Cheeba

Note: The author does not promote the use of illegal drugs, she merely suggests it.

The sun settles high in the sky over foreign countries with languages that sound like butter melting over hot stones and you're stuck counting the moments between sleep and sunrise like it might decide to move out permanently. Not everyone is afraid of the same bump in the night, but your senses heighten, your hackles raise all the same. Its instinct, its wild in definitions we've forgotten, it's the metaphor of the werewolf creeping up on the loafers walking deserted sidewalks to wait for buses that come only seconds before the pounce.

Ryo thinks maybe he shouldn't watch horror films after a third bowl.

They're walking two abreast, with him lagging hopelessly behind. The concrete of the ground before him wavers friendly and out of the corner of his mind he thinks, maybe, that he should sit down and see if it feels as soft as it looks. But, in all honesty, he knows it for what it really is and he doesn't particularly care to give the guys any other reason to shoot him dirty looks over their shoulders.

Ryo thinks maybe you shouldn't take the boy you have a crush on to get high at the same movie theater your best friends frequent.

In class, whenever he tries to picture the artic, it always comes out looking like the inside of a snow globe- all dancing penguins and low glass ceilings that arc down forever. Which is a terrible analogy anyhow seeing as he's pretty sure there aren't any penguins at the North Pole. Well, mostly.
The boy to his right leans over and taps the notes Ryo's taking with his pencil. His thick mouth forms Do penguins live in glass houses in Greenland? as he traces a finger across the lines forming the beak of the bird. He raises an eyebrow and Ryo would feel stupider if the boy weren't smiling like that.
By the end of the week they're spending nights in the back of the boy's car, fogging up the windows with the tropical energy that exists in every teenager.
Ryo understands why they aren't to so much as talk to each other anymore during classes. Well, mostly.

Still, he sometimes thinks the sky around here must be very low as well.

On a field trip a few months before, he was startled by a suit of armor keeping careful guard of the tiled floor beside a bathroom entrance. Noises in the subway make him wary; he could swear the people walking by look familiar- old men in ancient hats and guys with forked tongues scenting the air as he passes.
And sometimes, sometimes the line he walks between murderer and former something-approaching-hero seems more the steam rising from a hot road than the road itself. In the middle of the night he'll roll over and half think that none of that ever happened.

Ryo thinks that's when he's happiest.

Sai compares marijuana use to murder and Ryo is just completely baffled. Falsity of the statement aside, aren't they already? (Or maybe that part was only him, he isn't certain anymore.) Later, when hes home watching his father putter about attempting to cram 3 weeks worth of gear into the only battered suit case they own, it occurs to him to wonder about the real cause of their anger; the pipe in his left hand or the boy holding his right.