Chapter 2: Stages

The best times of my life has always been in that tiny sliver between waking life and sleeping dead.

In that brief window, I am in absolute control. Isn't that the dream? To have everything go exactly the way I want it to? But reality soon wrestles that feeling away and disappointment sets in. I lose control, I lose the memories, and what I'm left with are the ghostly imprints of something—perhaps the only something that gives me hope that life isn't a total wash. I'm forced to make the hard choice: do I stay in bed or do I get up?

When it's the summer, the answer is obvious: stay, stay, and stay in bed.

Only during the summer can I enjoy life without stress or worry. It's a feeling that every teenager can relate to, but I'm not every teenager. I relish academia. All the school projects, pop quizzes, worksheets, and tests are the things I live for. It keeps my mind busy. There are many things about school that drive me crazy, but school itself is not one of them. What does? I don't want to think about that right now. Just let me relax.

I live in Destiny Islands, where the weather is great 99% of the time (with that 1% reserved for cataclysmic thunderstorms, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions—no, not really). There's nothing like an early summer breeze blowing through an open window. I sleep comfortably, half-covered with a thin blanket, with my body sprawled over the mattress.

Who am I? I didn't tell you? Let me introduce myself. I am Sora. Everything about me is average, which is just the way I like it. Average is unnoticeable. Average is invisible. Average is average. And life is good.

Until I feel the mattress vibrate to the thudding footsteps that stop outside my door. I know who it is. My cocoon of peace is breaking. I let out a sigh, almost imperceptible as a sleepy exhalation. The door creaks and muffled sound becomes clear.

"Hey Sora, its tomorrow now! Didn't you promise you'll show me around today?"

Roxas. That blasted fool. How dare he disturb the careful equilibrium I have tried so hard to maintain? One week ago, I was free to refine my social isolation techniques, as I have always done over the last few summers, but I never calculated for some cousin who popped out of nowhere making an impromptu move into my very home.

Yes, this "cousin" of mine claims to be from Twilight Town and has moved to Destiny Islands for reasons I care not for. He is bright, cheerful, and highly sociable—the person I could've been, but the very opposite of what I am. Either he's friendly to a fault or he's got an ulterior motives. Ever since his unwelcome arrival at my doorstep, he's been trying to get me to go outside nonstop. I understand that some people are stubborn, but he's being suspiciously persistent.

I hold special insight into human behavior. A lifetime of self-imposed solitude and isolation tends to wreak havoc on the mind. What friends, music, movies, and video games that people have filled the void with, I replaced with dictionaries, psychology text books, self-help guides, and diagnostic encyclopedias. My pursuit in finding the solution for my mental affliction has left my thought processes a little unconventional. I like to think I'm really smart, but I don't want to brag. Oh wait, too late. You're curious about my mental affliction? Sorry, but I can't talk about that right now.

"Leave me alone," I mumble. It's too early in the morning. Hopefully, he can pick up my obvious disinterest and leave me alone already.

"No can do. You have to show me around." No can do? What is this nonsense? Just go out and explore on your own!

"Do you really need a babysitter? Walk out there and enjoy the sunshine." I hear his feet shuffle.

"Look man, I've been here for a whole week already and I haven't seen you go outside once. Don't tell me Destiny Islands is so boring that even you don't want to go out?"

It's a rhetorical question, but not a very clever one. Who is he kidding? Destiny Islands is the number one resort island location in the entire world. It's thriving economy is based solely on its fantastic weather, amazing beaches, and world-class food. The schools here aren't so much schools than they are tutorials on showing people how to have a good time—which is what the entire business on the island consists of: tourism, tourism, and tourism—on that thought, I have just the thing.

I crawl towards the dresser and pull open my drawer. My hand searches until it snags a brochure. It's the standard Destiny Islands travel guide. I toss it over to him. "Here. Go crazy with it."

I've crossed the line of no return. I've been roused to that state where returning to sleep is impossible. Waking up is a dicey preposition, you have about a minute at most to get back to sleep. After that, good luck with knocking yourself out again.

I look over his getup. It's laughable and completely impractical for island use. His Twilight Town threads have no place in the tropical heat. The long sleeves and pants are a dead giveaway that he isn't local. Roxas lets out a frustrated sigh and rubs the back of his head. His hair is appropriately spiky, which lends credence to his claim of blood relation, but it spun and spiraled as opposed to my head of hair, which exploded.

"Okay, you got me." I did? I mean, of course I did. Ulterior motive, reveal yourself. "Aunt Aerith let me stay here on one condition, and that is if I could help you get some friends."

I stare at him dumbly. It's true that I don't have friends, but it's because I can't have friends. Why not? Let me explain later, I'm in the middle of a conversation here. "Why does mom want me to get friends?"

He shrugs his shoulders. "Maybe because she wants you to? I don't care that much, but if getting you friends is my rent, then I'm gonna have to pay it." Good luck with that.

"You do know that I don't want you here, right?"

He smiles. "I could guess that."

"Wouldn't it be in my best interest to have you kicked out?"

"Well yeah... but that would make you an asshole." Like I have any qualms about being one.

I laugh. Human interaction… I almost missed it. "Fine. You win." His eyes light up like high beams on an empty stretch of desert road at night. "But first, give me your clothes and," I point to my drawer, "you'll have to wear mine."

He took a step back. "What are you going to do with my mine?"

"Burn it."

He chuckles. "Good one."

