right?”
“What?”
“I dunno, you…you’re a real profound kid.”
“No, that’s Kazuki.”
“Kazuki’s not profound, she’s a nerd. There’s a difference.”
Kazuhiro begs to differ. Even Kimie is more profound than he is. Still, his father is nothing if not stubborn, so he gives up.
“So, um…you got me something.”
“Oh, yeah, right, right.” Satoru roots around in his pocket and pulls out a small gift box, teal with a white bow and pleasantly heavy in his hand. “I, uh…I don’t know, I just felt like…damn. I guess I’m feeling sappy tonight.” He scratches at the back of his neck, laughing uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, Hiro, I know you hate this kinda stuff.”
He studies his father’s face for a moment. “It’s okay.”
“Well, I just…I know it hasn’t been easy for you. But you, well…you do your own thing. Chart your own course, y’know. Never let anyone change it.” He takes a deep, shaky breath. “And…and you’re a lot like me in that.”
“Two days ago you gave up on trying to get a pet snake because Kaa-chan told you no.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Love is weird.”
That it is. Kazuhiro wholeheartedly, if confusedly, agrees. “Okay?”
“Anyways. Charting your own course.” He snaps his fingers a few time to jog his memory. “Right! That. So, I…I guess this is just my way of saying I’m proud of you.”
Kazuhiro carefully unties the ribbon around the box. “For what?”
“Being Kazuhiro.”
“That’s not an accomplishment.”
“It is when people are always tellin’ you to be something else.”
He sets the ribbon aside and lifts the lid off the box to reveal a sturdy metal compass, the kind too heavy for practical use now that lighter ones are available. It’s probably old, he thinks. Though Kazuhiro has no idea what he’s going to do with a compass at music school and even less of an idea what his father means for this to be a symbol of, he weighs it in his hand and says nothing.
“Compasses always point the same way,” Satoru says.
“Oh.”
“Just…stick to your compass, kid.”
“Like a moral compass?”
“No…kind of? I don’t know, the…voice in your head. Your gut, I guess.” Satoru takes the compass from his son’s hand and examines it as if he’s not the one who picked it out and bought it. “Whatever part of you it is that makes you not wanna do something whenever somebody says to.”
Kazuhiro frowns. He sort of gets the symbolism now, but he can’t help but think his father his misread him. There’s no element of choice or pride or resistance in his nonconformity; he acts in whatever ways make sense, and that is all. Only through observation, memorization, and the ill-will of others does he ever learn which of his sensible actions don’t make sense to anybody else. It is not conviction that makes him so different, but logic. He knows what good sense is. He follows it.
But his father is trying very hard to be generous, so Kazuhiro lifts his head to look at him and says, “thanks.”
“’course, kid.”