Izumi Koushirou and the Splendiferous Valentine's Day Shindig
Whose Splendor Was So Diferous
It Ought to be Immortalized in Song
(alternate title: "Why Everyone Hates February")
Chapter One
February the First
To: just_kido sushiweb (a) sushiweb-dot-com
From: myhairitsalive (a) sushiweb-dot-com
Subject: be my valentine?
Hip hip hoo-ray for our favorite Bespectacled Casanova, whose mane gleams like the backside of a porpoise and who gallops free as the wind, except when he is chained to his desk by several enormous textbooks and his tie which is once again caught on a screw. I hope it isn't the gangster leprechaun tie I gave you for your birthday.
I am writing to tell you that as student body president of Odaiba Junior High, I, Yagami Taichi, have decided to use the rest of our winter funds for a splendiferous Valentine's Day shindig. I, Yagami Taichi, am pulling out all the stops since we decided to blow the budget and leave next year's student council in the lurch (how will they learn to deal with the world unless they suffer?).
There will be red red streamers that will fall on everyone's heads while they mash faces, and heart-shaped balloons and complimentary chocolate boxes complete with naked cherubs for all guests. Yamato's band will play some gooey music and five third years have already offered to man (and woman) a couple kissing booths, but shhh we are keeping that very secret from our supervisor. If you can extract your tie from that screw without strangling yourself, I would be very honored if you would hightail your hoity-toity prep school ass over to the Odaiba Jr. High gymnasium on the fourteenth day of the second month, as tradition dictates we should make merry in nasty old February. One must respect tradition. If you do not show up I will assume you strangled to death and take it upon myself to eat your chocolate box.
RSVP and all that jazz
try not to drown in the sea of anatomy papers that I'm sure stretches from your classroom all the way to Shibaura pier
Yours truly
Lord and Master of Odaiba Jr. Yagami Taichi
P.S. are you allergic to nuts, if you are then I selflessly volunteer myself to eat your chocolate-covered almonds.
The morning of February First dawned like many other February Firsts – cold, gray, and smelling faintly of misery and anguish.
The asphalt on the road to the school was buried under an entire month's worth of snow, some of which had melted into slurry and later refrozen smooth to give it a nice ice rink-like slipperiness. It was while Koushirou was carefully trying to skate around a large clump of questionably yellow snow that he became aware of just how slippery. As he picked his way around the clump, a large and stupid something barreled into him from behind and sent him spinning into the bank. He landed gracelessly on his side, wincing more from the thought of the grapefruit-sized bruise that would swell on his hip by tomorrow than from actual pain. The safety of his laptop was of more immediate concern.
"Oh my God, I'm sorry, man, here let me – Koushirou?!" Daisuke, it turned out, was the large and stupid something that went barreling down ice slick roads. A grin broke across his face. "I've been looking all over for you!"
"To knock into the snow?" Koushirou muttered with a glare of resentment as he brushed frost off his laptop case.
"I checked at the junior high, but the computer club said you'd already left," Daisuke yammered on. "How is it the computer club president gets to go home before everyone else?"
"The computer club president has to play catch up on three days' homework on account of being out sick with the flu."
Daisuke took a couple steps back.
"I'm not contagious anymore, Daisuke."
"Oh, good." He still looked wary.
"Why were you harassing the computer club about me?"
"I desperately, desperately need your advice," Daisuke clasped his hands in a beseeching gesture and gazed at Koushirou. "Won't you please take pity on your humble underclassman and share with him from your bottomless pot of wisdom?"
For someone with a bottomless pot of wisdom, Koushirou had a sinking feeling his judgment had badly erred when he answered with a nod. "Alright. But let's go inside, I want to check my toes for signs of gangrene."
"Great, this is very private anyway," Daisuke replied. Koushirou raised a brow. "Not the kind of thing I'd want anyone overhearing. I trust you, you're the trustworthy polo shirt-type, but some of the trees have ears," he went on in a conspiratorial whisper, and shot a young maple an accusing glare as they passed.
Yoshie, Koushirou's mother, met them at the door. "You two look frozen," she clucked with a maternal tilt of her head. "How about warm apple cider and gingersnaps for a snack?"
