Too Late

a story

Part 1:

You ever wonder what it's like to have a brother? I always did. Being born an only child, I was always curious about the "joys" of having siblings. I made most of my observations and assumptions through mass media. The older brother is typically the bully, making fun of and/or torturing his younger counterpart to his delight. Said younger brother is usually favored by the parents, gaining all the attention and materialistic objects that all of his older siblings resented him for. I always figured "hey, maybe I'm lucky I don't have to deal with any of that".

Boy was I wrong.

Junior year was nothing like I had ever expected it to be. You thought school was tough before? Try adding college-level AP classes to your schedule. The workload was tremendous, and your free time is cut almost in half. There's no more fooling around. You either get your shit done or you fail.

But even aside from all that, you still get freedom in some degree, even if it's small. You get three electives to go with your core classes. Maybe you'd want to take some easier classes to level out the huge upscale of difficulty of the new year. Some might even want to take harder classes to add to their list. I have no idea who in their right mind would do that, but hey, to each their own I guess. For me, I went with the former. I took TV production because I was always good at techy stuff. I took Art because..well honestly I just wanted an easy A, but it turned out to be more fun than I expected.

Now, I had signed up for culinary because come on, who doesn't love food? Turns out, all of the classes were already filled. In cases like these, the school system likes to stick you in whatever free class they can find first. Who knows where I'd end up? Some french class where I could hardly understand the teacher. Drama class where I'd understand the teacher a little too much. With my luck, I'd probably end up in band.

But as fate would have it, I didn't.

Now, I had never thought of myself as good with kids. I only ever looked out for myself, and the thought of taking care of another human being, teaching them, learning about them, had never crossed my mind even once. Imagine my surprise when I was placed in none other than Mentoring 2. I had no idea why I ended up in the second sequential class since I had never even taken Mentoring 1, but I guess the 20 year old system the school still chugs on is to blame.

Since I had never taken the class or anything close to it. I had never even been inside of the building it was located in. That's why on the first day of school, if you look real close, you can see me scrambling through the halls looking for the room where my newest class awaited. After finally finding said class and already being 10 minutes late, I tried my hardest to sneak in without anyone noticing.

"Ah, Mr. Hikari. Call it a hunch, but I just knew I'd have you pegged down as a troublemaker."

I looked up to my captor and was greeted to 30 sets of eyes looking right back at me. The important looking ones, located at the head of the class, seemed as if they were already mentally branding me right on my forehead. A big, red X right between my eyes.

"I'm really sorry miss..uh.."

"Holland. Aqua Holland."

"Right. Ms. Holland. I'm really sorry about being late, it's just I've never been inside this building before and I got lost and then this one kid asked me if I knew his name which I obviously didn't so then he told me and asked me if I 'had it memorized' which I don't even know that means cause like-". Her eyes told me that she didn't care about any of my excuses. Why would she? None of the other kids were late.

"Sit down, Sora." Jesus. Her eyes were like cold, blue daggers.

"Right, so do we have assigned seats or…? Is there like a seating chart I could-" suddenly a hand pulled me down into a seat.

"Wow, you really are an idiot, aren't you?" I turned to my left and was met with auburn hair and bright blue eyes put together to create a face that would make anyone who's seen it bow down in glory which was attached to a body that guys and girls alike drooled over.

In other words, it was my best friend, Kairi Lockhart.

My eyes widened in disbelief. "What the hell, Kairi," I whispered to her. "We showed each other our schedules, and you didn't have this class on yours."

"I got a schedule change this morning. I got out of P.E. and got put in here instead!" She looked like she had just won the lottery. I scanned the class for any signs of familiar faces, and I didn't recognize a single person in the classroom except for some random kid from my chem class last year.

"Well it's a good thing you did," I told her. "Looks like you're the only person I know in here."

I tuned into whatever Ms. Holland was babbling on about and it turns out the whole purpose of this class is to teach and guide kids from bad homes or neighborhoods so that they grow up to be productive members of society. I had no idea what high schoolers could do to accomplish that, but it turns out the school had made a deal with some mentoring organization to get more volunteers. Though I don't think making us do it for a grade counts as volunteering. Tomato,tomahto I guess.

"You and your partner, the person you are sitting next to at the moment, will be assigned a child from the ages of six to 13. You will report to this address every day after school, where you will meet your assigned child and be put in custody of them until 8 p.m. every night. On weekends, the hours are from noon to 9. Your assignment is to mentor this child, guide them and keep on the straight and narrow. Each week we'll be receiving reports from the children to make sure you're all doing your jobs. These reports will be taken into consideration at the end of the semester to determine your grade." She started handing out sheets of paper that had everything she had just said written on it almost word for word. She was more than likely a new teacher. So that was it? One assignment for the whole semester? It seemed easy enough. I looked at Kairi and she had "nervous wreck" written all over her.

