Disclaimer: I do not own Prince of Tennis.
A/N: Inspired by Alexandra Pelosi's documentary, Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County. We had to watch it for our Public Health Nursing class discussion. This is for all the homeless kids around the world.
NOTES: Young Akaya (age 7). Young Yanagi (age 10). Homelessness. Realistic fiction. Childish language (?). U.S. setting—Orange County, CA, to be exact. Akaya POV.
...
[BGM: Monkey Majik - "Mahou no Kotoba"]
Orange
~オレンジ~
When Akaya saw his friends and neighbors climbing on the rusted garbage disposal and digging through the trash, he knew another family had left the motel. The things they couldn't shove into their car, the things they didn't want all got tossed away. Here.
"Hey, wait for me!" Akaya dropped his old backpack right then and there to join the kids at the other end of the parking lot.
He dove into the metallic disposal as if jumping into the ball pit at the fun spot his mom once took him to for his birthday.
All the children now gathered at the motel dumpster scooped through ripped books and broken toys as if they wanted to uncover hidden treasures beneath it all.
Akaya pulled out a picture frame from a pile. He didn't recognize anyone in the photograph behind the glass cover, so he chucked the object over his shoulder and continued his shoveling.
Some children left after they found what they wanted. Some got discovered and dragged away by their parents. Eventually, only he remained.
Sooner or later, he managed to yank out a yellow plastic bag buried deep within the mound. A bag from the local convenience store.
Food, he exclaimed. He untied the knot. A pungent odor hit his sensitive nostrils even before he saw its contents. Reaching in, he withdrew a soft, almost mushy, round fruit.
An orange. Though, the black, green and white mold covering it made it unidentifiable.
His stomach growled when he looked at the fruit he closed his fingers around. It was a reminder of the scarce lunch he had at school that day. The bag of oranges would surely fill him up nicely.
Akaya was about to bite into its blackened peel when a voice called out.
"You shouldn't eat that."
He stopped. He turned to see another scrawny child like him standing outside the garbage disposal. The other wore a red sweatshirt and khaki shorts. His straight auburn hair fell below his ears. He couldn't see his eyes.
Akaya remembered him. He lived in the motel with his family just like he did. Because the other lacked facial expressions unlike the other kids, he and his friends always referred to him as "No Face" when they talked about him behind his back.
Akaya stared at him. No Face talked to him for the first time today.
"You shouldn't eat that." He told him again.
Then, the other reached into his pocket and pulled out a ball. An orange, actually. No Face offered it to him.
"You can have this instead."
He peered at the orange in his hand, then at the orange that No Face held out in front of him. Without warning, he dropped the orange he held, jumped out of the garbage disposal and grabbed the fruit the boy offered.
Akaya ran as if he had just stole his classmate's lunch.
Once he got to the other side of the parking lot, he turned and stuck out his tongue in the other's direction.
The boy only walked away without another word.
He glared and pouted at the other's back; he hated when people ignored him.
...
The next day, Akaya woke up to his mother's shaking and calling.
Even though he already knew the answer, he still asked his mother the day of the week when he sat up in bed groggily.
It was Thursday. That meant he had to go to school today. And tomorrow too.
Half awake, he slid off the bed gingerly as not disturb his sleeping father beside him. His father worked the night shift, so he could only rest in the daytime. He and his sister had to be extra careful not to disturb him because it would only lead to a nasty beating.
In the single queen-sized bed motel room, he and his parents squeezed together to fit on the bed while his sister laid out extra blankets to sleep on the floor. Akaya passed her rummaging through her clothing basket on his way to the bathroom. His mother busied herself mixing packages and cans of food to be heated up in the microwave.
By 7:30AM, he and his sister were dressed and ready and out the door with their ripped backpacks walking to the bus stop at the front of the motel. Their mother didn't pack them any lunch because lunch would be provided by the school however meager it might be.
He sat with his friends Bunta and Masaharu on the bus. Though, taking the luxury of getting the window seat, he spent the majority of the bus ride staring outside. He watched the settings change before his eyes. The houses. The stores. The nearby shabby motels the bus stopped by to pick up kids like him. The local elementary school that had a track and a playground and was the same size as the motel they lived at.
Akaya always gave the elementary school extra attention whenever their bus passed it in the mornings.
After a fifteen-minute ride, the bus pulled into a small parking lot. They arrived at school. Project Hope School.
When they got off the bus, a counselor greeted them, gathered them and formed them into a single file. They marched into the gray stucco building about half the size of the elementary school building he sees every morning.
They grab their lunch and snack from separate piles on the table in the school's main corridor. Then the children filtered into different classrooms.
Akaya cruised into his class munching on the bag of chips that his hunger didn't let him save for snack time later.
