Chapter Text
“Y’all gotta see this!”
The classroom - more accurately a renovation of a room in a slum from the 20th century, was plunged into chaos. The sets of desks and chairs; often arranged neatly were now awfully disheveled; their legs entangled in one another. In the middle of that jumble was a crowd of children, surrounding a single blonde child. Their endless chattering and laughing were loud enough to be heard from both end of the hallway, submerging even the noisy buzz of summer cicadas. On the podium, the teacher sitting at her desk stared boredly at the window. The students continued to exchange glances and pointing their fingers, as if they had just discovered a bizarre creature.
“So, it turns out our Tsukasa loves this style, but he still acted like such a try-hard to hide it!” A boy in the crowd exclaimed.
“What a fancy outfit you have there! You don’t have to go that far just to make us want to hang out with you, though ~” Another girl led on with a smirk on her face. The children held their stomachs cackling.
“Sh! From now on…” another child in the bunch suddenly spoke. The children held their heads close together.
“...how about we call him…” she lowered her voice as they listened intently.
“...prin…”
Then her voice shifted to a weird high pitch.
“...cess?”
“To hell with that! I already told you that my shorts are still drying!”
The scream came from the center of the crowd. It was the lone child standing in the middle of it all: Tsukasa. Despite his fiery gaze piercing at them, none of the children seemed to care. Though straining to the utmost, he couldn't conceal his remarkably small and thin frame compared to his peers; especially for a boy in his puberty years. While his male peers were growing thick body hair, bristles appearing at the corners of their mouths and their voices turning deeper; Tsukasa seemed to be endlessly stuck in the body of a 10-year-old. His skin was rough with scars and scratches but there was little trace of body hair. He stood just barely above the chins of boys his age, his shoulders only somewhat wider than half of theirs. Not to mention his voice: the shrill and high-pitched tone that had cursed him since birth still had barely deepened.
On his body currently were two pieces of fabrics that were not made to exist alongside. The top was a buttoned-up T-shirt with black and white checkerboards, one that was often worn by middle-aged men. Not only was this T-shirt so cramped to the point that it could be mistaken for those rags often used by housewives, but it was also abnormally wide that the collars dropped to his chest. Still, that was not the elephant in the room for either Tsukasa or the other children in the room. What stirred up this commotion: all the laughs, the ridiculing looks and the sheer frustration he felt; was what he wore as his bottom: a dress of lotus pink shade that reached his ankles, decorated with a great amount of colorful flower details. Painfully apparent to be too old-fashioned for a child, and especially unfitting for a boy. As if rubbing salt to his wound, the dress’ edges were sewn with petal-shaped laces. It was as if everything about this dress were made to shame him, then turned him into a laughingstock.
“Oh, really? I thought boys have lotssss of pants.” said another girl as she raised the corner of her mouth.
“Well, it’s just you! I don’t have money for that crap!”
“So that’s why you wear those two same old ugly shorts to school all year around?”
“You…”
“Silence!” The teacher that was lazing at her desk suddenly rose from her seat. Her previously unfocused eyes now constantly moved between the door and the freely chattering students, who did not seem to give a care about her warning. Then, she left the classroom in a hurry, leaving the door to bang as it closed. But everything stayed the same when she came back some minutes later.
“If you don’t keep quiet right now, I’m going to tell all of your parents! You better clean up in the meantime as well or a quarter of your following exam’s mark is gone!”
The crowd dissipated in the blink of an eye. Children rushed in every direction to find their desks and chairs in the disarray they created. Those kids that previously laughed together now moved in urgency, some even yelling insults at one another. There were no children that wasn’t afraid of adults, let alone said adults were their parents. Only Tsukasa remained still. He didn’t need to go anywhere, as all this chaos happened due to the other children crashing at his place. Neither did he have any desire to raise his voice - he had enough of that already during the argument.
With the noise finally dying down after a short while, the teacher slowly made her way to the door. Her hands were sweaty and her shoulders were raised all up to her ears as she nudged it. The door slid in millimeters. She was being overly careful, ridiculously even. It was a sight that never happened unless a class observation attended by her higher-ups was coming, and there was no announcement for that today. The students, seemingly confused by the odd situation; collectively stared at the door still not fully opened. They were probably wondering who could have caused their grumpy teacher to turn so obsequious.
“What an abnormal day,” thought Tsukasa as he idly shifted his gaze to the window.
Outside the window, the sight of golden sunlight penetrating through the gaps between lush green leaves unfolded. A speck of light fell on one part of a branch where a sparrow rested. Time after time, its round head would cock from side to side and its little tail would sway. Tsukasa drowsily observed the movement of those undulating feathers.
“Class, we’ll be having a new student today. Kamishiro Rui, will you tell us about yourself?”
The old door screeched, followed by the sound of quiet footsteps. Whispers and discussions began to spread. Some students at the back of the classroom loudly exclaimed.
