"Give me that sock."
Mob woke up suddenly. She had just gotten used to sleeping through the night again. It felt weird, not having to get up with someone to feed and change them, and she didn't know when it would start to feel normal again. Sleeping through the night. She had been trying to sleep through the night for a while now but she still got up sometimes.
She woke up suddenly, sometimes, because she couldn't hear the baby.
There were those terrifying moments, the most terrifying, where she would wake up to silence. Just Sho's breathing in the night. The drawer the Mukai had slept in wasn't on the floor and the room didn't smell like baby throw up anymore. Baby Mukai was gone, off to her new family, and…and Mob was happy for her. She was happy, now, she had to be.
Baby Mukai had a mom now.
She someone who loved her and would take care of her. It was a good thing that baby Mukai had been adopted. Being adopted was better than being born into a family, Mob figured, because when you were adopted the people around you had chosen you. That meant that they wanted you. That meant that they accepted you. After all adopting kids was like going shopping. You could pick out the one you wanted so therefore the lady who adopted Mukai would love her for who she was because she could have had any orphan in the world. The lady who adopted Mukai also would never leave her. She had chosen to have Mukai and that meant that she had no reason to leave. She wouldn't just leave someone who she had picked out from all the orphans in the world.
Sometimes moms left.
Baby Mukai would have a better life than Mob's had for the past ten years. There were some parts that she liked, mom had been very nice when she had been around and also she and Sho'd had a lot of fun when they had been little, and also some parts that she didn't like. Mom leaving and Sho being mean to her and dad being his weird combination of nice and mean at the same time…Mob didn't know what to make of her life sometimes. There were plenty of people with much worse lives. People who lived in those starving countries they talked about on TV. People who'd had their arms and legs bitten off by sharks. That guy from the movie she and Sho saw, once, that got locked in a prison for fifteen years and then I turned out that his girlfriend was his daughter….but that had been fiction. It didn't matter. There were people out there that had lived much more difficult lives than Mob had so she should have been happy for what she had.
She had a lot of things to be happy about.
She had friends….sort of. She and Minegishi were definitely friends and she and Sho were siblings which was like friends but he was allowed to be mean to her and she and Shibata were kind of friends even though he was always trying to throw her in the air and telling her how cute she was and also Shimazaki maybe thought that they were friends….and he could be ok sometimes…when he wasn't saying anything or doing anything or thinking about saying or doing anything….so she had friends and that was something that she was happy about. She also had a family that loved her and that was something to be happy about, too.
She'd also been promoted which was something that she was supposed to be happy about.
Even though she really did not want to be promoted. Now that she was promoted Sho was extra mad at her. He was always telling her that she was too bossy which made no sense because she had been promoted which meant that she was just the right amount of bossy. He was extra mean sometimes…or maybe it just felt like it because he had been so nice to her when Baby Mukai had been their pretend sister. Maybe he would be nice to her when she grew and they had kids. Then he'd be a dad and an uncle and also the ruler of the world so maybe then he would be nice to her.
Because he was not being nice to her now.
"Sho…what are you doing?" asked Mob. She hadn't been fully asleep, she'd still half expected to have to wake up with Baby Mukai, when Sho had pulled her covers off and taken the tiny baby sock out of her hand. She had found it while they were moving from one house to another. This one had been stuck to the side of their dryer. That meant that Baby Mukai had an odd number of socks which meant that her feet were maybe very cold, or at least one of her feet was very cold, and she knew that she had to give that sock back to her but…but she couldn't.
She needed this sock more than Baby Mukai did.
That was selfish, the most selfish thought that she could have had, because without this sock Baby Mukai would be cold and then when she got cold she cried and she was probably crying and crying and crying…but she also had other socks. She had a mom now, too, and they knew where to buy socks from. Mob hadn't known. She had thought that baby socks would have been in the same aisle as all the big people socks…but they weren't….and also maybe she shouldn't have sent a blind person to find socks…but it worked out eventually. Shibata went to the baby store with Shimazaki and he came back with all the baby clothes and socks…
And then they had to figure out the sizes…
But Baby Mukai would be ok. She had a mom now and moms knew how that kind of stuff worked. She had a mom who was taking good care of her…Mob hoped…and Baby Mukai would have a much better life than she did. She felt good knowing that Baby Mukai was happy with her new family but also kind of sad that she would never see her little sister…her pretend little sister…ever again.
The tiny sock helped.
"You've been hogging the sock. I want a turn." Said Sho. He was trying to take Baby Mukai's sock out of her hand…and she held it tighter even though she knew that she was being selfish. Her little brother wanted something and as the person who was now in charge of him fulltime, like a mom and a sister at the same time, she had to give it to him…but she needed this. She just…
Mob was a very selfish person sometimes.