"We have to take care of a kid, Sora," her voice was shaking. "I've never done that before."

"Come on, how hard could it be? This'll be a cakewalk." I had no idea if I was telling the truth or not, but it couldn't be that hard, could it?

Part 2:

After school, Kairi and I arrived at the address written on the paper that Aqua had given us. I saw a few kids from our class as well as what I assumed were kids from other schools participating in the same program. Everyone had gathered in an auditorium sort of room where the people running the place told us the do's and dont's and gave us the whole spiel. Afterwards, we were let into a huge cafeteria with hundreds of kids running around, playing with whatever they could find, dancing, even fighting with each other. They all turned toward us, and some even came to say hello. From what I could gather, we were supposed to choose our kid from this sea of adolescence.

"Damn baby, you're hot as fuck." I heard a young voice coming from just a few feet away. This blonde kid couldn't have been more than twelve.

"Oh, um..thank you?" Kairi stammered, obviously not expecting that from someone so young. I wasn't surprised. Kairi's beauty attracted almost every guy she came into contact told us his name was Demyx. I told him to get lost and he reluctantly went off to hit on the next pretty high schooler he saw.

"That was uh..surprising," she half said, half laughed.

"Not really," I told her.

"What do you mean?" She was always oblivious of the effect she had on everyone of the opposite gender. I didn't want to be the one to burst her bubble.

"Nothing, I just meant-"

"E-Excuse me". I heard a voice at the softest level humanly possible. I turned around and there stood a small boy with a mess of blonde hair sticking up in all sorts of directions. It reminded me of my own mess of brown hair. He was looking up at us, alternating his sharp blue eyes between Kairi and I.

"Hi there! Did you need something?" Kairi knelt down to talk to him.

I studied the kid. What came clear was that he hadn't been clean for a while. His cheeks had smeared dirt on them, and his clothes had all sorts of holes and tears.

"Where are my parents?" his soft voice asked Kairi.

"You lost your parents? I'm sorry about that, let's go find them." She took his hand and they went off searching. I don't know what she was so nervous about, she's a natural.

"They're not going to find them." Jesus dude, this is third mystery voice I've heard in the span of five minutes. At least this one's british. I turned around and was greeted by an older looking guy with a full grown blonde goatee. He didn't look like a teacher.

"My name is Ansem, and I run this establishment." Ah, so this is Mr. Boss-man. "That boy," he tells me. "His parents died a few weeks ago in a fire. The firefighters only had enough time to get the boy out before the entire building caved in on the parents. They were a fine young couple, grand supporters of what we do here. It was a terrible tragedy." Something didn't make sense.

"If his parents are dead," I started. "Why was he asking for them?"

"A child's mind is a very complicated and guarded place," he tells me. "Sometimes they cannot comprehend certain events, and often they choose not to." I looked across the room and saw him walking around holding Kairi's hand, asking around for people who weren't there. I had no other choice, and even if I did, I already knew what I would choose. I walked over to Kairi, and when she saw me she smiled.

"We've looked everywhere," She huffed.

"Nevermind that. This is our kid," I told her.

"Wait, what? Him?"

"Yup." I knelt down and looked at the boy. Our eyes locked and I could see right away the innocence this kid had in him. Untouched by the troubles and happenings of the world. I knew I'd made the right choice.

"What's your name, kid?" I asked him.

"R-Roxas." he answered.

"Well, Roxas," I told him. "My name's Sora. And this here is my friend Kairi. We're gonna be hanging out pretty often from here on out. That okay with you?" He replied with a simple and soft "Okay".

Part 3:

And that's exactly what we did. Every day Kairi and I would pick him up from the center and do whatever two high schoolers could do to entertain a seven year old kid. We took him to the movies, and even though Kairi disapproved of my choice of horror genre, Roxas seemed to like it. He slowly started to open up more, talking to us more and more every day. Sometimes it got to the point where he'd talk so much I almost wanted to tell him to shut up, but I didn't. It felt good taking care of this kid. He'd tell us all about what was going on with the other kids at the center. In October he told us that some older kids, around the eleven to thirteen range, were bullying him. I was gearing up on teaching Roxas how to fight, but Kairi opted for a more peaceful approach and told him how to stand up to the bullies. And what d'you know, it actually worked. Over the course of one semester, we had gotten closer and closer to him. I learned all sorts of things, like how he only eats the red gummy bears, how he can't sleep if the door in his room is all the way closed or all the way open. According to Roxas, it absolutely has to be open halfway. I teased him for having a crush on a girl named Naminé, even though he swore he hated her and that girls were gross. I think I finally was starting to understand what it was like to have a brother. We were supposed to guide these kids to be good members of society, but honestly, we were just two high schoolers. It's not like we had that much life experience in the first place. So we taught him what we knew. Don't be friends with snakes, never sit in the front of the class, don't take shit from anyone, your girlfriend is never really "at the library". He thought we were the smartest people on the planet, and hell, he made us feel like we were.

