Ryouta's Wall

The thought had followed him home.

It had followed him onto the train, and up the stairs, and into a sleep that kept handing it back to him.

What is it I'm so scared of letting out? Why would it hurt me? The thing I'm fighting so hard to hold down... it isn't some enemy that got in. Isn't it me? How could it hurt me?

And then, the moment he reached for the hurt, the numbness came back in to cover it — the hollow gap left behind by an unfortunate turn of events.

But was it really just an unfortunate turn of events? Or was it that the part of him he had tried so hard to bury was the very thing that had brought the tragedy down on him and Ryuuji?

Ryouta had spent two years building a very good wall, and he had spent all of last night lying awake on the wrong side of it, listening.

That was the difference, though he couldn't have named it yet. For two years the rule had been simple: do not think about it. Do not look at it, do not name it, do not open the door even a crack, because behind the door was the thing that had ruined everything, and the only safe move was to lean on it with your whole weight and never, ever turn around.

And last night, for the first time, he had turned around.

He hadn't opened anything. He wasn't brave enough for that, or stupid enough — he couldn't tell which. But in the dark it was easier to look inside, and the boy who carried a weight far beyond his years let himself look at the shape of the door instead of only bracing against it, and he thought:

What if he's right? Is it really... my fault?

The thought terrified him and it also would not leave. But underneath the terror was another feeling — so faint he kept losing it — that he had even less practice with than fear.

A small, unfamiliar warmth he would not have dared to call by its name.

But before he could reach it, the numbness flowed back in, and he had to start over.

Dawn brought a kind of relief as it grew too bright to keep peering into his own darkness. One by one he shut the spiraling thoughts down, sinking back into the trained regulation he knew by heart.

He still didn't have an answer. But he didn't need to find it right now.

***

"Oh! Wait, wait, before everybody heads off!"

Futaba came up out of the returns cart like a prairie dog, waving a hand until she had the room, which never took her long. 

"Okay, so the summer festival's next Saturday, and I think we should all go!" She was already lit up about it, the idea running ahead of her mouth. "As much as I love books and reading to kids, doing it for three weekends along with my college prep has me exhausted. I say... we all have earned a night off for our hard work. So let's have fun at the summer festival!"

The room warmed to it immediately and that only wound her up further.

"The plan is to meet at the west gate at six o'clock, so we get there before it turns into a sea of people," she said, ticking it off on her fingers, quick and bright. "The food stalls are supposed to go crazy this year, I asked around. The fireworks are planned at nine and... Oh— and yukata. Everyone who's got one, wear it, come on, it's ten times better with yukata." She grinned. "I'll feel a bit lonely being the only one dressed up, so please wear yours too!"

She had cleared it with Ryouta first that morning, quietly, the way she had been clearing the things that were technically his to call for a bit now. As excited as Ryouta was when he started the club, he was still not used to social responsibilities like these. 

She had caught him at the shelves and said, "What do you think about going to the festival all together as a club? We should do the festival together, right?", and watched him blink up out of wherever he lived these days and say "Yeah, sure, that sounds good" in a vague, faraway way. There was something definitely on his mind, but Futaba couldn't get to it. He had been somewhere else for a few weeks now and behind that quiet careful face, the vice president had simply stepped into the gap he left and held the whole thing together without ever once making him feel the weight of it. Nobody had voted on the arrangement. It had just happened, the way rivers find the ocean — and Futaba had never said a word about carrying two people's share.

***

The last day of the volunteering carried something bittersweet in the air. The children were louder and clingier than usual, as if they could feel the ending the way birds feel the rain coming. One of the small ones — the one who had cried, weeks ago, on the very first morning, and had loved Hinata furiously ever since — attached herself to Hinata's leg near the end and refused, on principle, to be pried off.

"You have to come back," the child informed her, with the total moral authority of the very young.

"The program's over, Daiki-chan. But you know what, I really like this library, and you might just find me here sometimes. You'll come here more often yourself, won't you?"

"It's not the same! What if I come and don't find you here? It's definitely not the same!"

Almost comically large tears began to brim around the edges of Daiki's eyes, and Hinata's mask broke into a sad smile as she pulled the boy closer into an embrace.

From somewhere inside the hug, Daiki's muffled voice cried, "Won't you stay at the library forever? I'll come every weekend!"

A dark thundercloud moved across Hinata's face, too quickly for anyone in the room to catch. She found she couldn't answer him at all, and only held him tighter. 

From the doorway, Shiomi went still.

She had come in late, paint still drying on the side of her hand, and she hadn't been around enough this summer to have learned the trick everyone else had — the way their eyes slid right over Hinata, pretty and polite and nothing to see. She and Haruto had college prep eating most of their days now, the same school, the same brutal entrance load, half the reason the two of them would have to skip the festival next week. And so she was still looking when the little boy wailed into Hinata's shoulder, and she caught the half-second the others missed: the smile going one way and the eyes going somewhere else entirely.

Shiomi's hand stilled against her thigh.

She knew that look. She had spent a whole winter once trying to paint it and never got it right — Haruto, on a swing, smiling like nothing was wrong.

Shiomi lingered but for a moment, and then she heard Haruto call her name from the hall. She went to him but she looked back once, at the polite girl and the child in her arms, before the crowd closed over them.

***

Ryouta watched all of it from the shelves, half a room away, and it landed on him strangely. He had spent the start of the library volunteer program two rooms deep inside his own head, and he was only now, on the last day, lifting it enough to see them — Ryuuji vanishing under a hill of children for no reward but their laughing, Ai darting between them all with her arms full, Futaba running the whole room without once raising her voice, Hinata kneeling to be small enough for a four-year-old's goodbye. All these people, being warm, in a warm room, while he had stood at the edge of it holding a door shut.

