“You should introduce yourself, Kengo!”
“Yeah! Get her to be your friend. We could use a new friend too, y’know!”
“Ah, right. My name…” He pointed at himself with a thumb. “Hagio Kengo.”
“I’m, um…”
“Rara.” His face still red, Kengo called my name. “I know you, Rara.”
We stared into each other’s eyes for some time, neither of us able to move. Why did this feel so intensely nostalgic? Would this peace, like I’d just come home from a long, long trip, keep on spreading from my heart? I had no idea.
X
“HUH?! WAIT! GO WHERE? GO WHEN?!”
“The first summer after you met!”
The first summer after…
“You’re kidding me.”
I hadn’t seen Kengo in a while, and my jaw was on the floor the moment I saw his hair…or, I guess, his head. We were sitting at a cafeteria table in the station building, and an awkward silence reigned over us mercilessly. I’d prepared a few conversation topics and responses for our meeting. I couldn’t remember a single one now.
“You’re…kidding?” I knew it sounded dumb, but it was the only thing I could say.
“You can stop now.”
“Can I? Maybe I should keep going.”
“It’s not that weird. I kinda like it. Keeps me cool.”
He was right: It wasn’t that weird. It didn’t not suit him. I took a moment to find the right words. “You, uh…look like you’re gonna spend your summer on the baseball team.”
Kengo ran a hand over his crew cut and pouted slightly. “You could’ve said literally anything else. Those guys are always walkin’ round school on their tiptoes to ‘strengthen their calves,’ and they guzzle like a ton of protein powder every month. They don’t know the meaning of fun. I’d never be friends with them in a million years.”
We took our trays from the counter and to a table, where we sat facing each other. Kengo was drinking his oolong tea through a straw. He hated sweet drinks, so he always picked water (still or sparkling) or tea. I had an iced café au lait.
“I guess it was unfair of me. You’d be way more tanned than that if you’d been playing baseball all summer.” I did like sweet drinks, so I put some syrup into my coffee.
“Right. If anyone asks, I was gonna say that I’m volunteering at a temple.”
“That’s amazing. A temple that even shaves its volunteers’ heads?”
“Hey, Rara, don’tcha think you’re addin’ too much syrup?” Kengo frowned as I added my second little syrup packet.
“No?”
“That’s gonna be way too sweet.”
“Yeah, and? I want it to be too sweet. You paid for it, so I wanna enjoy it as much as I can, and that means making it super sweet! It can’t go down smooth, or I’m gonna drink it too fast.”
The faster I finished it, the sooner we’d be saying goodbye. Which was not something I was looking to rush. I wanted to be with Kengo for as long as possible, even if the difference was only a second. Obviously I wasn’t gonna tell him all that. It was my secret. Plus, I knew how valuable his time was now that he had entrance exams coming up. I was just so happy to be with him right now that I couldn’t help but giggle as I sipped at my overly sweet café au lait. I was getting used to his new haircut too.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing!” I trilled.
“That’s gonna melt your teeth.”
“Fine.”
“It’s not ‘fine’…”
It was fine. Besides, it was too late. My teeth were already melting. So were my bones, my mouth, my eyes, my ears, and every one of my organs. Kengo was right in front of me, after all!
Ever since we exchanged our LINE IDs on the platform, we talked almost every day. We spoke on the train, on the platform benches, and we messaged each other. At first, I called him Hagio-senpai. Then Kengo-senpai. That quickly changed to Kengo-kun. And now it was just Kengo. I changed the way I spoke to him over time too. I was speaking to him way more casually now than I had been at the start. It had all developed completely naturally.
Kengo told me why he used to change his hair color every few days. His parents divorced when he was in his second year of elementary school. He had been living mainly with his dad since then, but his mom lived close by, so he was constantly ping-ponging between the two of them. In the spring, his mom started dating a stylist. Her boyfriend was young—way younger than she was. Worried about her, Kengo started looking into him behind her back. His school didn’t have any restrictions on hair, so he started going to the salon the guy worked at like crazy, borrowing money from his dad to do it. His cover story was that he was in a high school visual-kei band and was struggling to figure out the “character” he wanted to adopt.
He worried that the guy was a weirdo. Or a gold digger. Or a cheat. Or didn’t have legit feelings for his mom. He spent more than a month having conversations with this guy to scope him out. But getting his hair colored cost a few thousand yen a pop, his scalp was starting to fry, and he couldn’t borrow any more money from his dad. The time came to think up a new plan. Before he could though, the stylist finally told him something that turned his stomach…
“Y’know, I’ve known you were my girlfriend’s son this whole time. You look just like her. You don’t have to force yourself to keep coming back. Also, one look at you is enough to tell me you’ve got nothing to do with visual kei. Sorry, no refunds.”