"I think I have everything for the computer club’s party?" Miyako said doubtfully, examining the contents of her shopping bags. One of them was filled to the brim with sweets, chips and cakes, all ‘donated’ by her father’s convenience store. The other had bottles of mineral water and soda in it.

"Even if you do not, you will still have enough for an army of programmers," Iori replied with a slight smile. Her friend had changed a lot in the course of three years. He had grown tall and thin, while his hair had grown out of its pudding-bowl neatness into a sleek, elegant style. His years of kendo had given him finely-defined muscles, which were evident beneath the tight, mocha shirt he was wearing. Only his eyes were the same - brilliantly green and oddly solemn. Unsurpisingly, his name was on the cover of more than one schoolgirl’s book.

"Should we wait for Takeru?" she asked him.

He shook his head, "I saw him leave his apartment an hour or two ago. I think he goes running in the park early in the morning."

Miyako frowned. It seemed like weeks since she had spoken to Takeru. When they passed in the hallways at school or at home, they greeted each other or exchanged pleasantries, but it had been ages since they had had a proper conversation. Ever since Hikari had gone, Takeru had been behaving strangely. According to Yamato, he was spending all of his time on the basketball court training or in his room doing his homework. Even though his marks and game had both improved from what she could tell, she knew it was not healthy for him. Takeru had always been the friendliest, warmest person she had known, yet he was isolating himself now.

Before she could reply, however, a scrap of crumpled, yellow paper skittered across the pavement in front of them.

"Ugh. Don’t you just hate litterbugs?" she groaned, placing her bags on the step beside her and running after it. Litter was a pet irritation of hers. She stooped to retrieve it, smoothing it in her hands to see if there was a name on it, and felt herself go cold. Three months later, the bold words across the top of the paper still read like an accusation: Girl Missing. Beneath them, her tinsel-halo crooked on her forehead, Yagami Hikari still smiled out at her. It was like being interrogated by a ghost.

"Weird," she shivered.

"What’s weird?" a boyish voice asked.

She looked up from the paper to see Takeru standing in front of her. He was wearing a faded, grey shirt, printed with the words "ODAIBA BASKETBALL", over a pair of blue tracksuit pants. Sweat formed damp patches down its front and beneath his arms. His dirty-blond hair was plastered darkly across his forehead.

A fake grin coming to her face, she crumpled up the poster and attempted to palm it. Without success. It slipped out of her grasp, skittering across the pavement to rest between them. She tried to pretend it wasn’t there, although she knew he must have noticed it: "Weird that I have enough sugar to send a kid into a permanent coma, and I’m still thinking about getting more for the party. Ha ha . . . ha."

Takeru smiled politely and stooped to retrieve the paper, "I think you dropped this, Miyako. I’ll throw it away for you . . . . "

"No need," she said hastily, "I kinda need it for school today."

"Yes, it’s her biology essay," Iori added, "Very important."

A confused expression on his face, "Maybe you should get the wrinkles out of it before you hand it into your teacher. Otherwise, she might think it’s litter. Here, let me . . . "

Before Miyako could stop him, he uncrumpled the poster. His whole expression changed in an instant, as if he had been shot. All the colour drained from his face, and his pupils dilated to swallow up the blue of his irises. He dropped the paper onto the floor and ran up the steps into the apartment complex.

"Takeru . . . Takeru . . ." Miyako called after him, but he carried on running. It was too late. The damage had been done. She sighed, picking up the poster and throwing it in the bin. It felt wrong, but she did not know what else to do with it.

"Do you think I should go after him?" Iori asked.

She shook her head, "And say what? ‘Hey, I’m really sorry that Hikari’s gone, but you should get over it’. Besides, you’ll be late for school, if you don’t leave now."

"I wish there was more I could do for him."

"Me too, but there isn’t," she gave him a tight smile, hefting her shopping bags, "Life goes on. Which means we have to get moving, or else we’ll get detention."

