Sho only did this once a year.
Which was way too much as it was!
"I can't get your hair to stay flat…oh! I know." Said Big sis. She took off her headband and put it on his head. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He looked upset. He was upset. He hated this. He had on one of her dresses over his clothes, the purple one, and now he had her headband on too. He looked like her little sister instead of her little brother.
He really hated this.
"You look really pretty." Said big sis. Sho wanted to push her. He wanted to hit her. He wanted to bite her. He wanted to pull her hair and poke her in the stomach and kick her in the knees and…and a whole lot of other stuff that you did not do to your big sister on her birthday. Today was her birthday and that meant that he had to be nice to her no matter what. He had to play with her all day and watch movies that she liked and also do…this.
He wished that she had wanted to play anything other than the Shoko game.
That was what this was called. He used to play it more with her back when they were little and they just called it dressing up. He used to do this for her, pretend to be her little sister instead of her little brother, to make up for when he had been particularly jerky to her. He had minded it back then when they were little too but not as bad as now. That was why he had stopped doing this. She had called him Shoko and then it had been so weird because he was not Shoko, he was not a girl, and then he had pushed her and then she had hit her head and so now this was just a birthday thing.
It all balanced out because on his birthday she had to do whatever he wanted.
"Don't ever say that." Said Sho
"Sorry. I meant you looked boy pretty. Handsome." Said big sis as if that would make it better. He was not pretty because girls were pretty and he was not handsome either because that was something that moms called you. They told you that you looked handsome when kids in your class made fun of how weird you looked. Sho did not need to be reminded of that and he did not need his big sister to stand there next to him pretending to be their mom. They had a mom. She was just off…somewhere.
He wondered what mom was doing right now.
What was it that she did, now, on their birthdays? Did she make a cake and eat it all alone and be sad that she had left her kids? Or was it just a normal day for her now? And what did a normal day even look like for her now? Did she still lay in bed all day sick and tired? Did she still go to the pool and the library and the animal shelter? Did she still do the things that she used to do? Well maybe not because she was gone and they were in a different place from her and….stuff.
A lot of stuff.
"You're my sister don't call me that." Said Sho
"Oh…ok. But you do look nice. We can do something else though if you're unhappy. We can do something you like to do. We can draw pictures of watch the livestream of hamsters or….I guess we could jump out and try to scare people again even though I don't know what's so fun about doing that…" said big sis
"No…it's your birthday and we have to do what you want to do…and also I'm not scaring anyone again for a while. Dad got really mad at me." Said Sho. He was glad that this dress had long sleeves. He had never been glad before, or thought that he would be glad, about wearing a dress but this one had long sleeves. Fukuda was away on a secret mission so he couldn't heal Sho up from what happened…and he didn't like that. He was never hurt too badly, afterwards, because Fukuda had always been there.
Ever since he was a baby.
But now he was gone. He had left and Sho had no clue if he was even coming back. Sho knew what happened on missions. Dad sent people into danger and they came back with injuries and stuff. Not fun at all. He didn't want anything to happen to Fukuda. He was one of the people that Sho had known the longest and he cared about him and he was fun to play with and…and Sho didn't know what he would do if something happened to him and he didn't come back…or worse.
He ran away.
Adults could run away. Sho knew what happened to people who tried to run away from Claw. It wasn't good. He didn't know why people would try to leave Claw. Dad was the strongest esper in the world so of course it made sense to follow him. He was going to rule the world so the best thing to do was to follow him now instead of later. That way he liked you a little better…as much as dad was capable of liking someone who was not himself or big sis.
"I'm sure that he was just mad about something else and he just took it out on you. It's ok, though, because he loves you." Said big sis. Sho turned around from the mirror. He pressed his hands to his sides to keep from pushing her as hard as he could.
"That's not better, you know. I don't feel better knowing that he was mad at something else and he just…got mad at me because he was already mad at something else." Said Sho
"But it's a good thing that he wasn't that mad at you. He loves you even if he doesn't show it. Sometimes the people who love you hit you and push you and stuff. That doesn't mean that they don't love you or something. If they didn't love you then they would just leave or make you go away or something." Said big sis
"Yeah….I guess you can love someone and still be a jerk to them." Said Sho. He clasped his hands behind his back. He knew what she meant. He loved her, he really did, but he could also be such a jerk to her. Now, even on her birthday, he was thinking about shoving her backwards until she fell into the bathtub and hit her head really hard because she had said…and he was the worst little brother in the whole world. Wasn't he just? Well it made sense. He was dad's kid after all. He wondered if this was why dad didn't have any brothers or sisters. Maybe his parents knew that he would be a jerk to them and they spared them the misery of having to be related to him.
