1.01: Reiko, Reiko, Reiko!I woke up already crying.

  Not the dramatic kind of crying, either. The ugly, half-choked kind where your throat hurts and you don’t even remember when it started. My futon was damp under my cheek. For a second I thought I’d knocked over the water gss by my arm clock—again.

  Then my eyes focused and I saw the streaks on my own fingers.

  “Reiko-chan…”

  Her name came out hoarse.

  The nightmare was the same as always: a distant street, sirens, the smear of red at the base of a gss tower. Sometimes I saw her face clearly. Sometimes I only saw that broken shape from a police photo I’d never actually seen, but my brain kindly supplied anyway.

  This time, though, there’d been something else.

  A mask.

  White. Empty-eyed.

  It lingered, just behind my eyes, like afterimages from staring at the sun too long.

  I forced my gaze to the clock. 6:03 AM. My arm hadn’t gone off yet. I could lie here and let the paralysis swallow me again. Make excuses. Call in sick. Lose my job. Disappear properly.

  My stomach growled.

  It was pathetic that hunger did more to drag me out of bed than “professional responsibility,” but there it was. I rolled onto my back, staring at the cracked ceiling.

  I’d become a ghost that paid rent for the house it haunted.

  I sat up slowly, joints protesting, and rubbed at my eyes. My apartment looked like someone had paused halfway while moving out. Open boxes. Clothes draped over the back of a cheap folding chair. Dust motes drifting through weak winter light from the balcony.

  If I stared too long, it all blurred into another nightmare.

  I pushed to my feet.

  “Move, Susumu,” I told the room. “Move or you’re dead.”

  My body didn’t listen right away. It never did. But eventually my feet found the tatami, then the cool tile of the kitchenette and genkan, up the narrow path to the bathroom.

  I flicked on the light.

  The man in the mirror gred back at me like I owed him money. Bck hair ragged. Eyes red-rimmed and sunken. The kind of face people crossed the street to avoid. I’d heard it all my life.

  YAKUZA.

  THUG.

  DON’T MAKE EYE CONTACT.

  Reiko-chan used to call me a goril.

  Honestly, she was being generous… gorils look like they have their life together.

  I brushed my teeth until my gums stung. Showered for the first time in more days than I’d admit. Let the water beat against my face until I couldn’t tell where it ended and the tears started.

  By the time I stepped out, toweling my hair dry, my lungs felt clearer. Not okay. Never okay. I was just… functional.

  I dressed in my only decent suit. It still carried the faint chemical scent of starch from the st time I’d ironed it for interviews. The tie slid around my neck with familiar resistance, a polite little choke.

  I stared at my reflection again, my tie half-done.

  She would have said something snarky about how I looked like I was on my way to collect protection money.

  The thought hurt and warmed me at the same time.

  “Reiko-chan…”

  Her name kept looping in my brain, like a stuck track. As if saying it enough times might run time backwards.

  My phone sat on the low table where I’d dropped it st night. Same old cheap model. Same old cracked corner. Same old custom ringtone that I still hadn’t changed, because I was a coward.

  Caramelldansen.

  That stupid, happy song spilled out of the speaker…

  Do-do-do-oo, yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah…

  Every ridiculous beat was a knife and a memory at once.

  I closed my eyes.

  If I followed the sound backwards, it always took me to the same pce. Not the train. Not the newspaper. Not the headline circled in red.

  Before all of that.

  Back when she was alive.

  Back when our biggest problem was who got stuck pying the grappler in Tekku.

  My mind was stuck in the past. I went back to the park where it all started.

  I was nine when I fell in love with her for the first time. Not that I really understood what it meant.There was someone on the pyground who wasn’t afraid of me, and that made my entire world tilt.

  The other kids knew the rules. Don’t talk to the scary boy with the gangster face. Don’t sit next to him. Don’t stand near him. His family will probably kidnap you for ransom to dump you in the bay. Concrete boots… the works. Teachers watched me like I was one temper tantrum away from stabbing someone in the carotid artery with a 2b pencil.

  It was a hot afternoon. The kind where the slide burned your thighs and the metal of the swings squeaked like rusty animals… if they were made entirely out of iron. I sat on one of the swings, hunched, letting the chains creak while I barely moved.

  The girl marched straight up to me out of the blue.