Leaning his head against the tiles, Takeru shivered in the icy water that poured down on him. The hot water had run cold a long time ago and he knew he was going to be late for school, but he could not get out of the shower. His legs felt too heavy to move, his arms were leaden at his side. At least he had stopped crying.

The memory of her picture was like a scab he could not help picking. Despite his best efforts, his mind kept returning to the image printed on the poster. Her clear, large eyes. Her cold-flushed cheeks. The crooked, tinsel halo. Her brilliant smile. He squeezed his eyes tight against it, but it didn’t help. He still saw her.

Why should I be surprised? he thought bitterly, I even thought I heard her earlier this morning. His mind replayed the high, clear girl’s voice asking for directions home. On the long run back to his apartment, he had dismissed it as a coincidence or as a trick of his one-track mind, but . . . it had sounded so much like Hikari. He felt warm tears well up in his eyes, and he blinked them back fiercely. She had been the one to run away from home. She had been the one who had left him. He wished he could hate her for it.

"Takeru? Are you still home?" his mother’s muffled voice asked from the other side of the door, "You’d better get going. School starts in two minutes. I’ll give you a ride."

"Coming, mom . . ."

In amazement, Yagami Hiruko stared at the broken bottle on the floor in front of her. A golden stain spread out from it and soaked into the beige carpet. Light caught the splinters of glass, shattering into rainbows. And a sweet smell that reminded her of someone painful rose from it. Some part of her knew that she should clean it before it became permanent, that she should go to the cupboard and fetch soap and a cloth, but the rest wanted to sit and watch it grow like sunshine.

Giving into her impulse, she sat down on the floor in her faded house-dress. She noticed that it had a loose thread and she began tugging at it with the same perfect attention that she had paid to the broken bottle. Inch by slow inch, she pulled it out and twined it around her forefinger. She was amazed by how its pale colour became a pure, rich purple as she worked it loose. It seemed like a miracle, although not the one she wanted.

Losing interest in both bottle and thread, she stood and walked to the window to look out at the city. Against the pale, midday sky, the high-rises looked like cardboard cutouts. If she pushed them, she knew they would fall. They wouldn’t even crash, but would rustle gently to the ground. Birds fluttered jerkily between them. The neon signs seemed to twitch on their buildings. The whole scene looked so ridiculous that she couldn’t help laughing. And, once she started laughing, she couldn’t stop herself, even when her sides began to ache from it.

"I’m worried about Takeru," Daisuke told Ken, as he sat down on the bench next to him and undid his shoelaces. The match between Tamachi and Odaiba had fizzled to a draw a long time ago, but they always waited for their respective teammates to leave before coming to change. Their two regions were not that far apart from each other, but they were distant enough that Ken didn’t want to waste any opportunity to spend time with his boyfriend. However, he knew he would have felt the same way even if they had been neighbours.

"I never thought I’d hear those words come out of your mouth," his boyfriend said with a teasing smile. Daisuke made a face at him, sticking out his tongue and pulling down his eyelid. As much as he wanted to forget it, he would never live down his jealousy of Takeru or the ridiculous ways in which he had tried to show Hikari he was better than his love-rival. In his turn, Takeru had tried to be mature about it and tried to pretend that Daisuke’s constant flirting with her didn’t bother him, but there had been times when his temper had snapped. They had been a constant source of amusement for their friends through most of elementary school. Once Daisuke had started dating Ken, however, they had been able to put their antagonism aside. In time, they had even become friends.

"It’s been three months now, and he still hasn’t come to grips with the fact that Hikari’s gone and that he has to move on from it," Daisuke continued, "He’s keeping to himself at school, and he hasn’t spoken more than two words to any of us in weeks. And, this morning, he was late for school and then he was practically a zombie in class. The teacher had to ask him a question about five times before he answered it. I tried to speak to him after the lesson, and I could just see that he wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible. I don’t know. It’s not healthy."

"If it were me who had gone missing, how long would it take you to ‘come to grips’ with it?" Ken asked quietly.

Daisuke flushed, looking ashamed.

"I guess I wasn’t thinking."

