This beach had a lot of seashells.

Not that they were going to take them with. No, they never travelled well and there wasn't much to do with them outside of the beach. The shells stayed at the beach where they would serve to decorate their castle. This one was called castle Suzuki, because their family name was Suzuki, and it was the best of the castles that they had made so far. That was why they had written castle Suzuki in the sand beside it with a bunch of seashells.

Not the best writing tool, they found out, but something permanent. Or at least Mob felt like that. Shells were like rocks, they lasted forever, but not in suitcases and backpacks because unlike rocks shells shattered and got sharp little pieces everywhere and then Fukuda looked at you funny when you told him why you had a bunch of tiny cuts on your feet. That had not been a fun day at all. Nothing like today. Today was a very fun day.

"It doesn't look like it says what it's supposed to say." Said Sho. He turned his head to the side to get a better look. Nope, that was not what that was supposed to say at all. He was seven, he knew how to read, and he especially knew how to read his own family name.

"You think, little brother?" asked Mob

"You can see just as well as I can." Said Sho

"We need more shells, I think." Said Mob. Sho was right, that looked just awful. It was because the shells were all different shapes. Maybe if she only got shells that were the same…but those were hard to find. She wished that she could have just moved the ocean out of the way and then used her powers to collect and sort all of the shells…but there were other people around. Not a lot of them but enough that she knew someone would notice.

"We already got most of the shells on the beach." Said Sho

"That's true but I think that it looked bad because we don't have enough shells. We should go in the water and feel around for more." Said Mob

"Here, I'll just write it in the sand." Said Sho. He picked up their sand shovel, the good one, and wrote what they had been trying to write.

"The wind could blow it away, though, or someone could step on it. That's why I was using shells, so it would last forever." Said Mob as Sho wrote in the sand. His hand writing was better, he remembered the stroke order this time, but sand was too impermanent. It would be nice if it was there forever. Things changed much too fast in Mob's opinion.

Like moving.

Moving happened much too fast. They went from winter to summer. One day she had been wearing a snow suit and now she was in her bathing suit. It was so weird…but nice, too, because she had to look at the positives. They were at the beach. Before they went places with dad they had never gone to the beach before, just the pool. The beach was hotter and saltier and there was sand everywhere…but it was still fun. They made sand castles. That was always fun. Having fun was important. What was the point of life if you weren't going to have fun with it? Experience it? Live it? Life was to live after all, at least Sho had heard that somewhere. Maybe in a movie or a popsicle stick or a fortune cookie. They ate a whole box of fortune cookies the other day. Dad said that they were being ridiculous but he also said that their English reading skills were getting better. Dad could say nice things, sometimes, even if he had to wrap them up in mean things. It wasn't fun when dad said mean things….so Sho chose not to think about that. He chased those sorts of thoughts from his head.

It was important to have as much fun as possible.

"It's a sand castle. Unless we sit on this beach guarding it for the rest of our lives then it'll just end up turning back into beach. That's how sand worked." Said Sho. He wrote more stuff in the sand. 'Sho was here and so was his big sis' and stuff like that. He didn't know what she was on about, wanting it to last forever. Nothing ever lasted forever.

Nothing.

They could wake up tomorrow in the lands of ice and snow or something. They could wake up tomorrow and dad could be a jerk again. They could wake up tomorrow and dad could be nice. They could wake up tomorrow and eat with chopsticks. They could wake up tomorrow and eat with sporks. They could wake up tomorrow and it could be dark out. They could wake up tomorrow and it could be light. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Things just changed all the time.

And you got no say in it so you had might as well go with it.

Otherwise you started to feel trapped. Sho liked how they moved so much. The trapped feeling had trouble catching up to him. The feeling he got when he realized how truly far from home he was. How he would never go home again….how this was his life. How even then he went around the world it still felt small because the only people in this world were dad and big sis…

'Suzuki Sho will rule the world!'

