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When you have five brothers with the same face as you, you tend not to bother checking your reflection in the mirror as often. Unless you’re an idiot, like Karamatsu, who spends more time looking in the mirror than he does making any kind of meaningful contribution to society. Chances are, nothing on your face is new and improved or worsened that hasn’t also cropped up on one of your other brothers’ faces as well, unless it’s food, and then someone will eventually tell you, probably.
“Ichimatsu, what’s up with your hair?” Osomatsu wants to know.
You scowl at him. Surely this is just his usual trickery. Perhaps he’s trying to pull that whole what’s-on-your-shirt-flick-your-nose trick, but he’s too stupid to remember how it goes. “Nothing?” you say when he doesn’t back down. You don’t feed into his bullshit by groping for your own bangs.
But he’s peering at you now, looking closer. “You look like you’ve got a bald spot or someth—OW OW OW!” Osomatsu is suddenly locked in a particularly tight-looking Octopus Hold before you even have time to process what he might have been saying.
“Osomatsu-niisan, let’s wrestle!” Jyushimatsu shouts from his position of being entangled with your eldest brother’s limbs. He’s not making eye contact with you, merely focusing on restraining Osomatsu.
“I don’t want to wrestle you, Jyushimatsu, damn you! Ow!” Shenanigans ensue, which Osomatsu is clearly on the losing end of. Todomatsu is snickering and Choromatsu is smiling. Karamatsu is distracted by his own reflection, but snickering as if he’s been told some kind of great secret. You consider snatching the mirror from his hands and examining your own reflection, but think better of it quickly, deciding instead to silently excuse yourself to the bathroom.
Oh. The mirror tells as much of the truth as Osomatsu had tried to. There’s a visible thinning in your bangs where your scalp shows through, and you’re embarrassed to realize you know exactly how it got to be like that. You weren’t really thinking about it at the time. The pieces you pulled out didn’t look like that much more than you would lose on a daily basis, but you suppose it was all in one spot, and over a period of multiple days. You frown, becoming more aware of what you’ve been doing as you struggle to disbelieve, and lift what remains of your fringe. Your eyebrows are sparse—incredibly so—confined mostly to small nubs nearing the bridge of your nose along with a few stray hairs here and there.
You suddenly feel very bad. You used to regret sharing a same face with five other people, but now that there’s something setting you distinctly apart, marking you as visibly defective, you want the old sameness back more than anything. You lock the door to the bathroom you and your five brothers share and sink down to the cold floor. For some reason, the only thing you want to do is what would make it worse.
“I—chi—ma—tsu—nii—san!”
You freeze, caught in the act. Your mother will often tell your to get your hands away from your hair, and now Todomatsu is going to tell you the same thing. You aggressively shove your hands in the pockets of your hoodie, flicking the hairs into the mess that’s already in there. “I got it—”
“Come here a minute, I want to see something.”
Maybe not then? You turn around to give him a belabored look, but he just smiles at you and curls his fingers towards his palm to beckon you like some kind of dog. You prefer cats anyway. But you heave yourself off the ground and cross the few steps to him, plopping heavily back down in front of him. He frames your face with his index finger and thumb of each hand and sticks his tongue out between his lips. You’re uncomfortable being scrutinized like this, but you just stare dully back to give the impression that you don’t care one way or another. It doesn’t last too long anyway, and he quickly darts up and rushes into your shared bedroom, calling back at you to stay right there.
When he comes back, he’s clutching something, though you can’t tell what. It looks like it’s made out of fabric. You realize it definitely is when he suddenly jams it down over your head. A hat.
“I saw this and thought you might like it,” he says, digging his phone out of his pocket and opening up the camera to face it towards you. The hat is purple, your favorite, with little triangles sticking out on top that are obviously meant to be cat ears. It covers the sparseness of your bangs and forces the rest of them down over your plucked-at eyebrows so they’re not visible. You take the phone and look at yourself for a minute. It actually kind of suits you. You fleetingly think the word ‘cute.’ “Think of it as an early birthday present,” Todomatsu says, waving a hand as if you had tried to reject the gift on some kind of principle you don’t have.
“Our birthday isn’t for another four months,” you say, instead of something sincere like ‘thank you.’
He gently presses a finger to your nose. “That’s why I said early, dummy.”
There are too many people here, jostling you, stepping on your toes, barely missing knocking you over. You’ve lost track of Jyushimatsu and Choromatsu and are wondering why the hell you agreed to come to this stupid store this close to the stupid holidays with them in the stupid first place. You’re freaking out slightly from all the unwanted contact and not knowing where your brothers are, and before you’ve even realized it, your hand is up by your forehead, pulling with intent. You push past people as your hairs come loose under your fingers until you can make it past whatever it is all these people are so eager to buy that you couldn’t give a shit about. There’s a column in the children’s clothing department supporting the ridiculously high but not non-standard ceilings for a department store, and you lean against it, hoping for some solitude.
You stay glued to that spot for a while. A mother passes with her kid, giving you a weird look, but you don’t acknowledge her. Yes, you know, thank you; you’re trying to stop. After this one, you’ll stop. Just one more. Your fingernails burn from gripping into each other. You finally close your eyes and just let it happen, accepting it’s beyond your control.
A hand lands on your wrist, thumb pressing into your palm. You open your eyes, ready to tear into whoever it is who’s dared to touch you, only to come face-to-face with a widely-smiling Jyushimatsu. “Niisan, hold my hand, it’s crowded.” He doesn’t let go of your hand until you let go of your hair, and then he turns it so his fingers cup yours and his thumb presses over yours. He tugs you through the thinner parts of the crowd and you stare at his hand where it’s joined with yours. His sleeve, normally pulled over to hide them and then flap around an extra bit, is bunched up like some sort of ridiculous, sagging tumor over his wrist. You feel stupid having to hold your brother’s hand in public like you’re 12 instead of 20-something, but you don’t want to stop. You squeeze him, and he returns the gesture threefold.