Koushirou was not much for sweets, but he loved the tang of mulled cider. As Yoshie went to lay out their snack, he and Daisuke pulled off their boots as quick as fumbling icicle fingers could, then shuffled into his room.
"Okay," Koushirou said, once their bellies were warming with cider and Koushirou had given his laptop a just-to-be-safe once over to make sure nothing had come loose that wasn't supposed to. "What's the big secret, Daisuke?"
"Well – it's –" Daisuke's cheeks took on a pink hue. Perhaps he really did have something highly private and personal to share, Koushirou thought while trying to puzzle out why, if that were the case, he wanted to discuss it with Koushirou, of all people. Koushirou's solution to most Problems of a Personal Nature was to play hours of online sudoku until his mind filled with so many numbers that they nudged everything else out. Problems of a Personal Nature belonged in an airtight box, in Koushirou's opinion, wrapped in heavy chains and dropped in the Bermuda Triangle, to become just as much a mystery lost in time as Amelia Earhart.
"You know Valentine's Day is in two weeks," began Daisuke after a few moments of uncomfortable fidgeting. "And I don't give two craps about cupids and flowers or any of that sappy sentimental stuff. I don't often lie on the floor in my room clutching pillows and sobbing over the pangs of love while I listen to Taylor Swift. But there are some."
"– Some… what?"
"Pangs. Of love," answered Daisuke.
Koushirou couldn't help but frown. "You wanted to talk to me about your pangs?" This was very unusual. "Okay, well, it happens to the best of us…"
Daisuke rolled his eyes. "No, dummy. If I wanted to cry over my love life with someone, I'd find Miyako. I want to do something about my pangs, so I've come to you for advice."
"Daisuke," Koushirou managed in spite of his state of shock, "I can't advise you about love. The only things I know about love come from the time my mother forced me to watch Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing." He paused. "Would your… love interest be impressed by Patrick Swayze?"
"I don't think so," Daisuke frowned doubtfully. "That's what I came to you for. You would know better than me what he likes."
"What who likes?"
"Taichi," Daisuke exclaimed with a sigh, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
And in some ways it kind of was, Koushirou realized. He should have figured it out himself. Wherever Taichi went, Daisuke tagged along with his eyes and his grin for no one else. Taichi once compared him to a "heat-seeking missile." Taichi liked Daisuke, so he never said much to indicate he might be intruding, even when Taichi and Koushirou were playing Golden Eye 007 on two-player mode, and all the wins Koushirou accumulated mostly had to do with Daisuke squirming in to stick a finger in Taichi's ear with a shout of "Wet willy!" and Taichi dropping his controller to chase after him.
But Koushirou had not figured it out, and now he couldn't trust his voice not to creak like an unoiled door hinge if he so much as tried to reply. He had not figured it out, but that really wasn't surprising, considering he thought, like Taichi, that Daisuke's tendency for PDA was just his overzealous cry for attention. And he thought, like Taichi, that Daisuke followed Taichi around and agreed with everything he said because after all he shared genes with Jun, he couldn't suppress his inner fan boy. He also thought Daisuke liked girls.
"What about Hikari?" Koushirou asked (or rather squeaked).
"Yesterday's news. You could say she was my gateway drug into Yagami admiration."
"Gateway – So you like boys now?"
"Have you never heard of a bisexual," Daisuke replied with a look of boredom.
"No – I mean I've heard of bisexuals – I mean, so you like," Koushirou found he could not string words together anymore. "You like Taichi," he breathed. It took everything in him not to choke on his own tongue.
"Yes," sighed Daisuke in exasperation, as oblivious to Koushirou's turmoil as to the gingersnap crumbs hanging off his lower lip. "And you are Taichi's right hand man. So I came to you to ask what I should do to snag him."
"To snag him?"
"Woo him. Court him. Make him swoon, make his heart flutter. Stoke fire in his furnace."
"Stoke fire in his –" Now Koushirou was sure he'd made a lapse in judgment in letting Daisuke speak of anything that he didn't want the trees to hear. Why his wisdom chose this moment to abandon him, he could only attribute to karma and its tendency to bite where it hurts the most. All this belonged in a box. In the Bermuda Triangle. With Amelia Earhart, who surely collected mountains of strangers' personal problems and wiled away her time on some forsaken island writing horrific fanfiction about them.
