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“I bet you wanted to see what was under her skirt~”
“I did not!! Why would you even say that!? ”
Overhearing the reaction of the boy sitting behind him, Sousuke feels a swoop in his stomach, the type you get when a train runs over a speedbump. When that happens, the residual inertia is a collective experience which Sousuke never enjoys. The ricochet of bodies swaying in succession, like a trail of dominos falling into one another. It always felt stupid to be swept up by such untenable forces.
Right now Sousuke simply uncrosses his legs, picks up his pencil and releases a soft sigh he’s sure nobody heard while surrounded by a classroom full of bustle and chattering. Just a moment, just a second; and then the euphoria was gone. Slouching in his seat, just enough that he might remain within the acceptable bounds of mildly flawed posture, he picks up his pencil and begins sketching aimlessly in the margins of his notebook.
It was lunch period and Sousuke had already finished his food. It was a simple off-center hinomaru bento he’d quickly prepared this morning with some leftovers he’d scraped up from the half functional rice cooker his mom keeps forgetting to replace. It was hardly satiating, and now he sits waiting for class to resume.
Growing impatient, he attempts to imitate a lone cedar tree he sees standing outside the window and draws an off-angle branch which he promptly erases after evaluating it as hideous. Sousuke never particularly enjoyed taking upon the role of an eavesdropper. It bruised his ego to overhear to the discussions of his classmates, to understand the sheer dearth in experience between himself and literally everyone else. Listening to his peers chatter about going to the new pastry shop together after cram school, discussing club events, making weekend plans: what did Sousuke have to do with any of it?
Sometimes Sousuke wishes that he might get into a freak accident and maybe then, he might finally get away with ditching school forever. Or maybe he’d end up with two deaf ears and would have to be sent off to complete a private education alone in the countryside, a plotline he’d watched play out in an old coming of age film. Maybe somewhere out in the Honshu region with its mountain ranges; they'd be fun to photograph, he bets. Frankly, the technicalities of these daydreams were quite variable, but each had to follow some specific criteria: he’d have to be far far away from any boys who clapped one another's backs too aggressively, or any girls who giggled and tucked their heads down together in hushed whispers when you walked by.
Alas, he couldn’t just turn off the world, or even plug in his earbuds to drown the noise away without facing repercussions for doing so on school grounds, and Sousuke would rather die than orchestrate his own humiliation ritual.
The heckling behind him continued without much further observation from Sousuke until a more pensive voice peeped up, pitched a little higher and rougher around the edges, still caught in the throes of puberty. Humming in thought, Satou-kun says, “But you clearly like her; it’s obvious. So, it must be for a reason.”
And now, another flip in his stomach. But this one approaches him with an irritating chill, and he curses himself for not having packed a bag of chips with his lunch this morning.
Minamoto Kou’s reputation tended to precede him, but Sousuke always found his lack of awareness to be a little charming. There was nothing intentional about his sheer volume: it was totally random and unrefined, shoes tapping too erratically and elbows knocking where they shouldn’t. As Sousuke makes his best attempt to ignore him now, Minamoto-kun’s shoe abruptly kicks the back of Sousuke’s chair in what Sousuke suspects will be an unacknowledged accident.
The ensuing denial delivered by Minamoto-kun only becomes increasingly less reputable. By the way his voice starts to crack, the way Minamoto-kun begins to stutter, Sousuke suspects that his cheeks are beginning to flush.
“I don’t even know much about her, since I only see her in the hallways sometimes. And she's an upperclassman anyway…” There is a slight pout in his voice, and Sousuke wishes he could turn around to see it for himself.
Yokoo-kun, the seediest of Minamoto-kun's crew, leans in closer to his desk and coos mockingly. “Ah, so you’re into older women. Kou-kun’s favorite onee-chan!”
What was immediately evident regarding Minamoto Kou was his transparency; his deck lay face-up. Sousuke had seen it for himself, no matter how fervently Minamoto-kun spluttered in attempts to deny it. The way Minamoto-kun became entranced when she passed in the hallway, breath caught as he watched the offending onee-chan in question.
When he felt his neck begin to hurt from sitting in a hunch, Sousuke scooted further back into his chair and corrected his posture as he got to thinking that Yashiro Nene was average in general, if not a little strange and maybe even severely maladjusted. Trying to drone out the conversation behind him, he remembers that she is the type of person to abruptly halt and drop down in the midst of a busy hallway to tie her shoes. Sousuke had been eyewitnesses to such an occasion himself; the poor victim stationed directly behind her, Sousuke took his time to glare as he sidestepped her. On her first attempt Yashiro Nene had bunny-eared her shoes too loosely before hurrying to undo her progress and giving it another shot. Mitsuba had thought to himself, I can tie my shoes much more quickly and efficiently, and it looks much neater when I do it too. But Yashiro Nene, with her suspicious platinum hair and her tacky turquoise tips, simply got back up and resumed her hallway stroll as if she had never been obstructing anyone’s path in the first place.
A girl with a tendency to forget her manners due in no part to any intentional malice but because she was a little bit absentminded. That trait, Sousuke supposed, she shared with the boy sitting behind him. An aloof kind of girl, but someone nonetheless unexceptional, save for her exceptionally fat ankles. On the shorter side, and if you were to ask Sousuke, she slight reeked of litter and pee, a stench which was poorly masked by a cheap perfume applied too liberally. Yet, if she were to trip over her own two feet and fall flat on her face, Minamoto-kun’s gaze would be sure to follow, totally and utterly hypnotized. Sousuke wondered to himself if Minamoto-kun might still like Yashiro Nene if she suddenly went bald.
