Archive of Our Own ^beta

“I give warning: daughters will always have it harder.”

– Fae Myenne Ng

Hinata Natsu is born at 11:56 PM on August 31st, 2002, in the midst of a heatwave that’s been sweeping Miyagi, Japan for the last week. She is slime-covered and sincere, with a shock of bright orange hair atop her soft-shelled head. Her thrashing arms are pudgy like purin.

For the first 52.08 seconds she’s out of the womb, Natsu is a crying, unremarkable thing. But 52.09 seconds into her stay, a nurse taps her mother’s arm. 

“Would we be able to take your daughter’s measurements now, Hinata-san?” the nurse asks. “This might just be the biggest baby girl we’ve had!”

Natsu may be a wondrous infant, yes, but she is an infant nonetheless. This early on, she needs her mother’s embrace more than anything else. But Hinata Hatsuko has always been a little more down-to-earth than the average person—understanding in all the old ways—so she hands her daughter off without complaint. “Of course,” she says. “Thank you.”

Clinic staff measure Natsu as fifty-five centimeters tall and 4,480 grams heavy, with a head and chest thirty-six and thirty-four centimeters around respectively. 

“Your daughter sure is something,” the nurse marvels, returning Natsu to her mother. “Among the top five biggest baby girls ever born here. Monster babies, we like to call them.” She makes a show of leaning in and raising her hand to her mouth, as if to impart a secret. “Prepare yourself, Hinata-san: Your daughter may very well be quite tall in the future.”

Hatsuko tucks Natsu close to her heartbeat. “Rather curious,” she murmurs, brushing two fingers along the thick yellow blanket bundling her baby. “My first child wasn’t very big at all. In fact, Shou-kun was barely 3,000 grams.”

The nurse laughs, clapping nitrile-gloved hands together. “Well, genetics are funny. Fate even more so.” She purses her lips. “Now, I do hate to dampen the mood, but do you feel any exceptional pain in your lower body? Babies as large as yours often result in tailbone fractures, especially in slighter women such as yourself.”

Hatsuko shifts in the clinic bed, and sure enough, a dull pain rents out the basin of her hips. “Why yes,” she confirms through clenched teeth, “I do.”

And so it goes. Hinata Natsu is born as the hottest summer month dies: a life for a life. She is slippery and strong, with the same flaming hair as a mother who broke bones for her and a brother she knows only by name. She is special in exactly one way, and she will grow tall.

For the first nine years or so, the delivery nurse’s prediction seems to ring hollow. Natsu is not short, but she’s not tall either; she’s just average. Typical. Ordinary. Run-of-the-mill. During her terrible twos, she’s in the fiftieth percentile for height. At age three, she falls somewhere between the fifty-fifth and fifty-eigth, and when she’s four, she finally cracks the sixtieth.

On Natsu’s fourth birthday, her mother records her small stature against the door frame of the kitchen. One—especially a young one—might think that a new practice signals a new development, but this isn’t the case. It takes Natsu only a small amount of squinting and whining to realize that the height marking doesn’t reflect a growth spurt; Hatsuko’s just doing what she did when Shouyou turned four. 

This, of course, won’t do. So Natsu sleeps twelve hours each night, and stretches every morning with her brother, and consumes a frankly unhealthy amount of milk. But it’s all to no avail. Her five-year-old stature comes up just four centimeters taller than Shouyou’s when he was five. This pattern will persist well into elementary school.

Time and time again, Hatsuko tells Natsu that she’s allowed to grow—that she doesn’t need to start all grown up. But it’s difficult for an adolescent to understand this, and nearly impossible for a child to. After all, Natsu has been told since birth that she’d be a monster, so why isn’t the prophecy fulfilling itself? Why hasn’t she reached her full potential? It’s hard to hurry up and wait when you’re young.

To fill her empty days, Natsu leans into sports. And even without her birth-ascribed gift of height, she’s still a talent to watch from the beginning. She sprints about as fast as her brother. She teaches herself how to do mill circles on the playground bars and double-unders on the concrete. She gets comfortable holding a basketball in her hands, balancing a soccer ball on her toe, and plunging into the freezing water of the local swimming hole. 

But even as Natsu’s athletic prowess develops, she doesn’t find herself drawn to a single sport. One way or another, there’s always some barrier that prevents her from selling her soul. Figure skating? Lessons are too expensive. Ballet? Natsu’s hair couldn’t be wrapped into a bun if someone gave her a ribbon and tape. Tennis? The nearest courts are a thirty-five-minute walk away.

Then, one unexceptional spring day, Shouyou comes home from school with a worn volleyball under his skinny arm, and the world ends and begins again. 

At first, the changes are small. Shouyou starts yapping more about terms Natsu’s never heard of—dives and feints and cross hits—and they argue more over who gets to use the TV. (Thursday evenings are Natsu’s time to watch Pretty Cure. They’re also conveniently when the collegiate volleyball matches are streamed.) 

As the months strafe overhead like swallows, the changes get bigger. Shouyou passes his entrance exam to Karasuno, a high school that’s a literal mountain away. When asked why he’s so committed to a school that requires a good forty-five-minute bike ride, he answers in one word: “Volleyball.”

That becomes his answer to a lot of things. Sorry, Nacchan, but I have volleyball practice. There’s a match on this afternoon, so we can’t go to the park. I’m really sorry, but Izumi-kun’s coming over and we’re going to practice all evening. 

The obvious way to circumvent Shouyou’s time-consuming hobby is to simply participate in it too. And in the beginning, Natsu attempts to do so. But volleyball proves to be the first sport that doesn’t come naturally to her, and when Shouyou snickers after she fails to perform his lonely passing drill, it feels more like he’s laughing at her than with her. So she starts reaching out to her brother less, and he follows suit. 

At age sixteen, Shouyou makes it to nationals with the Karasuno Boys Volleyball Team. His face gets plastered on local bulletin boards, and the convenience store two blocks from their house starts giving him unofficial discounts on Pocari Sweat bottles. This is to say that Shouyou becomes a Big Deal. This is to say that he isn’t around much anymore. 

On Natsu’s tenth birthday, Shouyou taps out of their family movie night tradition to practice his serves. He apologizes, of course, but it’s sloppy, and when their mother mandates he at least put the candles on his sister’s birthday cake before leaving, he only sticks in nine. 

Hatsuko fixes her son’s mistake as fast as she can, but it’s too late: Natsu has already scrambled into the kitchen and noticed they’re one short. Her little heart buckles, breaks, and leaks out love. 

Before she can get a word in, her mother makes like water and falls. “We know you’re turning ten years old, Nacchan,” she spills, smooth and steady. “What a big age for my big girl! An unforgettable age, really.” Hatsuko brings the birthday cake over to the table, shoves a tenth candle into its spongy center, and strikes a match. “So Shou-kun couldn’t have forgotten,” she continues matter-of-factly, lighting the candles with the grace of a fire dancer. “He’s just a little distracted with volleyball—that’s all. You know how your brother can be.”

Natsu watches the wax of the tenth candle soften before dripping down into plush whipped cream. She doesn’t say anything in response.

(There are few reasons why, but here’s the biggest one: Hatsuko had told her, “You know how your brother can be,” but what she should’ve said was, “You know how your brother is.” Because in all honesty, Shouyou’s been prioritizing volleyball for over three years now, and he shows no signs of changing his behavior any time soon. Natsu’s big brother eats volleyball, sleeps volleyball, and dreams volleyball. He doesn’t have time for Ultraman marathons or coloring competitions anymore. He doesn’t have time for most things that involve his little sister, it seems.

Shouyou has grown out of Natsu—just as she’s started growing up. Their joined-at-the-hip, peas-in-a-pod relationship is gone, and it will never be coming back. Such is the way of the world.)

Hatsuko takes a seat at the kitchen table next to her daughter. “Happy birthday, Nacchan. Make a wish.”

And Natsu does.

(For what it’s worth, Shouyou does apologize for the birthday candles mishap. And even if Hatsuko is the one who put him up to it, Natsu can tell that her brother’s regret is sincere. After he finishes his apology, he gives her a hug, and then a pat on the head, and then the best gift she’s ever received: a limited edition “Hello Kitty in Hawaiʻi” plushie. Shouyou tells her he spent three months saving up for it. Natsu hugs the stuffed animal to her chest for the rest of the day and falls asleep with it under the covers beside her.

In the morning, Kitty-chan has migrated to the bottom of the futon and lost half of her seashell bikini. Natsu rubs the sleep out of her eyes and squints at the fluffy cat. She decides that in spite of the wonderful gift, she’s still mad at her brother—at least a little bit.

At ten years young, Natsu learns that you can’t put a monetary value on dignity. It’ll take her the rest of her life to learn that you never forget your first heartbreak.)

According to a given survey, only 9% of Japanese citizens identify as devoutly religious. This figure is interesting, if only because it must be accompanied by an asterisk. The majority of Japanese people do in fact participate in religious activities on a regular basis; they tend to the butsudan, cleanse their bodies before entering shrines, and pray for luck in love. But they deem these activities to be cultural rather than spiritual. They’re a part of the very latticework upon which Japanese society and history rest upon. 

Natsu falls among the 91% of Japanese folk who don’t consider themselves religious but still practice religious activities in conjunction with their culture. Maybe this is why she sees her descent into volleyball as something predestined, cosmic. Perhaps this is why committing herself to the same sport as her brother feels like divine retribution.

This is a story as old as time itself, and it only has one ending. It opens like this:

Against all odds, every member of the three-person Hinata household is home. Shouyou’s terrorizing the grasshoppers in their front yard, practicing something or another that involves a lot of falling down and hissing curses through his teeth. In the kitchen, Hatsuko’s preparing dinner (okonomiyaki, Osaka style). Natsu colors at the kitchen table, trying and failing to ignore her brother just beyond the sliding doors of the living room.

It’s early fall, and it’s criminally hot, and it feels like the sun will explode any day now, but it won’t.

“You know, Natsu,” Hatsuko begins, stirring her batter like she’s trying to lull it to sleep, “you might like volleyball if you gave it a chance.” 

Natsu scoffs, uncapping a red marker to color in a crooked strawberry. “I did give it a chance, remember? Niichan didn’t wanna play with me.”

“Really?”

“Mhm.” Natsu colors harder, tongue peeking out between gapped teeth. “He laughed at me. He was embarrassed by me.”

Her mother walks over to her. Setting down her mixing bowl, she says, “Now, we both know that’s not true. Your brother loves you, and he loves volleyball. Sure, he could’ve been nicer a few years back, but you were both so young then. Things’ll be different this time.” She reaches over and peels back Natsu’s coloring sheet, which has gone soggy with oversaturation and started staining the green tablecloth. “Besides, volleyball might be a better way to get your energy out than coloring.”

Natsu scratches triangles into her shorts as she considers this. She does miss Shouyou, and as much as she loathes to admit it, a part of her misses volleyball too—in a loose, nebulous way. There’s a distinct thrill that comes with being bad at something initially; it’s a reminder that struggle is one of the only things guaranteed in life, and that from struggle comes growth. 

“I guess the tablecloth is a little dirty,” she mumbles at last, setting down her marker before running over to the living room sliding doors.

“Be careful, Nacchan,” her mother calls after her. “And have fun!”

As Natsu slips out through the doors and onto the deck, she’s met with the sight of her brother hunched over, panting, with his narrow hands digging into scabbed knees. He’s smack in the middle of the yard. A blue and gold volleyball bounces a few meters in front of him before petering out to a stop.

Natsu quietly swings her legs over the ledge of the porch and onto the plush grass. Then she sneaks up behind her brother and greets him with a boisterous, “Hi, Niichan!”

Shouyou shrieks like a banshee and nearly topples over. After regaining his balance, which takes a concerningly long amount of time for a nationally ranked-athlete, he manages to wheeze out, “God, Nacchan, you scared me! I thought you were a burglar or something.”

“Why would a burglar be outside?” Natsu asks through giggles.

“I don’t know!” her brother barks, crossing his arms defensively. “Do I look like I know how a burglar thinks?” 

“Do I look like I know how a burglar thinks either?”

It’s easy to fall back into their regular banter; it always is, even after a long while apart. As they continue to shoot the breeze, discussing burglars and money heists and recent buddy cop films, Natsu relaxes. She begins to wonder why she ever started spending time apart from her brother. But then Shouyou scoops up his volleyball off the ground and starts passing it to himself, and she remembers why.

“So,” he says in between flawless bumps, “what’re you doin’ out here?”

“Well, I—”

Bump.

“I was—I mean—”

Bump, bump.

“You see Mama told me to—”

Bump, bump, bump.

“—I wanna play volleyball with you!”

Shouyou’s wrists unstick from each other and his arms fall limp at his side. As he opens his mouth to gape, the still-suspended volleyball collides with his left temple. 

Natsu’s seen this exact situation happen more than a few times, so she leaves Shouyou to recover on his own. “I wanna play volleyball with you, Niichan,” she repeats, more sure of herself this time. 

Shouyou massages his skull, looks his little sister up and down through a squint as he picks up the fallen ball. “I heard you, yeah, but why?” His eyes widen as he processes his words. “Not that it’s a bad thing! I’m just curious ‘cause we used to play when you were in preschool, and then you kinda—stopped entirely.”

Natsu knows exactly why she’s giving volleyball another chance. She reckons it isn’t all that hard to put two and two together, but her brother’s always been a bit dense, and if he doesn’t get it on his own, she’s not going to explain it to him. Shouyou doesn’t need to know everything. He shouldn’t have to know everything. So she replies, “Dunno. Looked interesting, I guess.”

Her brother’s got a heart of gold, so he merely pumps his fist in the air like a Shounen Jump protagonist and lets out a hoot of victory. “All right, sounds good to me! Let’s teach you how to pass.”

Natsu tightens the straps of her light-up velcro shoes. “Let’s.”

Hatsuko was right: Things are different this time around. Maybe it’s because Natsu’s finally growing into her body, or maybe it’s because she’s been imbibing volleyball knowledge like sacrament over the last few years. Whatever the reason, the learning curve is far less steep this evening. It takes some time for her to get used to the burn of leather against her forearms, but before long, she’s able to keep a rally of a few hits going with her brother. 

“You should give volleyball a real chance, Nacchan,” Shouyou muses as he bumps the ball long and high. “I think you’d like it a lot.”

Natsu receives his pass with all the grace she has. “Yeah? Why’s that?”

Shouyou catches the ball in his hands this time. He taps it in thought, then gives an “I don’t know” shrug. “I guess ‘cause I like it, and I think we’re pretty similar.”

Above them, the sky yawns opens with warm rain. Fall lasts a long time.

Natsu’s only been on a plane once. She was four years old, which means her memories of the trip are very, very blurry and also probably informed by the stories Shouyou and her mother have told her. They spent a week in Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi munching on poke nachos and lounging on the beach with Hatsuko’s Nikkei friends from college. It was a welcome respite from the hustle and bustle of their daily lives. It was also one of the last trips their family took together before Natsu’s father left. 

But that’s beside the point. The point is that one of her muzzy memories from the trip was the sensation of sinking into her seat as their plane descended onto Oʻahu—the heavy drag of the wind, gravity wrapping around her ankles and tugging. 

The changes that unfold in Natsu’s life after that sky-seen fall night feel a lot like that. They’re slow at first, a steady drip-drip, and when she finally realizes they’re happening, she’s already in the thick of them.

Competitive sports typically stunt puberty, but volleyball catalyzes it for Natsu. It’s as if the same week she starts practice, her forehead becomes a deep frying factory. She wakes up with a pimple the size of Tokyo right between her eyebrows and has to put up with her brother making snide comments about it until she pops it in the bathroom in the dead of night. It bleeds horrifically. It’s worth it anyway.