"It's too little for your foot. You have a whole drawer full of your own socks to pick from." Said Mob on the off chance that his feet were cold. They probably weren't, though, but she could still hold out hope that they were. She could still hold out hope that he didn't miss Baby Mukai as much as she did…because that was her little brother and she loved him and she never wanted him to feel as bad as she felt in that moment and had been feeling since her baby sister had been taken from her.
"I don't want it to wear, dummy, I want it because….because you were stupid and packed up all of her stuff so we don't have anything to remember her by." Said Sho. He tugged really hard on the sock and Mob decided to let it go. The elastic could only stretch so far. She would rather have seen it given to Sho than to have seen it torn in half. Like that king who went around cutting babies in half until he found a lady who loved her baby so much that she would rather have seen the baby with another mom than chopped in half.
Mob was happy that Mukai hadn't been chopped in half but she was still sad to see her go.
"Can you give it back when you're done?" asked Mob. Sho was right. She should have saved some of Mukai's stuff. She shouldn't have been dumb and packed everything. That had been selfish of her, too, because now they didn't have anything to remember her by. Well they had pictures of her and stuff but you couldn't cuddle with a picture and pretend that she was still near you.
She should have taken more pictures, too.
She wished that she had taken pictures for every moment that Mukai had been living with them. Maybe that would have made up for missing her entire life. Mob would never see her grow up. She would never help her take her first steps or hear her first words. She would never feed her the first solid food that she would ever eat. She would never read Mukai the Galaxy Express manga…she'd tried but Mukai was too little to understand….and she would never read Mukai a lot of other good manga too. Like the Frozen manga or-or-or a lot of other good stuff! And she would never tale her to her first day of preschool…..did her mom know how scary the first day was? How scary it was to suddenly be in a room full of stranger away from your family? Not even your little brother? And what about grade school? Did her mom know how to help her pick out a school satchel? And how to teach her to put on her uniform?
Mob should have been there for her.
But she wasn't. She wasn't there and all she had to remember her pretend little sister by was a single sock…which Sho had now claimed. It was late, Mob was tired, and also her head hurt a little bit too because she had been overdoing it lately which was not good at all for her but helped her control her powers so…she didn't know. What she did know was that she was having some very mean thoughts about her own little brother right now.
He thought he could do whatever he wanted.
He got punished over and over again but he just never stopped. He made dad mad all the time and she tried to protect him but he never let her. He was always saying things and doing things that he knew he shouldn't have been and he….he never thought about her. How much it hurt her to see him punished. How hard it was to keep dad's attention off of him. Now she'd been promoted to a job she never asked for and he was still being mean.
Mean thoughts to have towards her own little brother who she loved very much and would never be angry or annoyed at because that was wrong and having feelings like that was wrong and she had to be good and sweet like mom had said which meant that all bad feelings had to be exorcised because they were wrong and she had to be a good person all the time because that was who she was supposed to be even if it made her feel tired and sad all of the time and-
And she was just so tired….
"Shut up. You've been hogging it since she left. You think that everything is yours but it's not." Said Sho
"No. I don't think that everything is mine. My things are mine and your things are yours and some of our things are communal property, like that sock, and that's why we have to share." Said Mob. She needed to be calm. Like dad wanted her to be. Like mom would have been. Mom had never once gotten upset with Sho. Mob remembered. No matter what Sho did mom never once got upset with him.
That was just how moms were supposed to be.
She wasn't mom but now she ranked the same as mom…which meant that she was a sister with the power of a mom…or something. Dad was bad at explaining things sometimes. She knew that she was filling in for mom though and that meant that she had to do things the way mom would have done them…but not with the running away part. She couldn't run away. She wasn't even in Japan. Where would she even go?
"No, you think that everything is yours. You thought that little sis was your baby and that's why would were always telling me and everyone else how to take care of her and that's why you just gave her away without even…and now you're trying to take her sock from me, too." Said Sho. Mob sat up quickly.
What the h-word?
"Sho, no. I didn't give her away. I had no say in that and you know it." Said Mob. She was being mean, there, in her words and also her aura. Sho's stuffed animal hammock flipped over. Her doll house fell backwards. She needed to control her powers, she reached for her bottle of milk and other stuff but remembered that she had finished it ages ago, so she tried to calm down…even though Sho had said something that wasn't even in the same TIME ZONE as being true!
