A/N: New Ouran story! Just an introduction, I wrote it in about forty-five minutes. Though, it's a bit premature since I still haven't organized all of my thoughts on it yet. Feedback please, should I continue? (If I do, I probably won't do much until I finish 'Everything'.)

Introduction

Relatives are always telling me that I'm different than when I was a child, that when I grew up, the shyness instilled itself into me, without reason, without incident. I don't think I believe that, to be honest. It isn't possible for a person to wake up in the morning and suddenly discover what I have, discover they no longer have a voice.

Furthermore, regardless of how hard I try, I cannot place this alleged 'outgoing'-ness in my memory and so I have decided that it did not exist and that my relatives say so only for their own convenience, a way to assure themselves that I wasn't born as an abnormal person. But as far as I'm concerned, it did not exist. Well, I suppose every child has a stage in their life when they're the center of attention and probably more extroverted than they ever will be later on in life. I simply can't remember mine. I've had a theory that perhaps my confidence was thoroughly spent as a baby. Nevertheless, no matter how much they'll try to convince me of what I was as a child, I only know my own recollection for absolute fact. In particular, one memory stands alone as what I believe encapsulates my entire childhood.

I am walking down the gray, asphalt pathway and my excitement is simply mounting to a point at which I can't contain it; I know that a large, goofy smile is upon my face. It's been raining for weeks and I'd begun to create some fantasy that a witch must have cast a curse on our town that traps us into a great glass dome in which it will rain endlessly with no promise of sun, no promise of life because it's all been drowned out by the downpour. I thought very strenuously about this fantasy and it began to terrify me because it could have very well been true. Then the sun came out at dawn. I was relieved. Somebody must have shattered the glass dome somewhere. Somebody must have broken the spell.

I make a point to stop at every amateur-drawn chalk hopscotch outline, no matter how badly the lines and the numbers were smudged and squiggled, probably written by a child younger than I. I am five. Maybe six? No more than six.

I can see the jungle gym growing larger and larger as I approach it, and I naively think that it is the size of a skyscraper. As much as I want to, I do not run into the sand. Because that is not in my capacity at this point. There are other children watching. Looking back now, I know that they were not watching because children care about very little and, generally, are not intentionally judgemental. Even if I did throw myself into the sand, it wouldn't have mattered. I might have even found some playmates.

But I don't. Hiromi does, however. Only two years old (maybe three, depending on whether I am five or six) and she is unlike me in every way. Like every toddler, she runs everywhere. Hiromi runs headlong into the sandpit, her pigtails bobbing behind her as she clumsily trundles along, what with such stumpy limbs. It doesn't happen right away but, like she had a tendency to do and like she still does now that we've grown, Hiromi attracts the attention of every child in the park. Slowly but surely, they begin to gravitate toward her. And why not? She was loud and babbling, she wore denim overalls and a pink shirt with the print of some run-of-the-mill popular cartoon character and her velcro sandals lit up when she stomped hard enough.

Then, I step on the sand hesitantly, because I imagine that everybody is watching me intently, even the seagulls who scour for bread scraps. Maybe when they screech, they mean to laugh at me. "Look at Sayuri. Look at how she thinks she'll make friends."

But the seagulls don't bother me much today, because I feel particularly daring. It must have been the sun that gave me spirit. If somebody can break a witch's curse, then I can do anything.

I spot a couple girls beneath the shade of the jungle gym and I immediately know what they're doing. They flatten wet clumps of sand into hockey puck-shaped cylinders and through some childish intuition, I know they're making cookies. Cookies, or cakes, or brownies, it doesn't matter.

I walk over. "Can I buy some?" I ask.

One of the girls squints up at me and I can take in her appearance. I don't know it at this point, but I'll come to never forget her for the rest of my life. Her skin was tanned and her hair, sun-bleached, sandy and ratty but covered with a stained white baseball cap. She glances at me very briefly, then exchanges a glance with her friend. I know they've come to an unspoken agreement.

In the end, they don't answer me at all.

I sit by the swingset in the wake of my rejection, scooping sand into an empty water bottle and dumping it all back out again. I do this until evening when mom says we have to leave.

I remember very distinctly on the walk home, Hiromi clutching mom's skirt and saying, "I want to go back to the park tomorrow!" and because I don't want to disappoint Hiromi, I agree, but I never want to go back there again.