Over the next two years, Natsu gets a crash course in self-care. She learns that sunscreen should be worn every day, not just in the summer. (This is a lesson she’ll often disregard.) She discovers what deodorant is and why she should always keep it in her bag. Then, over the course of three particularly painful months, she shoots up six centimeters, makes splints out of her shins, and convinces herself she’s dying when she pulls down her pajama pants to find her underwear covered in blood. 

Natsu tells her mother about her impending doom over breakfast the following morning. 

Hatsuko, who has just come off a double shift at the clinic, laughs, forgetting herself. She stops when she sees her daughter’s teeth-baring reaction. “Oh, Nacchan, you’re not dying. That’s just your period, remember? We talked about it a while ago.”

The empty bottle of a memory floats to the top of Natsu’s mind. She’s eleven years old and searching for the flat iron, which her mother has hidden away somewhere. (At this age, she detests her natural hair. Natsu’s still coming out of that nasty phase, but she no longer frys her waves each morning, which has to count for something.) She opens every cabinet and drawer in their bento box of a bathroom. Finally, she checks for the flat iron in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror, and that’s when she sees it: a hyacinth-purple box adorned with dents and drawings of daisies. Sanitary pads. 

“Right,” Natsu murmurs, creasing the memory in her head like origami paper. “It’s my period.”

Hatsuko starts the electric kettle. “The first one’s always a bit of a shock. I didn’t have a clue what was going on when I got mine.” She flicks her wrist. “You know how your grandmother is. She never spoke a word to me about puberty—and we didn’t have internet access the way you do now either, mind you—which meant I was at a total loss.”

“So what did you do?” Natsu asks, pouring shouyu into her tamago kake gohan and stirring.

“Oh, I just wadded up toilet paper in my underwear for a few months. Eventually one of my friends at school caught on that something was bothering me and cornered me, but for half a year or so, I was just walking around like they did in the olden days.” Hatsuko drums her fingers against the kitchen counter as she waits for the kettle to finish heating. “I mean, I assume that’s what happened in the olden days. I guess I’m not really sure how they went about things.”

Natsu takes a bite of her slimy rice. She tries to picture Hatsuko at her age, waddling around her school grounds with a clump of toilet paper between her unshaved legs. It’s nearly impossible. 

“I was awkward too,” her mother says, as if reading her mind. She takes the kettle off the stand and pours it into her favorite tall mug. “It happens to everyone, but hits us girls especially hard. It’s just a part of growing up, the same as your period.” 

“Really?” Natsu blurts, before she can help it. She takes a sip of her miso shiru to cover her embarrassment.

“Really.” Hatsuko rests her hip against the counter and swirls her tea with one hand. “Now, finish up your breakfast. After I do the dishes, we’ll go to the store and buy you some pads.”

“Tampons!” Natsu corrects, soup bowl still lifted to her mouth. The force of her word sends a ripple across the bonito broth, bobbing neat squares of tofu up and down.

Her mother blinks, both hands coming up to clutch her mug. “Sorry?”

“Tampons,” Natsu repeats, steadier this time. “I should mainly be getting tampons. You know, cause of volleyball.”

The house smells like dashi. Beyond the kitchen window, a young boy whistles past on his bicycle. It’s a Sunday in February and this is one of the last times Natsu will speak to her mother without reservation, but she doesn’t know that yet. 

If Hatsuko is put off by her daughter’s outburst, she doesn’t let it show. She takes a contemplative sip of her tea. “Of course, Nacchan. We’ll be sure to get you both.”

Practicing with a tampon in, it turns out, is a bit awkward. Natsu’s racked with paranoia that her string is sticking out of her shorts, and she goes to the bathroom every hour to frantically check that she’s not leaking. But the change is nothing she can’t get used to. She’s an athlete, after all, and athletes adapt. So by the end of the week, she’s back in tip-top shape. And by the end of the year, Natsu’s life is nearly unrecognizable.

Now, her weekdays revolve less around memorizing the stroke order of kanji and more around the squeak of rubber soles against polished polyurethane. She spends her Saturdays and Sundays conditioning and playing in practice matches. Her YouTube history is cluttered with conditioning content.

Volleyball breaks Natsu’s ribs and pries her chest open. It forces her to be agile, resourceful, and diligent. Above all else, though, it teaches her how to be tough. And tough doesn’t just mean gritting her teeth through the dozen and a half swan dives she has to do every morning practice. It doesn’t only mean spiking until she’s certain her labrum is going to tear from overuse—that her body is going to unravel like a spool of thread. 

Tough also means losing sleep and seeing her grades drop. Tough means spending even less time with her brother because she’s self-conscious about their gap in skill level. Tough means trudging home after a three-hour practice and finding her mother asleep at the dining table, arms pillowed beneath her head and an untouched meal in front of her as if she is waiting—just waiting—for her daughter to come home.

Volleyball takes Natsu’s childhood between the teeth, and it bites down hard.

Somewhere amidst the madness, Shouyou moves. And he doesn’t just move cities or prefectures like a normal young adult; no, because Shouyou is Shouyou, he moves across the entire fucking globe. Natsu wishes she could chalk it up to her brother’s impulsive, firecracker personality, but she knows this decision has been in the works for years now. She can tell from the moment Shouyou brings up Brazil. His suggestion is too precise and his reasoning too cogent; he’s planned this, and he isn’t taking no for an answer.

Their mother pretends to think over the contrived proposal. “All right, Shou,” she concedes at last. “We’d better start saving.”

So Shouyou gets a part-time job, and then another one, while Hatsuko starts picking up more and more shifts at the clinic. Through it all, Natsu focuses on volleyball. She spends entire afternoons at the school gym, even when there’s no practice, just stretching or watching highlight reels of top female spikers on her phone. Her coach beams at this development, but other teachers at school show their concern. Why isn’t she going home? Aren’t her folks worried? Natsu explains that her father’s not in the picture, her mother’s a working woman, and her older brother has practically rented a room at their local recreation center to practice his serves. She does not tell them that anything is better than sitting by yourself in an empty house. 

Things continue this way for the next two years. In 2016, Natsu waves goodbye to Shouyou as he boards the train to Narita International Airport. He’s equipped with barely any money to his name and less than ten intelligible Portuguese phrases. He’s got zero sense of direction; sometimes he still gets lost on his morning jogs around their neighborhood. But Natsu’s not worried. Shouyou is Shouyou, which means things will work out for him. 

She’d told him as much the day before. 

It was Shouyou’s last night in Japan for at least a year, and he asked to have some one-on-one time with her. Natsu couldn’t fathom why; she and her brother hadn’t been close since she started junior high, and he was the one now astronomically widening the distance between them. But maybe his upcoming departure was making him nostalgic. That would certainly explain why they were going to sunset park, a local haunt they used to spend entire afternoons at before Shouyou’s volleyball career took off.

On the way there, Shouyou stopped at a vending machine. He got himself a beer and gave Natsu her favorite grape soda, followed by a pointed look that read, “Don’t tell Mama.”

Natsu shot one of her own back. “It’s not like she would care.”

Shouyou stuck out his tongue. “Yeah, but sometimes she’s a stickler about shit like this.”

With a roll of her eyes, Natsu concluded the conversation. “Yeah, yeah, I got it.”

Once the park was in view, they cracked open their drinks and clinked them together. Natsu chugged half of her soda, then stifled her laughter when Shouyou took the first sip of his beer and immediately started coughing. He’d been drinking for the last year or so, but still had trouble handling his liquor. (On more than one occasion, Natsu had been woken up in the dead of night by a call from an exasperated Kageyama, begging to be let in so he could deposit her deadweight brother in the genkan.)

They took a seat on their favorite bench, right beside the playground. 

“So, how’s practice going lately?” Shouyou asked, scratching at the faint stubble on his chin. 

“It’s good,” Natsu replied, trying not to think about how volleyball was the only thing they ever seemed to talk about now. “Hard, too.”

Shouyou laughed, bright. “Well, you’re almost fourteen. Everything’s hard around that age.”

A breeze whisked past them then, mussing their hair into twin orange rat nests. Natsu scrambled to fix her angry waves. By the time she’d tucked her baby hairs back behind her ears, Shouyou had launched into a full monologue.

“It’s the same with me, really,” he was saying, talking with his hands. “To be honest, I’m a little scared of going to Brazil. Not ‘cause of beach volleyball, since I’m sure I’ll figure that out in time, but everything else.” He took a swig from his bottle. “I mean, I haven’t even been on a plane since I was like ten, and I’m pretty sure Mama had to knock me out with meds back then so that I wouldn’t spend all eight hours in the bathroom.”

“You have your noise-canceling headphones now,” Natsu reminded him. (They were her brother’s big nineteenth birthday gift, and Natsu had pitched in a good 5000 yen. It cost her six month’s worth of allowance.) “You’ll be fine.” 

Shouyou rubbed at his right shoulder. “But still, I’ll miss everyone when I’m gone, Nacchan. I haven’t even left the country yet, and it already feels like someone chopped off an arm.” 

Natsu bit her bottom lip, nodded to herself. The phantom pain her brother alluded to was probably Kageyama. The two had become bound by a collective psychology over the last three years—moving as one entity, perpetually performing that mirror exercise from Natsu’s sixth-grade theatre class. At times, their synchrony seemed almost romantic. 

Then six months ago, Natsu walked in on her brother’s best friend pinning him to the wall of their laundry room, and she realized it was, in fact, romantic.

Shouyou and Kageyama were a good match: both agents of chaos, both a bit oblivious, both overwhelming in different ways. And they loved each other. They loved volleyball because they loved each other; they loved each other because they loved volleyball. So when Shouyou told Kageyama he was leaving, his boyfriend voiced no qualms. But voicing no qualms is different from not having any. They both knew as much.

Natsu, in a rare gesture of affection, placed a hand on her brother’s knee. “Don’t worry, Niichan,” she tried to soothe. “Things’ll work out. They always do.”

“You’re just a kid,” Shouyou grumbled, looking away. “How the hell could you know that?”

Natsu winced, retracting her hand as if burned. She looked off into the distance where the sun was setting, framed by tall, dark trees shooting up from the long, hooked grass. “I just know,” she said, slurping down more of her soda.

“But how?” Shouyou pressed again, and for just a second—one minuscule sliver of a split-second—Natsu felt like they were five and eleven years old again, snuggled up together on the carpeted living room floor, whispering secrets into each other’s ears. 

“Because you’re the kind of person who has a happy ending,” she said at last, rocking the memory back and forth in her arms.

Her brother didn’t respond. They walked home from sunset park in silence, and their quiet held fast until they arrived at the train station the following morning.

“See you when I see you,” Shouyou said, saluting two fingers from his temple.

“See you when I see you,” Natsu echoed back, giving a curt nod.

They didn’t ask each other to text, or call, or check-in with their mother. Natsu would like to think that this was because they simply didn’t need to, but she’s not stupid. She knows that that morning was just the end of the beginning.

Her brother doesn’t reach out for three months. Natsu doesn’t dwell on this much. Why would she? It’s inevitable. She and Shouyou were the best of friends as small children, sure, but that was then. This is now. They’re six years apart in age with nothing in common aside from the sport that has ravaged both of their lives. Frankly, it’d be weirder if they got along without a hitch. Natsu tells herself this over and over again as she scans her empty video chat logs and LINE chats. 

When they finally do share a FaceTime call, the dynamic is stilted, the fictive motion of it all off. This is when Natsu realizes that while Shouyou will always be her brother, he won’t always be her friend. There’s a brief bit where she thinks about randomly messaging him about her days: the stray cat she saw outside school, the saishoku dinner their mother reheated, the new contusion spanning her shin. She considers asking her brother if the exhaustion in her bones is there to stay. 

But in the end, she always decides against it. Natsu’s life will continue, with or without Shouyou in it. She’ll turn the earth herself if she has to.

When Shouyou first announced that he wanted to be a spiker—that he wanted to be the best ace Miyagi Prefecture had ever seen—Natsu decided that she would do the same. 

She didn’t say this aloud, of course. She’s never been a fan of making claims she can’t support, and when she first touched a volleyball, she was terrible and tantrum-prone. Her brother would’ve laughed at her. He would’ve dismissed her without a second thought. 

So instead, Natsu kept the dream like a secret. Cradled it at night with her soft hands, and kept cradling it even after her hands no longer remembered how to be soft. 

Height never mattered until it did. By the second half of junior high, Natsu is 165 centimeters tall. She towers above her classmates and can hold her ground against other volleyball players too, but she’s not exceptionally tall among the world she’s trying to conquer. She begins to worry, in the back of her mind, that she’s too short to be the spiker her team needs—the spiker her prefecture and country need. There is a difference between being a giant and being a monster, after all, and Natsu is only one of these things. 

This becomes clear when Coach Kawakami beckons her over after practice one day. 

“There’s something I want to talk to you about, Hinata-san,” her coach begins, calm and collected. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. Maybe you have too.”

Natsu lets down her sweaty hair, winces when her fingers catch in the knots of it. “It’s about my position, isn’t it, Sensei?”

She knows the answer from the way her coach’s breath hitches. So it’s settled then: Natsu’s body has failed her.

“You’re a wonderful hitter, Hinata-san; nobody is saying otherwise.” Kawakami looks up for a moment, as if searching for the right words among the rafters. “It’s just that you’ve already started puberty,” she continues, looking back down, “and from here on out, there are going to be more and more people who are taller than you. Spikers, middle blockers, setters who are all taller than you. What I’m trying to say is: It simply isn’t realistic—”

“—to think that I’m going to outgrow them all,” Natsu finishes for her. 

“You’ve got a great jumping vertical now, but there’s only so much that effort can eclipse.” Kawakami shakes her head. “And with the rate you’re going, I’m afraid you’re more likely to bust a knee on your landing than you are to play in college.” She claps Natsu on the shoulder and smiles wide. “But the good thing about you, young lady, is that you’re multi-talented. And even better, you’re still young. If you work on your defense a bit more, you’ll be an excellent libero. Any high school will be lucky to have you.”

Natsu subtly shrugs her coach’s hand off her shoulder, then bows to her—in apology, in gratitude, in a secret third thing.

Being a libero comes as naturally as Natsu could’ve hoped it would. Coach Kawakami begins allotting time at the end of practice twice a week for her to condition with Mikki, their current libero, and when their team splits apart to run position-specific drills, Natsu starts to go with the defense crew. She won’t lie and say she doesn’t miss being a hitter. Sometimes she’ll watch a particularly good spike in one of the collegiate matches on TV and feel her right arm just vibrate with muscle memory. But the hum always goes away after a few seconds.

By the end of her junior high career, Natsu is officially an unstoppable defensive force. Her team sweeps the Miyagi Prefectural Championships and the offers from sports high schools roll in like cash. The interviews start to come too: questions about Natsu’s upbringing, her switch in positions, her last name and its connection to one Hinata Shouyou. She prepares cookie-cutter answers that have every reporter twinkling up at her. She’s honest when she says she doesn’t know what her brother’s future has in store.

When Coach Ozawa extends Natsu an invitation to play for Niiyama Girls High School, she accepts without a second thought. Why wouldn’t she? Niiyama are consistent national qualifiers and Ozawa herself played in the V.League for many years before a lower back fracture had her turning toward coaching. If Natsu wants to compete internationally in her future, this is the path she has to take. Sure, Niiyama is ridiculously expensive and ridiculously far away, but it’s nothing a sports scholarship and a PASMO card can’t fix. 

Hatsuko let her son go to Brazil. She can let her daughter commute two hours round trip five days a week.

A few days after Natsu celebrates her official Niiyama acceptance with two dozen chicken wings, Shouyou texts her. It’s the first message he’s sent in weeks.

From: Shouyou

To: Natsu

[08:24]

> congratulations on committing to niiyama!!!!

> [description: animated gif of a cartoon brown bear shaking pom poms in celebration]

> i hear you’re a libero now ?

When we were young, you never had to hear these things through the grapevine, Natsu thinks, staring long and hard at the messages. Bitterly: You used to know me. 