  Her hair was short, wild around her face like she’d cut it herself with kitchen scissors. She had scraped knees and scuffed sneakers and the kind of intense green eyes you don’t forget. She couldn’t have been more than eight like me, but she walked like she owned the whole park.

  I watched her sidle closer, expecting the usual routine: stare, flinch, whisper, run.

  Instead, she pnted herself in front of me, put her hands on her hips, and frowned.

  “What kind of yakuza kid are you supposed to be? Which Family do you belong to?” she demanded.

  I flinched. What she said was so blunt, her words cut deeper than whispers would have.

  My brain, of course, chose that moment to freeze.

  I wanted to say: I’m not one of those. My parents are really, really boring. I just look like this. Please don’t call me that.

  What came out was more like a strangled squeak.

  She narrowed her eyes, then did something no one had ever done to me before.

  She kicked me.

  Her tiny foot, in frayed socks and the cutest little cutoff shorts I’d ever seen, drove straight up into my chin with terrifying accuracy.

  The world turned upside down. The chains rattled as I flew backwards off the swing and nded hard in the sand. For a second I just y there, staring at the sky, ears ringing.

  Blood trickled from my nose.

  I touched it with shaking fingers, staring at the smear of red. I’d never seen my own blood before. No one had ever talked to, let alone hit me. No one had gotten close enough.

  The other kids, who’d been pretending not to watch, recoiled in a wave. A few adults shouted. The girl herself froze, eyes going huge as she saw the blood.

  She snapped into a fighting stance like something out of a sentai show, like the reincarnation of a notorious yakuza after his reincarnated rival. But then she immediately panicked. “D-don’t throw sand in my face! You… dirty jerk!!!”

  I realized my hands were clenched in the pyground sand. For a heartbeat, I wanted to ugh.

  Something broke loose inside me instead.

  It wasn’t anger. Not fear.

  It was joy. Completely unfamiliar to me.

  So much ridiculous, overflowing joy filled me that it scared me more than any kick. Someone had seen me, decided I looked dangerous… and attacked me anyway. It was a girl too. She stood her ground. She didn’t scream and run from me.

  I started crying. Ugly, loud, shocked sobs.

  The girl flinched again, then dug in her pocket and stepped closer, cheeks burning. “H-hey, don’t cry. I… uh… I’m…”

  She thrust something out at me like a peace offering.

  “This is a rare gacha. Do you like Jetman?”

  It was a tiny figure, the pstic still warm from her hand. A red-helmeted hero captured mid-pose, his legs were spread dynamically, his arms battle ready, one stretched out with fingers extended and the other balled up in a fist.

  I sniffed, wiping my eyes with my sleeve. “I do. Jetman’s the best.”

  My voice wobbled, but I managed a smile. “Can we be friends?”

  She stared at me a second, then her shoulders dropped. The tension leaked out of her stance.

  “Yeah,” she said at st. “We can be friends.”

  She pressed the keychain into my palm. Her smile, when it came, was radiant.

  “I’m Reiko,” she said. “Though you look scary as hell, you’re crying. Though you look like a gangster, you’re not one. Too squishy. Pft. So… I guess you’ll do.”

  “I’m Susumu,” I said, clutching Jetman tightly enough to hurt.

  She tilted her head. “Susumu? Like… ‘tomorrow’?”

  I nodded.

  “Huh. Then you’d better grow into the name,” she said, matter-of-fact. “People named ‘Tomorrow’ shouldn’t give up so fast.”

  We were idiots together after that.

  Our parents didn’t need to arrange anything. We just kept meeting at the park until we figured out we lived a few streets apart, and then she started showing up at my door like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  My father, a chronically overworked saryman, and my mother, whose main hobbies were tea, shogi, and ignoring her only son, never invited her family over. They did, however, suddenly develop an intense interest in “spying” whenever Reiko-chan visited.

  They’d peek around corners when she marched in and kicked off her cute boots in the genkan. My mother made these little humming sounds like she was already pnning grandchildren. My father just muttered things like, “Huh. So the goril found a zookeeper.”

  I didn’t care. I had a friend.

  We made the living room our battlefield. Fighting games became religion. Tekku, Alleyway Brawler II, Dragon Brawl, anything with a versus mode. My collection grew over the years, and she beat me with roughly a ninety-percent win rate.