"Hurry up and get dressed already! Bad enough you're forcing me to wake up early. Don't just stand there."

"Geez, and here I thought you would take your sweet time since you like sleeping in so much."

I leave him to pick something out from my wardrobe and make a beeline towards the bathroom. I shut the door and turn around to face my reflection in the mirror. Every time I see my face, I can't help but crack a smile. It's only when I'm alone do I allow myself to grin. Dour expressions are best for keeping annoyances away. With one sweep of my hand, my hair shakes off the sleep and stiffens up. I lean close against the mirror and carefully rub away the crust that clings to my blue eyes. A few more runs through my morning routine and I should be prepped for action.

The reason I told Roxas to switch clothes was simple: I don't want him to stand out. Wearing out-of-town clothes is like wearing a giant neon-bright sign saying, "Sucker here!" There would be no end to the marketers, solicitors, and scammers. Blending in is the best option. Unless he wanted to be treated as a tourist, but even then, there'll be no tourists around me.

I finish brushing my teeth and slip into my clothes reserved for going out: the plainest white t-shirt and the most boring pair of brown shorts you will ever see. Perfect! I look at myself one more time and take a deep breath. You can do this. This entire summer has been training for this one moment. I put one hand over my stomach. You are iron now! Forged into hard steel from the hot summers of past. I am ready.

So you want to know what my problem is, right? I'm sorry for being so evasive, but that's part of my training. This may sound dumb, impossible, or even made up, but it's the truth.

Girls make me sick.

I'm not being figurative, this is literal. They literally make me sick, and by make me sick, I mean they make me throw up along with all the unpleasantness prior to the actual act: the queasy nausea, the dizziness, the cramping, and the dread of knowing that your insides will soon be outside.

Don't ask me why this happens when I'm around a girl because I don't know—or rather, I don't remember. There are gaps in my memory, and after that gap, I've suddenly acquired female proximity sickness. Conventional psychology says I have repressed memories. It may have been so traumatic, my mind simply refuses to remember. I'm no hypnotist and my mom is allergic to shrinks, so I'll have to wait for an epiphany or suffer a serious concussion to recover from my localized amnesia.

My nickname throughout grade school was "Sickboy," naturally because I was throwing up all the time. Everybody chalked it up to a weak immune system but I knew better. My suspicions were confirmed when mom took me to the doctor. Dr. Yen Sid couldn't find anything wrong with me and instructed mom to carefully watch my diet. It wasn't a physical problem, it was mental.

Even though I hadn't learned the scientific method yet, I intuitively experimented with my condition and found out that my gag reflex activated whenever I was near a girl. The experiments were painful to say the least, but by the time I figured it out, "Sickboy" became my permanent nickname. I found the solution to my problem to be quite simple: avoid girls at all costs. Thanks to the existence of "cooties" among prepubescent children, avoiding girls wasn't hard at all. The boys clung together and I was able to enjoy a decent social life.

Once middle school rolled around, "cooties" turned into "hotness," and every guy did an about face and started chasing after girls. I would've followed them, but I had my health to worry about. I finally realized that my one-sided social life could no longer continue as it was. With all my buddies jumping on the adolescent bandwagon, I had to fend for myself. I had no choice but to forget about socializing entirely. If interacting with 50% of the population reduces me to fits of puking, and if the other 50% is constantly chasing after the other, it just means that I have to omit 100% of the population from my list of things to interact with on a daily basis. Most kids start their "rebel" phase in middle school, I elected for a "repel" phase.

I read books upon books on how to be popular, how to be smooth with the ladies, and how to make friends. I gathered and cataloged all this knowledge—and did the complete opposite of what I learned. I took the laws of attraction and turned them into the laws of repulsion. People are drawn to confidence, humor, and mystery. So I became boring, withdrawn, and transparent. I became painfully shy, the kind of shyness that produces nothing but awkward situations. Lack of confidence was easy to emulate. All I had to do was change my posture, hunch over, keep my head down, never talk, avoid eye contact, and never smile. Whenever I stumble into an encounter, I simply mumble "sorry" and move on without waiting for a response. By the end of middle school, I was an antisocial asshole.

By freshman year, I knew that I couldn't continue being a prick, since that drew more attention than I wanted. People avoided me like I wanted them to, but there was no end to the white knights, nosy teachers, and bullies threatening to get in my way. Repulsion was only a temporary solution. I sought an alternative and found it in "invisibility." This way, I could maintain minimal exposure without inviting bad feelings. It involves doing things that make you feel like everybody is looking at you, until you realize that everybody is too hung up on themselves to notice. You have to blend in, and that involves researching the hottest trends. You dress between "outdated" and "latest" and nobody will ever notice. Even then, invisibility was just a stepping stone. This summer, I'm taking it to the next stage: perception.

They say perception is everything. Instead of me becoming invisible, I've trained my perception to render them invisible. If I am close to a girl, she does not exist as a "girl" until she moves outside my immediate cognitive zone. It's insane, I know, but it's the only way I can survive. The appearance of Roxas delayed the development of this technique for awhile, but I'm ready to test it now. I exit the bathroom and check on Roxas. He turns around, dressed in my t-shirt and shorts.

"Aren't these kind of plain?" he asks.

"They're perfect. Come on, let's go."

He grins and follows me earnestly. "Finally! So where are we going?"

I face him and quirk a brow. "Where else? This is Destiny Islands. There's only one place to go, and that's the beach."