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Yoshida isn’t sure what he’s expecting to hear when the boy sitting behind him in English class taps him on the shoulder, but it certainly isn’t this.
“Psst.” The boy smacks him against the shoulder again, a little too much force behind the blow so it stings through his jacket. He doesn’t seem to have noticed, though— or maybe he just doesn’t care, because he’s sitting there with a dopey grin on his face, eyes blown wide and eager, like he and Yoshida are already the best of buddies. “I have something for you, dude.”
What a punk.
“For me?” Yoshida whispers.
He nods vigorously, extending his hand underneath his desk and tipping his head down towards it. Yoshida actually thinks he might be able to remember his name, if he really tries: Denjiro or Densuke or Denki or something like that. He doesn’t think the two of them have actually ever interacted, much less been formally introduced. He could recognize him anywhere, though; it’s hard to forget a boy with his messy shock of blond hair and his loud, screeching voice that bounces down the hallway wherever he goes.
Technically, they are still in the middle of English class, so technically he shouldn’t even be engaging in whatever hijinks this kid’s trying to pull. But Kishibe-sensei is still droning away at the front of the room, underlining various verb tenses on the board: present perfect, present continuous, present simple. Well, presently, this discussion is boring Yoshida out of his skull. Enough that he’s willing to see what this Densaku guy has for him.
Reaching backwards underneath the desk, he fumbles his hand around in the empty space, searching for the boy’s hand. When he finds it, it’s sweat-slick and slippery in his grip, like grabbing onto an eel underwater. Nasty stuff. The boy takes his hand in his, gently and briefly, for the shortest of seconds, and presses something small and flat into his palm before letting go again.
Yoshida pulls his hand back to rest on top of his lap, flicking his eyes from the folded note to Kishibe-sensei and back again as he unfolds it, careful not to get clocked by his watchful eyes.
It’s handwritten, scrawled in sloppy, teetering characters on a piece of paper that clearly originated from the study guide Kishibe-sensei handed out at the beginning of the class. Not that Yoshida is topping the class anytime soon or anything, but he at least has the common sense not to toss away a study guide literally not even a full thirty minutes after it’s been given to him. Either this kid is crazy, stupid, or both. His lettering would suggest the latter, what with its haphazard strokes and egregious grammar mistakes. In big, sloping characters he’s written: if you could turn into any animal which would you choose. <3 Denji.
Yoshida uncaps his pen, not turning around to meet his eyes, and writes a message of his own before handing it back. What the fuck are you on right now? And next time, can you give me some so I don’t have to remember this conversation?
Denji makes a scoffing sound when he opens Yoshida’s letter, a quick and disappointed exhale of air that makes a couple of the students in their vicinity turn to look at him. “You don’t have to get your panties in a twist about it, jeez,” he says, leaning close enough to Yoshida that he can feel his breath on his ear. “I just wanna know, okay?”
Yoshida keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead as he speaks. “Is it that important?”
“Very,” Denji says, nodding solemnly. “It tells a lot about a person. More than you’d think. If they pick something completely lame, you know, like a cat or something, well, then you already know they’re a total dipshit without even having to talk to them. See? Easy.”
As much as he hates to admit it, Denji’s theory isn’t completely unfounded. He supposes that it is indicative in its own way, the qualities and characteristics that people wish they could embody. When faced with near-endless possibilities, you have to decide what’s really most important to you. Whether that be beauty, brains, brawn, or something else entirely.
Yoshida flips his notebook to a clean page, thumbing past the pages upon pages of English notes from Kishibe-sensei’s many lectures. Those could wait, although he’ll probably have to brush up on them a few times more before he sits for the exam next week. Ripping out a neat square of paper, straightening the edges with the press of his thumbnail, he jots down a single word before passing it to Denji.