That was a good thing to write in the sand. He was going to rule the world. When he did then he would never feel trapped again. That was because he would be able to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. He would be able to go wherever he wanted, even back to the real castle, and then…well he didn't know what he would do then. All of this was for when he was a grown up, anyway, so it didn't matter. Now, anyway.

"I don't think that we'll be here for that long so you're right, Sho, you're always right." Said Mob. She picked up their other sand shovel, the one that Sho had cracked trying to dig up rocks with, and started to write. 'Suzuki Shigeko was here'…just like Sho had written. She looked at it for a while. That was what you were supposed to write. Well at least that was what Sho had written. It didn't look right though, even though she had used the right stroke order. No, that wasn't right at all. She reached down and fixed it.

'Mob was here.'

That was better. There was no one around to call her Mob anymore. She didn't go to school and nobody ever even used her real given name. She was either 'big sis' or 'Daughter' or 'Miss Suzuki'. Mom had always called her Shigeko or Shige…never Mob. Even though Mob fit better. Mob was what she wanted to be. Mob was a regular kid, like those kids, the ones who were looking at them. Regular kids got to go to school and have friends who weren't their little brothers and….and she was being ungrateful like dad called her sometimes. She didn't want to be ungrateful. She should have been happy. Being a regular kids wasn't all that good.

Regular kids didn't get to go to Disney Land whenever they wanted.

Regular kids had bedtimes.

Regular kids didn't get to eat whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.

Regular kids had parents following them around all the time telling them what to do.

So maybe being a regular kid wasn't so great. Even though regular kids got to go to school and make friends and have moms…well not everyone had a mom. Some families only had one parent, like theirs, and some kids had no parents at all. Those were orphans. They lived in orphanages which were big scary buildings full of strange people and strange food and strange smells….not that she was sure that was what orphanages were like. She just got that feeling. Some kids had no parents at all. Some kids only had one. Some parents had two dads and two moms, too, they had seen some families like that once. They were married people, dad had said so, sometimes boys married boys and girls married girls he said. One to ten percent of the population was like that, dad had said. That was regular, he said, on the low end of regular.

Regular kids had families that all looked different.

But they all had a lot more rules than Mob and Sho had. She had so many rules back when they had a mom. They had to take baths every night and have at least one vegetable with every meal and they had a timer on their screen time and they had a bedtime and a wake up time…at least now they could do whatever they wanted. Well not whatever they wanted. They had to only play with each other, never use their powers in public, and not run away from the guys who followed them around. Mob could see them, or at least their auras, and they were there to keep them safe, dad had said…

Also to keep them from running away.

Though where there was to run away from she did not know. Dad was their dad and he could be mean but she would never have run away from him. Then she would have had no parents at all. Also Sho would have been all alone. She didn't want Sho to end up being all alone. She wanted Sho to be there, with her, all the time. Even now that they were older and it was a whole new year they still got scared when they got separated.

They only had each other after all.

They were best friends. They had to be. They were brother and sister after all. They had been friends since the day the doctor cut Sho out of mom's stomach. They would be friends until the very end, that was forever, and nothing could ever make them not be friends. Even when Sho was mean and poured sand down the back of her swim suit or put seaweed in her hair or stomped on her sandcastles. He was her little brother and she loved him even if he did do things that he knew were wrong.

Like now.

Like how he was breaking the rules now. Another kid was talking to Sho. Well sort of. Mob had no idea what the kid was saying. He was one of the regular kids who were watching them. This was a boy who was older than them…or maybe just super tall. He was taller than her and Sho. His hair was yellow, too, and his eyes were blue so he was foreign….actually she and Sho were Japanese so they were the foreigners. This was not Japan. They may not have been in Japan but they still had rules to follow. No matter how far from home they were they still had to follow dad's rules. Mob walked up and took Sho's hand.

He shook her off.

She tried to drag him away.