From: Natsu
To: Shouyou 

[20:16]

> thanks.

It takes Natsu all but two days to realize that Niiyama Girls High School is a hellscape.

Her first day is deceptively easy. She gives a boisterous self-introduction that has her classmates whispering to each other behind cupped hands. She says hello to her teammates when they pass each other in the halls, and she manages to show up to the gym early. Evening practice goes by without a hitch.

The trouble starts on day two. Natsu arrives almost twenty minutes late to school, courtesy of her bike chain getting stuck on the ride over to the train station. This sorry second impression easily eclipses whatever golden picture she might’ve painted the day before. Murakami Sensei, her homeroom teacher, assigns her detention without batting an eye. 

Natsu protests this, obviously; she brings up volleyball practice, her dedication to the team, Niiyama’s history of producing nationally-ranked athletes. But Murakami won’t hear it. 

“If you didn’t want detention, Hinata-san,” her teacher enunciates, slow and patronizing, “then you should’ve arrived on time. You’re in high school now. You do know your actions have consequences, yes?”

And really, what can Natsu say to a rhetorical question like that? She bows—once, twice, thrice—then scurries off to the gym while hollering to Murakami that she’ll be back to the teachers’ lounge shortly.

Ozawa was probably a psychic in her last life, or maybe a shaman, or a magician, because she understands the situation immediately. Somehow, this only makes Natsu’s predicament more embarrassing.

“I’m your coach,” Ozawa says, clicking her pen and setting it on her clipboard. “I’m here to shape you into the best volleyball player you can be, not weasel you out of detention.” She quirks a brow, juts out a hip. “You do know that excessive disciplinary issues can result in the suspension or loss of your sports scholarship, yes?”

Ozawa is one of those people who talks more with her body than she does with her words. It’s what makes her such a phenomenal coach: If you’re lucky enough to speak her language of nuances, she’ll give you life-changing pointers without even opening her mouth. Right now, the harsh contours of her figure are telling Natsu: You can’t shirk your academic duties and expect to mosey on down to practice afterward. You can’t work hard in one aspect of your life and not in every other. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. 

“I know,” Natsu insists, clasping her hands together in apology, “and I’m sorry. It’s a one-time thing, Sensei, I swear. I’ll be better from here on out.”

Her coach gives a skeptical grunt, then sets her clipboard and pen down on the bleachers. “I don’t need you to be ‘better,’ Hinata-san. I need you to be the best.”

Natsu hangs her head low as she follows Ozawa out of the gym, through the school, and back into the teacher’s lounge. Her coach enters the space with an astounding air of determination and finality. She’s three steps through the door, but it’s already hers; somehow, something has already been decided. 

“Keiko,” Ozawa calls, and it’s only as they’re walking over to Murakami Sensei that Natsu realizes two things:

1. Her homeroom teacher, like any other person, has a first name. That name is Keiko.
2. Ozawa knows her homeroom teacher well enough to use her first name.

How curious.

“First names are unprofessional in the workplace,” Murakami says without looking up from her desk. “Shouldn’t you know this by now, Ozawa Sensei?”

Something about the way Murakami curls her upper lip around the soft s ’s of “sensei” has Natsu feeling like she’s walked in on something. She fidgets with the hem of her shorts.

“Please, we’ve never been professional in the workplace,” Ozawa fires back, and now Natsu’s definitely sure she’s walked in on something. “But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Hinata-san told me you gave her detention. My athletes can’t miss practice if we’re going to defend our titles. Shouldn’t you know this by now, Keiko?”

A glare. “There you go again, prioritizing volleyball over everything.” 

An eye roll. “Hinata-san is one of our best players. It’d be a disservice to our school for her to be cleaning chalkboards rather than practicing her receives on the court.”

Murakami rummages through her desk until she procures the attendance sheet from first period. She circles her pencil around the double-digit number scrawled beside Natsu’s printed name.  “No, it’s a disservice to our school that Hinata-san arrived”—tap, tap, tap—“eighteen minutes late today. Tardiness is unacceptable at Niiyama, and by allowing her to go unpunished, I’m setting a poor precedent, especially in regard to student athlete special privileges.”

The shadows of Ozawa’s face tremble in quiet anger. Natsu thinks her coach might scream. She doesn’t, though; instead, she slams her hand onto the desk in front of them, hard enough to knock the pencil out of Murakami’s hand. 

This, Natsu thinks to herself as she watches in awe, is the hand of a setter: cold, calculating. 

“No, Keiko, we’re setting a poor precedent.” Ozawa snags Murakami’s pencil just before it rolls to the floor. She places it in the teacher’s shocked, open palm, then closes those impossibly pale fingers around it. “Now, if you’ll excuse us,” she says sweetly, “we have a practice to attend.” 

Ozawa drags Natsu out of the teachers’ lounge by the collar of her shirt. When they get back to the gym, she all but throws her onto the ground. 

“You have five minutes to get changed and stretch, Hinata-san. Practice is starting late because of you, so you’ve set two poor precedents today.” Ozawa leans in close, and Natsu can smell the cigarette smoke on her tongue. “If you pull this shit again, I’m making you a reserve.”

“I won’t,” Natsu says. And she doesn’t.

Shouyou once said that from age fifteen onward, life started to go by faster than he could keep track of it. 

He didn’t actually say that. He wrote it down during one of those phases where he was trying to be an avid journaler like Kageyama, because he was trying to do everything like Kageyama at the time. But Natsu found the forgotten journal a while back. It was wedged under the couch behind a box of ankle weights. She flipped open to a random page, and there it was: that short, solemn statement written in her brother’s signature chicken scratch. And it was jarring to read, kind of, the same way learning your mother dyes her gray hair is jarring. Before that day, Natsu had never really read her brother’s writing. She’d always assumed it would be packed with the same animation his speech held—those bwahhs and whooshs and pows—but it wasn’t.

“I’m fifteen now, and life’s going by so much faster than I can keep track of it.”

That’s all it said. I’m fifteen now, and life’s going by so much faster than I can keep track of it.

During Natsu’s first year of high school, something exceptionally unexceptional happens. It goes like this:

She arrives at school early, per usual, but decides to use the west wing restroom rather than the one by her east wing homeroom. There’s no particular reasoning behind this choice. Maybe Natsu’s eyes hunger for a change of scenery. Maybe it’s because of the rose scones her mother baked that morning. Or maybe it’s simply because she feels like it. Whatever the reason, Natsu’s spur-of-the-moment cross-pollination has her walking into the western bathroom at 7:18 AM on Monday, October 1st, and witnessing something she is not supposed to witness. 

Standing at the third sink from the door is Watada Mayu, a third-year Natsu has only ever seen in passing. She is arguably the most popular—and most beautiful—girl in school. 

Watada is leaning into the mirror and poking at her eye repeatedly. As Natsu watches her perfect pointer finger dovetail with her cornea, she realizes what’s happening. 

“Color contact lenses,” she murmurs to herself, dumbstruck. 

Watada whips her head toward Natsu's voice with force enough to break a lesser woman’s neck. “Excuse me?” she hisses. Her right eye is ever so slightly lighter and more dilated than her left. 

“Hi,” Natsu says, unsure of how else to respond. 

Upon realizing that it’s a nobody who’s walked in on her clandestine routine, Watada visibly relaxes. “Oh, it’s just you, Hinata-san. Thank goodness.” She squints her naked left eye. “Don’t tell the teachers.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Natsu responds, followed by, “Wait, you know who I am?”

Watada smirks, cat-like. “Of course, I do. Your posters are all over the school.” She lifts her hands up as if to brandish a banner. “‘Hinata Natsu, the first-year taking the volleyball world by storm and Niiyama to the next level.’ I’d have to be living under a rock not to know you.”

“Oh, right.” 

Natsu lingers by the door to the restroom, unsure of what to do now. The bathroom has become a sauna. Someone has put fireworks in her stomach. Eventually, she tugs at the collar of her uniform shirt and walks over to the second sink. “Can I ask you a question, Watada-san?”

The third-year waves a hand as if to say “go ahead.”

Natsu swallows down the anxiety stalking up her throat. Then, trying and failing not to feel stupid, she asks, “Why do you put those color contact lenses in?”

Watada lets out what can only be described as a cackle. “To feel beautiful, duh.” She stabs the other medium-brown lens into her left eye. 

“Okay.” Natsu rocks back and forth on her heels. For a brief moment, she considers dropping the subject, but she’s always been hard to satisfy. She presses on. “But you already are beautiful, Watada-san. Everyone says so. So I just don’t understand why you wear those.”

Both lenses in now, Watada flutters her lashes in the mirror. The movement reminds Natsu of when her father bought her a butterfly growing kit back in preschool. She and Shouyou spent hours each day watching the netted enclosure after the first caterpillar cocooned. Just when it started to seem impossible that anything would happen, the insect emerged anew from its brown chrysalis. It unfurled its thin wings, pumped them a few times, pata-pata , and then took off for the skies. 

Watada turns toward Natsu, still batting her eyes. Pata-pata. “Let me ask you a question, Hinata-san.”

Natsu crosses her arms. “Shoot.”

She thinks she has a vague idea of what Watada will ask her: Do my eyes look bigger or smaller with these lenses in? Exactly. Do you know how much these cost? Exactly. Do you know how weird it would feel to just stop wearing them after three years? Exactly. 

But Watada’s question is nothing like any of the ones that surface in Natsu’s mind.

“How would you define girlhood, Hinata-san?” 

Pata-pata. 

Imposter syndrome became a close friend of Natsu’s when she started at Niiyama. A prestigious all-girls school will do that to you—if you’re in a sport that isn’t traditionally feminine, sure, if you’re not all that academically inclined, yes, but certainly if you were only friends with boys growing up. Natsu’s a younger sister of a brother; it isn’t peculiar that her first friend was a boy. It’s just maybe a little peculiar—a teeny, tiny bit odd—that most of her friendships thereafter were also with boys. But these relationships just made sense. She and Miyazaki Kaito were always partnered up to demonstrate drills in PE. Suzuki Akira matched her whip crack sense of humor to a T. Nakahara Mamoru didn’t mind that they only really chatted during their laps around the neighborhood. 

Being friends with people of the same gender, on the other hand, didn’t make sense. Natsu was too boyish for them. She despised the feeling of a lash curler pinching her eyelids. She didn’t pitch up her voice when talking to guys. Her stationary sets were offensively plain. (Even she knew that.) 

Natsu’s always gotten along with her female teammates, but that’s because they’re coworkers before friends. Volleyball is the center of all their conversations; volleyball is the protagonist of their story. 

“Well,” Watada says, resting her rear against the sink, “answer the question. What’s girlhood to you?”

Pata-pata. 

How can Natsu answer that question if she’s never fit in with the people she’s supposed to? How can she respond when she’s always felt like more of a monster than a girl?

“Uhm. Well. Girlhood is—it’s painting your nails,” Natsu offers lamely. “It’s tying your hair up into a bun, putting on a scarf, and taking purikuras during winter. It’s watching Heroine Disqualified and trying sweets at new cafés. Staying up late and talking about boys.” She gestures vaguely in Watada’s direction, then looks to the ground in shame. “It’s, you know, putting color contact lenses in your eyes,” she finishes quietly.

In her peripheral vision, she sees Watada double over in laughter. 

“What’s so funny?” Natsu asks, jerking her head up. Cherry embarrassment colors her long neck. “Those’re the kind of things girls like to do, right?”

“I mean, yeah, most girls,” Watada says in between laughs, “but not all of us. Like, I’m pretty sure you don’t care about getting French tips or putting in lenses right?” She wipes away the tears starting to prick her lash line. “Gosh, you really do believe all girls are shallow, don’t you? How can you think so poorly of your own gender?”

Natsu rubs at her arm awkwardly. She feels like a kid who just got scolded.

“You wanna know what I think, Hinata-san?” Watada says then, still smiling, sucking on her plump bottom lip. “I think there’s no set definition for girlhood.”

“That’s cheating then!” she grouses, arms falling to her sides. “Why’d you ask me a question that doesn’t have an answer?”

Watada cuts her off with a perfectly manicured hand before taking a step forward. “What I was going to say, if you’d let me finish, is that there are a few things we girls definitely all have in common.” She’s close enough now that Natsu can see the stray lip tint dotting her front teeth, taste the perfume dabbed behind her ears. “And if I had to pick one thing that every girl goes through, even a girl like you, it’s hating the way she looks. ” Watada simpers, flashing fangs. “Girlhood is hating the body you were given, and then judging other girls for what they choose to do with theirs. Am I right?”

The bathroom suddenly feels very, very small. Natsu gasps for air. 

“It’s just a personal theory,” Watada concludes breezily, doing a 180 in demeanor. “Doesn’t mean anything really.” She walks toward the bathroom door, turning around only when she’s already halfway through it. “One friendly piece of advice, though: You should really roll the waistband of your skirt. The teachers don’t care, but your classmates do.” Watada winks. “You’ve got legs other girls would kill for, Hinata-chan. You might as well show them off!”

The door clicks shut.

Left alone with her reflection, Natsu briefly considers punching the mirror in front of her. But split knuckles are no good for a volleyball player, so she splashes cold water on her warm cheeks instead. She thinks of butterfly wings closing and opening as she lets her face dry. Thinks about her body, too. Then she rolls the waistband of her skirt once, tugs down her knee-high socks, and leaves the restroom.

During first period, the girl who sits two to Natsu’s right gives her a compliment on her skirt. Natsu smiles at her, then asks for her name. 

It’s not like she and Shouyou never talk anymore. It’s just that they don’t talk often. 

Sometimes Natsu will send her brother a clip from her match, and occasionally he’ll shoot her a link to an article written about himself (or, more often, Kageyama). Maybe once in a blue moon they’ll hop on FaceTime together and watch a match. It’s worth noting that their interactions almost exclusively revolve around volleyball. How could they not? It’s the nucleus of their lives—an unchanging constant, something to look out for.

There are a few exceptions to their sports-related conversations. One of these is birthday calls. 

Growing up, Natsu’s family always celebrated birthdays together. After her father left when she was six, Hatsuko made even more of an effort for the three of them to be together on special occasions. It was for this reason that Natsu assumed the birthday tradition would carry on, even after Shouyou moved out of the country. It didn’t. Time differences made video chats difficult, and Hatsuko getting promoted to lead nurse on swing shift meant she was mandated a lot more than in the past. After an unsuccessful three-way call for Shouyou’s twentieth birthday, their mother put her foot down: The new normal would be relaying birthday wishes individually, whenever they could. 

So that’s what Natsu’s doing. Shouyou’s birthday isn’t until tomorrow in Brazil, but her Fridays are packed, so today will have to do. Practice was light this afternoon, which means she isn’t egregiously sweaty either, and therefore borderline camera presentable. Another silver lining is that Natsu’s walking back from the train station rather than cycling, so she’ll be less out of breath on the phone. (Normally she bikes, but her poor, hand-me-down hunk of metal’s flat back tire finally got the best of her tonight.)

She checks the time. It’s just after 6 PM, which means it’s just past 6 AM in Brazil. For any other effectively jobless twenty-one year-old, a call at this time might seem vile, but Shouyou’s always been an early riser. He’ll be up. 

Natsu dials her brother’s number, then places her phone in the basket of her bike so she can see the screen. The phone hums a few times, trying to make a connection, before FaceTime opens to reveal what appears to be the ceiling of Shouyou’s apartment. 

Huh. Her brother’s still in bed. 

“Moshi moshi!” Natsu sings, putting on her best happy voice. 

A pale hand bats lazily at the front camera. “Mmmm, what?” rumbles a sleep-addled voice that is decidedly not her brother’s. “Uh, moshi moshi? Who’s this?” 

Natsu toes the kickstand of her bike down. Taking her phone out of the basket, she challenges the anonymous voice: “I should be asking who you are. Where’s my brother?”

