Joe had always been the reliable one.
That's why Sora was standing outside his apartment early one spring morning, pounding on his door. She knew she could rely on him. Rely on him to get out of bed at this hour. Rely on him to invite her inside, despite the mud still dripping off her shoes from her 6 AM soccer practice. Rely on him to think up a solution to her current problem.
Images of first aid kits and cold water bottles flashed through her head as she waited for the door to open, thinking back on the many times Joe had saved her life.
Palmon had good intentions when she had asked Biyomon for help, but what she wanted was simply impossible. That's why Biyomon had come to Sora, and Sora had come to Joe. If anyone could accomplish the impossible, it was reliable Joe.
.
.
"You want me to what?" Joe shouted in surprise. He and Sora were now seated at the kitchen table.
"You heard me," she replied, "I want you to help me get a thousand dollars to fly Mimi to Japan for her birthday."
It wasn't as if Joe didn't want to help. It was simply that it was impossible for a group of teenagers to raise that much money in less than a week. Mimi's birthday was only days away.
"Pleeeease," came a whine from inside Sora's soccer bag. A leafy head popped out. "You havn't seen Mimi in ages since she moved to America. Don't you want to see her?" Palmon's eyes teared up.
Joe sighed. Leave it to Palmon to come up with a last minute birthday present like this. Air travel took time. Planning. Money. But how could he say no when Palmon was looking at him like that? How could he say no to making Mimi's birthday so special?
Against his better judgement—he would probably end up disappointing everyone—Joe finally agreed to help.
.
.
"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Joe asked Matt, who was currently pouring flour into a mixing bowl directly from the bag without bothering to measure.
"Of course," Matt replied proudly, "I've been doing most of the cooking around my house since my parents got divorced."
Joe still looked doubtful.
The gang was crammed into Tai's medium sized kitchen, preparing cookies and lemonade. At one end of the kitchen Tai and Izzy were trying to decipher the seemingly foreign language of a recipe book as Matt mixed ingredients. On the opposite counter, TK and Kari were juicing lemons. Fearing for the team's safety, Joe was supervising. Sora was already outside in the park assembling a small wooden lemonade stand and putting up signs. The digimon were off in Tai's room, not to be trusted around food.
"I think this looks right," Izzy said, glancing over Matt's shoulder as he scooped sticky balls of dough onto a tray to be popped into the oven.
"Hard to tell, since none of us have ever made cookies before," Tai commented.
What a great start to the day, thought Joe as he waited for disaster to strike.
He could hear TK crying in the background, trying to wipe lemon juice from his eyes.
.
.
An hour later, with Joe balancing several jugs of lemonade on top of a container of burnt cookies, not trusting anyone else to carry anything, the friends made their way to the park to meet up with Sora. Other than the "Lemonade" sign being nailed on upside down, the stand looked sturdy enough. Joe sat his load of food down on the counter and arranged everything neatly.
This is going to be a disaster, he thought for at least the tenth time that day.
.
.
Joe, although he didn't often like to admit it, was proven wrong. Countless people stopped at their little stand. Thanks to the warming weather, the park was full of potential customers. True, most of them made a face as they bit into Matt's charcoal cookies, but a few generous customers took pity on the kids and bought seconds. Their business had a chance for success.
.
.
The Digi-destined passed the next few days in the same fashion, mornings spent in Tai's kitchen and afternoons spent in the park. Time flew by, and the evening before Mimi's birthday arrived. Everyone, with hope on their faces, sat around Joe's kitchen table arranging the money into neat little piles. Palmon wrapped an elastic band around a little stack of bills.
"Well how much do we have?" she asked, a grin on her face.
Joe looked at the little money piles, adding in his head. "If there's ten in each pile, and there are twenty-one piles…" His face fell. Two hundred and ten dollars. Seven hundred and ninety dollars short of their goal. Only two hundred and ten dollars.
Joe glanced up at the excited, expectant faces around him. They were clearly anticipating good news.
"Uh," Joe began, stuttering, "we have… we have… a thousand dollars. We have a thousand dollars."
Cheers erupted around the table. Hugs and high fives were shared. Joe, faking a smile, slid all the money off the table and into his bag before anyone else could look too closely and notice his lie.
"I… uh… think you should all leave now," he said, "So I can buy the tickets and stuff."
.
.
Joe woke up early the next morning and got on the bus. He lived closest to the airport, so he was assigned the task of picking up Mimi. He looked up at the airport terminal screen.
Flight 293, New York to Tokyo, Arrival Time 10:38 AM
He looked back down to his watch. 10:45 AM. She was late.
"Joe!" a voice squeaked from behind him. Before he could even turn around, arms were wrapped around him and lips were pressed to his cheek. A wide brimmed hat smacked him in the forehead.
"Mimi!" Joe smiled, having finally loosened her arms enough to look at her. "I've missed you."
Seeing Mimi's return smile made any regret disappear. Seeing Mimi, imagining the smiles and laughs of his friends during the coming weekend, convinced him that he would never regret his decision.
He was still two years away from finishing high school. Surely he could dip into his university fund, just a little bit, if it meant bringing the Digi-destined together. Surely he could do something so little, since it would make Mimi so happy.
He had made a withdrawal of seven hundred and ninety dollars from his account, but so what? He now had a total of twenty cents saved up for university, but who cares? He would gladly give up med school if it meant keeping his promise to Sora and Palmon, if it meant seeing Mimi.
After all, Joe had always been the reliable one.