Chapter Text
By the time the four teens climbed over the boardwalk railing and slid down the dune, the other beach-goers had either packed-in their Marine Day celebrations or made the trek north, on foot or by car, to the cape to watch the fireworks. All that remained behind of the crowds were the chaotic, overlapping impressions of human activity written in the sand: footprints and crumbling sandcastles and indiscernible names carved into the ground with sticks or fingers, all waiting for the tide to come and erase them and return the beach to a state of newness.
But for now, the newcomers laid their towels over the hollows left by others’ heels and stacked the logs they’d dragged down from the woods in a pit left behind by bored children who’d spent the afternoon wrestling the effects of gravity and granular physics with their trowels. The hole was high enough up on the beach that the bottom stayed dry – other pits further down near the ocean had filled with a slushy mix of sand and water.
Josuke struck a match. He held it to the dry wood and pulled his fingers back in a hurry when the fire took. The flame guttered a moment before sinking beneath the bark and extinguishing. Koichi suggested they use some sort of kindling, just to get the fire started. There was a whoosh of space folding in upon itself, and then Okuyasu, grinning, held up a handful of grass, the long and reedy kind that grew atop the dunes. Yukako took the matches from Josuke; when she struck the light she didn’t flinch away, holding the match within the nest of sun-parched grass and letting the flame lap shyly at her fingers before it spread to the reeds and began to smoulder.
Within the hour, the bonfire had grown into the surrounding pit. The logs cracked and popped, releasing bursts of sparks into blue-velvet night whenever the flames found a vein in the wood, a pocket of built-up gas created by the chemical act of burning.
A charming sight, we’re sure. Nonetheless, we would like to take the opportunity to remind everyone that having a bonfire on any one of Morioh’s public beaches is, in fact, a violation of municipal law.
All throughout the evening, a tension wound tight around the group: a semester’s worth of assignments, examinations, and deadlines left behind a mechanical need to do. With everything that had gone on – not just school but Kira, and Angelo and Akira and all the rest of them – it had been a long time since any of them had been allowed to relax. That same tension was just beginning to unravel when Koichi checked his watch.
“I should probably be going,” he remarked.
At the time, Josuke and Okuyasu were engaged in a private, inane conversation about an upcoming baseball match. As soon as Koichi spoke they snapped to attention. They peered at him from across the bonfire where they sat, huddled obnoxiously close together on one towel.
“What gives?” Josuke asked. “It’s not even midnight, dude.”
“We just got here,” Okuyasu whined.
“I have to get up in the morning.”
“He has cram school,” Yukako added, with the kind of authority usually reserved for speaking about people who are not present.
Her words hovered in the air for a minute, seemingly caught up in the drifts of smoke that wafted off the fire. The two boys stared at her with stuporous looks on their faces.
“Already?” Okuyasu said at last. “We ain’t even second years yet, dude.”
Josuke leveled a look at Yukako, who had her arms looped around Koichi’s shoulders. “You didn’t have anything to do with it, did you?”
“Koichi is perfectly capable of making his own decisions,” she retorted. The hair around her temples began to stir, writhing loosely in an unfelt breeze. “Just because the two of you haven’t thought about your futures doesn’t mean – .”
“Guys, it’s fine!” Koichi blurted out.
At once, the imaginary breeze brewing around Yukako’s shoulders went still. Sniffing, she unwound an arm from around Koichi to brush a stray lock of hair out of her eyes.
“Yukako had nothing to do with it,” Koichi continued. “I just wanted to feel more confident about my chances of getting into my top university pick, that’s all.” He smiled at them, face round and amiable in the firelight. “It’s the same with assignments. I always feel better when I get it done and over with – if I leave my homework until Sunday, I can’t relax all week.”
“If you say so,” mumbled Josuke, who was more of a Monday morning homework type of guy.
“I’ll catch you guys later.”
“See ya around,” Okuyasu said.
When Koichi stood, Yukako copied the gesture, pausing only to gather up her towel and bag.
“What’s the matter, Yukako? Not gonna stick around with me and Okuyasu for a bit?” Josuke asked, slinging an arm around Okuyasu’s shoulder in what he hoped looked like an emphatic gesture of comradery.
Yukako gazed at the boys, and at the narrow space between them, and her eyelids settled heavy over her eyes. “I’d rather not,” she said, flatly.
And then, when she was just at the edge of the bonfire’s circle, her face in shadow but the backs of her calves lit in firelight, Yukako glanced one more time over her shoulder and added, “Have fun, you two.” There was no sing-song hint of teasing to her voice – the words were delivered the same way one would dispatch an order.