It’s quiet enough to hear a pin drop, and then the line fills with a torrent of sounds and kaleidoscoping colors. Natsu hears a reedy, embarrassed voice whisper shit, fuck, and about a dozen other profanities in Japanese, English, and Portuguese—all right, so Shouyou’s definitely in the room. Then there’s that deep, sleep-addled voice piercing through the panicked squeals, snickering at her brother’s misfortune.

After about thirty seconds of din, Shouyou appears on screen, horrendously close to the camera. “Hi, Nacchan!” he exclaims, and Natsu watches the skin on his lips crack as he pulls his face into a clumsy smile.

She recoils immediately. “Dude, why’re you holding your phone like Mom? I can see your pores from all the way over here.”

Shouyou chuckles awkwardly. The frame widens ever so slightly, revealing rumpled sheets hiked up to his armpits. “Sorry, it’s just you don’t typically call so early in the morning! Or, you know, like at all.” 

“Well,” Natsu says, drawing out the word, “it’s your birthday tomorrow. I wanted to call on the actual day, but this is the only time that really works with my schedule, so here we are.” She scrunches her nose the way their mother does, momentarily brings her phone toward the wrinkled bridge. “Is there a problem? Like, do you sleep in now?”

Shouyou laughs that nervous laugh again. “Oh, uh, nope! Still an early riser.” He scratches at his disheveled hair. “Most days.”

“Most days?”

“We didn’t expect to have any calls so early in the morning,” he explains, “so we decided to stay up and then sleep a little—”

Natsu holds her hand out to the camera, the universal sign for “shut the fuck up.” He does. 

“Wait a second, Shou. Who’s ‘we’?”

Shouyou hiccups, and it’s at this point that Natsu confirms her brother’s accidentally let a secret slip. He’s always had the same tell, ever since he was a knock-kneed kid. 

In the back of her mind, Natsu decides that it’s comforting, in a roundabout way, to know that some things don’t change. In the forefront, she’s curious. 

One eyebrow raised, she watches as her brother flushes a violent crimson. His phone seems to slip out of his hand, and then there’s a kerfuffle of sorts, two voices overlapping again. After that, FaceTime produces an unstable connection warning. Shouyou’s hands disappear into pixels, his voice into white noise. Natsu’s left staring into the gray void of telespace. Eventually though, their signal sutures itself back together, revealing a tableau that would give almost anyone else a heart attack.

Lying beside her brother, sporting a bedhead so bad it could probably set some kind of world record—and would definitely start a hashtag trending on Twitter—is Kageyama Tobio. There’s sleep crusting the inner corners of his eyes. His neck is littered with hickeys. 

Natsu’s mouth catches flies for a good second or two. Then her sides promptly split. “Wow, uhm, hi, Kageyama-kun! I didn’t realize you were in Brazil.” Biting her lip to suppress her more inappropriate comments, she says to her brother, “Gee, my bad! I didn’t mean to catch you two with your pants down.”

If possible, her brother turns even redder. “We were doing no such thing, Natsu!” 

“Yeah, ‘s too early for that anyways,” Kageyama tacks on, bringing his arms up in defense.

“Shut your big, stupid mouth, Bakageyama!” Shouyou yells, smacking his boyfriend over and over again. “She’s too young for that kind of topic.”

From behind his arms, Kageyama shoots Shouyou a look. “No, she’s not. Natsu’s turning sixteen this year. At sixteen, some people have kids, or like”—he pantomimes something Natsu can’t make out—“drive cars in other countries.”

“Well, yeah, but this is my little sister we’re talking about!” 

“Little, my ass. She’s taller than most grown women.”

“Height isn’t a part of it!”

“It is too!” Kageyama contests, but once he notices the way Shouyou’s pulled the covers up over his shoulders, he softens like browned butter. “Hey, come on, Shou. You can’t treat her like a baby forever. Everyone’s gotta grow up some time.”

By now, Natsu’s brother looks about one gust of wind away from bursting into tears, and she has neither the time nor the emotional capacity to deal with a long-distance breakdown. What she needs to do is turn the tables, and quickly. So she shuffles her phone between her hands, wipes her sweaty palms on her skirt, and then hollers into the mic, “Happy birthday, Niichan! Uhm, the big twenty-one! Yay!” 

And just like that, her brother is crying, dreadful, loud sobs that make the entire screen shake. Fuck. Kageyama’s face goes pale, and for a second, Natsu thinks she’s going to get scolded. But he just tugs Shouyou close to his chest and presses a kiss into his shaggy hair. He plucks the phone from those quivering fingers, angles the front camera toward himself, and then does what Natsu now recognizes as his attempt at a smile.

“I think we better go, Nacchan,” Kageyama whispers, as if his voice could be any more disturbing than his boyfriend’s wails. “We didn’t get much sleep last night.”

Natsu’s fifteen, which means she loves a good innuendo. But right now, she’s hollow as an empty mollusk shell and has no energy for laughter. So she mutters, “Okay, yeah,” followed by, “Uhm, thanks for taking care of Niichan.” She folds a triangle into the pleating of her skirt. “Or Shouyou, I mean.”

Kageyama nods diplomatically. It’s in moments like these that Natsu thinks people don’t give his social skills and emotional intelligence enough credit. Then the call ends, and Natsu’s left thinking on her own.

Some people say that misfortune comes in threes. Natsu’s mother never agreed with this though. When Natsu was a child, she told her that the good and bad almost always came together, one after another. “They’re siblings, Nacchan,” she’d say, pinching her daughter’s chubby cheeks, “and they’re holding hands.”

It’s been a few years since Natsu and her mother were close, but she still keeps the lesson on file, takes it out and flips it over in her hands on particularly cold days. Hatsuko’s words serve as a reminder that Natsu is her mother’s daughter. They underline the truth that the soft poetry of her mother’s existence will always and forever bombard her life, no matter the distance between them. Most importantly though, they warn her that with happiness will always—without fail—come heartbreak.

And come it does.

Niiyama Girls Volleyball Team has swept every tournament they’ve played this year, and all that’s left now is nationals. They intend to win, of course, which means practices have been extended from four hours to five hours, and breaks have been shortened from twenty minutes to fifteen minutes. Halfway through an afternoon practice, Natsu and her teammates slump to the ground in a circular formation and catch their breath. They munch on protein bars and make idle chit chat while Coach Ozawa uses the restroom. 

Talking to the other girls has become second nature by now. Natsu felt a bit out of place her first year, but over the last few months, she’s opened up. Now, she has sleepovers once a month with the other second-year starters, Nii Hana and Tanaka Chiharu, and walks to the train station with the other libero, Matsushita Juri. Over summer break, Natsu even went to a party with the third-years! 

(Setagawa Hiroko, their captain, was the one who extended the invitation. Her boyfriend was throwing a rager while his parents were out on business, and he wanted it to be massive. When Natsu and her teammates arrived, the house was already bursting at the seams. Setagawa immediately split off and started slobbering all over her boyfriend. The other girls made their way to the backyard, which had been haphazardly converted into a make-shift dance space. Natsu chose to stand by the snack table and shovel handful after handful of Curl puffs into her mouth.

Setagawa’s boyfriend’s house was in the middle of nowhere, which meant there were no neighbors around to complain about the noise. But Natsu still felt uneasy about the volume. She could hear the glitch pop pounding from upstairs, the retching of someone in the bushes out back, what sounded like a bottle breaking. Halfway through eating the entire snack table, a thought struck Natsu like a stray bolt of lightning: “I don’t have anything in common with anyone here.”

The realization made her drop the Curl in her hand and message her teammates that she was leaving early. Then it had her calling her mother, who did not ask why they weren’t all at the Setagawa family’s residence, and who pulled up to the pulsating party without judgment.

“Are you drunk?” Hatsuko asked, silk chiffon-soft.

“No,” Natsu answered truthfully, and that was that. 

She climbed into the passenger seat of their old car and adjusted the vents towards her, even though she knew the AC was broken. Hatsuko pulled out of the driveway with great care. During the long ride home, Natsu stared out the windshield at the endless fields of green, almost black in the night, and watched as they slowly drove back into suburbia—into that inescapable place where all the houses looked the same.)

Nii once remarked that being on this team felt like having a dozen built-in sisters. At the time, Natsu agreed and went along cracking jokes with her teammates. But later, much later, she realized that she couldn’t understand what Nii meant—not really, anyway. After all, Nii grew up in a house of women. She’s the youngest of five girls, each a year and a half apart, and they’re thick as thieves. 

Natsu’s the only daughter in her family, and she and her brother have a six-year age gap. She heard somewhere, once, that if a person is more than five years younger than their sibling, they’ll often have the traits of an only child. Does that statistic apply to her? If her brother weren’t a local legend in their world, would her teammates think he didn’t exist? 

Natsu doesn’t have answers to these questions. She shouldn’t have to answer these questions.

Today Nii’s scrolling through Twitter during their break. (Devices are technically prohibited at practice, but so are colorful sports bras, and Tanaka still rocks her ugly tie dye racer back two days a week, so rules are taken with a grain of salt.) She begins to whisper to herself. After a few moments, the whisper becomes a shout, and a tremble overtakes her body until she’s shaking like she’s on a slipping tectonic plate. 

“Oh my god, guys, have you seen?” She tosses her phone into the middle of the circle with little to no coordination, still pulsing with seismic activity. “Hinata’s older brother is coming back to Japan next year. He’s thinking of signing with the MSBY Black Jackals!”

Matsushita, with her razor-sharp reflexes, snatches Nii’s phone from the center as the rest of the circle oohs and ahhs. After scanning the screen, she turns to Natsu with a hurt look. “Geez, Hinata, why didn’t you tell us about this, like, yesterday?”

Natsu shrugs. She doesn’t know how to say that she and Shouyou haven’t spoken since he FaceTimed for their mother’s birthday, so she doesn’t say anything.

“Oh, come on. This is a classic Hinata move,” a voice pipes up. It’s Fujiwara Ayumi, their setter, speaking from the other end of the circle. “She’s always nonchalant about her brother. ‘Course she didn’t bother to bring up news like this.” She squeezes a trickle of gel electrolytes into her mouth. “Man, you really are lucky to have a brother who’s famous like that though. Everyone already knows your name in the volleyball world.”

Nii nods, taking her phone back from Matsushita. “Gives you a leg up.”

“I guess,” Natsu says, instead of, “What it gives me is a bigger opportunity to disappoint them.”

Just then, Ozawa’s thundering footfall echoes outside the gym walls. The girls scramble to make themselves presentable, shoving phones into backpacks, brushing crumbs off of shirts, and squeezing the remaining contents of energy gels between licked lips. They’re lined up in height order by the bleachers just as Ozawa walks through the doors.

“Break’s over,” their coach yells, out of habit more than necessity, really. She crosses her arms. “If any of you want to become half the player that Hinata-san’s brother is, you’ll need some more nationals experience. So are you ready to work?”

“Yes, ma’am!” Natsu and her teammates roar back, backs straight, shins aching.

And really, in this moment, what else could matter?

Shouyou comes home in March of 2018. He doesn’t really come home though; instead, he moves straight into the MSBY Jackals housing facility in Osaka, where the food has a subtler flavor and the people don’t sugarcoat their words. Hatsuko uses three of her precious sick days to go and visit him. She doesn’t invite Natsu to join, and Natsu doesn’t ask to tag along. 

The tendency to overwork oneself runs in Natsu’s family. 

Her mother routinely picks up shifts to ease the clinic’s flow, often at her own expense. Before he left, Natsu’s father drowned himself in his work, coming home from the office in the dead of night. And, of course, there’s the infamous story of how Shouyou attempted to play through a fever during his first high school nationals. 

It’s only natural, then, for Natsu to bite off more than she can chew too.

As a rule of thumb, most girls will stay ten to fifteen minutes after practice to get in a few more plays or do a thorough cool down. But Natsu is dedicated at best and stubborn at worst, which means she’ll stick around until her vice captain has to drag her out the gym kicking and screaming. Tonight though, Arai Mima has gone home early to study for a geography test. In other words: It’s 7:27 PM, almost half an hour past when practice was supposed to end, and Natsu is still in a torrential flow-state. 

“Another one,” she demands, beckoning Nii to serve again. 

Across the court, her teammate gives a long, dramatic sigh. “Sheesh, just give me a second, Hinata.” She wedges the volleyball between her thighs to free up her hands, then slaps her arms to get the blood circulating. “Not all of us have your boundless energy, you know.”

“She’s right,” Tanaka chimes from where she’s stretching on the sidelines. “True volleyball monsters like yourself are hard to come across.” Bringing a thoughtful hand to her chin, she ruminates, mostly to herself, “But I guess you wouldn’t realize that, huh—growing up with your brother and all.”

Natsu wipes the pooling sweat off her brow before calling for another serve. When Nii only shoots her a withering look, she stomps her foot. “Come on! We don’t have all night.”

“You’re right,” a honeyed voice calls out then, knifing the thick tension. “You don’t.” 

Like three meerkats, Tanaka, Nii, and Natsu snap their heads to the source.

Standing in the doorway of the gym is a gaggle of girls dressed in all black, hair slicked back into perfect ponytails. The little sprite at the front of the formation is clearly their leader. There’s an air of authority, of regality, surrounding her, and Natsu’s pretty sure that if she squinted, she’d see a crown somewhere. But she doesn’t have to squint, as it turns out, because the girl is striding over to her like a charging bull. 

She’s almost impressively short, endowed with well-muscled legs that disappear into chunky white sneakers. Her hair is pulled so tight across her scalp that it looks painful to blink, and it pools into a thick curly ponytail that waterfalls down her back. And then there are those eyes. Dark eyes, like someone bottled the inaka night sky and poured it into her irises. 

Natsu’s pretty sure she’s never seen anyone like her.

“Hi,” the girl says, stopping right in front of her. She comes up to about Natsu’s chin. “It’s 7:30. Cheer gets the gym at 7:30.”

“Oh, okay,” Natsu mumbles, spellbound, before she remembers herself. “Wait, no, we need to keep practicing! We’ve got a game this week.”

“Well,” the girl says, sliding off her backpack and dropping it to the ground next to Natsu’s, “so do we. Now move aside.” As if on cue, the rest of the girl’s teammates chassé into the gym. There are scores of them—at least twenty-five or thirty—and they move like one great, big thunder cloud.

So Natsu and her teammates are sorely outnumbered. Big deal. They’ve never been ones to back down from a fight. 

At least, that’s what Natsu thinks until she turns around and sees Nii and Tanaka packing their bags. 

“What on earth are you doing?” she hisses, calloused hands tightening into fists.

“Leaving,” Tanaka grunts. “We were supposed to be out of here half an hour ago anyways.”

Nii nods vigorously, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. “As much as I’d love to stay here and keep watching the tension between you two, I have things to do.” She winces, rubs at her bad lower back. “And an ice bath to take. I’m exhausted.”

And now that Natsu takes a good look at her teammates, they do look worn out. The mascara on the bottom of Nii’s lashes has melted into her under eye concealer, giving her a distinctly raccoon-like appearance. Tanaka isn’t much better. Her pixie cut is matted flat with sweat, and her quads are shaking with overexertion; she keeps shifting her weight back and forth to give each leg a break. She has to bike home after this too.

Guilt floods Natsu’s mouth, leaving behind a bad taste. She turns back toward the cheerleader and bows her head. “Sorry, we’ll be out in a few minutes.”

The girl nods. “Good.”

On the sidelines, Tanaka and Nii all but click their heels with glee.

It’s cold by the time they leave the gym. Natsu thinks about a lot of things as she walks the perimeter of the school in aimless circles: How Nii is probably her best friend, but Nii’s best friend is probably Tanaka. How Tanaka has to cook dinner for her family on Tuesday nights, so now all six members of her household will be eating late. How Nii has a calculus exam she’s scared shitless for tomorrow, and will probably pull an all-nighter cramming for it. How Natsu knew all of these things, knows all of them, and still let them slip her mind. How Hatsuko once said, many years back, when they were planting tomatoes in the garden, that both of her kids were prone to forgetting: You and Shouyou both get distracted easily, excited easily, disheartened easily. You just feel so much. 