  Whenever I got a rare victory, she’d accuse me of cheating, then immediately demand a rematch. We’d end up mock-sparring between matches, copying moves from the games. She went to some kind of dojo on the side… karate, maybe. And occasionally she would “demonstrate” techniques on me.

  Kicks. Palm strikes. Throws that should not have been possible with her size.

  “You’re my punching bag, Susu,” she’d say cheerfully, helping me up after putting me through the shoji door. “You should be honored. Free training!”

  “I am honored, Reiko-sama,” I’d wheeze, clutching my bruises like precious gifts.

  In middle school, she discovered Caramelldansen. The first girly thing that she actually seemed to like.

  There was a period where every time she came over, she’d hijack my computer or the TV and pull up yet another remix. We’d end up bouncing along, arms wagging over our heads, ughing so hard we lost the rhythm completely.

  “You’re awful at this, Susu!” she’d decre with a ugh.

  “You’re the one messing it up, clubfoot!” I’d protest.

  It was stupid. It was girly. … It was perfect.

  When I finally got my own cellphone, I set the song as her ringtone. She rolled her eyes and called me a degenerate otaku, then secretly put the same file on her phone.

  It became our thing.

  Years blurred. We grew up. Reiko got prettier, sharper, scarier in ways that weren’t just physical.

  I… got taller and slightly less likely to trip over my own feet. The differences between us became more and more accented and as time passed, she gravitated a little more towards girly things, but never lost her love of fighting and pying action video games.

  As she blossomed and I sprouted, she acted like nothing had changed between us.

  I don’t think I ever had.

  By the time high school ended, I was hopelessly, pathetically in love with my best friend… more than ever.

  I wanted to spend my life with her, because she completed me in a way that I couldn’t completely understand.

  The morning I decided to confess my love to her started like any other: with my father telling me how useless I was.

  “You have no prospects, son,” he said, not looking up from his newspaper. “No friends… hmph… except for that girl… of yours… ahem… and no other social connections. Very well. Why not ask her out?”

  He said it like he was suggesting I take out the trash.

  Maybe that’s why it stuck in my mind.

  Maybe it’s because, for once, he wasn’t wrong.

  If Reiko fell for someone else before I’d even tried…

  I’d never forgive myself.

  When Reiko-chan appeared at my front door that morning, my heart tried to escape through my throat.

  She was beautiful. Obviously. She was always beautiful, but that day she’d gone for maximum critical hit: a bck sleeveless blouse with little characters marching around the colr, a cute hat tilted just so over straight brown hair, jean shorts hugging her thighs above bck knee-high stockings that refused to slip no matter what physics said.

  My eyes did the thing.

  My brain stopped.

  “Are you going to keep staring, Susu?” she asked sweetly. “Another ten minutes before you remember how doors work?”

  I spped my cheeks. “S-sorry. Morning, Reiko-chan.”

  She smirked. “Morning, goril.”

  Although I didn’t have the muscles for it, my face apparently qualified.

  I stared at her for a moment. Every morning I saw her, I ended up admiring her without meaning to. Her eyes and hair were the kind that stuck with you… bright, vivid, impossible to forget.

  The kick was so fast I only caught the blur.

  My teeth ccked as her foot snapped up under my chin. I went flying backwards into the shoe rack, scattering shoes everywhere. A boot wedged itself neatly between my butt cheeks.

  Ouch.

  “R-Reiko-sama… haha,” I groaned, shaking my head to clear it.

  She sighed, stepped over the debris, and offered me a hand. “Sorry about that. You totally spaced out there. Did that help clear your head?” She winked.

  It took a moment before my vision stopped doubling. She stayed crouched beside me, hand still outstretched.

  “You’re too weak, Susu,” Reiko said, poking my forehead lightly with one finger. “I’m just helping you toughen up. With a face like yours, you’ll need it, you know? Haven’t you considered taking karate lessons yet?”

  “Nah. If I could fight like you, everyone would be convinced I was actually yakuza.” I took her hand like I always did after a Reiko KO, like a drowning man grabbing a lifeline, and let her haul me upright.

  “They already are,” Reiko said with a wry smile. “The neighbors gossip about you all the time. I’m always having to remind them you’re totally harmless.”

  “Yeah, well, I do everything I can to change their minds,” I muttered. “I hold doors for people when I can, escort old dies across the street, rescue cats from trees…”

  “And scowl the whole time,” she added. “You really are hopeless, Susu.”