"It’s okay, Dai-chan," he smiled at him, "You know I love you." (1)

"Back at you, Ken-chan," his boyfriend leaned forward to kiss him softly, his lips barely brushing his own. Ken slid his arms around him, feeling the marvellous ridges of muscles in his back and shoulders, running a hand through his perspiration-damp hair. Their kiss intensified, feathery kisses slowing and deepening. He could taste the salt of sweat on his lips. He could feel the whisper of his breath against his skin. . . .

Behind him, he heard someone clear their throat, and he immediately pulled back from Daisuke. He had thought both of their teams had changed and gone home long ago, or else he would have never risked kissing him. To be caught like this! What must they be thinking of us? His cheeks felt warm, but only part of it was from embarrassment.

Slowly, Ken turned his head to see Taichi looking at them with a knowing expression on his face. The older boy had a tog-bag slung over one shoulder, and was tossing a football between his hands. He was wearing his green-and-blue strip with a matching sweatband around his forehead. Odaiba’s senior team must have practice this afternoon.

"Taichi, hi!" Daisuke said, rubbing the back of his neck, "We were just . . . talking."

"I can see that," the older boy said wryly, before walking to one of the lockers and throwing his bag into it. It clanged against its metal back.

"About Takeru," Daisuke continued, oblivious to his sarcasm, "About how we’re worried about him, because he isn’t handling the whole losing Hikari thing well."

Nudging him hard in the ribs, Ken shot Daisuke a warning glance. He loved Daisuke more than he could say, but his boyfriend was not the soul of tact. As all of them knew, Takeru hadn’t been the only one who had lost somebody they loved when Hikari had run away from home. Taichi had also had to deal with the loss of his little sister, and all the Chosen Children knew how protective he had been about her. He would have rather lost his own arm or leg than Hikari.

"How do you expect him to handle it?" Taichi said coolly, "He cared a lot about her. Some of us did."

Daisuke evidently realised what he had said, because he turned crimson and stammered: "Taichi, I’m so sorry . . . I didn’t mean to . . . ."

"It’s cool," he sighed, "At least you’re not pussyfooting around me like everyone else is. The other day, my physics teacher was teaching us about light. At the end of the lesson, he called me up to his desk and said he hoped he hadn’t been insensitive to my feelings," he shook his head, "I hadn’t even thought about it, and that made me feel even worse. Because . . . why hadn’t I been thinking about her? When the teacher was speaking about light, why didn’t I think about my little sister? He must have said hikari about fifty times in that lesson, and I didn’t once think of my Hikari."

Ken was embarrassed to see tears running down the older boy’s cheeks. Somehow, they were the worse for being silent. There had to be something he could say or do to make him feel better. Then, it came to him.

"You mustn’t feel bad, Taichi," he said gently, "You have to let yourself heal sooner or later. You have to let go of the pain. I learnt that the hard way when I lost Osamu. I became the Kaizer, because I couldn’t get over his death. I was so desperate to bring him back that I lost sight of who I was."

Taichi stared at him for a long moment, his hands clenching into fists at his sides as if to hit him. Ken met his gaze steadily. He could understand the other boy’s anger. Grief and memories were all he had left of Hikari, and he was asking him to give up one of them. If Taichi let his pain go, it would be like he was letting her go all over again. And he was wondering what right he had to ask him to do that. Ken understood, because he still went through that every morning when he woke up and saw his brother’s empty bed.

"You’re right," Taichi said eventually, wiping his eyes, "Thanks, Ken. I think I needed to hear that."

"So does Takeru," Daisuke chipped in.

"Daisuke," the eldest boy laughed weakly, "You’re like a guitar with one string. If it’ll keep you quiet, though, I’ll go around to his apartment tomorrow and speak to him."

LANGUAGE NOTES:

(1) - chan is the most intimate suffix, used by close families and friends. It is also used for and by young children. Generally, people go from -chan to -san on entering high school. Boys, however, pass through a stage where -kun is attached to their names. Honestly, I don’t know why textbooks say suffixes are so difficult.