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The last time Ryo spoke to his mom, he spent most of it hiding under a blanket.
Eden had picked him up from school and immediately noticed his foul mood. When she asked how his day had been, he just snapped “it was fine” before turning his head to stare determinedly out the window. Suspecting that prying would only irritate him further, she turned the radio on and drove them home without any more questions.
When they pulled past the gate into the mansion’s driveway, Ryo quickly left the car and headed straight towards his bedroom. Allowing him the head-start, Eden gathered up her purse and notes from work before walking inside, putting her things away in the office she shared with her husband, and knocking on her son’s door.
“What?” came Ryo’s annoyed, muffled voice from inside.
“Can I come in?”
She only received a grunt in response, but Eden decided to take that as an affirmative and opened the door.
Ryo was in a blanket cocoon on his bed pressed up against and facing the wall. Stepping over scattered clothes and the odd worksheet from school, Eden made her way over to the edge of the bed and sat down.
“Can you tell me what happened?” she asked, worried to see him so upset. When she got no response, she laid down on the bed to hug him from behind. Though he tensed at first, she could feel him start to relax a bit beneath the blanket. After a few minutes of this, Ryo spoke up.
“You know how I can change clothes for gym separately?”
Eden did not like where this was heading. They had made this arrangement with the school due to Ryo’s Klinefelter syndrome because he wasn’t comfortable with his classmates seeing that he used sports bras to bind his chest. “Yes. Did something happen?”
Another pause. “Some guys tried to follow me today to figure out why. I fought them off and the teacher noticed and got them to leave me alone, but I feel like the rumors are just gonna be worse than the truth. I’m just tired of it and I don’t really know what to do.”
Eden’s blood boiled, but she was also unsurprised. She knew that separate changing rooms was an imperfect solution when kids were bound to be curious and bound to gossip. As anger and worry for her son tensed her body and mind, she just hugged him tighter.
“I wish I could tell you what was best,” she said, “do you want to start changing with the other boys and just have the truth be out rather than whatever nasty rumors they can come up with? Or do you want to think of something to tell people if you don’t want them to know about your chest? No one has to know unless you’re okay with it, and if anyone at that school does or says anything to upset you, they’re going to have me to contend with.”
Ryo’s head emerged from the cocoon to turn back and look at his mom. “I’m not sure you storming into my school to yell on my behalf would be very helpful, Mom,” he said with a small, sad smile on his face. His eyes were red and looked as though they belonged to someone much older than 13.
She reached over to brush Ryo’s pale hair out of his face. Blond and blue-eyed, just like she was, with a smattering of freckles across his nose and cheekbones. She and her husband had adopted him when he was a baby, but everyone told her that he looked just like her because of his hair color. She always thanked them and wondered idly how much they knew about genetics.
“How about we wait until your dad gets home, and we can figure out some sort of game plan, hmm?” She felt helpless that she couldn’t fully protect her son or single-handedly make everyone love him as much as she did. For now, this was the best that she could do.
Ryo nodded before turning his head back around and burrowing back into the blanket. Sensing that he would prefer some time to himself, Eden squeezed his shoulder one last time before getting up and heading back towards the kitchen. She began pulling out the ingredients for dinner before realizing that while ice cream couldn’t fix the situation, it certainly wouldn’t hurt it, either. Resolving to go pick some up for after dinner, she grabbed her purse and called out to Ryo that she was going to the grocery store and would be back in half an hour. After waiting for an “okay” yelled back from Ryo’s bedroom, she left.
When the police called later, Ryo was the only one at home to answer the phone. When they told him what happened, the phone fell from his hands to dangle limply from the cord as he came crashing to the ground, punching at the floor and howling at everything and nothing. Eventually the police hung up when they realized that Eden’s son wasn’t answering anymore and called her husband’s office instead. When Dr. Asuka got the news, he drove home as quickly as he could, suddenly and viscerally anxious about crashing.
His son couldn’t lose both of his parents in one night.
When he got home, Ryo was still on the ground and the phone was still off the hook, though there was no sound but the dial-tone and occasional sob that burst out of Ryo’s throat. Without missing a beat, Dr. Asuka sank to the floor with him, gently pulling his hands out of his hair and holding him tight as they both began crying anew.
“She was going out to the store,” Ryo gasped out between hiccuping tears. “I didn’t even say goodbye.”
Dr. Asuka squeezed him tighter. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said through his own grief. “There’s no way you could have known.”
---
The last time Ryo spoke to his best friend, they were saying goodbye, but not forever.
“Will I be able to call you?” Akira asked, looking at Ryo as though he was lost but vaguely recognized some landmark on the road, as though he hadn’t given up on making it to his destination.
Ryo, however, had no such hope. He didn’t even look at his friend, focusing instead on the scrape of his shoes against the mulch beneath them, knowing that seeing Akira’s face would just make him cry.
And he was not going to cry this time, dammit.
“Probably not,” he eventually responded. “It would probably cost a lot of money to call me in Mexico, and I don’t really know how international calling works.”