He pulled free and kicked sand at her. Mob knew that there was no changing his mind when he got like this. She hoped that those weird aura guys weren't watching them carefully. She knew that with her powers she could have picked him up…but she was not going to stop Sho from breaking the rules by breaking and even bigger rule herself. No. She just sat down in the sand and started to think up explanations that would not be lies but would also keep dad from getting super mad at them…

"Sister." Said Sho using the few words of English he knew. He knew that he was not supposed to talk to the other kids but…but he wanted to. He couldn't just be expected to talk to only his big sister for the rest of his life. They were brother and sister, not best friends, being brother and sister was different. They were forced to play together because they had the same parents. He loved her like a sister, and he didn't want to be a jerk to her, but he hadn't talked to a kid who wasn't her in a long time.

He hadn't talked to another boy in a long time.

And that was why he was being so weird. He spoke better English than that. Dad even called his English passable, which being from dad might as well have been fluent….well Sho knew that he was not fluent but he spoke better English than this. Words were kind of hard right now. Standing in one spot was hard. Had it always been this hot out? He needed more sunscreen, he could feel himself turning red.

"Hi!" said the other kid. Sho hadn't caught his name. He wondered if it was ok to ask his name. He didn't know how the manners worked in this country. He was Japanese, not a native, and this kid might not have been a native, either. He wondered if that was ok to ask, where he had come from, and he also wondered how to ask….English was hard for him right now. Thinking was hard for him right now. Maybe he was getting sunstroke. That must have been it. Way too much sun out here.

"Shy." Said Sho pointing at big sis. He knew what it meant when she got like this. Later on she was going to pretend to be dad and lecture him about how he was acting wrong and stuff like that. Like she was the boss of him…which dad said that she was…but she wasn't because they were both kids. He could do whatever he wanted to, even break the rules, and it didn't even matter because it wasn't like dad punished her all that often anyway.

"Ni hao." Said the kid. Sho blinked. Oh, right. For some reason people always assumed that they, usually big sis, were Chinese. He didn't get why…and it usually made him kind of mad now…but he didn't feel mad now. Now he felt like the time he had eaten six of those big donuts and then ridden the teacups at Disney Land….which made no sense because all he had eaten today was bread and cheese and also four ice pops. Also he hadn't been spinning around…even though it sort of felt like he had been spinning around….

He wanted to start spinning around.

He wanted to run and jump and spin around and just MOVE and he didn't even know why. He had felt like this before….he remembered. Back when he used to play with Akira from his old class. Right. Big kid feelings that made you do dumb stuff and made people look at you weird…and he was being looked at weird.

"Konichiwa. Japanese." Said Sho remembering how English worked. His brain worked best when he was moving…and he wanted to start moving….but he also still wanted to talk to this kid. He hadn't talked to another kid, another boy, in what felt like a million years. He knew he would pay for this later but he didn't care. He was seven, now, and he was old enough to make his own decisions. He didn't need a big sister following him around and telling him what to do.

Sho wasn't doing anything wrong, anyway.

Mom had always been happy when Sho and big sis had made friends even though all of their friends had been normal kids. If mom said that it was ok then it was ok….even if she had run away from home…but he did not want to think about mom now. He thought about this other kid. He was talking now, talking way too fast, and Sho tried to keep up. Maybe he should have listened to his English tutor better. Maybe then he would have been able to keep up better. He really wanted to be friends with this kid. That was what this weird feeling was, him just really wanting to be friends with him, like how he had really wanted to be friends with Akira.

He hadn't had a friend in a long time.

Which was why he was being so weird. He wished that he could just remember how to be normal. He wished that he could tell his stomach to stop feeling so weird…and he tried to…except it didn't listen. It actually got worse then the kid asked, well asked with motions, to borrow his shovel…and then they touched when he handed it over…and then he was sure that he was going to throw up or have heat stroke or something like that….

And then he felt really dumb.

Because he was bad at reading English. He wasn't great at speaking it but he was even worse at reading and writing it…and he felt so dumb. He did his best but he was bad at it and the other kid, the letters that spelled out his name were S-K-Y-L-E-R, went back to playing with the other kids…and then once he was back to that Sho rolled around in the sand for a little bit just to get all of the weird feelings out.