November came, and so did winter. It seemed like Roxas had only a few changes of clothes, so I gave him some of mine from when I was a kid, including my old winter coat and scarf.

"No dude, come on," I started at him. "You gotta wrap the scarf like this," I fixed it for him. "Otherwise your neck just gets cold anyways and that defeats the whole purpose of the scarf."

"You're so smart, Sora!" he cheered.

"Yeah, yeah. You too, buddy."

"Hey guys," Kairi said. "My phone's about to die. Let's head back to my place so I can grab my charger."

We nodded and started to head out of the park that we were in. The winter breeze made my hands shiver, until I felt a small mitten grab it from below. It was Roxas. I smiled at him and we kept walking. We got to Kairi's house a few minutes later.

"I'll just be a second!" Kairi chimed as I watched her walk into her house. You'd think from how stunning she was that she lived in some rich neighborhood with a huge house. But in reality it was the opposite. She lived in a small house with just her parents and her sister. As for the neighborhood, it wasn't the best. It's population mostly consisted of a weird mixture of rednecks and hoodrats. I stared at the door that Kairi had just gone through for a few seconds and then turned to Roxas. He was looking at me, his brow furrowed.

"Sora," he said. "Where did you meet Kairi?" I looked at him, his eyes still as innocent as the day we met. I knelt down.

"Well then. You wanna know how I met Kairi, huh?" I said to him. He nodded eagerly. "Well you see, when I was twelve years old, I had just started middle school. And when you're in middle school, you get to have seven different classes instead of just one. So when I first went into my math class, we got assigned into group tables. And when I sat down at my table, guess who sat down right in front of me?"

"Kairi?"

"You got it. That's where I first met her, and we've been best friends ever since. I was twelve years old then and now I'm almost seventeen. That's five whole years, y'know."

"Wow!" His eyes lit up with excitement. "Five years is a long time. But if you've known Kairi for five years, why aren't you dating her?" I almost spit out my non existent drink. "Isn't that what love is? When you know someone for a long time, and then you date and then you get married!"

I looked at Roxas, envious of his innocence and view of the world.

"Well you see, it's not always like that. Lots of times, if you become good enough friends with someone for long enough, your friendship grows stronger and stronger and that bond is greater than a relationship would be. Do you understand?" I asked him.

"Yeah, I think so."

I thought harder about his question. They wanted us to mentor these kids to be productive hive worker bees. I didn't know how to teach this kid how to get a job, I didn't know how to teach him how to do taxes and I sure as hell wasn't qualified to tell him how to write a check. But If I was going to teach Roxas anything with the limited time I had with him, I was going to teach him about what I do know, about what I've learned in my time on this Earth.

"But Roxas," I started. "It doesn't always have to be like that. When you get a little older, you might meet a girl like Kairi. You might meet a girl who makes you feel all kinds of new feelings, whose very presence brings you joy. A girl who you would do absolutely anything for just to make her happy, no matter what it is. A girl you can talk to about anything, and who can do the same with you. A girl who makes you happy, who you know that you definitely, without a doubt, love. And when you meet that girl, Roxas, never let her go. Never hold back, tell her exactly how you feel about her, and don't hide your true feelings. Do whatever it takes to make sure that she knows that you love her. Because Roxas, it might be too late for some people, but not for you. You've got your whole life ahead of you, with brand new experiences waiting around every corner. When you find that girl, hold onto her, forever."

His wide eyes stared back at me. For a while, we were just staring at each other with only the cold winter breeze whistling around us. I know he heard me, and when the time comes he'll understand exactly what I meant. It was my job to protect this kid, and I had done just that in the only way I deemed important enough. I knew he would grow up into someone special. It might have been too late for most people, but not for him.

"Sorry I took so long," the front door of Kairi's house creaked open and she stepped out. "Everything alright?"

"Yup!" I grinned back at her, standing up. "Just fixing Roxas's scarf again."

Kairi smiled at me, and I looked down at Roxas. He was silent, his sharp blue eyes looking at me, and then at Kairi. It might take a while, but I knew he'd get it someday.