He doesn’t say anything this time— no gasps of indignation, no outraged cries, nothing. Whether this is because he doesn’t care or because he’s learned by now to reel in his theatrics, Yoshida isn’t certain. He doesn’t look behind him to analyze the expressions of his face, but he can hear him scribbling frantically on the backside of the piece of paper, his pencil skritching back and forth like he couldn’t move his hands fast enough to keep up with the flow of words in his brain. Jesus. If only he dedicated this kind of energy to studying kanji, the kid would be writing better than Haruki Murakami in no time.
Another tap on the shoulder. Another folded note.
Octopus??? (He must’ve copied from where Yoshida wrote it out first.) SEREEUSLY??? You could be anything in the world and you choose OCTOPUS. Be creative!! Let your imaginashin run wild!!!
Oh, so I’m not allowed to be an octopus just because you don’t deem it acceptable?
Yeah! I knew you would get it evenshully.
Well, this is my fantasy, and you said I could be anything. So I’m staying with octopus. Thanks very much.
But they don’t DO anything cool!!! Like punch people or fly or turn invisubal or something.
No animals can turn invisible. And they do, too. Do you know how powerful an octopus’ tentacle is? And you get eight at them to use all at once however you want. Plus, you could use the ink clouds to completely blind your enemies.
Denji laughs a little at that one, the sound high and giddy. That’s a solid point, he writes. Maybe it’s not so bad after all. This note comes with a drawing, hastily sketched and rough around the edges. It’s a portrait of Yoshida— at least, he’s pretty sure it’s supposed to be him— with his face contorted into a smug grin, hair hanging long over his eyes and a line of piercings studding his ear. Below his waist, a throng of tentacles explodes from his body, suction-cupped and curling around each other in a tangled web. It’s a little messy, sure, and there’s definitely a few stray pencil marks out of place, but all things considered, it isn’t half bad. He counts the tentacles; it looks like Denji’s given him nine instead of eight. Oh, well. He supposes having a little extra never hurt anybody, right?
Pretty decent, he writes. What about you, then? Which animal are you going with?
The answer comes back quickly, slammed down on Yoshida’s desk not a full minute after he’s asked it: CHAINSAW DOG!!!
And just as quickly as Denji’s sucked him into his little game, he’s lost him.
Yoshida swivels in his seat, tapping his pen against the metal rings of his notebook. “Oh, yeah?” he whispers. “Chainsaw dog, huh? Talk to me.”
Denji leans in, grinning wide, exposing the row of his teeth from end to end. They’re slightly crooked, Yoshida notes, and his canines are remarkably sharp, almost biting into the soft pink of his lips. “It’s a very special kind of dog, of course,” he says. “One that’s, like, all fucked-up lookin’ and fused with a chainsaw or something. Stickin’ right out the top of its head. Pretty dope, don’tcha agree?”
“A dog,” Yoshida repeats, dumbly. “Fused with a chainsaw.”
“Exactly right,” Denji says. “I dunno how it works, exactly. My sister, Power, you know her? She’s the one who explained it to me. I don’t really do well with all that technical stuff.”
“Right.” Denji’s talking nonsense. He know this. He knows there’s no such thing as a chainsaw dog, or a half-human octopus, but god, he just looks so endearing when he explains these things. The spark behind his eyes, the flush of his cheeks, the too-wide, toothy smile when he speaks. Something about it makes Yoshida want to keep asking questions. Makes him want to stick around and listen to the answers. “I don’t suppose you have one of those on hand to show me? Maybe in your back pocket or something?”
“Nope,” Denji says, his mouth dropping into a frown. “I wish. We have a regular dog, though! He’s real cute, I promise. His name’s Pochita.” He springs into action, reaching out to slap Yoshida’s shoulder again, even though they’re now facing each other. “You should come by and meet him after school! You’ll love him. Everybody does. Maybe you can find a way to make him into a chainsaw.”
“Yoshida? Hayakawa?” Kishibe’s voice cuts through their chatter, and Yoshida feels the unmistakable burn of dozens of pairs of eyes on the back of his neck. “I assume you’re already prepared for the exam next week, then?”