“How handsome!”
“I’ve never seen someone so tall. Is this guy really our age?”
“We need to call him over later!”
“Forget that, there’s no spare seats around you. He should be with me instead.”
The air felt suffocating with the pungent smell of sweat mixed into blazing humidity. Occasionally, a chilly wisp of wind would slide in and caress the children’s sweaty foreheads; but it never stayed long. The sweet chirping of white-eye birds echoed from far away, partly submerged by the noise of people talking and the buzzing of the cicadas. But the bird’s song remained with clarity. Amidst all of those erratic noises, a sound so divine as if sent from angels above could never be mistaken.
“Kamishiro Rui, can you please say something?” asked the teacher. Compliments went on incessantly. Some loved his face, some admired his large hands, some were fascinated by the look of his eyes. Some girls had probably fallen in love with him. Yet, there was only silence coming from the podium.
Tsukasa remained disinterested in his surroundings. His eyes were fixated on that sparrow. The sunlight casted a beautiful tinge of gold on its brown feathers. Sparrows were a common sight in every nook and crannies of this town.
This place was nothing more than a forgotten remote area of the country. Tsukasa, like any other child here; had never set foot in a real city. They only knew the feel of urban life when sliding their fingers across textbook pages that had turned dusty yellow with time - textbooks initially produced by factories in the urban areas, then donated by urban children. How far could that little sparrow go? People said it would take several days to travel by train from here to the big cities. Could it fly for that long? Even if it couldn’t, perhaps it didn’t need to. Why fly so far when one already owned the entire sky? Tsukasa, too; sometimes wished he were a bird. He would fly somewhere far away. Away from school, textbooks, homework; and everyone else.
…
The noisy chatter burst into a roar, causing even a half-awake Tsukasa to be shaken from his trance. A silhouette appeared by the window that he was viewing the summer scenery through. The person that it belonged to person was truly special. At first look, it was apparent that he must be at least a head taller than all the other boys in class. Children in rural areas lacked devices to communicate with the outside world, but even they knew of few spectacular faces. The famous figures around Asia including actors, singers and models propagated all channels of the old public television. As expected, all the boys were jealous of the tall and muscular physique of those people in that tiny television screen, but they could never achieve it no matter how much they tried. Their shoulders remained scrawny, bony even; and their biceps remained stuck at the size of a young cob despite any training.
This new student was nothing like that. He was obviously way too young to be as ripped and bulky as the actors in classic chancellor movies, but still visibly more toned than any boys in school. The soft curve from his neck led to shoulders felt surprisingly sturdy as they stretched under the neat T-shirt he wore. He stood out in the tiny room containing the masses of children his age, sitting on desks and chairs that stooped lowly. As he sat down, his side profile revealed an amazingly defined jawline and his tall, straight nose bridge. They gave him an exquisitely mature aura. Tsukasa remembered that rural boys desired a handsome face as well. Last year, a boy from another class wished he could trade his round face for the sharp features of a good-looking singer for his birthday. Another one said he would sell all his toys if it meant he could swap his snub nose for those of sword-fighting movies’ actors.
The new boy’s shoulders made the size of the chair’s back seem like a hill compared to a mountain. The table’s surface reached only a little above his belt, forcing him to stoop his head whenever he wanted to read. He must always keep his legs under the chair, as they would always stick out if he let them stretch freely. Writing was also a problem for him, because his elbows kept somehow going past the table’s surface’s edges even when he tried to keep them inwards. The sight was bizarre to Tsukasa, who never imagined how these objects could cause such a struggle to someone. None of these issues ever occurred to him, at the least. His scrawny shoulders had never and still hadn’t grown any wider than the chair’s back, or simply put: if the chair’s back were to be a hill, then his body would be a puddle of mud.
But regardless, this new student did not mind all the things troubling him nor anything else in his surroundings. As soon as he sat, he took out a pile of books from his bag - not only textbooks but also those challenging science books that were at least a kilo in weight. After that, he instantly got on with reading them. He didn’t pay a single mind to the girls’ flirty glances, the boys’ constant invitations, nor the symphony of birds and cicadas. The background behind was a mix of leafy green and vibrant yellow, while he wore a plain set of clothes consisting of a white shirt and dark blue pants. He was special in the way that he didn’t look as if he belonged to this place. It was as if he was a portrait created by the hands of the most refined artist, slapped on a scribbled canvas of a 3-year-old.
This new student was not merely “a boy”. He was the superb boy. People wished to be him, went mad with envy over him, but at the end of the day; they worshipped him. Right now, he was blocking the view of Tsukasa’s favorite window.
For reasons unknown, Tsukasa’s heart screeched in his chest. A weird feeling of frustration arose, making the air already burning with summer heat even more scorching. He clenched his fists then placed them on the table, trying to pay attention to the letters on the pages of his textbook. Somehow, the table felt taller today.