Maybe this was why he didn't have any little brothers or sisters.
Moms were the ones who decided to have the babies, Sho figured, because they grew in the mom's stomach and not the dad's. The dad just kissed the mom and did the really terrible thing to her. The terrible thing that adults did to one another because they were weird. Sho hoped that he never became that sort of adult. He had never even liked a girl in his life so he was in the clear. If he did end up liking a girl and having kids with her he hoped that his girlfriend or wife or whatever was smart like his mom and stopped having kids if one of their kids inherited his jerkiness. That was why mom had stopped having kids, maybe, because she could tell how much of a jerk Sho was and she didn't want any of her other kids to have to deal with that.
He had no idea if he would have been nice to a little brother or sister.
"Love is about how you feel, not what you do. Well it's about what I do because I show my love by being nice. Some people keep their love for you inside and show it by taking care of you and not leaving. Even if they hit you sometimes or pull your hair they still love you." Said big sis
"Yeah! Of course I still love you!" said Sho. She didn't have to tell him that. Of course he still loved her. Little brothers were supposed to love their big sister. Sure he wished that she were less bossy, the she liked more of the things that he liked, and that she wouldn't put him in a dress and pretend that he was a girl every single year on her birthday but he still loved her.
"I wasn't talking about you, Sho, I was talking about dad." Said big sis
"Well it sounded like you were talking about me." Said Sho
"I was talking about dad, about how he can hit us and say mean things to us but he still loves us." Said big sis
"Me. He hits me and he says mean things to me. He loves you." Said Sho. That was the way that it had always been. Big sis was dad's favorite and Sho was just this other kid that he'd had. He had been mom's favorite, back when they were little they had decided that each of them got one parent, but now she was the only one with a parent.
"He loves us both. He hits you more than me but he does hit me…well he did." Said big sis. Sho wants to hit dad now, not her, because she was his sister and…and she had gotten hurt. There was another feeling there too. A sort of…he didn't even know what to call it…because dad had hit her too.
Shameful joy, maybe.
He stuffed that feeling down. Being hit was the worst thing in the world. You felt all small and helpless and also scared plus there was all of the pain, too. He wished that dad didn't hit either of them but that was just what dads did. Well Sho wouldn't. When he had kids he was never going to hit them no matter how angry they made him. Even if they were terrible. Even if they went around drawing on the walls and picking their noses and starting fires and doing crimes and pulling on cats' tails he would never hit them.
"Why'd he do that?" asked Sho
"I bothered him while he was trying to work. He's just…upset. Because of stress from work. I mean something bad must be happening if he sent Fukuda away." said big sis. Sho didn't know if something bad was happening, something bad was always happening but this could have been really bad for all he knew, but he did know that sending Fukuda away was weird. So was dad punishing big sis. He only punished her when she lost control of her powers and he would have noticed if she had lost control of her powers. Dad had been so weirdly upset lately. Even his aura was showing it. That was weird…for him. That was weird for dad, his aura showing his feelings, but normal for everyone else. Even big sis who liked to pretend that she had no feelings at all like dad did. He knew better, she had feelings, and she was happy. She had been weird when she came home last night, she had crawled into bed next to him and woke him up by telling her how much she loved him, but now she was just happy…and he didn't want to be a jerk and make her unhappy.
It was her birthday after all.
She always did what he wanted on his birthdays. She always did what he wanted in general. He could at least be nice to her about this…even though it was hard. He could have just said that he was sorry, though, if he accidentally did something mean. If he ruined her birthday. Fukuda said that as long as he said sorry then it was ok for him to be mean sometimes. He was just a kid and stuff like that.
But he was going to try his hardest to be nice to big sis.