“Sorry, sensei,” Yoshida grumbles, at the same time that Denji chirps, “Sure are!”
Yoshida shakes his head. He should know better. He should know better than to engage with weirdos, much less strike up a rapport with them. Yet here he is, accepting Denji’s folded slip of paper with his phone number. Tucking it into the pocket of his jacket. Calculating the hours until the end of the school day.
What the fuck has gotten into him?
So he waits for Denji after school, tapping his toes by the lockers until he finally shows up, ten minutes later than he said he would.
“Dude,” Yoshida says, “you were the one who told me to meet you here.”
“Sorry, man,” Denji says, and casts his eyes towards the floor, looking genuinely sad in a way that kind of makes Yoshida want to wrap his arm around his shoulders and draw him close. “I guess I just got distracted and lost track of time. I promise it wasn’t ‘cause of you.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Normally, Yoshida has a low tolerance for these kinds of things. He tends to snap at people when they turn up late, losing patience with friends who get off at the wrong bus stations or sleep through their alarms. It’s always felt exorbitantly disrespectful to him, inconsiderate of the time and resources he devotes to being there. If he’s expected to fulfill his commitment to a certain activity, why aren’t other people capable of holding up their end of the bargain? For some reason, though, today he isn’t mad. Any trace of frustration he’d been holding tight and clenched in his muscles dissipated when he saw Denji’s face. “Ready?”
“Fo’ sho’,” Denji says, and Yoshida cringes just the teensiest, tiniest bit.
The walk from their high school to Denji’s house isn’t long, but with him incessantly yapping away in Yoshida’s ear for the whole journey, it feels like a lifetime. He yaps away about nearly every topic under the sun, from his brother and sister to the intricacies of the Minecraft world he’s building to the indescribable pleasure that is jam on toast. It’s not self-indulgent, however, nor is it narcissistic. He stops periodically throughout his spirals of speech, punctuating his sentences with little check-ins as to Yoshida’s state: Are you still with me, man? Am I losing you? Here’s the really cool part, ready, you gotta listen to this.
And Yoshida does. He hangs onto every word, and it’s not because he gives a crap about whatever niche topic Denji’s currently dissecting within an inch of its life. It’s the light behind his eyes when he speaks, the way his voice picks up in speed like he can’t get the words out fast enough. It’s the way he reaches out to touch him, every so often: a light tap on the shoulder, a quick brush against his forearm. Nothing serious, nothing lingering; yet somehow it sends sparks dancing across Yoshida’s skin every single time.
“I’m home! ” Denji calls when they reach the apartment, a sparsely furnished and almost suspiciously clean walk-up on the third floor. From the ten-minute backstory of his entire life that Yoshida just received, he knows that he shares it with his older sister– Power, who he actually does remember from school— and their older brother, Aki. There was no mention of any mother or father in the picture, and Yoshida certainly doesn’t want to be the one to bring it up, but Denji refers to their little trio, proudly, as the Hayakawa family. It struck Yoshida as odd at first, but the more he thinks about it, the more it makes sense to him. It’s beautiful, in an eccentric sort of way, the same way those broken ceramics whose cracks get filled in with shimmery flows of gold are beautiful. They’re beautiful because they’re unique, and maybe even a little bit broken, not in spite of it.
“Guess nobody’s home,” he says, after a few moments of heavy silence. “Just the two of us.”
“Just us two,” Yoshida says. The apartment is spotless, every item tucked away in its proper place, all straight edges and crisp lines. It must have been decorated by his brother, then, because although Yoshida admittedly doesn’t know Denji very well, he knows him well enough to know that he would never, ever in a million years decorate his apartment like this. There’s nothing about him that’s clean-cut, or simple, for that matter. He’s an explosion of sound and color, of variation and texture, all chattering teeth and bright, glinting eyes. He almost seems out of place in this environment, a shock of color against the too-white walls.