All the children from second grade to fifth grade shared the tight fourty-seat classroom and a single teacher. His sister was in sixth grade, so she sat in a different classroom listening to a different teacher.
Before he sat down in his usual seat, he spotted No Face a few seats away from his.
The other boy wore the same red sweat shirt and khaki shorts he saw him wear yesterday. Even so, his clothes looked neat and clean as if he never wore them the day before. Though, it wasn't uncommon to see kids wear the same clothes for weeks. Cutting spending on laundry took priority over clothing cleanliness. If he didn't roll around in the dumpster yesterday, Akaya was sure he would be wearing the same clothes he wore.
For their morning activity, the teacher gave the second graders a coloring sheet.
He looked at the image on the paper after his teacher handed him his copy.
A dog with a black, laser-ink outline, its color as white as the paper it was printed on.
He glanced over to his seatmate's paper and saw Bunta scrubbing his dog with a bright red crayon that matched his hair color.
Eventually, he picked up a crayon, a dark-colored one, and started coloring in his dog. He scratched some lines on his dog with a black crayon.
When the teacher came around to admire their artwork, she took a look at his page and asked, "What are those that you put on your dog?"
"They're stitches." He replied simply.
"Why did you give you dog stitches?"
"Because I like to draw my things dark. That's how I am. That's how I was born."
The more he looked at his coloring page, the more confident and proud of his work he became. After all, who could express himself as creatively as he could.
Akaya glanced over in No Face's direction. He wanted to show No Face his masterpiece.
Only, No Face hadn't been coloring like he had. The other dragged his pencil from line to line, jotting notes down furiously as he interacted with his seatmate—a bookworm with thick, opaque glasses.
The other ignored him twice already.
So, came lunch time, as revenge, he stole an orange from No Face's lunch bag.
Though, he became disappointed with the results. No Face ate lunch with his bookworm friend without even commenting about his missing orange.
Akaya fumed. He came up with another plan.
During recess, when his classmates dispersed out into the small courtyard, he flew past the duo swiping away Bookworm's glasses.
Bookworm's hands rose instinctively to cover his eyes.
He glided from side to side taunting them, goading them while he waved the glasses in front of him.
No Face didn't panic. He remained expressionless still. But the other boy revealed to him his gleaming dark eyes.
"Hand over his glasses." His firm voice demanded.
As if the other's gaze and words enchanted him like the witch who enchanted the princes and princesses in fairy tales, he could only gawk as he surrendered the prize willingly.
Once No Face retrieved the item, he turned and walked away with Bookworm.
When he realized what he had done, Akaya was already glaring and pouting at their retreating figures.
...
The same yellow vehicle that took them to school in the morning took them back to their motels in the afternoon.
Their father sat on the bed watching news on television when he and his sister entered. They greeted him, and he nodded. That was the end of their short exchange. Their mother didn't appear. Which probably meant she was out doing grocery shopping, or on a job search. Again.
He and his sister worked through their homework at the table. The only table in the room that they ate their meals at, folded their laundry at, watched their father fix things at, watched their mother mix food for the microwave at.
Akaya rushed through his homework so he could play outside with his friends. He ran out the door, through the hallways and down the stairs to the parking lot. In his mind, he always wondered why their room couldn't be more spacious like the parking lot. Or why couldn't his classroom be more like the parking lot he played at? Why were most of the places he stayed at so crammed and tiny?
Akaya remembered asking his mother why they couldn't live in a house as spacious as the parking lot he and his friends played at where everyone could have his own room. And his mother replied because she didn't have a job and what daddy made wasn't enough for them to get a house.
Then, Akaya asked his father why mommy didn't have a job and why daddy couldn't make enough for them to get a house. His father only smacked him over the head and told him that kids shouldn't ask so many questions.
That put an end to his questions.
In the parking lot, Akaya played ball with Bunta and Masaharu. After a while, they got bored and played Hide-and-Seek instead. Akaya hated to be the seeker because it always took a long time to find his two friends.
Today, however, instead of finding Bunta first as usual, he found No Face in his usual red sweatshirt and khaki shorts sitting by one of the stairs focused on doing his homework.
The other boy didn't seem to notice him even when he passed him going up the stairs.
He looked over his shoulder to the paper full of math problems that the other currently worked on.
He squinted and made out his name on top of the page.
Y-a-n-a-g-i R-e-n-j-i.
Yanagi Renji.
His mother once taught him the word for Orange in their native language. Orenji.
He awed at the similarities between the two words. Renji and Orenji.
The other became from No Face to Orange him that day.
He associated the other with his favorite fruit.
...
Akaya lost count of the weekdays and weekends.
School was filled with the usual boring lectures and pointless in-class activities. He continued taking bits and pieces of Orange's lunch. Orange caught him in the act a few times. When he thought he could elicit some reaction from the other, like the same way he did when he took Bookworm's glasses, Orange only told him.