He didn't have a word for what he felt, watching them. It was close to grief yet close to hunger and it was pointed, for once, not inward but out toward the room. It was pointed toward all of it, toward the ordinary warmth he had been standing next to for weeks without once letting himself feel the heat.

Ryouta thought about something for a little bit longer and then decisively set down the book in his hand. He would not need to pick up another anymore.

***

The program ended the way small good things end — without ceremony, in a slow scatter of goodbyes and half-finished sentences and see you at the festival, then. 

Ozaki gave a short speech nobody had asked for, about diligence, and then ruined it by getting visibly emotional at the end and pretending it was allergies. The roster came down off its hook. Whatever power it had held, it held no longer. It was just a laminated sheet now, a chart that couldn't be manipulated anymore.

The club broke apart into the afternoon. Ryuuji peeled off first for his shift at Nagasaki's with a wave and a bad joke. Before turning around, he threw a last long unreadable look at his brother that Ryouta, as usual, did not catch.

The others went their own ways into the sharp light of a summer afternoon.

Shiomi had been halfway to the gate when she glanced back for Haruto and found him not following. He was over by the bike racks, and Ryouta had caught him there, and whatever Ryouta was saying he was saying it with his eyes on the ground and his shoulders up around his ears, the whole of him trying to take up as little space as possible.

Haruto looked up, across the lot, and found her.

Neither of them said anything. They didn't need to; they never had. She raised an eyebrow — you staying? — and he gave the smallest tip of his head, barely a motion, yeah, this one matters, and something in his easy face asked her, without a word, to leave it to him. She held his eyes a moment longer. Then she nodded once, and let him go, and turned back toward the gate on her own.

Which was how she ended up falling into step with Futaba instead, the two of them drifting out into the heat together without quite deciding to. It was on the way, more or less. They walked a while in the good tired quiet of a thing finished, the cicadas going in the trees and the day finally loosening its grip.

"That Hinata girl," Shiomi said, out of nowhere. "Something's wrong with her."

Futaba glanced over. "Wrong how?"

"Don't know. I saw her face do a thing, back there, with the kid. Like a door blowing open and shut." Shiomi shrugged, hands in her sleeves. "She didn't look sad. But, I think it was worse. And then poof! It was gone and she was doing her usual smile again." She frowned at the road. "I only saw it for a second, but I know what I saw."

Futaba hadn't seen anything. She had been elbow-deep in the returns cart when whatever it was happened, and if anyone else had told her they had caught a whole hidden thing cross a girl's face in half a second, she would have filed it under imagination and moved on.

But it was Shiomi. Shiomi didn't imagine things. Shiomi looked at people the way she looked at everything she was going to paint later — all the way through, no flinching — and if Shiomi said she had seen a door blow open behind Hinata's face, then something really did happen.

"...Yeah," Futaba said slowly. "I could believe that."

"You don't like her?"

"I didn't say that."

"Your whole face said it."

Futaba almost smiled. It was hard to keep anything from Shiomi. It was as if the girl read faces for a living. "It's not that I don't like her. Everyone likes her, that's sort of the problem." She turned it over, trying to put a shape to the thing that had bothered her all summer. "She's easy. Easy to talk to, easy to be around, agrees with everyone, never a wrong note. And she lets you get exactly this close—" she held up two fingers, a hair apart "—and not one step closer, ever, and she's so nice about it you don't even notice she's done it until you're already home." She shook her head. "She keeps the whole world at arm's length and makes it feel like a hug. Nobody's that smooth unless they're covering something. I don't know what. But there's a real her under there somewhere, and she's decided none of us are allowed to meet it."

Shiomi considered that. "Huh."

"What?"

"Nothing." She kicked a pebble off the path. "But I can't help but wonder why she does that? If it is a performance, there must be an audience?"

Futaba took a sharp breath and said, "I think it's Ryouta, mostly. She's around him more than she's around anyone. Watches him when he's not looking." Shiomi squinted at Futaba for a second. "Whatever she's after, he's tangled up in it somewhere. I just haven't worked out how."

Futaba said it like an observation but Shiomi noticed something else in her voice. She wanted to ask something but she let it go, because her question made no sense. 'That couldn't be possible, right?' she thought to herself.

"Well," Shiomi said eventually, as their roads forked. "Keep an eye on your president, then. Somebody who watches that careful usually wants something." She lifted a hand without turning around. "Hope you guys have fun at the festival. Send us pics on the group chat!"

Futaba watched her go, small, unhurried and certain, and then turned toward home, turning the whole conversation over the way she turned over everything until it made sense — except this one wouldn't, quite, and she couldn't have said why.

***

Ryouta stood in the emptying heat outside the library and felt the thought turn over in him one more time, and made a decision that would have been unthinkable a week ago.

He went looking for Haruto.

Not to be found by him this time. He went looking. He crossed the lot to where Haruto was unlocking a bicycle with the unhurried air of a man for whom no appointment had ever truly been urgent, and he stopped a few feet away, and it took him a second to make his mouth work, because asking for help was a language he had forgotten to speak.

"Hey," Ryouta said. "You remember how we talked about something... Um, something that was bothering me before?" He looked at the ground, then made himself look up. "Can we— do you have a while? I think I need to talk about it."

Haruto looked at him for a moment. Then he walked his bicycle out of the rack, and something in his easy face went quietly, warmly serious.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, of course." 

He beckoned Ryouta as he started walking in the opposite direction of the library.

"Come on, I know a place."