From the bonfire Josuke and Okuyasu watched Yukako and Koichi make their way back toward the dune and the rickety old wooden steps leading up it, the couple’s voices hushed in the privacy of darkness until their conversation was lost completely in the sound of the steps creaking underfoot. The pair ascended, twin-cut negatives of shadow against the moon-bathed expanse of dune behind them, distinguishable only by height. At the top of the steps their bodies merged into the black stretch of treeline and disappeared.
“You wanna head back soon too?”
In the course of watching Yukako and Koichi depart, Okuyasu had forgotten the physical proximity between Josuke and himself. He jumped at hearing his friend’s voice come from so close by, the warm imprint of Josuke’s breath scorching where it grazed his cheek.
“I don’t mind hangin’ around a lil’ while longer if you wanna,” he mumbled, scooting away a from Josuke’s curious gaze. In the dim firelight the other boy’s eyes were black pits, showing only pinpricks of red where the fire caught the domes of his eyes – reflections that shifted back and forth appraisingly.
“Same.”
“Cool. Hey, I’m kinda cold. You cold?”
Okuyasu Nijimura was not actually cold. This was late July, when the heat of day lingered well into night; he could feel it in the sand beneath his feet, lukewarm more than an hour after sunset.
“A little, I guess.”
“Hang on.”
Unzipping his knapsack, Okuyasu pulled out the blanket he’d packed. An optimistic addition to his swim trunks and towel, thrown in on the off chance he got to have a moment like this. The blanket was grey with stripes of faded colour. Fleece gone mangy and soft with age. A childhood comfort that he couldn’t help but associate with Josuke: both were measures of warmth and safety.
His arms felt too light as he wrapped the blanket around his and Josuke’s shoulders; weightless, his hands trembled at the slightest movement.
Josuke shifted closer once more – of course he did, Okuyasu’s baby blanket wasn’t that big after all – and he could feel the other boy’s heat and weight lean against his arm. Pressing his lips firmly together, Okuyasu willed his buoyant body to be still. After all, there was nothing unusual or significant about the two of them, alone on the beach, sharing a blanket in front of the bonfire. Josuke was just a touchy guy – by now, he should have been used to all the casual little gestures of affections that passed between them: an arm around his shoulder when they were walking down the street together, Josuke leaning up against him as they waited for the bus, the way he’d tow Okuyasu by the hand whenever something caught his eye. Even now, however – even after all that – Josuke had a way of making him feel seasick.
When he was younger he used to get motion sickness from riding in the car. Focus on the horizon, Keicho would tell him. Pick a point of reference, and your brain will make sense of the rest. He wasn’t sure if the same held true when the cause of his churning stomach was another person, but at the very least, finding some common ground to focus on gave him something to distract himself from just how sweaty his palms were getting.
Don’t think. Just look ahead.
“Got any plans for the summer?” he asked.
“Not really. Mom wants me to pick up some part-time work or something, but it’s like…” Josuke smoothed a hand over the blanket in his lap, running his thumb along a faded pink line, “…I’ll have plenty of time for work and shit later, you know?”
“I feel ya.”
He didn’t tell Josuke that he’d been planning on finding work himself that summer. That since spring, letters had been arriving in the mail addressed to his father’s name, from the utility companies and the bank. The past few months Okuyasu had kept the letters in a neat, untouched pile in the drawer beside the stove, but while the letters were easy to ignore, the constant phone calls were not.
“Besides,” Josuke contined, “Jotaro’s coming back to visit with his daughter sometime in August, so I might score some babysitting cash.”
“Jotaro’s got a daughter? Doesn’t that make you, like…” Okuyasu paused, searching his vocabulary for unfamiliar words of kin that were only ever spoken by the families of others. “…A grand-uncle or something?”
“You mean great uncle? Shit, no. Great uncles are old, man. I’m more like a second uncle or something.”
“Second uncle.”
“You know, like how people have second cousins and third cousins and shit. Second uncle.”
Okuyasu was pretty sure there was no such thing as a second uncle, but then, Josuke had a way about him, in how he spoke, that always made him sound like he knew exactly what he was talking about. He believed every word that came out of his own mouth. That kind of certainty was infectious.
“Sure, makes sense to me.”
“What about you? Got any plans?”
“I was thinking I’d just hang around, spend some time with the old man”
Okuyasu, on the other hand, never quite sounded like he was certain of a single word he said. Everything he spoke concealed a question, less in the connotation or denotation of the words he used and more so in the way he held himself, like he did just then when he looked to Josuke like he was waiting for affirmation.
Josuke grinned at him. “We’re both kinda lame, hunh?”
“Nah dude, s’just you.”