Had her mother said that they feel so much or too much? 

Natsu takes a seat on one of the stone benches out front of her school, watches her teammates become fingerprints in the distance. She tries to remember the details of that sun-sloshed day in the garden. She can’t. 

By the time Natsu thinks to check her phone, the moon has gone to bed. Unsurprisingly, she has no worried texts from her mother, just a selfie from Tanaka and Nii letting her know that they got home safe and wouldn’t tell Coach Ozawa that she made them stay late—so long as it didn’t happen again. Natsu smiles at the message, wobbly, then drops her phone into her lap. Clutches her head in shaking hands, exhales long and hard. Thinks about the world ending. Feels her heart drop when it doesn’t.

A deep voice cuts through her stupor. 

“You okay?”

Natsu glances up from between her fingers to see that same cheerleader from earlier standing an arm’s length away from the bench, Nike backpack slung over one shoulder. 

“I’m fine,” she rasps, crossing her arms and looking away. Idly, she wonders if there’s enough space on the small bench for the cheerleader to take a seat beside her.

There is, it turns out. “You sure?” the girl asks, dropping her backpack to the ground before scooching in beside Natsu, touching their thighs together. “Cause it’s 8:57 PM now, and I’m pretty sure your teammates went home like normal people after we kicked you out.”

“Well, I’ve never been normal.” Natsu rushes to create an addendum. “I mean, I love volleyball.”

“Are you saying your teammates don’t?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Natsu replies, running a hand through her knotted hair. She scratches triangles into the moisture-wicking cloth of her shorts. “I mean that I just—I guess I care about it more than they do.”

A gasp from beside her. “Wow, you think you care more than they do? How could you say such a thing?”

“No, like—I’m just saying that I give a lot to volleyball, you know?”

“And you really think the other girls on your team don’t?”

“No, that’s not at all what I think!” Natsu splutters, dam breaking as she finally whips her head around to look at her companion. It’s at this point that she notices the shit-eating grin on the girl’s heart-shaped face—and subsequently finds her next defense evaporating off her tongue. “Oh, fuck off!” she groans, ramming the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. Her ears tinge pink. “You’re just fucking with me.”

The girl laughs into the space between them, a delightful little sound. “I’m doing no such thing.” 

“That’s cruel, you know,” Natsu reprimands without any bite. She’s trying to draw triangles into her shorts again, but the lines are going all wonky.

“I can’t help it,” comes the girl’s sing-song response. “You’re just so fun to tease.”

Heat builds in the tip of Natsu’s nose, blooms horizontally across her face like a bad sunburn. She creaks her stiff body toward the girl, gives her an obvious once-over. Up close, she can see that her eyes aren’t black, but rather a dark, dark brown. She’s got the kind of beauty that blues at the edges.

“What’s your name?” Natsu finds herself asking.

The girl smiles sweetly. “Akemi.” She gives a small shrug. “I know it’s weird to introduce yourself with a first name, but my family moved here from America six months ago. Mom’s Japanese, and I grew up speaking it, but the whole ‘being called by your last name’ thing never made much sense to me. Hope you don’t mind.”

Natsu beams. “Not at all.” 

Akemi leans an elbow back on the armrest of the bench, cups her chin in a delicate hand. “And who are you?”

It should be a simple question, and in a lot of ways, it is. Who is she? Well, she’s Hinata Natsu. But the caveat is that there’s always been an invisible asterisk attached to her name. It appears on court and during the interviews that follow her matches. It’s how they refer to her in every article concerning her volleyball career that’s ever been written in the history of the world. 

Yes, she’s Hinata something or another Natsu. 

Hinata “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” Natsu. Hinata “Do you by any chance have an older brother?” Natsu. Hinata “So, how does it feel being related to a Miyagi legend?” Natsu. 

So when a beautiful girl asks for her name at 9 PM on a Tuesday night, she tells her, “My name is Natsu.” Just Natsu. 

“Oh.” Akemi looks out at the empty street as she seems to mull over the name. After ten seconds, ten minutes, a lifetime, she meets Natsu’s waiting gaze. “You know, it’s funny. I’ve always loved the summer.”

Sports are Natsu’s strong suit. She walked at just eight months, and long before she started to get tall—that funny, subjective term—she had clear athletic prowess. It was only natural that she’d eventually fall for, fall into something. And that something’s corporeal form just so happened to be volleyball.

School, on the other hand, has never come easily to her. Academics aren’t quite the bane of Natsu’s existence, but they’re something close. Preschool and kindergarten were a walk in the park. Elementary school was easy enough, too. But things got difficult in junior high. That’s the time when volleyball became Volleyball with a Capital V; when kanji started to look a lot like expressionist paintings; and when teachers introduced pre-algebra, which became algebra, which became advanced algebra, which became trigonometry. 

Natsu struggled for a good few months. Got her fair share of exams handed back to her face down and public humiliation when she was asked to solve a problem on the chalkboard in front of the class. Eventually, she realized something had to give. She started to make time in her packed schedule for studying, and things got better. But it’s still hard. School is still far from intuitive. 

It’s for this exact reason that her future isn’t exactly intuitive either. Most everyone else at Niiyama plans to attend a four-year university, and not just any university, but ideally one of the top-ranked institutions in the country: Todai, Kyodai, that sort of school. Even Natsu’s teammates, many of whom could probably be picked up by professional teams as soon as they receive their diplomas, plan to go to college first. College is natural. College is expected. College is—

“—a time for character-building,” Murakami Sensei says, shuffling the stack of papers on her desk until they’re even. “It is fondly regarded as a favorite life experience of many adults, including myself.”

Natsu nods. If she had more energy, and more interest in getting thwacked on the head with that stack of papers, she might roll her eyes. But she always feels a bit listless when talk of college happens. Her tongue goes slack; her body stops being her body. Autopilot takes over, and by the time the topic has faded out of conversation, Natsu has all but astral-projected to another planet. 

Which is why she and Murakami are having to redo her career counseling appointment for the third time. Natsu’s finishing off her second year of high school soon, which means the pressure to declare a post-graduation path is mounting by the day. Her classmates have made up their minds, with all but one of them—Akiyama Saeko, a girl from an agricultural family—set on applying to college. Akiyama’s going back to help on the family farm, which would be looked down upon by Murakami if it weren’t a roundabout way of saying her grandparents were getting old and didn’t have a male heir to take over the land. No, Akiyama’s future plans are noble.

Natsu’s, it seems, are not. 

“I know that college is important,” she starts, wringing her hands in her laps. “I know what everyone says about it: that it’ll change your life, that it’ll be so much fun, that kind of stuff. I know all of it, but I still don’t know, you know?” 

From behind her sleek mahogany desk, Murakami levels her with a flat look. “You used a variation of the word ‘know’ five times in that sentence, Hinata-san. Did you ‘know’ that?”

“I guess I’m just not sure that college is the right path for me. I mean, at least not right away.” Natsu flexes her fingers, frowns. “The thing is, I’ve always been good at volleyball, and I’m pretty good at it now too.”

“Don’t try to be self-effacing, Hinata-san,” her teacher says. "It’s not a good look on you.”

Okay, then. “I’m really, really good at volleyball, and I’m thinking that maybe playing professionally straight away is the best plan for me.”

Murakami wipes her hands on the lapels of her blazer, leans back in her chair to eye Natsu quizzically. “Is it guaranteed that you’ll get an offer from a professional team?”

There’s no use in being coy. Natsu nods her head. “Coach Ozawa says it’d be more likely for me to get into Tokyo University than for not a single professional team to reach out.”

“Tokyo University? Well, then that’s certainly saying something.” Murakami pulls Natsu’s post-graduation planning sheet out from the middle of her tall stack of papers, somehow not disturbing any of the other completed sheets. “All right. Maybe playing professionally is the way to go.”

Natsu perks up. 

“But I’m not signing off on your post-graduation plan right away,” she continues, dousing the flickers in Natsu’s stomach before they can catch fire. “I want you to take some more time to think about all of this, Hinata-san, with both your heart and your head. I know your brother’s playing professionally now and that he didn’t go to college, but that doesn’t mean things will work out the same way for you. You’re not him, after all.”

“I know,” Natsu growls, because she does. She’s known this from the day she started volleyball, no matter how much she wished things were different. “But things will work out. I’m good. I’m going to play professionally and then I’m going to qualify for the Japanese national team. It’s what I have to do.”

Murakami hums in thought. It’s not a judgmental sound, but it isn’t entirely impassive either. “Well, even if things do work out the way you want them to, the lifestyle of a professional athlete is grueling. The devil’s in the details, Hinata-san. It always is.” 

Natsu stands up to avoid lingering on the girlish shadow that’s overtaken her teacher’s face. “If that’s all we have to discuss for now,” she says, pushing in her chair. “I’ll be heading out. Practice match and all that.” For some reason, her skin is crawling.

Her teacher nods, still with that young, far-away look in her eyes. Then, as if just noticing Natsu’s about to leave, her gaze sharpens. She sniffs, nose upturned. “Well, all right then. We’ll talk again after next term.” 

Summer stretches over Miyagi like a large, lazy cat. Natsu starts rolling the waistband of her skirt three times instead of two and switches out her half-up half-down hairstyle for a high pony. Breaks during volleyball practice lengthen and classroom windows open. Time itself grows syrupy. 

It’s during these strange, slow months that Akemi becomes a constant in Natsu’s life. Frequency illusion states that after you become aware of something—or in this case, some one —you’re bound to notice them more often. Akemi’s sudden interference in her days is just like that. Natsu starts seeing her everywhere after that night outside the school. She’s in the hallway filling up her water bottle. She’s running laps around the school with her teammates. She’s crouching in front of a refrigerator of milk tea at the convenience store, running a glossy fingernail across the frosted glass. 

Whenever Natsu sees Akemi, her heart decides that it needs to have a minor anxiety attack. It pounds and pounds against her chest like a child locked out of the house. Natsu has an idea about what this might mean. Her brother’s about as gay as they come, and she’s always had an inkling she’d end up with a girl. But never before has she been drawn to someone the way she’s drawn to Akemi. When Natsu spots Akemi out of the corner of her eye, she spends the rest of the day trying to coax the butterflies in her stomach back into their cocoons. It’s that bad.

After the sixth or seventh time she sees Akemi on campus again, Natsu decides it’s a sign. They need to talk. Blowing her long bangs out of her eyes in one great, determined breath, Natsu marches over to the girl. 

Akemi is lying in a sunny patch of grass just outside the gym, arms pillowed beneath her head. She’s got her eyes closed like she’s trying to nap, but Natsu knows she’s not; over the last few weeks, she’s learned that cheer has practice at 3:30 PM on Wednesdays. (They’ll head into the gym at 3:25, review forms until 3:35, and then stretch until 4.) 

Natsu checks her phone. It’s 3:18 PM now. Napping at this time would be silly, which means talking to Akemi should be fine.

“Good afternoon, Akemi!” she says, then immediately cringes because the greeting makes her sound like a posh salaryman—or worse, Murakami Sensei. “I mean, uhm, hey.”

Akemi cracks an eye open to assess who’s disturbing her, and then her mouth splits like an orange into a pearly smile. “Hey, Natsu.”

Heart pounding, Natsu plops on the grass beside her. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me,” she admits, tossing her backpack aside to lean back on her elbows. She looks out toward the other end of the field. The sun plays off the panels of the student bleachers, where the soccer team is currently doing conditioning—jump squats, by the looks of it. The smooth metal is frustratingly shiny, but Natsu wills herself to keep her gaze fixed. If she doesn’t, she’ll look over at Akemi, and then she’s pretty sure she’ll never stop looking. 

“You’re a hard person to forget,” Akemi says, and Natsu feels it then—those dark, glittering eyes shifting toward her. 

She keeps watching the girls do their jump squats. “I’ve heard that before.”

“Makes sense.” Akemi’s hair makes a soft swishing sound as it rubs against the grass; she must be nodding her head. “You don’t have practice on Wednesdays. What’re you doing lingering around at the school?”

The urge to look is overwhelming. Natsu bites the bullet. “You know my schedule?” she asks, tilting her head toward Akemi.

She holds Natsu’s gaze like it’s bisque-fired porcelain. “Well, you know mine, don’t you?”

“I know most of the athletic teams’ schedules,” Natsu bluffs.

“Sure you do,” Akemi smirks, rolling onto her side. With the full-body attention now on her, Natsu’s surprised she doesn’t start smoking like a panini press. “Say, Natsu-chan, why’d you come lie down beside me?”

If Natsu were smarter, maybe she’d make up some kind of an excuse. Perhaps she’d even come up with a clever line to throw out—something flirty, sardonic, and charming. But she’s only ever been herself, and she’ll only ever be running out of time. So she opts for honesty.

“I felt like it.”

Akemi laughs then, luminous, and for one devastatingly short moment, it’s just the two of them lying in a field of green, smiling on the edge of seventeen. Then the buzzing starts. It’s like the growl of a chainsaw, the starting of a lawnmower, the roaring of a car engine. As a result, whatever moment they might’ve been sharing balloons at the edges and then snaps back inward like a stretched rubber band. The reverb of it has Natsu jerking away from Akemi and sitting upright. 

“Sorry, sorry!” Akemi stammers through a laugh, breaking eye contact to rummage through her backpack. “That’s my alarm to get ready for practice.” She fishes her phone out from her bag, taps the screen a few times, and the horrid noise stops. 

“So do you try to set the world record for the worst alarm in the world every single Wednesday?” Natsu asks before she can help herself. 

Akemi stands, brushing the grass out of her hair. She hoists her backpack over her shoulder and flashes a perky smile. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

For some reason, Natsu gets the impression she’s supposed to stand up too. So she does. It’s a bit jarring to go from seeing Akemi eye to eye, then to looking up at her, and then to looking down at her, but no matter.

They stand in tense silence. They stand for what feels like twenty years. 

“You should get going,” Natsu says at last, and she wonders if above them, the sky is still pretty. 

“I should,” Akemi says, not moving.

“You wouldn’t want to be late,” Natsu continues.

“Of course not.”

Neither of them move. 

“You’re captain, after all,” Natsu reminds her, and that’s what does it. That’s what breaks the spell. 

Akemi blinks, scuffs her feet against the grass. “You’re right. I should go.” She inhales sharply then, and for a good three seconds, Natsu’s positive she’s about to get sneezed on. But then Akemi is exhaling, long and slow, and her lips curl upward. “Can I get your LINE first though?”

Everyone, Natsu thinks, wants to be a part of something beautiful. At least a little. And so she answers, “Sure.”

Hatsuko isn’t able to take off work for Natsu’s seventeenth birthday. Neither of them expect her to, but it’s still with her head hanging low that she relays the news to her daughter. 

“Shibata-san’s caught the flu. It’s technically not my turn to be mandated, but Jun has little kids, so I said I could cover for her.” Hatsuko clicks the stove off, and from the kitchen table, Natsu hears the gas flicker for a moment. “You can invite a friend over for the night maybe, like Akemi.”

Natsu’s shoulders raise to her ears. Her mother knows about Akemi, has met her more than a few times, but she doesn’t know know. Natsu’s not sure that she, herself, even know knows—at least not 100%. Sure, Natsu likes looking at Akemi’s face and would gladly shove her own against it, and yes, the day lightens when she gets to see Akemi at lunch, but does this actually mean anything? 

Sometimes Natsu gets the feeling that she’ll never understand herself.

Willing her shoulders to lower, she says, “You don’t have to feel bad, Mom. Work pays the bills.”

Hatsuko lets out a brisk laugh as she spoons the shougayaki out of the frypan and into her bento box. It’s one of Shouyou’s old ones, adorned with the smiling face of Shimajirou across each of its smooth black sides. She’d refused to throw it out after Shouyou deemed himself too old for it. 