  In my room, we pyed Tekku as usual. Or rather, she annihited me as usual while I tried to string coherent confession sentences together in my head.

  Eventually, something in me snapped as her hip bumped against me.

  “Reiko-chan,” I blurted, dropping my controller. “There’s something that I’d…”

  “Hm?” She didn’t look away from the screen.

  I moved before I could think myself out of it, kneeling in front of her, taking her hand around the controller she held.

  “I love you,” I said sincerely.

  My heart pounded so hard I thought it might crack my ribs.

  Her character knocked mine out on muscle memory alone as her fingers kept madly pressing buttons. The KO screen fshed. Reiko-chan stared at me like I’d turned into a different species.

  “Why,” she said slowly, “did you have to go and make things weird, Susu?”

  She shoved me hard enough that I stumbled backward through my closet door.

  It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Her blows nded heavy enough to send me crashing into the spare futon in my closet, paper door torn, blood from my nose spotting the fabric.

  My body hurt. My heart hurt worse.

  “The answer is no, Susu,” she said, standing over me, fists clenched. Her face was bright red. “I can’t… I don’t… It’s better if we just stay friends. Or maybe not even that.”

  I pushed myself up, swaying. “At least tell me why. Did you… find someone else?”

  She looked away.

  “You’re the most useless piece of trash on the face of the earth,” she said, voice raw. “You have no pns, Susu. No drive. You’re happy to rot in your room and let your parents pay for everything. I’m not dating a man-child.”

  The words hit harder than her fists.

  She sat down beside me, shoulders tense. “It was fun while it sted, okay? But it’s time we made other friends.”

  That was the first time I lost her.

  I didn’t see her at my door after that. Not once.

  The house was too quiet without her ughter, without her boots thudding in the genkan, without her yelling at my father when he tried to pretend he wasn’t listening in.

  I tried to pretend I was fine. I filled the silence with games we used to py together and discovered they tasted like stale bread without her commentary. Graduation loomed. I had good grades and absolutely no idea what to do.

  One day, on the way to the convenience store for a yuzu soda, I saw her.

  She was walking down the street with her mother, chatting animatedly. They didn’t notice me. Something desperate and ugly twisted in my chest. Before I realized what I was doing, I’d followed at a distance and watched them turn into a quiet side street and through a gate.

  So that’s where she lived.

  I stood in front of her house for a long time, debating whether I was a stalker yet.

  Eventually I knocked.

  Her mother opened the door, blinking at me in surprise. “Susumu-kun?”

  I bowed so fast I almost headbutted the doorframe. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

  She ughed softly. “Although we’ve never met, I know you. Reiko-chan described you. The average-looking boy with a mean face and messy bck hair.”

  Average. Mean face. Messy hair… That hurt more than it should.

  “She also said you weren’t friends anymore,” her mother added, smile turning wry. “But she didn’t tell me she never wanted to see you again. So. Come by sometimes. Just… maybe not today. She’s out.”

  Her kindness warmed something frozen inside me.

  On the walk home, the warmth congealed into resolve.

  If the problem was that I was useless, then I’d have to stop being useless.

  “Start, Project Susumu,” I muttered, bowing to my father so low my forehead touched the kotatsu.

  He stared at me over the top of his newspaper. “My useless son is asking for a job?”

  “Please,” I said. “Help me find one. Anything.”

  He snorted, tore out the cssifieds page, and slid it across.

  “Here. Mascot wanted.”

  A pink elephant suit in a seaside amusement park. Not exactly gmorous. But the pay wasn’t terrible, and honestly, I didn’t deserve to be picky.

  “Don’t you have something more managerial?” I tried weakly.

  He ughed for a full minute.

  … So I became the elephant.

  Summers were hell. The suit was thick, the head heavy, the air inside humid enough to grow mushrooms. I nearly passed out a few times, but I kept going. Every yen I earned went into savings. Every day, between waves of shrieking children, I imagined a future where I’d show Reiko-chan a pay stub, an apartment lease… a life that I’d built myself.

  Even with a mask on, I still had trouble endearing myself to people. I followed the mascot manual exactly, waving and waddling and doing the routine poses, but most of the kids kept a wary distance.

  Could they sense the kind of face hiding under the giant pink elephant head? That thought haunted me. I worried I’d get fired before summer even ended.

