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“Kamishiro, right?”
Rui turned towards the guy on his left.
His dark silhouette shone behind the strong light from the window behind him, May's sun already blinding despite summer still being far away.
“Yeah..?”
The boy stared at him; well, at his hair.
He noticed, embarrassedly grabbing it.
“You cut your own hair?”
“Yeah, but I cut the other side too short and didn't have the courage to even them out...”
The classmate smirked, turning back ahead of him.
“Quirky.”
That was the first interaction that they'd had.
Rui doesn't even remember how they became friends after that... if they ever were.
“You never had a girlfriend?”
“I don't want to waste my time dating just for the sake of dating”
“Why, have you ever had a girlfriend?”
“I was rejected, he's never been in love, it's different...”
Rui awkwardly sat amid the guys conversing about trivial matters.
He felt uneasy, terribly so.
Despite his new school year propositions, his desk neighbor had become the only person he'd speak to...
And obviously, it didn't take long for him to fall in love with him.
He'd treat him... normally, ignoring gossip from a middle school he didn't go to, not too buddy-buddy but neither as just classmates.
It had been a long time since anyone had treated him like that.
When he refocused on the conversation, everyone had been forced to say if they had anyone they liked or if anyone had ever had a relationship, but him.
Not that it mattered, he had gotten used to being ignored and pushed away by groups.
When lunch break was over and Rui and his classmate returned to their class, the other took a detour, and he instantly followed.
“Were you uneasy?”
He was surprised by the, not so, unprompted question.
“...Was it that easily noticeable?”
“You say you're an actor but you're not that hard to read”
His classmate stopped, turning to him.
“Don't mind such a bunch of dickheads, they give air to the mouth because they have nothing of interest going on in here” he said, gently poking Rui's forehead.
The taller guy blushed, quickly averting his gaze.
How could he not fall for someone like him?
After the summer of their first year, though, something changed.
The kind classmate he had come to know had... vanished.
Or maybe had never been there in the first place.
On the last day of summer, Rui had been surprisingly invited by his classmate to join his group for an evening around town and karaoke, and he had accepted.
He only really knew his friend and a fellow member of the greening committee there, so he stuck to them.
The girl from the greening committee was nice, a fun girl who could put a smile on everyone's face just by walking into a room, and she was also close to his only friend, the crush of every girl, and Rui, in his classroom. Both of them had nothing to do with a gloomy, socially anxious guy like him...
Which made him all the more grateful for their presence.
…
It couldn't last long.
That same night everything came tumbling down.
It had just been many small things all together, really.
Nothing of great importance.
People not sitting next to him at the diner or karaoke despite his best efforts to smile,
not getting passed the device to pick a song,
his food not arriving with the others,
someone calling him “weirdo” when trying to get a conversation going.
At the end of the night he was so emotionally spent that he didn't even notice that only he and his classmate had been left in the karaoke room.
“Where is everybody?”
The other guy didn't look up from his smartphone, too focused on texting someone.
“Someone came back running from the bathroom saying they saw a famous YouTuber or something using a karaoke room to record a cover and went spy on them, I think”
“I see”
Rui took in the quiet of the room.
He closed his eyes, relaxing.
Yeah, he liked it better when it was just him and his friend.
He loved it.
He loved him.
He opened his eyes again, glancing at him.
“...Texting someone?”
“Hmhm”
“You finally got a girlfriend?”
“Yeah”
The revelation came like a lighting in clear skies to Rui.
After all of his bold statements...
“...Is it..?”
“No, it's not her”
Relieved as he was, Rui emptily stared at the table in front of him before letting out a small, sad chuckle.
“No way, after so many years you fell in love with a girl, that's--”
The other guy suddenly slammed his phone on the table.
“It's what, Rui? Unexpected? Unbelievable? What, do you think that I'm a fag!?”
Rui stared at him, speechless.
If he'd been startled by his sudden reaction, his words only cut deeper.
“Well, I'm not! Sorry to burst your little delusional bubble, I'm not like you.”
“I'm tired of you and everyone else always...”
“And...”
“...”
Rui doesn't remember anymore what he said that night.
He only remembers who he thought was his best friend snapping at him for no reason.
His anger ruptured with such strength that it scared and hurt him in a way he...
…
He didn't show up to classes for months, and when he returned to lessons after just showing up for exams, he realized that the first semester had come to an end and the seats had rotated.
Thankfully, he and his old friend weren't desk neighbors anymore.
