"Rin, honey, don't stay up too late," Mitobe Rinnosuke's mother told him as she reached up to kiss her son's check. He smiled and nodded his agreement. She took the basket of laundry she been folding and left the kitchen.
Multi-tasking was a survival skill for him. Whether it was feeding, quartering, and supplying a small army of siblings each morning or juggling laundry and homework every night after practice, he'd long ago learned the best ways to get things done in an efficient manner. He'd be in bed by midnight, and that was good enough for a Friday night.
But tomorrow promised to be an interesting day; he'd been invited to accompany Kuroko to a birthday celebration for a person he really didn't know. He'd agreed for two reasons. First, Kuroko was a friend, and a request from a friend should never be treated lightly. The other reason was more selfish; as the primary caregiver for his family, he rarely took time for himself. In fact, he could honestly say that he'd never even been inside a Karaoke club in his entire life. If there was one thing he'd learned from Kiyoshi's final season of basketball, it was to be unafraid of trying new things – so, Rin wanted to try new things.
So he found himself once again multi-tasking on this Friday night, after his siblings had turned in for the night and his parents were taking a little private time for themselves. College wasn't something that his family could afford, so he was in desperate need of scholarship aid – and these essays weren't going to write themselves. At the end of the kitchen counter, he'd laid out pens and paper, awaiting inspiration as he mixed the ingredients for the homemade cupcakes he'd decided would be his gift to the birthday boy.
The Mitobe family was frugal by necessity, and after years of trial and error, he'd perfected his personal recipe to fill his mother's ten-cup cupcake pan. A little flour, some sugar, eggs, a scoshe of fresh vanilla, and some sundry other ingredients would make them tasty, but also efficient. Kuroko had mentioned there would be only six guests, but he was unsure how reducing the ingredients by forty percent would affect the overall taste. Ten cupcakes, he thought, when was the last time I'd actually eaten one of my own desserts?
As the cupcakes baked, he turned back to the essay. The prompt was pretty standard for a needs-based scholarship: If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be? As Rin put pencil to paper – he'd have to borrow Koganei's laptop again to actually type it out – he ignored the trite and let his inner muse shape the answer. What this world needs, he wrote, is less noise, less distraction, and more active listening. With that in mind, if I found myself with the power to change one thing about the world, I would… Rin's cell phone chimed from his pocket, and he stopped to read the message.
[Shall we meet at the station around 6?] Kuroko's messages was the newest in a long string of messages, most of which were from Koganei.
[Sure] he replied. Rin had thought it odd that Kuroko had invited him to the party. Hmm, he chuckled, an invisible man and mute one, maybe that way they'd both blend into the background.
Once the cupcakes were out of the oven, he turned his attention to mixing the powdered sugar, water, and just a hint of lemon juice with the proper amounts of red and yellow food coloring to tint it the perfect shade of basketball orange. With that done, he wrote another page of beautifully crafted words across the paper. He may have been unable to communicate out loud, but he had a poet's heart that flourished on paper. The cupcakes were cool by the time his muse was feeling less cooperative, so instead of words across a page, he spread frosting across the spongy yellow treats. The orange cupcakes looked too plain, so he melted two squares of baking chocolate in the microwave and then, with a toothpick, used the chocolate as ink to draw lines on the cupcakes, to make them look more like basketballs. Yeah, he thought, that's appropriate for the Generation of Miracles Number One Shooter.
As he tidied up the kitchen, he also prepared for the 8 am breakfast rush. He filled the rice cooker, pre-sliced the onions and tofu, and set the table. He noticed as he dried his hands and slipped the apron back onto the hook by the back door that he'd been wrong, twelve thirty was a good enough time to go to bed.
Instead of heading to the bedroom that the rest of the Mitobe brothers shared, Rin went into the living room and stretched out on the couch, the same as he'd done every night for the last five years. Before turning out the light, he switched on the television and turned the volume way down so that it was a gentle hum. For a man so used to his own lack of voice, silence, true utter stillness (no matter what his essay said) was one of the few things that terrified Rin. Lacking a voice was one thing, but lacking the ability to hear as well...well that was something he wouldn't allow himself to even consider in the middle if the night. Maybe I should dial Koganei he thought, he never went to bed before 1 am. His fingers found the numbers from rote and his chipper best friend answered on the second ring.
"You're late," Koganei teased. "I thought maybe you'd fallen asleep without my dulcet tones tonight."
Rin chuckled.