I did not hear that, I did not hear that, Koushirou told himself firmly. No one is stoking fires anywhere, all Daisuke's got in his head is soccer, and pizza, and Veemon, and his only problem in the world is he can't play soccer with Veemon while eating pizza. Though more than likely he'd attempted it at least once.
Daisuke's eyes had gotten very big. "Dude, are you alright?" he asked with some apprehension, as what little blood was left drained from Koushirou's face.
Koushirou scrubbed furiously at his forehead. You're in the sixth grade! he wanted to shout. What business do you have talking about other people's furnaces?! You should be wetting your pants at night and swallowing wayward dimes!
Alright, maybe Daisuke wasn't quite that young. But Koushirou was only fourteen himself. He knew nothing about stoking people's furnaces. And he did not want to know.
Besides, Daisuke and Taichi, together? He tried to picture it. He supposed it would be a little like a boy with a puppy. Taichi would let Daisuke lick his ice cream, let him lie on his lap, throw tennis balls for him to chase. All things they did now, in fact, only Koushirou had never before seen it as flirting. Was it flirting? Did that mean Taichi saw it that way? Had there been flirting going on right under Koushirou's nose all this time, while he buried himself in computer programming lit and tried to deny the existence of things like mutual attraction and the swapping of mucous?
He felt – he felt – and why did his chest hurt all of a sudden?
"Koooooushiroooou," Daisuke slapped his cheek. "Say something!"
"Letters," Koushirou blurted out, with a huge sucking gasp like a trout flopping on the floor of a fishing boat. The confused, somewhat alarmed expression on Daisuke's face didn't change. "At times like these, people write love letters to the person they like," he explained.
"I know that." Daisuke sounded disappointed. "I was hoping I could give him something that would speak to him, you know? He gets letters like that all the time. I don't want to be just another particularly studly leaf on the breeze. But I also know he's not the type for roses and scented candles, and he'd probably be pretty confused if I rolled a meatball to him with my nose. You are closer to him than almost anyone. You've got to help me, Koushirou. Have you noticed, I'm wasting away here! It's lights out for me if you can't teach me how to impress him."
"Well – well," Koushirou thought. What did Taichi like? "He likes soccer. You could write a poem for him on a soccer ball, in all the white spaces. He'd have to figure out which line came next, like a jigsaw puzzle."
"I guess," Daisuke's lips scrunched to one side.
"Or he also loves mandarin oranges." Good Lord, how could he be any worse at this? "A… fruit basket, maybe?"
"I was thinking maybe I would mow a profession of my ardor into the grass at Rainbow Park." A few bits gingersnap tumbled off Daisuke's face as he started wiggling with pent-up excitement. "But it might be hard to get past the groundskeeper with the lawnmower. Then I thought I'd sing to him at the junior high's Valentine's Day party. I hear there's going to be karaoke."
If part of love included the willingness to debase and humiliate yourself in the most creative way possible, Koushirou felt very sure that he wanted no part of it. But he thought he'd be remiss in his duty as Daisuke's senpai if he didn't nip this well-meant, but bound for spectacular and very public failure, idea in the bud before Daisuke decided to shave Taichi's name into the back of his head.
"Look, it's true Taichi likes fireworks and extravagant displays." They were only having a Valentine's Day party because Taichi felt his life had been too dull and lacking in extravagance while he slogged through examination hell. "But he's not such a fan of drama. If he were going to confess… attraction… to someone, I think he'd be very practical about it. Maybe there'd be a few fireworks," he admitted as an afterthought. "But when it came to the heart of the matter, he'd be very direct, very open. He wouldn't want the other person to feel cornered."
Hopefully that would suffice to bring Daisuke back down to ground level. Love, he supposed, was a bit like being tied to a kite, soaring through the clouds while in blissful denial that at any moment you may crash into a tree and your shirt become forever ensnared in its branches, while everyone around laughs at your folly. Or the kite-flier may let go of the string, leaving you to float aimlessly through wind and hail until you end up in some yard somewhere, lost and abandoned with LeeAnn Womack lyrics on loop in your pathetic lovesick head.
After a long moment during which Daisuke adopted as deeply pensive an expression as Koushirou had ever seen on him, he gave a reluctant nod. "Yeah, I guess cornering him would give him a skewed idea of my intentions," he said sagely.