“And Pochita, of course!” he says, and his mouth falls open into a toothy grin. “How could we forget about that little guy? Pochita! C’mere, boy!”
At the sound of his voice, a blur of orange comes barreling into the living room, a fiery comet shooting its way through the galaxy. Yoshida hears the scribble-scrabble of long nails against the linoleum, and the little yelpy sounds he makes as he dances around Denji’s feet, so screechy and high-pitched that they almost sound pained. “Good job, buddy,” he says, and drops to his knees, raking his nails across Pochita’s back as he jumps up to lick a wet strip across his face.
He’s a funny-looking thing, if Yoshida’s being completely honest. Gnarled, stubby knees, a mishmosh of coloring splattered across his pelt, his jaw perpetually hanging open in a stupified smile. The creature looks more like a Frankensteinian fusion of spare dog parts than any recognizable breed. But Denji loves him, clearly, judging by his giggles as the thing practically vibrates in his lap. So Yoshida swallows the snark rising in the back of his throat and plasters on a smile. “Cute,” he says.
Denji looks up at him, his dark eyes narrowing. “Cute?” he says. “He’s more than cute. Pochita’s the cutest dog in all of Japan.”
“I— yeah, I can see that,” Yoshida says.
“You wanna pet him?”
Yoshida glances down at Pochita, who’s currently being held outstretched in Denji’s grip, squirming desperately like a fish caught on a line. His eyes are glazed over, milky and bulging out of their sockets, and his tongue lolls out of his mouth, a steady stream of slobber dripping off of its tip.
In other words: absolutely not.
“You bet I do,” he says, and holds out his arms.
Clutched tightly in Yoshida’s grip, Pochita feels more like a warm, wet worm than an animal, limp and squishy around the middle. He’s heavier than he looks, and Yoshida throws his arms around his tubby gut, hoisting him back into the crook of his elbows.
Denji gasps, an exaggerated, cartoonish outburst accompanied with widened eyes and raised eyebrows. “He likes you, man!” he says, incredulous at the fact that Yoshida’s managed to hold him steady for this long. “He totally does. He never lets anybody hold him for longer than a few seconds. And look at him now! Happy as can be.”
Pochita grunts, a clogged, guttural sound that sounds like he’s either trying not to vomit or already choking halfway to death on said vomit. Charming, indeed. Even still, pride swells bloated and puffed-out in Yoshida’s chest at Denji’s compliment. “What can I say,” he says, giving Denji a tight-lipped smirk. “He has good taste.”
“He really does,” Denji says, looking straight into Yoshida’s eyes.
Yoshida stares back, for just a second. They’re not actually as dark as he thought they were when he first saw them. The brown is actually speckled with flecks of gold, glinting against the harsh lamplight of the apartment and sending light refracting across Denji’s features. After a few moments, he looks away. He has to, because the heat of his gaze is shooting down the vertebrae of his spine, and Pochita’s fur is suddenly scorching hot and scratchy against his skin, and Denji’s hand is hovering way, way too close to his own.
“Too bad he didn’t turn out to be a chainsaw dog after all,” Yoshida jokes. As if he’s heard him, right on cue, Pochita wrenches his jaw back and snaps his teeth around the width of his pointer finger.
Well. Maybe, maybe not.
They continue to pass notes back and forth ever since the first time. At first, it’s Denji bombarding Yoshida with an onslaught of questions: what’s your favorite video game? What’s the best food you’ve ever tasted in your life? Who’s the person you miss the most? Yoshida obliges, at first avoiding the heavier questions in favor of the lighter, more palatable ones: Grand Theft Auto because I like driving crazy and I think the way the hookers walk is funny, fried takoyaki from a stand in Osaka. As the days go on, however, he finds himself circling back to the heavy ones that he’d previously shoved aside, the answers spilling from his pencil onto the page almost as if they’re being dragged out of him by force. I miss my sister more than anything. I miss her so bad sometimes that I lie awake at night thinking about it and I can’t even breathe. She killed herself a few years ago. Sometimes I still wonder if it was my fault.
