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The scratch of his mechanical pencil across the sketchbook page. The heat of the sun on Akira's face as he watches him.
Scritch, scritch.
"What are you drawing?" Akira asks, stretching out his legs beneath his desk. He finished his lunch and cleaned up long ago, and soon the moment will be over and they'll be back to learning the wonders of seventh-grade math.
It's the first thing Akira has ever said to Kitagawa Yusuke, and it feels like it's the wrong thing. Yusuke looks up at him, even as his hand continues to skitter across the page, ever scratching. His eyes are deep pools of gray, dark like asphalt. And then he's looking back down at his sketchbook as if he hadn't noticed Akira was there at all.
Yusuke always sits alone at lunch, ignoring the teacher's instructions to mingle with their assigned group. It's supposed to teach responsibility, to force them to socialize.
But Yusuke doesn't seem to care about that; he just draws. Even as his classmates whisper about him, even as his stomach roars loud enough for the whole classroom to hear.
For a while, nobody says anything. The silence sinks in, and Akira just keeps thinking about the question he asked: What are you drawing?
Stupid. Stupid.
The next day, Yusuke is aloof again, as always, staring at his sketchbook like it's a portal to another world. And for Yusuke, that might be exactly what it is.
Akira pushes their desks together during lunch as all the other children eat. The desks form a playing field over which to wage battle. He sucks in a deep breath before he pushes his bowl of rice across the adjoined tables, his fingers lingering on the bowl's rim too long. Yusuke reaches for the bowl so slowly, as if he expects Akira to snatch it back before he can grab it. Their hands touch, and then the bowl is in front of Yusuke's face. It takes only a few moments before it lies empty on the table.
Yusuke tucks his sketchbook into his desk, expecting more and yet expecting nothing, and Akira sets his bowl of soup in front of him. His hair falls across his face as he sips at his soup, a remarkable shade of blue, like the ocean when it's storming. When the soup has been vanquished, Yusuke pauses to tuck his hair behind his ear so gracefully that Akira wants to smile, but he can't; the giddiness seeps out of him even faster than it had come. There's a bruise marring Yusuke's forehead, once hidden by his hair, dark and mottled.
It explains everything. It explains nothing.
Before Akira can say anything, Yusuke turns away, hiding his face from him as he gazes out the window.
Akira's running out of food. The battlefield is covered with the skeletons of his failures: the empty bowls, the chopsticks set off to the side. But he's determined; he still has a few players left. He licks his lips as he slides the pudding cup toward Yusuke, its wrapper orange with a cartoon jack-o-lantern printed on top. Pumpkin is Akira's favorite.
Yusuke's hair has fallen down again, curling against his cheek, but it doesn't matter anymore. Akira saw. He knows.
The room is eerily silent for a class full of middle schoolers. Are they watching the odd, seemingly one-sided exchange? Akira hopes they are. Maybe they'll learn a thing or two. Maybe they all will.
The pudding cup clacks against the table once Yusuke has set it aside, and when Akira looks into the pools of his eyes, he realizes he can't hear his stomach rumbling anymore. The loudest sound in the room might be the thudding of Akira's heart.
"There's free lunch," Akira says, phrasing his question as an observation. Not to belittle Yusuke — everyone knows about the free and reduced lunch options for families unable to pay the fees — but to give him a chance to explain, to reach out to Akira.
Yusuke's voice is so low that he has to lean in closer to hear him, over the bowls, over the empty pudding cup.
"He wouldn't like that," Yusuke says.
Who? Akira clutches at the sides of the desk. Who wouldn't like that?
"Whether it's intended to be punishment or something about pride, I'll never know," Yusuke continues.
It isn't because he won't eat, then; it never has been. It's because he can't.
The bruise. The speed at which he slurped up his food. His unwillingness to mingle socially.
It's all starting to make sense, and Akira almost wishes he hadn't started digging. Because what can he offer this boy now other than pudding cups and friendship?
Akira's hand slips into his pants pocket, hot and full of shame. His fist curls around the two-thousand yen note he stole from his mother's purse. She hadn't needed it, not in the way Yusuke does. But what if the man hurting Yusuke finds out about it? What if he hurts Yusuke even more?
Such a conundrum, and it's only mid-afternoon. Maybe math won't be so bad today; if it can help take Akira's mind off of things, maybe it won't be bad at all. But nothing can erase what he knows now, even if it's only fragments of the truth.
Akira hands him his milk carton, the last thing he has to barter with other than the money. Yusuke downs the milk as quickly as he had everything else, and once everything is gone, every ounce of sustenance, Akira can see that he's still hungry. There's that flash in his eyes, that quiver in his lips.
He waits until after school to give Yusuke the money. If they spend it at a convenience store rather than at school, maybe people won't ask as many questions. It won't be as easy for the man hurting Yusuke to discover their plot.
They sit on a park bench around the corner from the convenience store. Children crawl over the park structures, their parents watching closeby. Nobody asks any questions as Yusuke slurps his noodles and chomps on the various treats their money managed to buy, with some even still left over. Nobody approaches them at all.
Akira fills the silence with his question, not feeling quite as stupid as he had that first time. Things are different now. He's changed.
"So what is it that you're always drawing?" he asks, and even though he doesn't really expect Yusuke to show him, he pulls out his sketchbook and hands it to him.
Akira turns the pages gently; this is Yusuke's treasure, after all. His escape.
There are sketches of animals; of the classroom, the various desks and the smudges of people twisting their way through the aisles; and then, the unexpected.
Drawings of Akira. The large frames of his glasses making his face seem tiny in comparison. The steel of his eyes lovingly sketched out in graphite. The swoop of his nose, the roundness.
All proof that Yusuke has been looking at him. A lot. More than Akira ever could have imagined.
"Why?" Akira asks. Not in disgust nor irritation; he is in awe that anyone would want to look at him at all, that anyone could go to such lengths to draw him with such care.
Yusuke brushes crumbs off his pants and crumples up the trash in his fist. There can be no evidence for the man to find. He stands, offering his hand to Akira as if the answer is the most obvious thing in the world, pulling him up even as Akira falls into his chest. For the first time, Akira realizes Yusuke is a good inch or two taller than him. He smells like charcoal dust and the thick scent of broth still on his breath from the soup.
"You're the only person who looks at me like I'm real," Yusuke explains.
Someday Yusuke will tower over us all, Akira thinks. The man. Me. The world.
Someday, he will.