He waited for Josuke to hit him with a comeback, but instead he was met by silence. Just when he was starting to wonder if he should retract the insult, beside him Josuke shifted.
“Nice night out,” Josuke remarked. The pinpricks of firelight in his eyes turned toward the ocean, where the moon cast a silver flight of steps over the water, narrow at the shoreline and widening out where it led up to the sky.
Watching Josuke, the realization finally settled in that come Monday, there’d be no classes. There wouldn’t be any classes for another six weeks. That meant no dragging his ass out of bed at the crack of dawn, but that also meant no more mornings at the Higashikata’s house either. No greeting from Tomoko, who always knew how to make him feel like he was a member of the family instead of a nuisance houseguest; no smell of coffee to wrap him up like a warm blanket while he waited for Josuke to come downstairs; no being the first person to see Josuke in the mornings, when his hair was freshly made up and his eyes were still hazy with sleep; no walking to school together, sharing the narrow width of the sidewalk and easy mundane conversation.
The silence that wound its way between them just then didn’t feel intimate, at least not to Okuyasu – it felt like the first step toward a more permanent absence. He was not comfortable with silence the way Josuke was. For Okuyasu, silence was a portent, synonymous with the empty bottles he’d sometimes find on the kitchen table when he went downstairs for breakfast, years and years ago. Back then he’d tiptoed around his father’s silence, made himself small out of fear of wakening the sound and fury that silence masked, and when his father changed and Keicho’s own brand of silence took over, stifling and heavy and masking nothing, Okuyasu learned to fill the emptiness of the house with his own voice, to announce his presence in every room as if to chase the ghosts away.
He wanted to do something, say something. The bonfire was waning and night was snaking in between and around them, and the darkness made him silly with the thoughts of things he could never bring himself to do during daylight.
We, of course, had seen this all before. But being sixteen and in love has an obnoxious way of convincing people that they are the only ones to have ever felt the way they do, when really they are partaking of sentiment as old and tired-out as the tides. Okuyasu was far from the first person to have fallen in love with his best friend, nor would he be the last, but from how obstinate he was being about the whole process you’d hardly know it.
Instead of acting on any number of the countless unimaginative scenarios he had running through his head, he blurted: “You wanna play truth or dare?”
“Kinda hard with just two people. What could you even do for a dare?”
Okuyasu hadn’t considered this – he’d only been thinking of the truth portion of the game. “Dunno. What if I dared you to go jump in the ocean?”
“I would, but I gotta walk home. I’m not gonna freeze my ass off, dude.”
“I’ll think of somethin’.”
“Alright, you first then.” Josuke folded his arms in front of his chest. “Truth or dare?”
“Truth.”
He hoped Josuke would ask him the question he was too afraid to ask himself, but instead he got:
“Have you ever done anything, like, illegal?”
“The hell kinda question is that?”
“C’mon man. Humour me.”
Just then, Okuyasu almost wished he’d lived a more nefarious life. Maybe not killed anybody or anything like that – just done something that didn’t make him seem completely lame. “Before I moved here, I was, uh. Some kids in my class invited me to a party an’ someone offered me a beer. I had one, just to try it.”
Beside him, Josuke gave a short, close-mouthed laugh. “That’s it?”
“Yeah, whaddabout it?” A thought occurred to Okuyasu. “Have you done anything illegal before?”
“When I was in lower-secondary, yeah. Sometimes I’d go to a store and see something I wanted, and Crazy D would just kinda… grab it for me. I didn’t even think about it, I’d just let it put it in my pocket and walk out.”
By then the fire had settled low into the logs. All Okuyasu could make out of Josuke was his outline, sketched in a faint red glow. He saw the other boy’s shoulders rise and fall in a shrug.
“It never felt like I was the one doing it, y’know? But anyway – I don’t do shit like that anymore.”
In the dark Josuke’s voice, though no more than a whisper, sounded loud and close without the visuals to distract Okuyasu. He thought about Josuke growing up with his stand. About how natural it all must have felt to him, without the experience of having that power ripped out of his soul by force with an arrowhead.
“That doesn’t count as your turn,” Okuyasu interjected.
“Come on!”
“Nah. You gotta pick truth or dare first.”
“Alright. Truth, then.”
All Okuyasu had to do was ask Josuke then and there: “Do you like anyone?” or better yet, “Do you like me?” But in the course of learning about Josuke’s history of delinquency, he’d gotten distracted. And so, Okuyasu did as Okuyasu did best – he blurted the first thing that came to mind:
“Who was your first crush?”
“Just some girl from class, probably.”