"Are you alright?" asked Mob. Sho had been so weird there. Not because he was rolling around in the sand like a dog, he did that sometimes that was normal for him, but because he had been so quiet before. Quiet and kind of shaky. He had been smiling a lot and looking at his feet a lot, too, and shuffling a lot. He seemed….Mob saw his aura and it was nervous….but Sho was never nervous. That was just not the sort of person that he was. He didn't even know the meaning of the word, at least it felt like that sometimes, so to see her little brother being so unlike his normal self….it had been odd.

Very odd.

"I'm fine, don't be nosy." Said Sho. He didn't want to talk to her about this. This just…it felt like something he didn't want to talk to her about. That wasn't so weird. They didn't talk about everything. Like he never talked to her about why she would get up in the middle of the night to hang out with dad and stuff like that. If he didn't get nosy into her life then she shouldn't have gotten nosy into his. And what was with all the questions, anyway? Didn't she have anything else to do besides ask him questions?

"I'm not being nosy, I'm just worried is all. You just seemed kind of nervous back there. Your aura, I mean. I just worry about you…and also you need more sunscreen because you're getting super red." Said Mob. She helped him to his feet.

"Don't put that stuff on me. If I'm red then I'm already sunburnt. Fukuda can just fix it when we get back." Said Sho. He brushed the sand off of himself. Well now he felt better…just so long as he didn't think about that other kid. Then he felt fine.

"You're turning back to your normal color, now, so I think you're getting better. Also I think that it wasn't a sunburn." Said Mob. That was good, she didn't want Sho to end up with sunburns or heat stroke. Then dad would get even madder than he already would be if he found out that Sho had been talking to another kid. A kid that wasn't her…not that she minded. No, she was just worried about him getting punished, that was all. She never felt bad about the fact that the other kids had always liked him more because he was more like them and she was too much like herself….she didn't mind that at all. She hadn't felt bad about that since she had been little. She was not little anymore. She was a big kid now and these sorts of things did not bother her.

"I don't know what that was." Said Sho. Normal. Be back to normal already.

"Were you scared?" asked Mob. She knew how he felt. Sometimes she had trouble with her feelings, too. Dad said that it was normal. Dad said that because they were so different the world felt like Wonderland and they were Alice. Everyone had their own crazy logic and they were the ones who were expected to figure it out. It would be different when they ruled the world, he said, but they did not rule the world now so she had to at least try to understand her feelings and the feelings of others.

"It was like…it was like a bunch of feelings all together…like scared but also happy and…and stuff…but I don't want to talk about this with you! Come on, let's dig a deep hole in the sand and see if there's treasure or something." Said Sho picking up his shovel…the shovel that he had let that other kid use…and now he was getting warmer again.

"Oh. Like being happy and scared and nervous and kind of like you're going to throw up but somehow in a good way?" asked Mob. She knew that feeling. She got that feeling sometimes. Back when she had been at school…and sometimes for no reason at all. Sometimes for boys she didn't even know the names of. Sometimes for boys that weren't even real. Liking someone was always a weird feeling….

Wait.

Sho liked that other kid?

But Sho was a boy.

But sometimes boys liked other boys.

So that was ok. That was a thing that happened sometimes. One to ten percent of the population, dad had said, and that was a whole lot of people even though it didn't sound like it. Sho just fell into that part of the population. That made sense. He had always been super different. He had red hair and blue eyes and hated citrus after all. Yeah, this was just more of Sho being 'Sho'. She loved him just the same now as she had ten seconds ago before she realized this about him. She wondered if this was something that was supposed to bother her. A lot of people were bothered by this…but a lot of people also wore shoes inside and thought that if someone didn't speak English they would magically learn if you talked super loud to them.