Natsu’s mother is sentimental like that. She keeps the spare buttons that come with new pairs of slacks and the ticket stubs from old movies no one born in the last twenty years has heard of. She presses at least one flower from every bouquet she buys. And on top of her dresser, the one tucked far back in the corner of her closet, she still displays a photo from when they were a family of four, not three. 

Natsu gets her emotional depth from her mother; there’s no doubt about that. But she’s not nearly as nostalgic as Hatsuko. She wonders what it must be like, sometimes, to remember everything so strongly. To always have the past creeping up on you, like the sun bleeding into the horizon.

“Seventeen’s a big deal,” Hatsuko responds, sliding a thick cloth band around her assembled bento box. “I’m sad I’ll miss it.” 

Natsu stuffs a wad of shredded cabbage into her mouth, talks around it like she’s twelve. “Why? Our only plans for the night were eating strawberry shortcake together. Plus, you can’t do anything special at seventeen. Can’t drink, can’t drive.” As an afterthought, and in between a large bite of pork, she mutters to herself, “Besides, it’s not like you’ve been around for my last two birthdays either.”

The rustling in the kitchen immediately stops. Fuck.

“Drinking and driving: what every mother wants to hear her child is yearning for,” Hatsuko says, clipped. She tosses her bento box into a reusable grocery bag rather than tying it in an elegant furoshiki—a sure sign that she’s frustrated. “I’ll be leaving now.”

She skirts past Natsu toward the front door, where she slips on on her clunky work clogs, grabs an umbrella from the umbrella stand, and yanks her work lanyard off the wall. Right before leaving, she looks over her shoulder. “Don’t for a second think that I deem myself a good mother, Natsu. My life wasn’t supposed to go like this.”

The door closes softly behind her. Somehow, it’s worse than any slam.

Natsu spends the next thirty minutes or so slumped over the kitchen table, playing with her food and replaying that sour conversation with her mother. But sitting still has never been her style, so after the pork on her plate starts to grow tough, she rises. Changes out of her school uniform and into a sports bra and pair of biker shorts, then goes to practice Shouyou’s signature lonely passing drill in the front yard. 

Her shoulders are spotted with sweat when the call comes. Natsu lets the phone ring, fixated on the tingling of her forearms, but after the person calls back two more times, she figures that she should check who it is. Dabbing her forehead with a kitchen towel—one of the good ones that Hatsuko does not appreciate being used as a sweat rag—she approaches her phone. 

It’s Shouyou.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, what with it being her birthday and all, and yet it does. Natsu can count on one hand the number of times she and Shouyou have called since he came back to Japan. It’s funny: She thought she’d hear from her brother more often now that they were living in the same country, but she hasn’t. If anything, her brother has become more distant. Sure, he’s there on the news and discussed at an even greater volume during practice, but this just makes the absence feel keener. He could be here, and he’s not. He could be talking to her, and he’s not. It’s at times like this that Natsu wonders if maybe she and her brother simply aren’t meant to reconnect.  

She slides the green phone icon over to answer the call. “Moshi moshi.”

On the other end of the line, she can hear her brother jolt. “Oh, moshi moshi, Natsu! I wasn’t sure if my calls were coming through. I tried a couple times earlier, but you didn’t pick up.”

“Yeah, sorry, I was practicing.” She could say more, but she doesn’t feel like it, so she doesn’t. Instead, she towels off the sweat on her neck.

Her brother coughs awkwardly. “Well, uhm, happy birthday! You’re seventeen now, yeah?”

“Technically not until the very end of the day.”

“Right, you were born so late at night!” Shouyou laughs to himself. “Dad wouldn’t let me go meet you at the birthing clinic until the next morning.” 

“That’s the story I’ve always been told,” Natsu responds.

What follows isn’t silence. It can’t be qualified as quiet, even—not when Natsu’s mounting the porch, sliding open the doors to the living room, and then stomping back into the house. Shouyou’s clearly fiddling with something out of view, too. But the white noise that fills the space between them is eerily still. It steals over them like a shadow, crowds the line like a clot of cumulus clouds.

“Anyway,” Shouyou starts again, clearing his throat, “how are you doing lately?”

“I’m good,” Natsu says as she rounds the corner into the bathroom. There, she snakes the kitchen towel off of her neck and tosses it into the drum of the washing machine. As long as she remembers to run the thing before Hatsuko comes home from work tomorrow morning, she should be able to avoid getting an earful. “Normal.”

“That’s great! How’s school?”

“It’s fine.”

“Are any of your classes hard?”

“Yeah, but that’s cause I’ve always sucked at school.”

“You don’t suck at school,” Shouyou says, and his frown is audible.

“Yeah, just like you never sucked at school either,” Natsu retorts, shutting the lid to the laundry machine. She marches back out into the hall and toward the stairs, which she ascends two at a time until they deposit her in front of her bedroom. 

Her brother lets out a single wooden laugh. “Okay, fair point. How’s volleyball?”

“Good,” Natsu says, and she means it. “Hard work.”

“It always is.”

“Yup.”

That same tension—that awful, not quite silent one—spreads between them like smoke. Thick enough to choke, it has Natsu stripping down to her underwear and sports bra and collapsing into bed all sweaty. Neither of them speak for a long time. Natsu lives three lives or sixty eons as she stares at her ceiling, trying to count all of the dents she’s made in it over the years from a volleyball tossed too high. 

“Nacchan?” her brother asks then, that old nickname that makes her feel like a little kid playing grown-up, even though she’s seventeen now.

“Yeah?” she responds, eyes still glued to the ceiling.

“Do you resent me?”

It’s not a question she was expecting. 

“Of course not,” she says instinctually, but even she can hear that her denial is faraway, if not a little flat. Maybe, she thinks, if we were younger, I could explain more. But they’re adults now, grown out of midnight confessions with little regard for each other’s feelings. They’ve changed. 

Natsu is seventeen and stupid and she hasn’t talked to her brother in months. Shouyou is twenty-three and nine-hundred kilometers away and he uses words like “resent.” 

Scooching her phone a bit closer to her head, she tells her brother, “Volleyball just takes up a lot of time.”

“Bullshit!” Shouyou’s voice crackles in and out of earshot; she wonders if he’s pacing in his apartment, if there’s a weak spot in the WiFi somewhere. “I’m playing professionally. If anyone knows how much time volleyball takes up, it’s me. The issue is that you don’t make time for me.”

“That’s not true,” Natsu fibs through her teeth. 

“Yes, it is!” Shouyou protests. “You might be able to lie to Mom, but you can’t lie to me. I know you too well for that.”

The air in her bedroom is heavy with her own stink. Natsu wonders how many molecules of sweat have sunk into her sheets by now, burrowed themselves into her mattress in a way that even a thorough washing can’t cleanse. Her limbs feel like lead. The only part of her body that’ll move is her mouth. It’s tortuous, and it’s somehow still not enough.

“You,” she snaps, laughter weaving through her whisper, “don’t know the first thing about me.”

“Because you won’t tell me anything!” Shouyou shouts. “You never call, you never text, and when I message you, all you do is thumbs it up! Even Tsukishima will love one of my messages every now and then!”

When was the last time Natsu heard this much emotion in her brother’s voice? When was the last time his words echoed this clearly in her head? It’s thrilling, and it’s disarming, but above all else, it hurts . To talk with her brother is to press on a bruise. To talk with her brother is to experience a unique type of catharsis. 

Nursing her life-long wounds, Natsu says, “Shouyou, do you have any idea what it’s like being related to you?”

“What?” She can see her brother’s scowl. “I mean, no?”

Of course, Shouyou doesn’t know. How could he? Natsu lets her muscles relax further into her mattress. She’s sinking in the shallow part, and she refuses to fight it anymore. 

“Being your sister is awful,” she whispers, and all at once, the heaviness in her heart disappears itself. A veil lifts; something comes back to her. “It is so fucking awful, Shou. People won’t do anything but associate me with you!” Her laughter is shrill; it grates on her own ears. “That’s literally all they do, and it drives me up the fucking wall! Why do I have to be compared to you? Why do I have to follow in your footsteps, be the same monster as you? It sucks!” She pounds her fists into the mattress. “There, I said it: It fucking sucks!”

There’s nothing but white noise for a long time. When her brother deigns to speak to her, it’s in a very, very small voice. 

“Are you embarrassed of me, Natsu?”

“What? No.”

“Look,” her brother continues, and with how loud he’s pacing, he must be wearing down the floorboards in his apartment. “I know I didn’t go to a special volleyball high school like you, and I know we didn’t win nationals like you guys have, but we tried really fucking hard, okay?”

Natsu tries to get in a word, but she can’t. 

“I'm sorry you’re disappointed in me!” Shouyou growls—angry, hungry. “I’m sorry that I put your name on every single coach and critic’s radar! Yeah, it must suck to have built-in attention. I had none of that shit, you know. I had to make a name for myself all on my own.” He pauses then, and Natsu can tell that whatever he says next, it’s going to hurt. 

She’s right, of course. 

“I’m sorry that I was born first and got to find volleyball before you,” Shouyou snarls. “I’m sorry that you also ended up loving it. And I’m sorry that you’re so fucking greedy that us doing the same thing—being similar in even just one way—drives you crazy!”

“Niichan,” Natsu whispers, a child in an adult’s body.

“No, don’t you dare ‘niichan’ me,” her brother spits, and the way he says the nickname sounds like a curse. “You lost that privilege when you shut me out of your fucking life! It’s been years, Natsu. Years.” 

“Shouyou,” she tries again, “Shouyou, I’m sorry.”

It’s amazing how much you can tell about a person just based on the rhythm of their breath. Her brother’s ragged breathing has finally evened out, becoming long and slow and painfully controlled. As she listens closely, she realizes he’s inhaling for four, holding for four, and then exhaling for four: box breathing—the kind Coach Ozawa makes her do when she’s losing her cool. 

They’ve both definitely lost their cool.

Natsu isn’t sure what to expect when Shouyou pipes up again. An apology, maybe, or perhaps a smooth switch into another conversation. Shouyou’s good at that kind of thing; he’s compassionate to a fault, a real master of forgiving and forgetting. His heart’s too big to hold a grudge against anyone for very long, after all. 

But Natsu’s just not anyone. She’s his little sister. 

“If I knew things would turn out like this,” Shouyou mutters into the kilometers, years, and feelings between them, “I’d have never introduced you to volleyball.”

The call ends with a beep. 

Natsu lies perfectly still on top of her covers. For some reason, she finds herself thinking of the day their father left. It’d been an exceptionally cold night. The winds were strong, as was the rain, and several trees in their neighborhood had already been knocked over. By the next morning, the streets would look like a saw mill. But Natsu didn’t know that yet, of course, the same way she didn’t know her father was leaving for Ibaraki Prefecture and never looking back. 

Shouyou, on the other hand, understood what was happening. He was eleven at the time and had noticed the chasm forming between their parents over the last few years. There was no overt bad blood between them; in fact, there might not have been any bad blood at all. But something or another happened one too many times, and the only solution was a split. 

Theirs wasn't a very physical family, but Shouyou hugged their father long and hard that evening. Then he told his little sister to do the same. But Natsu didn’t want to. She doesn’t remember why exactly she was mad at her father—maybe he hadn’t watched TV with her that morning, or forced her to go to bed early the night before. Either way, Natsu had crossed her arms and shook her head. 

A frowning Shouyou pulled her aside into the bathroom. Natsu took a seat on the plastic toilet cover while he crouched eye-level in front of her. “Look,” her brother said, “Papa’s gonna be gone for a long time. I’m not sure when we’re gonna see him again. So you need to give him a hug, okay?”

She didn’t budge.

“Please, Nacchan? For your big brother?” He smiled, all crooked white teeth. “I promise it’s important. I’d never lie to you.”

Maybe it was the confidence in Shouyou’s straight shoulders or the earnesty in his voice, but Natsu found herself nodding. They exited the bathroom and she promptly latched herself onto their father’s legs for a good thirty seconds. Then, once he’d walked out of the house, she leaned out the genkan window and screamed goodbye to him at the top of her lungs. Her hair got all wet, which meant that it got all poofy, and Shouyou spent the next hour toweling it off. He massaged her waves with such care back then. He’d loved her so much.

Natsu rolls onto her side, folds herself into fetal position. She lets her tears fall like rain and doesn’t get up to shower until her pillow case is soaked.

Akemi once told Natsu that when she needs to clear her head, she leaves. She takes a walk to one of the faraway convenience stores and calls up a friend from America for a few hours, or she bikes into the city, or she takes a bus to the middle of nowhere and spends the afternoon chatting with elderly locals who have the eyesight of bats. The point, she’d emphasized, was to get out of your environment. To go someplace else and see what clarity the geographic change could bring to you.

So Natsu leaves Miyagi prefecture seven hours after she’s officially turned seventeen. It’s Saturday, which means her team has conditioning from 12 to 2 PM and regular practice from 3 to 6 PM. (Nasty work, those doubles are.) She messages the groupchat and says she’s got a family emergency, but that she’ll make up whatever she misses on her own time, and will definitely be at practice on Monday. Immediately, the girls send her a deluge of well wishes. 

Natsu only feels a little bit bad for the white lie. What’s making her skip town is a family affair, but it’s not an emergency. She’s had her father’s address for years, after all, and there’s always been an open invitation to visit. She’s just never had the time nor interest to do so before. 

Her father’s not a bad guy; Hatsuko has drilled this into them since he left. But in Natsu’s eyes, his leaving meant abandoning any chance of a real relationship with his kids. Shouyou doesn’t feel the same way. Last year, their mother mentioned that he visits their father once or twice a year.

Settling into her seat on the train, Natsu writes a text to her mother. 

From: Natsu

To: Mama

[08:36]

> out for the day

> will be back by 10 PM

She doesn’t text where she’s going, even though she knows she should, for safety and trust and all those other flimsy words. But Hatsuko views herself as a bad mother, which means Natsu consequently views herself as a bad daughter. It only makes sense for them to betray each other.

The train lurches away from the station. 

Natsu’s never been to Ibaraki Prefecture before. It’s close enough that she could’ve gone to visit before, but for some reason, the knowledge that her father lived somewhere among the 6,000 square kilometers and change deterred her from ever stepping foot there. After all, what if she ran into him in a shopping center? What if he stood next to her on one of the local bus lines, or offered her spare change to buy grape soda from a vending machine on the street? 

These were unlikely situations, paranoid fantasies more than anything else. But still, they underscored a greater anxiety: What would Natsu say to her father if she saw him again? After all this time, what would be fair? He was the one who left, so how much did he deserve to know? How could she explain the things and things and things that had happened to her in the last decade or so?

She turns these questions over in her head as if wedging clay for the entirety of the five-hour train ride. By the time she hops on the bus toward her father’s side of town, she still hasn’t come up with any answers. There’s no rulebook for things like this, it seems. There is just Natsu and her hastily thrown together travel pack, thousands of kilometers from home; there is just now.

The bus plops her at a station roughly thirty-five minutes from her father’s house. She’ll have to take a taxi the rest of the way or walk it, the old man behind the wheel explains. They’re in the inaka now, so public transit stations are fewer and farther between. 

Natsu thanks the driver and tells him she’ll walk. God knows she has enough to think about during the trek.

Her father’s house is a small, squat thing. It’s not exactly ugly, but it’s certainly not much to look at either. Natsu drinks it in for a long while—the peeling paint, the shingled roof, the squared windows—until her stomach feels full and sloshy. Then she walks up to it. 

She lets herself in through the rickety gate, and her hand lingers for a second or two on the name plaque mounted on the bars. It has her father’s name of course, which is to say that it has her name: Hinata, written in a traditional, calligraphic font. Their name plate back in Miyagi is far more modern, all squared off letters and no nonsense. There’s something oddly charming about the one here. It feels anachronistic, almost, but then against, so do most things in the area. This town seems to exist outside of time and space.