  Then one day when I was seriously thinking about quitting someone’s phone started pying Caramelldansen.

  The melody hit my ears like a lightning strike.

  Before I knew it, my body moved on instinct… the same silly, synchronized motions Reiko had drilled into me years ago during those afternoons we bounced around my room.

  Something clicked.

  The kids froze… then burst into cheers. They ran up, crowding around me, copying the moves, ughing, bouncing, shouting. Even after the music stopped, we kept dancing. Them giggling. Me sweating bullets inside the elephant’s sauna the whole time.

  For the first time in a very long time, I felt… good while working. Like maybe I could bring a little joy into the world after all.

  It wasn’t the best moment of my life. But the little I was able to do was worth something.

  After graduation…

  An event my parents didn’t even bother attending…

  I moved into a tiny studio.

  Standing alone in the empty main room, staring at the scuffed wooden floor and the efficient little kitchenette, I felt something close to pride.

  It wasn’t much. But it was mine.

  Maybe, someday, it could be ours.

  I ran into her again in front of an electronics store.

  “I-It’s been forever,” I said, clutching my empty briefcase like a shield.

  She’d grown even more stunning. A breezy dress with leaf patterns, perfectly applied makeup, a white leather purse slung over her shoulder. She looked like she belonged in a commercial, not on the same sidewalk as me.

  “I never thought I’d run into you,” she said, her lips quirking. “Even though we live so close, it’s been too easy to avoid you until now.”

  That stung, but there was a glimmer in her eyes that wasn’t quite hatred.

  She gnced at my suit, then at the reflection of a shiny new TS5 console in the window. “What’s with the saryman cospy? Trying to impress me?”

  “No,” I said honestly. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Susu. Don’t lie to me like this.” She grabbed my tie, dragging me closer. “You waited here hoping I’d show up for Tekku 8 too, didn’t you?”

  I should have denied it. Instead I met her gaze.

  “I’ve wanted to see you every day,” I admitted.

  She froze for a heartbeat, then released my tie, cheeks pink.

  “You don’t need a suit to buy video games, baka,” she muttered.

  “You don’t need to dress like a bombshell to buy them either,” I shot back before my brain could stop my mouth.

  “B-bomb—?” Her blush deepened. “Pervert.”

  She looked away, then back. “Mou… Why are you here, Susu? The suit. Talk.”

  “I bought the suit because I’m job hunting,” I said. “I can’t just work as a mascot forever. I wanted a pce of my own. A real career. A life that I earn myself.”

  Her expression shifted, just a little. “Your parents have money. You could just live off them forever and py games all day. They don’t seem like the types to cut you off. Why bother?”

  “Because what I want in life… easy money… those things can’t give me,” I said quietly.

  She didn’t ask what that was.

  A small figure wearing a loose bck-tshirt with some unreadable text on it darted into the electronics store. I frowned. Was she standing next to Reiko-chan? A friend? I barely noticed her. Abruptly, Reiko took my hand and pulled me after her.

  “C’mon.” She smiled over her shoulder at me.

  She pulled me after her for a while. After we went through a couple of intersections, she cleared her throat and said, “Susu… want to get dinner? For old times’ sake.”

  My brain shorted out.

  “YES—” I coughed. “I mean. Sure. That’d be nice.”

  Dinner was on the highest floor of a Shibuya skyscraper. I'd never been anywhere like it. Outside the window, Tokyo glittered like a field of stars fallen to earth. Tokyo Tower glowed against the dark, a lone orange nce skewering the cosmos.

  We shared an order of sukiyaki, dipping tender slices of beef into beaten egg, fishing noodles and tofu out of the rich, fragrant broth. The waiter murmured something about “enjoy your date” on his way out.

  “It’s not a date,” Reiko snapped automatically, face hot. “We’re just catching up. Right, Susu?”

  “Right,” I said.

  It was definitely a date for me.

  She asked about my parents, how they were doing these days. I shrugged. She talked a little about school, about wanting to be a reporter, about internships and expectations. The conversation stumbled sometimes but not fatally. For a night, it felt almost like we’d rewound to those gaming days, except there were more city lights and less being punched or pushed through doors.

  When I walked home afterwards, my feet barely touched the ground.

  Maybe I still had a chance.

  SusumuReiko

  Relwing