"I just said that I didn't want to talk about it! Now either grab a shovel or go away!" said Sho. He did not want to talk about this. He wanted to…to dig a deep hole. Maybe there was treasure underneath the sand. Or maybe there was just lava and stuff…or maybe if they dug past the lava they would get to China or Japan or maybe just the ocean.

"Ok, ok, I'm sorry…but you know that I would never make fun of your for liking someone, right Sho? I'm your big sister, I would never make fun of your for anything. Even that time you wet the bed when we were sleeping next to each other….and I know that we agreed never to speak of that again…and I'm sorry I remembered it just now. I just meant that I won't tease you because you like that boy." Said Mob as she dug next to Sho. She wondered if they would actually find something this time. Last time they had only found bottle caps, seashells, and rocks. Maybe they would find something cool this time. Or maybe not. Maybe they were giving up before they had even started. Sho had stopped digging after all.

"Don't be dumb. I'm a boy." Said Sho. Him? Liking someone? Nope. Gross. Plus he was a boy and boys couldn't like other boys. Boys married girls, that was how it went. He was different enough. He was bad at having powers and bad at all the other stuff dad said was important. Dad was always saying what it would be like when he grew up and got married and had a kid. If dad found out that not only did he not have powers, and not only was he bad at just about everything that dad cared about, but also that he liked a boy…

Dad already didn't like him much.

Also liking people was gross! Liking led to holding hands and kissing and all of that gross sort of stuff! He hated kissing! Five girls had kissed him already, and one right on the lips, and it had always been the worst thing ever! Kissing was the grossest thing that anyone had ever invented! The only thing worse was that gross thing that adults did to make babies! Love was gross and sick and wrong! So was liking someone!

"I know that you're a boy, Sho, but boys can like other boys. I don't mind that you do. I'm your sister and I will love you no matter what." Said Mob. She decided to keep on digging even if Sho had stopped. This was close enough to their castle that it could have been a moat. They'd need to get some water in it first. Then they could redo the writing that Sho had ruined somewhere else.

"Big sis. Shigeko. Suzuki Shigeko. Listen to me when I tell you that I, Suzuki Sho, do not like anyone like that. Liking someone leads to holding their hand which leads to kissing and kissing is gross. I do not and will not ever like anyone. Ever." Said Sho in his most serious tone of voice. The kind of voice that dad used when one of the people who worked for him messed up. She had messed up. He didn't like anybody and he would never like anybody…like that. So gross.

"Ok…but if you ever do like someone and want to hold their hand and kiss them I just want you to know that I'll love whoever you love…but not in the way that you love them because if we liked the same boy then that would be bad." Said Mob. She knew not to argue with Sho when he got like this. With Sho she had to pick her battles and sunscreen was a big enough battle to make this not worth it. Besides, Sho was too little to think that liking someone was ok, anyway. She wondered why so many boys were like that. Liking someone was a good thing…if they liked you back…and she hoped that Sho found someone who liked him back. She had someone who had liked her back for a little bit and it had been so nice…and she wanted Sho to feel like that, too, because if anyone deserved to feel that good it was her little brother.

"Shut up and dig." Said Sho. He wished that she would just come off it already. He didn't like anyone like that…why was that so hard to understand? Liking someone was gross and it led to doing gross stuff. Girls were always thinking about that stuff, that was why so many movies had love and kissing in them even though that was a great way to ruin a perfectly good movie. He did not like anyone, especially not another boy, because then dad would like him even less than he did now…

And he already disliked him for all of the other things that made him, him.

Sho didn't want to give him anything else to dislike him for. He wasn't big sis. He wasn't just like a smaller version of dad. He was fully himself and all of the things that made him Sho were also things that dad thought were wrong with him. It didn't matter if big sis didn't see it that way because she was not dad. Dad saw things his way and his way was the only way, according to him. He had already planned out Sho's life and there was nothing at all that he could do about it because dad was dad and he was not only the boss of him but he was also going to be the boss of the whole, entire, world someday.

So he might as well dig a deep hole and see what he could find.

He found seashells.