Natsu approaches the front door. About two hundred thoughts flash through her head as she raps her knuckles against it, but she remembers exactly zero of them. Because as soon as she’s pulling her fist away from the wood, a familiar face is greeting her. 

Hinata Eijirou looks much the same as he did the night he left, all those years ago. He still has those wide, sparkling eyes—Natsu and Shouyou get theirs from him—but they’re now bracketed by faint crow’s feet. He’s kept his hair cropped close to his head, though it’s a bit thinner now. A bronzed glow emanates from his skin, as it always has; the freckles dotting his arms indicate some kind of outdoor work though. 

And all at once, Natsu finds herself overcome with emotion. 

“Hi, Papa,” she says. Maybe the name is childish, but it’s the only one she’s ever known. Eijirou left before he could become touchan or otousan or anything else.

“Natsu,” her father whispers, and she must not be the only one facing an onslaught of feelings, because he looks close to tears. “I—What are you doing here? Does your mother know you’re out?”

“Yeah, I texted her,” Natsu says, which isn’t technically a lie. “I told her I’d be back by the end of the day. I just needed to clear my head, get away for a bit.”

“So you decided to come to Ibaraki?” her father asks incredulously. A single star trickles down his cheek. “Well, no matter. Happy birthday, by the way.” Stepping back to clear a space in the genkan, he says, “Would you like to come inside?”

Natsu walks into the house as if she’s lived there her entire life. She toes off her shoes and tucks them in an empty cubby, then hangs her backpack on one of the coat hooks. A small part of her feels like calling out tadaima, but she refrains. 

Eijirou’s place has many of the marks of a traditional bachelor pad: a coffee table stained with milky white rings, a kitchen table with just one chair, an ever present masculine musk. But it’s also littered with photos of their family—both old ones from when they were four, and newer ones of them as three. Natsu runs her hand along the golden frame of a photo of Shouyou and her at a summer festival in elementary school. She remembers this one because of how hot it’d been. Hatsuko had insisted on making her wear a yukata in spite of the cruel weather, and the only reason Natsu agreed was because her brother slipped into one too. Her yukata was a light pink, but in the picture, it looks almost white. She’s fanning her face with one hand while her other hand is clasped firmly in her brother’s. Shouyou’s smiling, running toward the camera and tugging Natsu along. She’s two steps behind. She always has been, it seems. 

Eijirou offers to make tea. Natsu declines at first, but upon noticing the desperation in his eye, she gives a small nod. She can’t blame him for his nerves. She, herself, doesn’t know what to do with her hands in a situation like this. Part of her wants to throw herself onto her father, to give him a great big bear hug that’ll crack a few ribs. Another part wants to go cower in the genkan and hole up all the emotions that have started leaking out of her over the last few hours.

In the end, Natsu does neither of these things. She waits patiently for her tea, and when it’s done, she takes the cup from her father, follows him into the living room, and has a seat on the opposite end of the couch from hum.

“There’s only one chair at the kitchen table,” Eijirou says by way of an explanation, scratching his neck the exact way her brother does. 

“It’s okay; your couch is comfortable.” Natsu relaxes into the lumpy cushions, takes a scalding swig of her tea. “Tea’s good.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

For a while, the only sound in the old house is their loud sipping. Eventually, Eijirou breaks the ice and asks Natsu about her life as of late. “I get photos from your mother still,” he explains, “and I watch all of Shouyou’s matches on TV, but you’re a bit harder to keep up with, Natsu.” A pause. “Nacchan, I mean.”

And just like that, Natsu finds herself opening up like a cherry blossom in late March. She talks about her team and how they’re gunning for another national title. She talks about Akemi, who’s become something like her best friend, and confesses that she’s never really been close with anyone the way the two of them are close. She talks about Hatsuko’s increasingly busy schedule, and the shooting pain in her right knee when she lands wrong, and how Murakami Sensei’s been breathing down her neck about choosing a “proper” career path. Natsu even thinks about mentioning her fight with Shouyou, though she doesn’t in the end. 

All the while, her father listens patiently. She knows this is quite the feat; she and Shouyou get their rambunctious nature from someone after all, and it’s certainly not their mother. But then again, maybe Eijirou’s ability to hold his tongue isn’t all that impressive. Maybe calmness comes easier to him now. Perhaps the years in this little, quiet town have mellowed him out, for better or for worse. 

By the time Natsu’s finished recounting the last decade, she’s down to her last drop of tea. Her father refills her mug in the kitchen, and—when he thinks she isn’t watching—dumps his own down the sink. 

He returns to the living room with both of their mugs. “I suppose you wonder why I ended up here,” he says carefully, handing hers off. 

“Not really,” Natsu admits, taking her mug with two hands. “Ibaraki’s pretty enough, and there’s something kind of calming about the stillness of it all.”

Her father chuckles, and it sounds like an older, wearier version of Shouyou’s laugh. “True enough. But I suppose I didn’t speak clearly. What I meant by that was: I suppose you wonder why I don’t live with you and your mother anymore.”

Oh. Natsu brings her mug up to her face, lets the steam irritate her cheeks. “Not really. I kind of just took it at face-value. I was so young.”

Eijirou twitches. “Right.”

“But that doesn’t mean I don’t wanna know now,” she blurts, taking a tentative sip of her drink. It’s still too hot. Good. If her tongue is blistered, she won’t be able to say something else stupid.

Her father takes a deep breath. Then he starts to run his hand up and down the carved grooves of his mug. The stoneware makes a scratchy shh shh shh sound. 

“My daughter,” he begins, “happiness has never come easily to me. Your grandmother and grandfather died when I was very young, and I spent a lot of my childhood trying to tend to that wound. My days felt long and gray. I had poor grades—yes, even worse than you and your brother—and poorer attendance. I was slipping through the cracks. All the teachers knew it, and they just turned a blind eye to me.

“And then, just when I was losing all hope, the world sent me an angel! Your mother. She transferred to my high school during our third year. She was everything good bundled into one person: laughter, light, love, and—well, you know what Hatsuko’s like.

“After high school, we went to college and got married. By twenty-one your mother was ready to have kids. I had my reservations though. I was happy the way we were, just the two of us, and worried that children would throw me out of balance. It sounds awfully selfish, I know it does, but it’s the truth.”

It doesn’t sound selfish; it sounds heartbreaking, Natsu thinks to herself. She gives her father a small smile of encouragement to keep going. 

“I loved your mother though, Nacchan, and I wanted to believe in us. So when we were twenty-three, we had Shouyou. And somehow, amazingly, things were fine. If anything, my happiness increased, in spite of the fact that we were living dangerously close to the poverty line and without steady employment. Five years later, our finances were finally settled. Your mother was finished with nursing school, and I had a high-paying corporate job. So we tried for another child, and that’s how we ended up you, our little summer miracle. You were born two weeks early. Did you know that?”

Natsu shakes her head.

“It’s true,” her father says, setting his mug down so he can talk with his hands. “You were supposed to be a September baby, but you just couldn’t wait that long. You had to get out—get into the world! So out you popped on August 31st.”

“I’ve always had a problem with patience,” Natsu muses.

“Your brother’s the same way. You’re a lot alike, you know that? Spending time with the two of you—your starbursting energy, your larger-than-life personalities, even at such young ages—that was my greatest joy. Still is.” Eijirou pauses then, and corners of his mouth turn down. “But somehow, when I wasn’t paying it close enough attention, the sadness crept back. I came home from work one day and it was like it’d never left. What I need you to understand is that it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t Shouyou’s fault either, or Hatsuko’s, or even my job’s. It was just one of those things that was. You know those kinds of things, yeah?”

Her volleyball position changing. Her brother growing up and out. Her mother stretching herself thin like fishing wire. 

“Yeah, I do,” Natsu murmurs.

“Well, that’s really all there was to it.” Eijirou picks up his empty mug, rubs blunt nails against the subtractive surface of it again. “I’m sorry, Nacchan. I was worried that the only thing I could pass onto you was sadness, so I left. Know that I did what your mother and I thought was for the best. We didn’t—” He sighs. “We didn’t want you to see me as a monster.”

Monster. The word sounds funny falling from the lips of her own flesh and blood. Natsu’s been called kyodai, a kaijuu, and an oni since she exited the womb, and Shouyou came into similar terms as he made a name for himself in volleyball. For some reason, Natsu never imagined that her father could’ve felt like a monster too.

She sets her tea down on the coffee table and scooches closer to her father. She’s not sure what she’s doing at this point; her body’s moving on its own, limbs flopping like they’re on marionette strings. But then she’s hugging Eijirou like she’s six years old on a stormy night again, and her eyes are getting misty, and her nose is running all icky, and it’s only as she ugly-sobbing into the rumpled collar of her father’s shirt that she realizes whatever she’s doing, it’s the right thing. In this moment, it’s the right thing.

Eijirou wraps his arm around Natsu without complaint. He smooths down the barbs in her hair, petting her like she’s a frightened animal, and the embrace feels so much like Shouyou’s that she starts crying even harder. 

She misses her brother, maybe. She misses her mother too, probably. She thinks she misses her father as well, even though she’s hugging him right now, and that she misses the life she’ll never know—the life they could’ve had together if only they knew how to help him. 

“I understand, Nacchan,” Eijirou says, patting her back steadily, the way he did when he’d tuck her into bed all those years ago. “It hurts.” Pat, pat. “Understanding hurts.”

Natsu cries into her father’s arms for twenty minutes. When her tears finally subside, she’s sticky with embarrassment. She asks to be directed to the bathroom, where she proceeds to sit on the toilet for a good long while and stare at her message logs. 

She should probably message Shouyou. She should definitely message her mother. Instead, she drafts a message to Akemi.

From: Natsu

To: Akemi

[14:24]

> what’re your plans for sunday?

> wait i meant tomorrow

> oh wait tomorrow is sunday i think

> oops ..

The reply comes just as she’s realizing her father probably thinks she’s drowned in the toilet considering how long she’s been gone.

From: Akemi
To: Natsu 

[14:29]

> oops ..

> hmm, tomorrow looks open for me

> why? do you wanna hang out?!

Natsu smiles to herself. Sends a reply, then tucks her phone in her pocket as soon as she sees Akemi’s.

From: Natsu
To: Akemi 

[14:30]

> yeah, i could use someone to talk to right now

> well, not just someone

> i could use you

[14:32]

> we could grab lunch at mari’s?

From: Akemi
To: Natsu 

[14:32]

> okay !! see you then <3

Natsu leaves Ibaraki an hour later. Her father pays for her taxi back to the bus station, and then insists on giving her some money toward her train fare too. She tries to refuse it, but he presses the bills into her hand with more force and gives her a desperate look. Let me do this, the yellowing roots of his teeth seem to say. Please let me do this. 

So Natsu does. She gives him a hug goodbye and promises to visit again sometime soon, though she doesn’t define when that is, and he doesn’t ask her to.

“I’ll see you when I see you,” Eijirou calls as she climbs into the taxi. 

Natsu’s heart splits, and Natsu’s heart sings. “I’ll see you when I see you,” she echoes back.

As a registered nurse, Hatsuko’s work schedule is prone to fluctuation. Sometimes, she’ll be off for an entire week. When this happens, Natsu will come home from practice to find the house spotless, the garden weeded, and the table plated with a full spread of food. At other times, work effectively turns her into a zombie. It atrophies her muscles; it tests her mental fortitude. 

This week is one of those times.

Hatsuko is going on her ninth day of work in a row, and she has the eyebags to prove it. Her movements are slowed, like someone’s turned down her shutter speed, and when Natsu tries to talk to her, the words seem to go in one ear and out the other. Maybe in the past, this wouldn’t have bothered her, but Natsu’s done a lot of thinking about her mother since visiting her father a few weeks ago. 

In all honesty, she hasn’t come to any new, life-changing conclusions. She might not have come to any new conclusions at all. Everything she’s pondered has been something she’s already known, at least peripherally: Hatsuko got pregnant when she was young. Hatsuko reared her children on her own. Hatsuko works late hours to support both of her children, even though one of them is now salaried and living on his own. Hatsuko is kind to the world, even when the world has not been kind to her.

These thoughts are not epiphanies; they are remembrances. When you are seventeen, it’s easy to forget that your parent is just a person. 

Natsu watches the steep curve of her mother’s back as she slices an apple at the counter. She’s just a person.

“You don’t have to make them into rabbit shapes,” Natsu says, crossing from the living room and into the kitchen. “You don’t have to be cutting up fruit for us at all. I know how to use a knife. If we get hungry, I’ll cut some myself.” She studies her mother’s sallow complexion. “Besides, you have to leave for work soon. You should be relaxing, not worrying about me.”

“Nonsense,” Hatsuko chides. “A good host always prepares tea and snacks.”

Natsu likes to think of her mother as a relatively progressive woman, but at times like this, she seems awfully old-fashioned. She knocks her hip into the counter. “Okay, yeah, but Akemi’s been here a dozen times.”

Hatsuko cleaves her halved apple into four even slices. She takes her pairing knife and starts to cut intersecting slits into the amber skin. “Well that’s exactly my point.”

“What do you mean?”

Her mother finishes slitting the first half of the apple slices, then scoops up the pieces and dumps them into a bowl of lemon water. “What I mean,” she says, voice like birdsong, “is that you like Akemi, don’t you? In a ‘more than a friend’ way, yes? So you ought to entertain her properly, and do so consistently.” A bit of lemon water splashes up out of the bowl and Hatsuko dabs it with a paper towel. “It’s a matter of respect.”

Natsu has pictured coming out to her mother a few times now. For some reason, she always assumed it’d happen in the morning. They’d both wake up early, neither of them with obligations, and sit at the kitchen table chatting over cups of coffee. The mug would keep Natsu from gesticulating. She’d very casually bring up Akemi, then naturally segway into a discussion of her sexuality. Her mother would listen attentively, give a small gasp somewhere in the middle of her speech, and then nod politely. Things would be awkward for the next few days, and then life would move on.

In retrospect, this expectation didn’t make much sense. For one, neither Natsu nor her mother are coffee drinkers. Hatsuko goes for a strong tea, while Natsu is still fine with her orange juice, thank you very much. But the bigger issue, it seems, is Natsu’s assumption that her mother wouldn’t have been able to read her heart. Because Hatsuko has —read her heart, she means—and almost as if it were an open book, which they both know it’s not.

Willing her jaw not to drop, Natsu nods. “I guess that makes sense.” After a beat, she adds, “And I do like Akemi, yeah.”

Hatsuko finishes designing the other half of the apple. “I do too. You know some mothers might not be okay with their daughter dating a foreigner, but I really don’t mind.” 

Ah, so she’s extra old-fashioned today.

“Akemi’s not a foreigner, Mama,” Natsu drones, because it’s a conversation they’ve had more than once now. “She’s a Japanese citizen, and she grew up in California where there are great Japanese schools and a ton of other Japanese and Japanese American people.” Confusion lowers her eyelids. “And wait, wouldn’t other mothers be more concerned about their daughter dating a girl than a foreigner? How come you didn’t think of that?”

“Oh, I suppose you’re right!” her mother chortles. “Your brother’s been in love with Kageyama-kun for so long that sometimes I forget not everyone knows what it’s like to parent a queer child.”

Natsu raises an eyebrow. “‘Love’ is a pretty strong word.”

Hatsuko bats a hand. “Please, your brother’s brought up proposing before. He’s definitely in love.”

“You can’t even get married in Japan!” 

“You can in Brazil,” her mother says, dropping the rest of the apple slices in the lemon juice.

That’s a fair point. Natsu watches Hatsuko take the bowl of bunnies and wedge them into the open corner of the bottom shelf of the fridge. Then a thought strikes her head like a stray bowling ball. She says: “But Shouyou’s living in Japan again. He’s playing for a Japanese team and everything.” Quieter: “You don’t think he’ll stay?”