"I don't know what's happening so don't ask me." Said Sho
"I wasn't going to…but if you did know something that I didn't know then…well I guess that you would have told me." Said big sis
"Maybe I know something that you don't know and maybe I don't. I can't read your thoughts, dad says that telepathy is a rare power and none of us are probably going to ever have it, so I have no idea what you do and do not know." Said Sho. He knew things that she didn't know. He knew about what dad did to people who betrayed him and people who tried to kill him. He knew exactly what happened at the awakening labs. He knew where he hid his half of their giant sandwich. He didn't want to talk to her about those things because that was stuff that she didn't need to know about at all.
"I know…well I think that I know some things that you don't know. About dad. About people. Just…when you're with dad does anyone ever call him by his given name?" asked big sis
"What? No. Nobody's that stupid. They call him Suzuki-sama like they're supposed to." Said Sho. He was Suzuki-chan and dad was Suzuki-sama and big sis was Suzuki-san. He should have been Suzuki-san, he wasn't that much younger than her, but everyone still called him chan like he was a little kid…and even when they had been little kids people still called her Suzuki-san. It wasn't fair at all. At least nobody called them by their given names, well Minegishi called big sis 'Mob' because she wanted to be called that for some reason…he wasn't going to complain about being Suzuki-chan when she had people calling her Mob and even Mob-chan sometimes. Nobody called dad anything either than Suzuki-sama though. At least one day Sho would be Suzuki-sama too and dad would be either really old or really dead.
"Oh…ok." Said big sis
"Why? Did you hear someone call dad by his given name? Because that person is going to be in for it once dad finds out." Said Sho. Maybe dad would let him watch him deal with the traitor. That was always cool. It was always cool when someone else was on the receiving end of dad being all mad and stuff.
"I didn't hear anyone call dad by his given name. I just…nothing. It's nothing. I just wanted to see if I could figure out what dad was so mad about. It's ok, though, because he's not mad at us. He loves us and he's mad about something else. He loves us. He really does." Said big sis. She said it a bunch of times, almost like she was trying to convince herself that she was speaking the truth. If anyone loved her, if dad had to love one of his kids, it would be her. He could be mind of a jerk to her too, though, and Sho…he wasn't sure. Mom had loved them. She had always been so nice to them and she always took care of them…but dad hadn't. Maybe dad just didn't feel love. He was always talking about how he had to get rid of his feelings or he could end up exploding or something, a power that big came with a bigger expense he had said, and maybe he had gotten rid of love when he had gotten rid of all of his other feelings except for being mad at stuff. Or maybe not. Dad did take care of them. If he hadn't loved them then wouldn't he have just given them to an orphanage or left them by the side of the road or whatever else people did with their unwanted kids.
Ran away and never came back?
"You really think dad loves us?" asked Sho. He knew in his mind that his dad must have loved him because that was what dads did. Dads loved their kids and took care of them. If a parent didn't love you anymore then they left. Dad hadn't left so he still must have loved them. It only felt like, sometimes, that he only loved big sis. He was always calling Sho names and hitting him and telling him to go away and stuff. It wasn't fair…but life wasn't fair.
If life had been fair then he would have gotten a big brother instead of a big sister and he would have been doing something fun like fighting or drawing or shooting guns instead of standing there in a dress so that his big sister could pretend that she had gotten a little sister instead of a little brother. Nobody got what they wanted in this family. Dad wanted a better son, even though Sho had his powers dad still didn't like him and big sis wanted a little sis to be friends with. Sho…he didn't want a big brother or a little brother. Another brother would have just given dad someone new to compare him to. What he wanted was a mom. He didn't know if he would have traded big sis for mom back, he would have to think about that some more, but he knew that he would have traded dad for mom in a heartbeat.
"Of course he does. Sometimes he can be mean and hurt us but that doesn't mean that he doesn't love us. If he didn't love us anymore then he would just leave…but he won't. He loves us and I love you…so I won't leave you ever." Said big sis. Sho sighed. He didn't know with her sometimes. Yeah, ok, dad could have left them but…but he was just such a jerk all the time! It was like he woke up every morning and looked for things to be upset with them about. Like he thought to himself 'Suzuki, you've been too nice lately you've got to kick it up a notch' but in doing that he was being even meaner and more of a jerk than normal.
Maybe it was just how he was.
Maybe he had passed it down to Sho. That was why he wanted to be a jerk to big sis on her birthday…and also because she had dressed him up as a girl so she could pretend to have a sister…but it didn't matter. He reminded himself that he had hid behind the shower curtain the other day so he could jump out and scare her. He had and it had been funny, especially when she made the toothpaste explode everywhere, but that had been a jerk thing to do. So he owed her one. So he kept the dress on.