Minamoto-kun had only recently developed a crush on Yashiro Nene. A couple weeks back Sousuke had watched Minamoto-kun ushering Satou-kun to a bulletin board in the front of the classroom littered with event flyers during a morning before homeroom; looking off to the side with a face tinted pink, he asked Satou-kun to accompany him to a gardening club meeting.
“You like gardening?” Satou-kun had asked, clearly only half interested, chewing on a stick of taffy. “I didn’t know that.”
“Well, I actually don't have much experience with it, but,” Minamoto-kun looked up at the flyer decorated with dancing worms saying MAKE YOUR OWN FERTILIZER WITH FUKIYOSE AND FRIENDS! “I think I’ve got to at least give it a try.”
“That girl’s in the gardening club, isn’t she? The upperclassman with the fat legs,” Satou-kun was looking now too, gaze carefully trained on the face of Minamoto-kun, which had then suddenly erupted; red, stuttering, eyes shifting rapidly from down to the floor then back up to the ceiling as he tried to search for an excuse. At that moment as Sousuke stared at him from the other side of the room wondering what his temperature might be, he suddenly wished to sit and watch at Minamoto-kun's bedside while he ran up a hot fever.
That night, Sousuke spent far too long in the shower under water far too hot, and later nearly knocked over the kettle he was boiling for his ramen. Waiting for it to cool, he lay on his couch while the television played a mostly unfunny gameshow until his mother arrived back from her late shift. He then promptly evacuated the common area, and went to sit tucked in his chair with fat warm tears rolling down his cheeks, eating his now soggy noodles alone in the silence of his room.
Thankfully, to Sousuke’s great relief, Minamoto-kun had only gone to a couple gardening club meetings before losing a battle to his own shame and abruptly quitting.
“Gardening wasn’t for you?” Satou-kun had asked when he finally caught on to this fact after school one day, tucking his school slippers into his locker and pulling out the pair of off brand sneakers he would wear home.
“I wasn’t really cut out for it,” Minamoto-kun said, not sparing Satou-kun a glance as he leaned against his locker, arms crossed and gaze trained on his own sneakers. New Balances, fresh; since Minamoto-kun had recently worn out his last pair. He scuffed his shoes against one another, but only once.
Sousuke had seen it on that afternoon as he put on his coat and collected his camera, his locker right next to Minamoto-kun’s: a positively glum disposition. The insecure croak of his voice, the hunch of his shoulders as he shrugged, the stiffness of his posture, it was almost as though Minamoto-kun was trying to close in on himself; it was kind of cute, Sousuke had mused to himself while putting on his own coat. When Minamoto-kun declined Satou-kun’s offer to walk home together, Sousuke’s heart skipped a beat.
Recently when Yokoo-kun came to Minamoto-kun’s desk with stories of his own sleazy escapades, two-timing and forgetting to text back, Satou-kun might naturally tell him off as the established straightman of the group. But where Minamoto-kun might have once asked clueless questions of his own like “Do you know if girls pee standing up?” he would instead sit in silence, barely pretending to be engaged. On one of these occasions Sousuke took the opportunity to get up from his seat and sharpen his pencil, just to catch a glimpse of Minamoto-kun looking outside the window as Yokoo and Satou sat in chairs they had each drawn up to Minamoto-kun’s desk, chattering amongst themselves; yet Minamoto kun’s body was still save for the occasional slow blink, slouching with his chin resting on his hand. He couldn’t help but admire the way the sunlight’s glare bounced off of Minamoto-kun's blonde eyelashes when he finally sat unperturbed; Sousuke really liked it best when Minamoto-kun was sporting a look of despair.
When lunch ended, Sousuke’s head remained slouched over his notebook, where he’d eventually begun drawing a picture of a strawberry shortcake. All this thinking was only making him hungrier. If only he’d had brought the allowance for a vending machine visit.
Then he felt a tap on his shoulder, and it was like his body had been struck by lightning: the muscle at the point of contact jumped as if it longed to erupt straight out of his skin, and Sousuke winced, wondering to himself if Minamoto Kou had felt the movement against his own fingers. Willing his face to remain neutral he turned around, hearing his voice begin to crack as soon as he uttered the single syllable “Hm?”
Minamoto-kun seemingly paid little attention to Sousuke’s humiliation; he didn’t say anything like “Why’d your pulse begin to race when I touched you?” or, “How can you like someone you hardly even know?” or, “Isn’t it weird, how obsessed you are with me when I don’t ever think about you.”
Instead, Minamoto-kun claps his hands together in mock prayer and bows his head ever so slightly, an apologetic grin on his face, one that is wide-toothed and which lifts the apples of his cheeks high. “Can I borrow an eraser? I’ve run out of my own,” he says, turning his own pencil around to display its eroded nub; a humble plea, but Sousuke finds himself wondering, How might this be different if he were asking Yashiro Nene instead of me?
“Sure,” Sousuke puts a smile on his still warm face, the one he practices in the mirror and reworks periodically. While he is digging through his pencil case he can feel his heartbeat in his throat. His fingers are shaking and he’s scolding his body to stop sweating so much when he finds an eraser that he is especially fond of; one shaped like a toad that says “HOW RIBBETING” in English.
Their fingers brush when Minamoto-kun takes it, bright blue eyes bore into his for a second, two seconds: “Thanks,” He says, still not looking away. Sousuke has to quickly avert his gaze when there's another flip in his stomach, one that leaves him feeling like an undercooked pancake. He nods hastily, eyes on the ground when the teacher starts to call for the attention of the class.
He’s giddy with the feeling when he turns back around to look at the whiteboard, and Sousuke thinks to himself that Minamoto-kun didn’t blink even once when their hands touched.