“Really? Who?” Okuyasu asked, trying his best to conceal his disappointment.
“You wouldn’t know her, dude. I don’t even remember the name. It was a long time ago, back around when I first met Jotaro.”
“That was three months ago, dude.”
“No, I mean the time before that. When I was a kid.”
This clarification bough Okuyasu some measure of relief – at the very least, it meant there was still a chance that Josuke wasn’t taken up with anyone else.
“Man, I never knew the two of you’d met before,” he complained. “How come ya never told me?”
When Josuke answered, there was a heat to his voice that hadn’t been there moments ago. “Musta slipped my mind.”
“What happened?”
“You can’t ask me two questions in a row – it’s your turn.”
Okuyasu hadn’t expected the game to take a turn for the serious. He’d seen characters play truth or dare in movies before – on celluloid, it was always the buildup to a romantic revelation. Not… whatever this was.
“Forget about the game a minute. I wanna know what Jotaro was doing in Morioh.”
“You know, the usual. Stand user stuff. He was only around a couple weeks. I was six at the time so it’s not like I remember much.”
Keicho had never mentioned anything about other stand users living in Morioh before he’d made himself the vessel of the arrow’s judgement. He’d always just assumed Josuke had been the first.
“Come onnnn dude. What kinda stand stuff we talkin’ bout here?”
The blackened timbers gave a pop, throwing motes of ember into the air, and in the brief burst of light Okuyasu saw Josuke lean in, one corner of his lips quirked up. He was biting into the smile, teeth sunk into his lower lip. Fuck, Okuyasu thought. He doesn’t know he’s being cute.
“You really wanna know?”
“Just spill it already!”
“Alright. Guess I hafta tell you. So there was this stand user…”
Josuke paused just then. With his features receded back into darkness, Okuyasu couldn’t tell what the other boy was thinking. Maybe he was trying to build up dramatic effect, the way they did in movies – the music cutting out, sound effects fading to white noise just before the monster of the week burst into the frame from off screen.
“They were using their stand – .”
“They?” Okuyasu asked.
“He. He was using his stand to kill people.”
“Holy shit, dude. Like Kira?”
“Yeah. Only he was killing kids. Like, you’d hear about it all the time, right? These parents would be out in the yard with their kid and they’d have their backs turned for just a minute…”
“Shit.”
“He must have stayed hiding in the bushes. Hours, days, who the fuck knows. And all that time he’d just be waiting for the moment when whoever he was watching felt safe enough to turn their back.
“And you wanna know the scariest bit? People started telling stories that the guy, whoever he was, was luring kids with just his voice. Like he’d pretend to be a parent or a friend. You’d be minding your own business one day and you’d hear your mom’s voice calling to you from under your bed or something…”
Just then the wind picked up. Up atop the dunes the grass gave a rustle; the boys turned just in time to see it rise and fall in a long, slow wave. From where they sat the entire ridge above was flattened into one black mass, leaving no gaps that might betray the presence of an onlooker.
Okuyasu drew a shallow breath. “Hey, dude? D’you think we could pick this up some other time – like during the day?”
“Yeah, alright. I’ve gotta head home anyway.”
“Walk you back?”
“We’re both going the same direction, genius.”
Nonetheless, Josuke pressed himself close to Okuyasu’s back as the other boy kicked sand over the fire, smothering the last dying embers. With the immediate light extinguished, the background came slowly back into focus: the half moon and the grey cotton clouds above, the beach stretching empty and featureless around them, the silver ripples of moonlight snagged on the waves.
The wind wicked the late July humidity from their skin. In the darkness, Okuyasu felt brave once more – he fumbled, and felt for Josuke’s hand, and with the other’s skin burning holes in his palm he pulled him toward the steps.
They were quiet as they walked along the edge of the woods on their way back to the main road, the sand-laid trail soft and spongey underfoot. The world around them seemed animated by a sinister force, causing the trees to toss and quiver and the clouds to fly like ragged spirits overhead. Both boys kept glancing over their shoulders, imagining the same thing: that the waist-tall grass on either side of the trail concealed eyes that were watching them, waiting for the moment they felt safest, for their backs to turn. Not a human thing but an irrational phantom, a chimeric horror of murderer and victim that crawled belly-low on the grass. Fear of the frightful – how depressingly mortal!
Funny, how the living can walk through an empty field and still worry they’ll run into ghosts. Ghosts are the products of human society, and much prefer the haunting grounds of civilization. The wilderness is a slippery place; not much there for a spirit to take hold of, unless they were a particularly vindictive hiker in life. No, the only ghosts watching from the bushes were us, but that’s hardly a surprise. We have eyes everywhere, after all.