Having put distance between himself and his only friend in the classroom, he started hiding and spending most of his time in his committee's room if not in between flowerbeds.
“You spend so much time out here, how come you're still so pale?”
Rui sadly smiled while pulling out some weeds.
“Well, it is winter, it'd be weird if I did have a tan”
“Touché!”
The girl crouched next to him.
“...I heard you two stopped talking”
“...”
Rui continued his weeding quietly.
“...He told me what happened”
“...What about why?”
“He had had a bad day and your classmates had exhausted him with questions when they found out about his girlfriend”
“He didn't have to take it out on me”
He stopped searching the flowerbed for weeds.
“...Sorry, I don't want to talk about what happened”
The girl softly smiled, patting his back.
“It's fine”
Rui changed schools.
The whole incident brought him even lower than he'd entered high school and he knew that he wouldn't have gotten back up had he not tried to improve again, just like the year before.
He heard that Nene was enrolling in Kamiyama, and so he too signed up there for the second year, in hopes of maybe re-obtaining an old, healthy friendship... the only one he'd ever had.
...Who knows if Mizuki, too, would've enrolled there that year.
A month in, he walked into his former friend.
“Ohh, Rui!!”
“Ah, you're...”
The girl ran up to him, beaming.
“How are you!? I heard you changed schools! I was so sad, we were supposed to end up in the same class this year, too! What happened? How are you??”
Rui's smile faltered for a second.
“I texted you, but you never replied...”
The shorter one paused for a second before smiling again.
“I forgot! Come, come, let's go to a cafè, we have to catch up!!!”
Maybe unwillingly Rui followed the girl and was amazed at how unilateral their conversation ended up being.
He could've sworn that in the past they'd been equals, but he slowly started realizing just how many times, how many afternoons he'd spent listening to her and her problems and never got to tell her about his.
“He's sorry, you know”
Rui uncomfortably stirred his drink with the straw.
“He could've told me himself”
“He's ashamed”
“For his reaction? Who wouldn't be”
“What were you even trying to say that night? Were you really going to ask him if he was..?”
Rui furrowed his brows.
“Of course not. I was going to say that it was romantic. He had waited years and finally found his special someone, had been rewarded for his patience, but he...”
He took a deep breath in.
“Is he really sorry?”
The girl nodded.
“Yeah”
“Then, he has my number. He could've called me”
“You know he isn't very chatty...”
“Why are you defending him like this?”
“We're dating now”
Rui slowly looked back up at the girl.
He thought he would've gotten angry at the news.
He went through all the trouble of “waiting 16 years to find his soulmate” and then dumped the girl a few months in to date someone else? Speak of coherence! And don't get me started on how that's the friend he told me not to worry about, technically!
...But he didn't feel any of that.
He just thought that he had had a terrible taste in finding friends.
That night he received an apology via text. He politely accepted it and then threw his phone away before hiding under the covers.
…
…..
….......
“Rui!”
Tsukasa smiled at Rui from the riverside, waving his arm.
“I found a spot with stones smooth enough!”
The taller boy slowly smiled, closing his eyes, enjoying the first, chilly morning breeze.
“Rui? Are you okay?”
He then opened them again, making his way towards his best friend.
He looked at the river that was dyed the same colors as the dawn.
Tsukasa didn't waste a minute, diving straight into teaching him how to skip stones.
After a few failures, Rui got the hang of it and the two held a contest, which the latter won.
While Tsukasa despaired on the ground, yelling and punching the dirt, Rui softly smiled, sitting on the grass and looking at the calm water of the river, slowly, calmly flowing.
When Tsukasa calmed down, he sat next to him.
“Is this a date?”
“I didn't think of it that way”
“Would it disgust you if I thought of it that way?”
“Of course not”
Tsukasa smiled at Rui.
“You're you, my best friend, I think, maybe my first real one. I could never find you disgusting”
Rui returned the smile before looking back at the river.
“You don't know how much it means to me”
Tsukasa too looked back at the water, still smiling.
“You neither”
“What do you mean?”
“Being here with you, as friends or whatever. It means a lot to me too. I hope we never lose sight of each other no matter what happens. I know it's unrealistic, that Wonderlands x Showtime won't last forever and that there's always a chance of us ending up far away from each other either spacially or emotionally, but... Being here with you, right now, means a lot to me.”
Rui almost teared up at Tsukasa's sentence, so he hid his face in his knees as he hugged them tight for a moment before looking back at the river.
“...Hm”
“I hope so too.”