"Stealing is wrong."
Akaya kept taking his things. Orange kept repeating himself.
Inside, Akaya knew how much he wanted the other boy's attention. It didn't matter that he scolded him with a straight face. It didn't matter how little he said to him. He would rather him talk to him for five seconds than ignore him an entire day.
Eventually, with summer half-passed, he heard his friends talking about Orange. About how his sister got a job. About how both his mom and sister had jobs now. About how they were going to move out of their motel rooms at the end of summer recess because they could afford to rent an apartment then.
Akaya wondered if their apartment would be as spacious as the parking lot he played at everyday with his friends.
That same afternoon, the children at Project Hope School received their report cards.
His mom admonished him harshly when she opened his copy. Akaya groaned. His mom's reaction probably meant that he would be getting a bad beating from his dad when they get back to the motel.
Out of the corner of one eye, he spotted Orange's usual red sweatshirt. When he turned to look, he was startled to find the other boy with his face on his mother's shoulder. The blue report card crumpled in his fist. His mother patted his shaking shoulders as an attempt to comfort him.
Was Orange crying?
He blinked. Even as his sister pulled him away, he couldn't take his eyes off of the other's shrinking figure.
...
Night.
The faint police sirens grew louder and louder yet until they pulled into the motel parking lot.
Maybe another man beat up another woman, he thought. Maybe another guy shot and killed another guy. It didn't matter. He was used to all the things happening in this motel, that he already lost track of them.
After being grounded for an entire week for his bad grades, Akaya finally got the chance to slip out unnoticed. He ran, his tight sneakers slapping against the concrete ground as he passed the motel office, the resident laundry room, the signs on the windows that read "No prostitution allowed" and "No soliciting." But of course, he was too young to both read and understand what those signs mean.
He found himself at the part of the motel that he hardly visits. He knocked on a door that he has never knocked on before.
When the door opened, Akaya saw the same expressionless face he would have never expected to be standing behind the door before tonight. He craned his neck to see better into the dim room. He guessed the other's sister and mother were out at work from the quietness inside.
"Do you need something?" Orange's hushed voice asked.
He readjusted himself and rocked back and forth on his feet attempting to make himself appear taller in front of the other.
"I-I heard they're going to be sh-showing the fireworks at D-Disneyland f-for the last time to-tonight." He managed his lie through a couple of stutters.
"And?"
"...I-I want to know if y-you want to c-come see it with m-me."
"I have homework."
He gave him a pleading look and insisted. "But, you just have to come!"
The other paused for a moment. He goaded him with an eager look.
Orange finally consented.
In the dark of the night, the two boys meandered through a series of hallways, stairs and sidewalks to arrive at the entrance of the amusement park. The amusement park that the motel children lived so close to but couldn't get into.
They stopped and found an area in the parking lot to sit at. Akaya lied down on his back and used his stacked hands as a pillow. Orange sat, leaning backwards on his hands.
The two of them looked up to the night sky, soon to be a canvas for fluorescent fire flowers.
"One day, I'm going to get enough money so I can go inside any day, every day." Akaya announced.
"Oh."
"Yeah, one day. When we get our own place." Then he remembered. "Hey, that place you're moving to... What's it like?"
"...I don't know. I haven't been there yet."
"Well... However it is, it's gotta be better than the motel. At least you can call it your home."
"...Hm."
"As much as we talk about 'home' in class, I still have no clue what it is... I think about home being like a house as big as the parking lot at the motel... I'm still not sure if that's what it is..."
"..."
Their conversation stopped there when a loud boom sounded in the distance. The start of the fireworks.
They watched strings of color shoot up into the air, explode into balls of light so much like the Christmas tree ornaments he sees at stores during the holiday season.
"Hey, you got any oranges on you? I'm kinda hungry."
The other boy reached slowly into his shorts pocket. He pulled out a ball and started peeling it like a banana. In the peel petals, small orange slices huddled together in the center.
He slipped the orange from the other's hand and ate it while watching the fireworks.
...
A month later, Orange and his mother and sister moved out of Room 402.
A few days after that, Akaya was accused of damaging motel property. He and his family got evicted. Though, he didn't worry much, because his parents told his sister and him they were going to look for a new home.
Maybe this time, he would finally find out what 'home' is.
End Notes:
Project Hope School is actually the name of the school the motel kids attended in the documentary.
After watching the documentary, I wonder which is worse: Knowing that you're suffering, or suffering without knowing what suffering is. We think the children are suffering because their living standards are so many levels below ours. Yet, seeing them go on living so normally—playing, eating, sleeping, talking—we really question whether they know that they're living under such minimal standards.