Even though he hated it.
He hated it so much. The sleeves were itchy and the bottom part kept on getting tangled around his legs. How did she walk around like this all the time? At least he was still wearing his clothes underneath this. It may have been too hot and uncomfortable but at least he wasn't actually wearing a dress. Well he was but not for real because he was still wearing pants.
On his birthday he was making her wear pants.
He was going to make her pretend that she was his big brother. He was going to make her wear pants, which she hated, and he was going to make her play fighting and guns and throwing things and hitting each other with swords and all of that other fun stuff that she hated. Her games were so boring. Playing dolls was so boring. Painting nails was so boring. Brushing hair was so boring. Making glitter art…ok that was fun. That was fun and he liked glitter, dad hated it but dad hated everything that Sho liked, and he did sort of want to do more glitter art with big sis…
Far away from dad, though, because his aura felt mad.
It had felt mad when big sis and him left the bathroom and went to the living room. She had to paint his nails there because the light was better. He sat through it even though with every single stroke of the brush he wanted to kick her. She was painting his nails blue but it was a way too bright blue. He wanted nothing more than to figure out where they made this stuff and then burn it down! Or maybe just tell them to stop since it was her birthday and she would not have been happy if he just went around starting fires and stuff.
He had to make sure that she was happy on her birthday.
"What color do you want for your toenails? I have this blue but I also have red and pink and purple and green-" said big sis. She went outside of the lines again. She went outside of the lines a lot. He didn't know what was so hard about painting a straight line. He didn't paint that often but straight lines were the easier thing in the whole world!
"Here, if I have to look like a girl at least let me do the painting. You're going outside of the lines." Said Sho. He took the brush from her and went to finish. Huh. This was kind of fun. Sort of like drawing but on yourself….it was ok. It was still for girls but he could see why she did this so often.
"You're better at it than I am. I guess that I'm just not an artist like you are." Said big sis
"You're ok. Some of your drawings are alright." Said Sho. They used to draw together more often when they were little. He had always been better at it than her. She mostly drew cats and characters from stuff she liked. He used to draw stuff like that too but now he mostly just drew pictures of things from life. Like the view from plane windows, the people around him, what happened to traitors, stuff like that. She hardly drew but when she did it was cats and stuff like that. The same stuff that she had drawn when they were little.
Which was so dumb. Why not draw something new?
But she liked cats and stuff. That was why he had drawn her a picture of her as a cat for her birthday. She liked it when he drew her pictures. He could have just gotten her stuff but that seemed sort of dumb. They got almost everything that they asked for and what they didn't get it was for good reason. If dad said 'no' then that was it. There was no point in going behind dad's back because he would just find out and get mad at you and that was never a good thing, dad being mad at you.
"But I'm not as good as you are, little bother. You're the best artist that I have ever met in my whole life." Said big sis
"You're just saying that." Said Sho. He wasn't an artist, he was just a guy who liked to draw, that was all. He had seen real art before and he was no artist. He was just a guy who could draw pictures. Lots of people could draw pictures. It didn't make him special. He wasn't a prodigy or anything, not like her, he couldn't do even half of the things that she could and she knew it.
She still tried to make him feel better anyway.
She told him things just to make him feel better because she knew that he felt bad about it. How she was born right and he was born wrong. She was the Prodigy, she had been born with her powers and she had been more powerful than most adults back when they had been little. He was the Awakened Child. He had to go through a bunch of terrible stuff to get his full powers. He thought that it was better, getting his powers through hard work, than getting them through luck. Everyone else thought different.
That was why he was Suzuki-chan and she was Suzuki-san.
"I am not…well I mean I am saying words but they're true. You're a great artist, better than I am, and I wish that I could draw as well as you." Said big sis. Sho almost yelled at her for telling him things that he just wanted to hear but he reminded himself that this was her birthday and on her birthday she could say whatever she wanted. So he let it go even though he knew that she was just fishing for things to say so that he wouldn't be upset or anything like that.
"There's nothing special about being able to color in a straight line." Said Sho. He finished his nails and held them up so he could see them. The hand that she had done was all goopy and she had gotten as much paint on his skin as she had gotten on his nails. The other hand, the one that he did, was much neater and not goopy at all.
It was blue so it was ok.