What was her name? Denji writes back, and Yoshida pauses, the hand holding his pencil perched over the scrap of notebook paper, folded over so many times that the creases on the page have gone thin and weak, like lace. Akane, he writes, tracing the character carefully, knowing it also stands for the word red. It’s the first time, he realizes, that he’s written her name since she died. It’s also the first time that his chest doesn’t ache when he sees it printed out on paper.
She loved you a lot, Denji writes, and Yoshida has to hold back a laugh.
What makes you so sure of that?
Just trust me, he writes back. I’m not smart, and I can’t spell, and words make my brain hurt if I stare at them for too long, but I do know some stuff. That’s 1 of em.
Yoshida stares at the piece of paper until the edges of Denji’s chicken-scratch writing goes blurry and distorted in his vision. Without turning around to face Denji, he tucks it into his back pocket, nestled close against his skin through the denim.
He doesn’t pass him any more notes that day.
Eventually, Denji asks Yoshida to help him write one of his own.
“So allow me to just reiterate one more time,” Yoshida says, swishing around the last few dregs of his bottle of Coke. The two of them are sitting in the cafeteria, all the way in the back right up against the wall, and the cacophony of the lunch rush swells around them. “You want to write someone a love letter? Like, on the pink paper with the red hearts all lovey-dovey?”
Denji groans and tips his head back. “Nah, dude,” he says. “It’s not a love letter. That makes it sound all girly and shit.” He pops a fry into his mouth, speaking around it. (Of course Denji would have an affinity for going off campus for lunch, and of course he would find a way to drag Yoshida into it.) “Let’s call it a letter of appreciation. To let this person know that I… care about them.”
“Sounds exactly like a love letter.”
“It is not,” Denji says. “But I guess I do like this person. Like, a lot. I’m not really sure if I’m allowed to love them, though.”
Yoshida frowns. “Why wouldn’t you be?”
“I dunno,” he says. “I think… I think they might not want it. Coming from me, I mean.”
Something in Yoshida’s stomach goes cold; he can feel the Coke sloshing around, sickly-sweet and sticky against the inside of his stomach. “Chin up,” he says, and snags a fry off of Denji’s tray. “They’re gonna love you, bud. They’re not even gonna know what hit them by the time you’re through.”
“You think so?” Twin spots of color rise on Denji’s cheeks. “How can you be so sure?”
“Just trust me,” Yoshida says, quietly. “I do know some things, after all.”
He turns away, staring straight down into the grooves of his tray, the hash marks uniformly scored into the red plastic. He knows it’s not polite to ask, but part of his brain is itching to know who this mystery person could be that’s captured Denji’s attention so fiercely. Is it someone in their class? He flicks through the roster he has in his mind, recognizing even as he does so how woefully incomplete it is. There’s Kobeni: painfully quiet, tiny, but pretty in a delicate sort of way. Quanxi, always one to push the boundaries of the school dress code, hiking her uniform skirt up far enough for the backs of her thighs to be visible. Even Reze was kind of cute, if you were into the whole scary-hot rocker-chick thing. Yoshida’s pretty sure he’s caught Denji staring down the front of her blouse on an occasion or two. Yeah, that has to be it. Or something like it, anyway. Yoshida really, really doesn’t want to linger on the details; for whatever reason, picturing Denji with his mystery girl is turning his stomach inside-out.
When he glances back up at him, he’s pulling a spiral-bound notebook out of his backpack, slapping one sheet of freshly torn-out paper onto the cafeteria table.
“You know a lot more than me, Yoshida,” he says, grinning. “Which is why you’re gonna help me write this letter.”
Fantastic.
“About that. You might be on your own for this one, seeing as I have absolutely no experience in the ways of love-letter-craftsmanship.”
Denji squints at Yoshida like he’s speaking a foreign language. “Yeah, exactly! Stuff like that. Those are the kinds of words that I need.”
