It’s not that I don’t love them.

It’s not that I don’t love him either.

And maybe it could have been different if not everyone knew about me.

But that’s the way it happened and everyone knew and everyone pitied me.

The scene that stands out most in my mind is the first day of second grade, Sho and I walking along to school together, finally getting to class, and sitting down next to each other happily, because the seating was in alphabetical order.

And the teacher called roll. Each name, one by one.

And then us.

“Ikeda Masato.”

“Hai!”

“Ikeda Mitsuru!”

“Hai!”

And then she paused, looking over the paper at me, frowning slightly. “Oh! You must be that boy…”

Nodding to herself, she continued reading off the list.

That recess, I left Sho and wept by myself in the bathroom.

I was never the black sheep of my family. Never. I was the golden sheep. Both my parents and Sho had such dark hair, devouring sunlight without slake, whereas my hair was the complete opposite. I was tall, and Sho was much shorter. I always excelled in school while he struggled. Girls flocked around me like birds to seed, but a girl had never so much as glanced at him.

And the worst part was that he did not hate me for any of it.

Not only had I taken his birthright, his heritage, but I took from him any sense of pride he might have had in himself. I was better than him in everything.

But, in a way, I had to be. There was no better way in my eyes to try to give back to my parents all the generosity they had shown me when I was young, except to leave. At last, though, when my perfection seemed only to warrant their praise, I chose the opposite path.

I hated being in the gang at my school. Of course, no one could beat me in a fight, so my gang loved me, and my face healed so quickly that my family would never have known about it anyway. It was sort of a pointless rebellion, except for Sho.

Because where I went, Sho went too.

When he came home with black eyes and bloody lips, our mother scolded him, fussed over him, asked him why again and again, and sent him to his room. And he stayed silent, blue eyes resting only on me.

And that’s when I knew I had to go away.

When he failed the entrance exam into Ryukuto Academy, that settled my decision. If I went there, there was no way he could follow me. I would no longer be a burden to my family.

And their little household of three people would be right.

That is, however, when my world started to fall apart even more.

I was pleasantly alone now in general, surrounded by books and quiet and studies and band and sports, content in my own little world of achievement and chocolate valentines. I was untouchable, impenetrable, unreachable.

But I did, of course, have a roommate.

And, unfortunately for me, it was Shinobu.

I can’t say that I’ve ever met anyone who comes close to him. He just looks at you and seems to know what’s on your mind. And everything is so exact when he opens his mouth, like arrows from his mouth directly into your heart. I don’t think I could ever lie to him.

And so when he inquired of me about my family, his sure lips asking exactly the right or wrong questions, I told him everything, the first time that I had ever been completely honest and open with anyone in my life.

He was also the first person to hold me as I cried into his arms.

I felt that I disgusted him, that by showing him my weakness he would want no part of me ever again. He was not a touching sort of person, like I was. He was cold, aloof, strong, brilliant… all those things I had tried to be and could never quite manage.

Much to my surprise, after my breakdown in front of him, he started accompanying me to meals or walking me to classes we shared, which he had never done before.

Eventually, in that way, we became friends.

Slowly, bit by bit, I started to piece together things about him that no one would ever realize by just looking at him. His family was rather cold, demanding, and instead of that making him crumble, he instead met those demands and exceeded them. His older brother had been missing for several years, and his sister… Apparently the same treatment that had made Shinobu so stoic had broken her.

Living with him made me realize how Sho must have felt. Shinobu always dressed perfectly. Shinobu could do trigonometry without hardly an effort. Shinobu hid in the background and controlled everything secretly. His wish was the campus’ command.

Shinobu seemed almost god-like.

Which was almost funny, with me being the son of a monk.

He did, however, have flaws, which he would never have admitted to anyone. Living with him, however, and studying him, allowed me to catch a glimpse of a few of them.

I think I was his first real friend. I’m also pretty sure that he trusted me, or else I don’t believe he would have opened himself up so much to me.

Likewise, he was my first real friend after Sho. I was always very popular when I was younger, especially in junior high, but I never let anyone in close enough to actually get under my skin, except Sho.

And Shinobu.

Yet I trusted him enough to tell him these things that I had never before told anyone, not even my brother. I could talk for hours to him, telling him everything I wanted or needed to, and he would just listen, occasionally making comments, but there was something in his eyes at those times that I had never seen before, in him or in anyone else but my family.

He actually cared.

But, then again, like my family, he was kind and rather stuck with me.

And that’s why I have to go away from him too.

I do love him. I love him very much, just as I love my family dearly. But it will be for all of their sakes that I leave after I graduate. In a way, I just wanted to cling onto him forever, to just be with this kind person who had taken me as I was and not tried to change me, this person who wasn’t my friend just for my looks or my skill in physics or my trombone playing.

And I’m going to leave a note for him before I go, so he can read it and understand that it’s not that I don’t want to be near him; it’s that I don’t deserve it. If my own mother, my own blood, did not want me, I do not want the pity from my family or from him that evokes such kindness.

I have a feeling I’ll see him again, though. Shinobu isn’t the type to give up easily.

Even so, after graduation, I’ll be gone. I won’t tell him my plans, because he’d either laugh or me or flat out tell me I’m an idiot. Maybe he’s right. But I don’t believe that so much guilt in me has no reason.

I’ll be alone again for a while, and maybe I’ll finally come to terms with myself, to find out how to pay my parents back for loving me, how to pay Shinobu back for being my friend.

I’ll hug him before I go.
 

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