They were both on swings at the park near the Fudos’ old house. The Fudos didn’t live there anymore - Akira’s parents had left for the arctic some time ago, leaving him in the care of their friends, the Makimuras. Ryo had never met the Makimuras. They lived close to the city center as opposed to the Asukas’ wooded mansion, far beyond the lights and the crowds of Tokyo. The city stressed him out and Akira’s transfer to a different school and constant talk of his new family and friends made his eyes and throat hurt for reasons he chose not to explore.
“This really sucks,” Akira proclaimed after a moment of contemplation, shifting his gaze away from Ryo to the middle distance in front of him, glaring out at whatever higher power that had decided to separate him even further from his friend. “If I had known that you were moving away, I would have made sure to visit you more this summer. It’s bad enough that we don’t go to the same school anymore and now you’re not even gonna be in the same country.”
Now that Akira wasn’t looking at him, Ryo could safely turn his own gaze towards his best friend. Looking at the distraught expression on Akira’s soft, rounded face, Ryo knew that he would die for this boy. Kill, even, though he knew that that is never something that Akira would ask of him. Akira was the type to take under wing rather than take a swing, and that was even how the two had met: Ryo had always been alone on the playground when they were little, his serious demeanor and trouble understanding other kids resulting in his elementary school ostracization until another lonely little boy had shyly asked him about the book he was reading. Torn between his general distrust of others and his desire to talk about stars, his very favorite subject, Ryo haltingly explained the concept of the book to Akira’s wide-eyed wonder. As that library book was swapped for another, Ryo finally got to talk at length about things that excited him without being chastised or hushed while Akira nodded him on, asked questions, and occasionally asked to talk more on the swingset or monkey bars instead. Years passed, and library books were swapped for hefty textbooks, monkey bars for the chemistry lab, daily interaction for intermittent phone calls and snippets of time when they could meet up now that they weren’t classmates. It was only an odd twist of fate that caused their last meetup they would ever have to be in playground not unlike the one where they had first become friends years ago, sitting in swings only just big enough to accomodate them now.
“Yeah, it sucks, but we shouldn’t beat ourselves up over it,” Ryo said, tightening his grip on the swing’s chains. “There’s no way we could have known.”
---
The last time Ryo spoke to his dad, they had gotten takeout, but neither felt like eating.
“You know, son,” Dr. Asuka began, peering over the top of his glasses, beer in hand, “you’d probably have better luck stealing my car without me noticing if it didn’t smell like marijuana in the morning.”
Ryo chose not to answer. Using his chopsticks to move greasy “Mongolian” chicken around his plate seemed like a much better use of his time than trying to make any headway with his dad. He felt more than saw his dad put his bottle down to rest his elbows on the table of their rental house, hands covering the professor’s face. Covering the tired eyes and worry-lines, the frown that Ryo had put there. Ryo scowled at his plate.
“Are you doing this just for attention? Is that why you’re acting out? I don’t understand what is happening. I don’t know how to fix this.” All Dr. Asuka’s slightly muffled voice managed to do is cause Ryo’s contempt to boil over.
“I don’t understand why I’m here,” Ryo spat out. “You could have left me in Japan. You were barely around anyway! I’m old enough to watch out for myself and you could have just hired someone to check up on me every now and again if you were that worried. I don’t know why you dragged me out to the middle of the jungle to be miserable just so you can dig around for weird bones!”
At his son’s outburst, Dr. Asuka just looked even more lost. “You were miserable in Japan, too! You have been ever since Akira moved! I thought a fresh start might be good for you. You’re getting opportunities that other people would kill for. You’re traveling, you’re picking up a new language, you’re getting to help me out in the field rather than going to school. I brought you because I thought this would be a good chance for you to get out of your slump. Also, 16 is not old enough to watch out for yourself and I wanted you with me because I love you and want you around. I didn’t realize that made me selfish.”
Ryo gritted his teeth. “If by ‘fresh start’ you mean dragging me even further away from my friend to a country where I don’t even speak the language to be a gofer for you and your colleagues all day, then yes, how absolutely selfless and thoughtful of you! I can’t imagine why that would make me upset! Why on earth would I want to drive around and unwind after dealing with this bullshit all day just so you can get another accolade pinned onto your name!”
His dad dropped his hands from his face to grip the table instead. Dr. Asuka’s glasses did little to hide his bloodshot eyes or the bags underneath them. “Just look at this from my perspective, please. You’re all I have left, Ryo. I love you so, so much and I hate seeing you put yourself in danger and I don’t know what to do or how to help you. Please. If there’s something I should do, tell me. Because I don’t know what I would do if I lost you, and I feel like I am.”
Ryo put his chopsticks down, stared as dispassionately as he could as his father, and excused himself from the table. “Maybe you are,” he said, leaving Dr. Asuka with nothing but cold takeout, lukewarm beer, and grief.
Words consistently failed Ryo. They came out wrong, stuttered out, skipped over, never communicating what he meant.
Sometimes he didn’t know that he would only have one more chance to say something. Those are the words that he resented the most - not the ones that he bungled, but the ones he failed to say through no fault of his own. He always thought he had more time.
If Ryo had known what was going to happen, he would have had different words for his dad. Since he did not know, he swallowed against the lump in his throat and resolved to steal his
dad’s car again tonight. He wasn’t sure how to feel about his dad’s outburst, but maybe a drive would help to clear his mind. Maybe when he came back, they’d be able to help each other through this.
There’s no way he could have known.