He sighs. Somehow, some way, Denji seems to be able to rope him into anything. “I’ll give it the old college try,” he says. “What do you need help with? Specifically?”
Denji taps the end of his pen against his chin, looking faraway. “Well, what would you want if someone was writing a love letter to you, Yoshida?”
His brain short-circuits for a minute. “I really wouldn’t know,” he says, finally. “I’ve never actually gotten one before.”
“If you had to choose. Gun to your head and all that.”
“Um…” Yoshida thinks back to the crushes he’s had throughout high school; there have been plenty of them, but most resulted in humiliation and late nights blasting music in his room with the door shut rather than love letters and chocolate kisses. Girls from his classes, his own friends, hell, even his buddies’ girlfriends from time to time. And, yeah, maybe the occasional guy or two. But absolutely nothing that would even come close to love-letter-exchanging status. “I would want to know why they like me,” he says.
“Okay! I can definitely answer that,” Denji says, and starts scribbling onto the paper. It’s thin and flimsy, just a standard sheet of paper he’s ripped out from his notebook, and Yoshida can tell that the letters are bleeding through the back where he presses down too hard. “No peeking, dude.” He cups his left hand around the paper, so Yoshida’s view is blocked. Damn. He’d been hoping he’d be able to snoop around a little and get the inside scoop on the dirt.
“I’d want them to write… what they think about me.”
“Sure.” More scribbling, more cupped hands.
“I’d want them to write why they think we’d be good together.”
“That’s good to know.” This time Denji throws his entire arm across the table, so the only thing Yoshida can possibly get a glimpse of is the ratty sleeve of his hoodie.
“Why so secretive, man?” Yoshida asks, swiping across the table to jab him in the forearm. “You’re not writing it to Kishibe-sensei or anything, are you?”
Denji laughs, sticking his tongue out into a point. “You’re nasty,” he says. “Nah. Just don’t want you seeing what I’m writing to your mom before you find me in her room tomorrow morning.”
That one earns Denji a solid smack, right on the highest part of his arm, but there’s no force behind it when Yoshida delivers the blow.
The next letter Denji gives him comes sooner than expected.
It’s not during English class the next day, or even in his phone inbox when he gets home from school. It’s stuffed in between the vents of his locker, folded clumsily so that slivers of the paper are hanging off of the folded edges. Yoshida glances behind him quickly before he opens it; none of the students passing by in the steady stream of the hallway seem to notice him.
Dear Yoshida, it reads. You may be wundering why I am writing this to you. Well, Aki always tells me to tell people how I feel before it is too late. I’m not sure what he means by that. But I feel something for you, so I am telling you now. I’m sorry I’m not very good with words, and that I had to ask you for help and ruin the suprise. I hope you like it anyway.
First, I like you for a lot of reasons. You’re funny and you make me laugh so hard that my nose hurts. You are kind and you never juge me even when I ask you weird questions like what kind of animal do you want to be. You are smart and you know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff, even though you don’t think you do. You are open-minded and you always want to learn more about other people instead of making assumpshins. You make me happy to be around. I look forward to the time I spend with you more than anybody else. That first day you walked home with me, I was so happy, even though I couldn’t tell you it then.
I think we would be good together because we are already good friends. Aki says that the most important thing in any relashunship is to be friends with the other person first. That way you know that it’s not just superfishul or something. You both actually like each other for who you are, not just for what you look like, even though I think you’re handsome. I would still like you if you weren’t handsome, because we’re friends, and friends have each others’ backs no matter what. We both like the same stupid movies and good music. We already communicate well (like I’m doing right now!!!) which Aki also said was an important part of a relashunship. He and his boyfriend have been together for like forever so I guess he’s doing something right, even if he is annoying about it.
Anyway. You don’t have to say yes if you don’t want to. I still want to be your friend even if you don’t like me back. But if you do, you’ll know where to find me.
Yoshida responds with a note of his own; it’s the shortest one he’s written yet. Just one word, actually: finally.