You are twelve years old, Koushirou bit his lip to keep back a groan, what 'intentions' could you possibly have?
"Instead of the lawn at Rainbow Park, maybe I'll carve my feelings into his bed post. Then he'll be the only one to see it."
At least Daisuke had returned to Earth. Maybe he'd turned up somewhere up in the Himalayas rather than on a nice flat Indiana plain, but laws of gravity remained intact and that Koushirou called progress.
"Alright," said Daisuke. "I'm going to confess to him. I'll give it a whirl. I don't know how yet, but I'll think of something perfect. Thanks for the advice, man. I knew you were the one to go to."
"Really, but I didn't even have many ideas," Koushirou replied. And Taichi would have a good laugh at the few I did come up with.
"I didn't need ideas so much as I needed to know how Taichi thinks. All that stuff about drama and not making him feel like he's Bambi and I'm a hungry pack of wolves. That was good. I mean, I'll make a note about mandarin oranges, too." Daisuke shrugged one shoulder. "You never know when that may come in handy. If he's picky about his fruit, I'll have you to thank for preventing me from making a fool of myself by buying him oranges from California."
What was it about Valentine's Day that people held so sacred? People who most days were perfectly happy to suffer their affliction in silence suddenly rushed in droves to stick their necks below the guillotine, to toss their oars into the rapids, to make the jump without a parachute. All in the vain hope that their Certain Someone would be there to pull them out of danger, or better, to show them there never was any danger at all – the guillotine dropping only out of its desire to be close to them. And Koushirou knew what a ridiculous comparison that was to make, but nothing about that hot, unreasonable, animal thing called love seemed rational. At least he saw the truth, that the danger was real and present, and he'd decided long ago that he'd rather live with the endless torment of What Ifs and If Onlys, than willingly place himself beneath the quivering blade and wait for it to fall.
But in spite of reason, Koushirou found, in spite of every synapse in his brain firing warnings for him to stay right there, where it's safe, now that someone else wanted to jump into harm's way, he became somewhat hysterically possessive of his proximity to danger.
To: myhairitsalive (a) sushiweb-dot-com
From: just_kido (a) sushiweb-dot-com
Subject: re: be my valentine?
His Revered Lord and Master of a Junior High School With 96 Students, Yagami Taichi,
The sea of anatomy papers I can attest to. It may prove more than I can handle to make it through alive, but if there are people who can swim the Strait of Gibraltar, I must not shrink in the face of a challenge. If I die, I graciously bequeath the contents of my chocolate box to you.
I'll come to your shindig if only so that you aren't disappointed when no one gets tangled in the streamers or breaks out in hives when it's time for Spin the Bottle. But you left out the most important detail, do we have to bring dates? Because Shin has already offered to don a skirt and go as my cousin, but I already went through that humiliation when I went to a party with Saki who has vowed never to go with me anywhere again ever, and she really is my cousin. I will come on the condition that there is a table at which I can sit and continue to forge my way through Leeches, Moxibustion and Other Somewhat Nauseating Medical Practices if any of the following happens to me: 1) I don't get kissed at the kissing booth, 2) I do get kissed at the kissing booth, 3) the kissing booth attendant replaces herself with a caterpillar once my eyes are closed.
Junior High, lamentable though it is, did not leave me with many memories that do not end with people tricking me into kissing caterpillars. But I'll come to your party (provided my tie does not feel homicidal that day) and hear Yamato's band play, and get sick from too much candy, and watch over your valuables while the rest of you hit the dance floor.
(Also, congratulations on passing your high school entrance exams!)
Sincerely,
Certainly Not Casanova
P.S.: Your gallantry in offering to protect me from chocolate-covered nuts is much appreciated, but it is my sacred duty as a Knower of Useless Knowledge to inform you that almonds are much more than simple nuts. They are drupes, which means they are covered by a fleshy outer layer while they hang from trees, and also that since I am allergy-free I will be eating every last one of them.
it's like soaring
it's like gliding
it's a rocket ship you're riding
it's a feeling that can take you anywhere
so why they call it falling
why they call it falling, why they call it falling
I don't know
leeann womack, "why they call it falling"