Hatsuko smiles, sorrow-song love lengthening her eyelashes. “Do you?”

Natsu doesn’t need to answer the question. “Does it ever make you sad?” she asks instead, voice just above a whisper.

“Sometimes,” her mother concedes, turning on the sink to wash her hands. “But that’s just the way it goes. I knew when I started raising Shouyou, just as I knew when I started raising you, that I was taking care of someone just for them to change in ways I could never imagine. That’s the only real guarantee you get with this parenting thing: your kid becoming someone entirely new by the time they’re your age, Natsu.” She shrugs, shaking suds from her fingertips. “Anyway, I don’t really go along with all that filial piety stuff. I want you to become your own people. I want you to fall in love and ignore me, and fall out of love and come back to me, and move away and start a new life, and then come back to me again if you need it.” Drying her hands on one of the nice kitchen towels, she says, “Mostly though, I want you to be proud of the choices you make.”

The kitchen sighs under the weight of her words. Outside, Natsu swears she can hear the chrysanthemum blossoms opening.

“Mama,” she says, “I’m really glad that you’re my mother and I’m your daughter.”

Her mother sets the towel down and comes to stand beside her at the counter. She gives her unruly hair a genial ruffle. “How odd. I was just thinking the same thing.”

Akemi arrives right as Hatsuko’s leaving, and they give each other polite little bows while shimmying through the narrow doorway. Natsu hangs back in the hall and tries to quell her flush. It’s a peculiar feeling to know that your mother is privy to your feelings for a girl and said girl is not. Relationships get complicated when they’re out of order, and Natsu and Akemi’s timeline has been jumbled a half dozen times over the last few months. The strings of their en-musubi are knotting tight in places, and unless Natsu wants one of them to get hurt, she needs to start being honest. So that’s what she resolves to do. 

The only trouble is, it’s hard to have any kind of resolve when Akemi is lying centimeters away from her, prattling on about her latest cheer practice and looking right in place. The two of them are on their sides in the middle of the living room floor, talking about everything and nothing. From a bird’s-eye-view, they must look like a pair of kidneys.

“The floor work in our most recent routine is just terrible,” Akemi whines. “I know we need it to get complexity points and different levels going, but come on. A knee spin? Really?”

“What’s a knee spin?” Natsu asks, because while Akemi seems to have picked up on volleyball jargon just fine, she still gets toe touches and hurdlers confused. 

“It’s like you start in a lunge, and then turn with all of your weight on your kneecaps. Hurts like hell, and look, I have the evidence to prove it.” Akemi hikes up her culottes then, revealing starbursts of bruises on her knees. 

Natsu sits up so fast she’s surprised she doesn’t pass out. Then she tugs Akemi upright too and promptly puts those battered legs in her lap. 

“What are you doing, Natsu?” Akemi laughs, bouncing her legs in place to emphasize the oddity of the situation. “Did you want me in your lap that bad?”

If Natsu weren’t so captivated, the tease would’ve sent her into cardiac arrest. But she’s busy bringing her face down to those mottled legs. They’re even worse up close. The colors look like muddy water colors, painted right on top of each other before the previous layer could dry. 

“It’s just—I don’t know,” Natsu admits at last. She thumbs at a particularly large purple mark right above Akemi’s left shin. “I guess I didn’t realize you got bruises too.”

Akemi lets out a jangling laugh. “Of course, I do! It’s a prescribed side effect of floor work. And unlike some girls,” she drawls, narrowing her eyes and knocking their shoulders together, “my team’s not allowed to wear knee pads. Cheer coaches and judges are sticklers about presentation. I get a ton of bruises at practices but always have to cover them up.” She rolls her pant legs higher to reveal oblong blotches criss-crossing her upper thighs. “These ones are from basing girls. I swear I can still feel Hashimura’s shoe here when I close my eyes.” 

“Wow.” Natsu trails her hand up from Akemi’s knee to her thigh. She rubs softly against the aggressive marks for a few moments, then feels her entire body blush when she realizes what she’s doing. “I, uhm—is this okay?” she blurts lamely.

Akemi bends her knee, pressing the muscle of her quad further into Natsu’s hand. “I’d tell you if it wasn’t.” 

Her gaze is so intense that Natsu thinks about running to the bathroom and locking herself inside. She cracks a joke instead. “You sure you want to get this close to me? You know what they say.” Wiggling her fingers, she whispers, “I’m a monster.”

“You’re so silly, Natsu,” Akemi says, not unkindly. “Why are you bringing that up to me? I was raised in America. My dad’s Black. I keep my hair natural.” She huffs a laugh. “It’s not a competition, but I promise, I’ve been called a monster a lot more than you, and in far worse circumstances.”

Akemi’s ethnicity isn’t something they discuss often, the same way the topic of the Shouyou-sized hole in Natsu’s life is normally off the table too. Just because a wound is visible to the naked eye doesn’t mean its bearer constantly wants attention poured on it. Akemi knows the way she’s perceived by others, so why would she waste time talking about it with Natsu? There are dozens of other people out there who are probably better equipped to understand her unique struggle as a mixed woman and a Black woman. 

To put it another way: For Akemi to suddenly bring up her identity, it must mean Natsu’s struck a nerve. 

“Oh, Emi,” she babbles, “I’m so sorry. I must’ve sounded so, so—I don’t know, tone-deaf? Is that the right word?” Her grip on Akemi’s bruised thigh increases as she fumbles for the right words. “No, I’m not sure it is. Maybe insensitive is the one I’m looking for? You know I’m not all that great at talking. What I mean is—”

And then whatever Natsu’s planning to blab becomes irrelevant—pointless, inconsequential, completely rendered moot—because Akemi’s cupping her hot, freckled cheeks and crashing their mouths together. She kisses Natsu like she’s something worth protecting, not something to be feared. She kisses Natsu like she’s fading. She kisses Natsu like she understands, and like it hurts, and like she understands that it hurts.

When they break apart for air, Natsu’s gone bright red in the face. Akemi smiles at her ruddy complexion before drawing their foreheads together. “Nacchan, my sweet Nacchan,” she murmurs into the sliver of space between them, “why should we give a fuck about who calls us monsters?”

The question ends Natsu’s suspicion that she and Akemi are now telepathically connected after sharing a kiss that rewired her brain. She tries to look into Akemi’s dark eyes, but it’s hard to do so when they’re this close together. She pulls back, considers her options. Finally, she maneuvers so that she’s lying down and her head is in Akemi’s lap. 

“You’re right,” Natsu says, as soon as she’s discerned that Akemi’s comfortable with their position. “It shouldn’t matter. I know it shouldn’t. ‘Monster’ is a compliment in volleyball. It means I’m skilled, passionate, hard to keep up with.” She clenches her teeth. “But it’s also always kind of rubbed me the wrong way, you know?”

“‘Cause it’s a borrowed word,” Akemi replies, bringing a hand down to stroke through Natsu’s hair. (Her fingers get caught in a knot, and they both sputter into snickers.) “They called your brother and his generation ‘monsters’ first, and then the term automatically transferred to you as soon as you showed any promise, yeah?”

Natsu leans into the gentle combing of her hair. “Yeah. It’s a stupid thing to complain about. I know it is. But hearing that word reminds me that Shouyou will always be there, and that he’ll always have been there first.”

“Right.”

“I started volleyball because of Shouyou,” Natsu continues, letting Akemi’s knee dig a soft indent into her cheek, “but I kept going because of me. I wish people could see that.”

“I see you, Natsu,” Akemi assures, leaning down to press a kiss to her forehead. Lips dragging across her hairline, she adds, “And I think your brother sees you too.”

Natsu brings a hand up to trace the lingering outline of Akemi’s lips. To love a girl, she decides then and there, is something special. To love a woman is something special. 

“You’re right,” she whispers softly. “But Shouyou and I haven’t talked in months. I hurt him real bad back then. I said horrible things—the kinds of things you should never say to another person.”

Akemi finger-combs a bit slower now. “You know,” she hums, scratching Natsu’s scalp here and there, “most people say we’re hardest on ourselves, but I’d argue that we’re actually hardest on our siblings. We grow up beside them, looking up to them and looking down on them, and we also ourselves in them. It’s a devastating combination.” She shrugs. “That’s how it is with me and my brother at least. It’s easy to say things we don’t fully mean because at the end of the day, we know we’ll come back to each other. We’re always in each other’s corner, you know?”

Natsu nods. She’s met Akemi’s younger brother once or twice now, and he fired a slew of insults at his older sister both times. Haruto’s just turned fifteen, which means he’s at that tricky age where his body is growing faster than he can keep track of it, and he’s extra irritable, and he’s also in desperate need of a stronger deodorant. Sometimes he and Akemi won’t talk for days at a time, if not weeks. But they live in the same house, so eventually they end up having to interact, and then they move past whatever argument they had. It’s a seemingly infinite cycle, but it could be worse. 

Perhaps Natsu and Shouyou are the worse. It’s been a very, very long time since Natsu’s talked to her brother. It’s been an even longer time since she saw him in person. That day at the train station where they traded stiff goodbyes feels like ages ago. It feels like a dream.

“Talk to him,” Akemi pleads then, and her hand has found its way into Natsu’s. She gives a firm squeeze. “He’s your brother. He’s more proud of you than you could ever know, and he misses you.” She winks. “I’m an older sibling. You have to trust me on this kind of thing.”

Natsu smiles in spite of herself, looks at Akemi like the sun looks at the moon. “I’ll talk to him. Eventually. I just—I need some time to figure out what I’m gonna say first.”

“That’s okay,” Akemi says, squeezing her hand again. “He’ll be waiting for you.”

Natsu thinks of her brother standing at the top of the stairs to the local shrine on New Year’s. She pictures him hunched over, panting, after sprinting to the end of the neighborhood hiking trail. Imagines him pedaling in front of her on his bicycle, back before it was a glorified piece of scrap metal, and remembers him tugging her through a scorching summer festival as kids. 

“I know,” she says.

One month before winter break, Natsu schedules a meeting with Murakami Sensei to go over her post-graduation plan again. Nothing’s changed with it, really, other than the fact that she’s now sure of what she wants and why she wants it. Her teacher might not agree, but they aren’t discussing the future of a middle-aged woman who wears her gray-streaked hair in a criminally tight low bun every day. They’re discussing Natsu’s. 

Taking a seat across the desk from Murakami in her cubicle, Natsu is reminded of her first time in the teacher’s lounge all those months ago. She thinks about her sorry attitude, her overflowing embarrassment, and most of all, her debt to Coach Ozawa. A small smile finds its way onto her face.

Murakami pulls out Natsu’s post-graduation planning sheet and uncaps her pen. “Yes, that’s right,” she mutters to herself, looking over her notes. “We were discussing the possibility of you putting off college to play professionally, correct?” 

“That’s correct. But you told me to think it over more.”

“I did, didn’t I?” Murakami is perpetually fond of her rhetorical questions, it seems. “Well, have you come to any new conclusions?”

This is it. This is the moment where Natsu has to stand her ground, where she has to believe in her love for volleyball enough to justify the absurd career choice of pursuing it professionally. 

“I’m going to play professionally. That’s what I want written on my planning sheet.”

Murakami’s face goes printer paper-blank. She sets her pen down.

Natsu takes this as a sign to keep talking. “I’ve done a lot of thinking lately about why I play volleyball and what it means to me. The answer is love, I think. I love playing volleyball more than anything else.” She twiddles with her fingers. “And I love that it connects me to the people I care about. I know it’s not all that practical, and definitely won’t make paying the bills easy, but it’s what I want to do with my life. This is what I want.”

Across the table, Murakami remains impassive as a stone wall. With that stillness, she could win one of those statue competitions. Then, slowly, beautifully, she smiles. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

Natsu nearly chokes on her own spit. “Wait, really?”

“Well, frankly, Hinata-san, you’re a terrible writer. I have no idea why you chose the humanities track.”

“Oh, god, cause I’m hopeless in STEM! In our first year, we started learning polynomial long division and I had to tell Fujino Sensei that I didn’t even know how to regular long division.” Natsu shudders. “One of my most embarrassing moments of the year.”

“Oh, I’m sure there were worse things,” Murakami quips.

Natsu snorts. “Yeah, there probably were.” As she watches her teacher scrawl down the words “professional athlete” in the anticipated career box of her planning sheet, a thought crosses her mind: “If you wanted me to play volleyball professionally, why’d you insist on making me think about it more?”

At first, Natsu assumes that Murakami didn’t hear her because she continues scratching away at the planning sheet without looking up. She keeps quiet as she pulls her fancy hanko out of her desk drawer, stamps a big fat mark of approval on the paper, and sets it aside. But when she looks up, Natsu can tell she has something important to say.

“Because I wanted you to be sure, Hinata-san,” Murakami murmurs, all the usual gruffness absent from her voice. “I wanted you to be sure.” She sets her elbows on her desk, getting into a familiar lecture stance. “Listen here: You are going to live so many more years outside of high school than you live in high school. Professional sports are tricky business. There’s no guarantee that your career will take off, after all, or that you won’t get injured right away, or that some other debilitating, freak event won’t occur.” A smile, sad some. “So I needed you to be sure that you wouldn’t look back and resent your high school self for the decision you made.”

“I won’t,” Natsu says, and she means it. Leaning back in her chair, she gives her Murakami a polite once-over. “I had no clue you had so many thoughts on the nature of going pro.”

Her teacher shrugs, tucking her post-graduation planning sheet away into one of her desk drawers. “It comes with being the girlfriend of a former professional athlete.”

Murakami excuses herself for another meeting before Natsu even has time to gawk.

One week before the end of the year, Natsu decides to call her older brother. Neither of them have spoken to each other in months now, so it’s a long shot that he’ll even pick up. It’s a pleasant surprise, then, when he answers on the second ring. Maybe, just maybe, he’s been waiting for this call too.

“Moshi moshi,” she says, and it comes out as a sigh more than anything else. 

“Moshi moshi,” her brother responds, and it must be a trick of the mind, the way his voice sounds a bit deeper than it did back in August. “I didn’t think you’d call.”

“Yeah, I’m—” Natsu cracks open the sliding door to their front yard, slides through it and then takes a seat on the edge of their deck. It’s cold out, but she has her jacket on. She should be fine. “I wasn’t sure I would either, to be honest.”

“That’s good,” Shouyou replies. “The being honest part, I mean.” 

“Yeah, it’s a nice change.”

From inside the house, Natsu hears her mother singing. It’s Tamaki Kouji, which means she must be folding clothes. She has a designated artist for all her household tasks: Tamaki Kouji for laundry, Arai Yumi for dishes, Ozaki Yutaka for cleaning, Ikimonogakari for cooking. Hatsuko does so much on her days off; Natsu really ought to help out around the house more. She makes a mental note to set the table for dinner tonight.

“So, why’d you call?” her brother asks then, and his impatience is strangely endearing. “You got a question for me?”

Natsu smiles to herself, all dopey and sad. What’s the weather like in Osaka right now? Is he getting along with his new teammates well? Are the FamilyMarts in his city also running that buy two-get one free deal on canned lemon sours? Is the sky blacker than black over there, too?

She wonders all of these things and then tucks them away for safekeeping. There will be other days to ask them. Today, she has just one question: “Niichan?”

“Yes, Nacchan?” 

Natsu undoes the top two buttons of her heavy down jacket. As the cold air clips her skin, she thinks—vaguely—of warm childhood summers spent with Shouyou, of jumping double dutch and building fairy houses and cleaning centimeter-deep cuts on each other’s purpling knees. She thinks of a volleyball thumping between their outstretched arms like a heartbeat. 

When Natsu exhales August’s breath into her frigid cellphone, the heat is sticky-sweet: “Did it ever hurt when they called you a monster?”

“Love, at its best, repeats itself.”

– Ocean Vuong