"The one you did is much nicer. Can you do mine too?" asked big sis. He wanted to tell her that no, he did not want to, but it was her birthday and he was not going to be a jerk. She wanted to play pretend then he would play pretend…but they were going to play target practice tomorrow to make up for this. He hated this game so much…but that was ok because this was her birthday…and on her birthday he had to do whatever she wanted.
Which included playing the Shoko game.
At least she didn't call him Shoko this time. Good. She had learned from last time that calling him Shoko was way too much. He was Sho, not Shoko, and he was a boy and not a girl like she had wanted. He was a boy like dad had wanted. He wondered what mom had wanted. He wondered if he would have had any little brothers or sisters if mom had still been around. He wondered if he would have liked that.
Then his little sister could have been the one in his place.
He would not have had a place at all, though, if mom had stuck around and she and dad went and had more kids. Dad would have had another boy to inherit the world or maybe if he had another girl he would have been all 'this works' and then had one of them inherit the world…and then he would have given Sho to an orphanage or something. Or maybe dad would have stopped by an orphanage and gotten another son. Then he could have been happy…though Sho couldn't imagine dad ever loving someone else's kid. He barely even loved the kids that he had.
Big sis loved him.
And he loved big sis. Maybe that was enough. Maybe them being together, loving each other, was enough. Maybe as long as she was there for him and he was there for her then it didn't matter how mean dad was to them and how much dad probably wished that he'd had other kids. Better kids. Or maybe just a better son…
Maybe dad would have been happy, then, that they were playing the Shoko game.
Maybe dad would have liked him better as a girl. Maybe dad just liked girls better. Girls were neat and quiet and boring and stuff just like dad was and probably had been for his entire life. Maybe he wished that he had two girls instead of a boy and a girl. He knew that dad didn't wish for two boys. If Sho had a brother then he would have fought with him all the time worse than he had ever fought with big sis. Even when he was at his meanest he always had that knowledge at the back of his mind that she was a girl and that you were not supposed to fight girls. Even if Fukuda said that it was ok so long as you told her that you were sorry. He wondered if he and big sis would have fought if they had both been girls…or maybe big sis would have just bossed him around worse than ever.
He didn't want to be a girl.
Big sis would have been way bossier if he had been a girl. That was enough of a reason not to wish that he was a girl. Also there was the fact that you had to wear dresses, which were uncomfortable, and also that you had to have long hair, which got in the way and also you had to brush all the time. Also the games were much more boring.
But this was kind of fun.
Mom had said, before, that it was alright for boys to do girl things and for girls to do boy things. But also there were a lot of rules for boys and girls so why, then, did the rule of things not matter but the rules about who got to wear dresses or inherit the world matter? He didn't know. He wondered if it mattered that he liked doing this with big sis. Or maybe he was just weird. He had always been weird, though, since the day he had been born. He had red hair and blue eyes and freckles after all. That was weird. Also he had been born without powers which was weird for his family. Also sometimes he acted like a jerk for no reason, just because his brain told him to, and that was weird…so maybe he was just weird.
Maybe he should have been used to being weird.
Or maybe he was weird enough. He didn't know. He knew that he should have just not cared. Dad said that he was a complete person all on his own and that he had never cared once what people felt or thought…but that seemed kind of jerky. Also dad did too care about what people thought and felt. That was why he dressed the way he did and read manga in secret and stuff like that. Sho didn't know if he should care about what other people thought or if he shouldn't have cared what other people thought or…or if he only cared about this because he cared what other people thought.
"Thanks Sho. You're really good at that." Said big sis. She was happy and that was what mattered. So what if he hated doing this? Playing the Shoko game? His big sister was happy and that was what mattered. He liked seeing her happy and he wished that…that he hadn't made her so upset before. He was always making her upset…but not on her birthday.
He would make her happy.
He would be there for her on her birthday. Birthdays were important. She had said before, so many times before, that the day that he had been born had been the happiest day of her life. She had been a baby when he had been born so she couldn't have possibly remembered that but it was still nice…just a nice thing that she said to him…but also one that she had meant. Because she loved him. She loved him and she was always there for him…and he would be there for her. He would be there for her on her would be nice and he would not fight with her or kick her or pull her hair and he would give her the picture he drew for her and he would play the Shoko game too.
He hated the Shoko game but he loved his big sister.