Theme Eleven: Smile
Himami has never been loved, or cherished, or held close by a hysterical parent.
She has never seen her mother's face. She could not pick her father out of a line up even though they supposedly share the same house. She knows how to prepare her own meals and clean the house. She knows she will never have to plead with anyone to stay home when she's sick. She will never wake up or come home and smell something delicious baking. She has never had a sibling to hold her close and tell her it will be alright. She has not known the embrace of another human being in a very, very long time. She has never climbed into the bed of her parents after a nightmare. There's never been a happy Christmas where she woke up with her heart hammering in her chest to see what she'd been given. She doesn't know what it's like to hold someone's hand and walk down the street together like it's the most natural thing in the world.
She always wanted that life. She just never said anything. She likes to hide all the loneliness with lots of laughter and lame puns, jokes and random comments that made people think she was wacky and silly. That way people wanted to be with her. That way she doesn't have to feel alone in a crowd. She wants to be part of a group so desperately that sometimes she's sure it shows. She's just so tired of coming home to an empty apartment and instant noodles. She's tired of the way the lock on the door clinks and clicks at her as if it knows she shouldn't be the only one to steadily occupy the building. Honestly she's even tired of not cleaning her room and cleaning it. No matter what she does, no one is there to stop her. Himami could eat her weight in cookies and no one would know or care. No parent or snot nosed jerk of a sibling is going to come in and stop her. There's no punishment coming for her. She's always alone. Kids say they'll be her friend, they take goofy pictures, exchange phone numbers, and then time passes and they tire of her. Like an old toy, she is thrown aside. All that remains is a few old photos stuck in a shoebox under her bed.
Suzie is the only one who has ever stood by her. Suzie has the opposite problem, too many siblings, nagging parents, and thus it's too crowded at her house to hold Tamer meetings. Her house is small and cramped, overflowing with voices and noise. A pang of longing hits Himami in the chest when she visits, but her spirits soar when her friends decide to come to her house. Suzie orders them all into it, and no one wants to argue with the bossy Chinese girl, who has never outgrown her booming voice from her early Tamer days. They show up to a place that rapidly becomes their home, their hide out when they're all in trouble, their place. And Suzie is there the most, always talking. The youngest Wong child is a very strange girl. She acts as grown up as she can around the adults and around the other kids, but some part of her is still soft and sweet. She is kind. She makes cookies, talks, asks the questions about Himami's family that no one has bothered to ask for a long time. No one else has ever cared. No one else would notice if Himami slipped off the face of the Earth.
After a few weeks the apartment begins to have a smell. For a long time it was clinical and clean, like a hotel or a stage set. Too neat, too tidy, yet not bad, just… off. Now there are smells. The incense that Mako steals from his grandmother to burn to make things smell cozy lingers in the air long after he leaves. Kouta smells like cigarettes because his father smokes, and after a while the coat closet smells pleasantly of that after-odor. Suzie brings cookies, she makes them, sometimes in the shape of katakana to spell out people's names or just to play with. She has her childish side after all, and it shows in the flowers she picked idly on her way here and the way she smiles at Himami's collection of hair clips. Pretty soon they begin leaving their things at her house. Coats, books, cards, the occasional piece of trash. The couches get dents from where Kouta jumps on them just because he can't at home. The carpet gets stained from a memorable occasion where they turned off all the lights and had an all out pillow fight with every stuffed animal and pillow in the apartment. There's crayon on her room's wall where Ai drew a mural, pictures of all kinds of digimon and flowers across the dull white paint.
For the first time in her life she feels like she has a home. Himami doesn't know what to say when Suzie shows up for the younger girl's birthday with a cake in her arms. She doesn't know how to put into words what Suzie has done for her, what she's saved her from. Before Suzie and the other Tamers came into her life Himami had no one to talk to, no one to confide in, no one to laugh with or cry with. No one would have noticed if she died. No one would have cared if she vanished. Now? Suzie is standing in front of her with a childish smile that comes from another lifetime, a lifetime spent in pigtails being ignored and alone in a crowded house instead of an empty one, and something passes between them then. Himami sees for the first time that nakama isn't a pretty word in plays. It's real. This is her nakama, her family, her true one that will never leave her alone for months without so much as a phone call. Once the cake is set down Himami embraces Suzie tightly, burying her face in the older girl's shoulder, and at first Suzie thinks there's something wrong because the blonde in crying. But there's a smile on her face, and these are happy tears.
Himami is loved.