"All I know is that you came back from work, another thing you took from me by the way, and then Fukuda was here and he took the baby away." said Sho
"What? Sho. No. That's not how that happened and you…you know that. Dad said that Fukuda had to find a new home for Mukai, that was what his whole mission was about. Finding a home for her. Dad and Fukuda went everywhere looking for the most perfect home for her and-" said Mob
"You let Fukuda take her away. You could have stopped him but you didn't." said Sho
"How was I supposed to stop him? His orders came from dad and dad ranks higher than me. I can't just tell Fukuda 'no, disobey dad and leave Mukai with us' because he would not have listened….and also what do you mean I took work from you? That makes no sense. You're not making any sense." Said Mob. She wanted to go back to bed. She wanted to take that sock out of his hands and go back to bed…but that was a mean and selfish thought to have. She thought that them sharing it, working out a schedule or something, would be the fair thing to do…but maybe that was selfish.
Maybe her having any wants at all for herself was selfish.
If she didn't want anything at all for herself then maybe she could have been happier. If she just went along with everything and did what she was told then she wouldn't have had these occasions to be mad at herself, then. She had to make Sho happy and to do what was best for him…even if he was being kind of a jerk…but it was wrong to think of your little brother as a jerk because he was your little brother and he loved you very much…even if he didn't always act like it.
"For my whole, entire, life dad told me that when he was gone then I could be the one running the world. Not you. Me. Dad promised it would be me.." Said Sho
"I wasn't running the world, Sho, just Claw." Said Mob. She didn't know how she could have handled running the whole world. Just keeping everything together at the one HQ had been hard enough. She didn't know how dad was going to run the whole world…well he was a lot scarier than her…mostly because he didn't mind being scary….but Sho was not as scary as dad or even scary at all. He couldn't have run the whole of Claw or even the HQ or even…anything, really. He was too little. He was just a kid.
"Claw was supposed to be for me! Dad said so!" said Sho
"Sho…no. You couldn't have run Claw and you shouldn't have run Claw. It's hard work and people are really weird and also you have to spend the whole day with Shimazaki and it's…it's not fun." Said Mob. She didn't know how Sho was going to rule the whole world when he grew up. She didn't know how anyone could rule the whole world. Running Claw was hard enough. It felt sort of like being Wendy and everyone else was Lost Boys and…and it wasn't fun. She had always wondered why Wendy wanted to go home at the end of that movie, not that she had watched that movie that often because the songs were boring and stuff, but she had always thought that Wendy was lucky. She already had two little brothers and then she ended up with a whole lot more.
Mob knew better now.
It was hard being the one in charge. Especially to a bunch of boys. They fought all the time and the ones that didn't want to fight still went along with it and also nobody ever wanted to do their job and people kept doing stupid things like chair jousting and waxing hallways so they could go sock skating and also take your pet to work day hadn't gone well…and they still hadn't found that snake…and it was just so hard! Sho wouldn't have been able to manage all the nonsense and craziness…
He would have been a part of all of the nonsense and craziness.
Then dad would have been mad at her because she had let Sho become a part of the nonsense and craziness. Even before her promotion dad had always put her in charge of Sho…and really the only thing that had changed was that she was in charge of Sho now that dad was around, too, which was not something the she wanted even a little bit…and it was all just so much…and it would have been a lot worse if she had let Sho be in charge.
She was the only one who could have filled in for dad.
"I don't care about it being fun or not. Dad still said that I would be the one who inherited all of it….not you." Said Sho
"Well dad's still alive so it doesn't even matter. Ok? We're fighting about something that happened already and that we can't change and that…that I wouldn't even have changed if I could. You wouldn't have been happy running Claw and it's my job to make you happy." Said Mob
"You're just like dad. You think you can tell me how I would and would not feel." Said Sho
"No, that's not true. I'm not ordering you to do anything. I'm just saying that you would not have been happy running Claw. I know that because I know you. You like to draw and play and take care of things. That's why your virtual pets never die and why you don't have to spend any money on any special items. You got to take care of Mukai and you got to stay at home all day. You were happy." Said Mob
"You're telling me how I feel again. You're just like dad. All you care about is work and being the boss of everyone. I don't know why he promoted you to mom's rank. You're not mom, you're nothing like mom, and you'll never be anything like mom. You're just like dad and you need to just…just stop it. Just stop…stop it." Said Sho. The lights above them flickered on before going back to being off. The drawings taped to the walls all fell down. Mob grabbed handfuls of her hair and held them down. She was not going to get upset with her little brother. She loved him.
He had hurt her.
That wasn't anything new. He had always hurt her. He was always hitting her or pushing her or pulling on her hair. She knew that little brothers just were like that. Boys were just like that. Even Shimazaki was always messing with her hair even though he knew that she hated that. She knew that Sho couldn't help the way that he was and she knew that she should have just…stopped it. Like he had said. She should have just let him keep the last thing that they had to remember Mukai by that wasn't a picture on a screen and just gone to bed.
That was what she should have done.
But she was being stupid and selfish. She should have just agreed with all the things that he was saying just so that they could have some peace together. She should have been a better big sister to him. She was a terrible big sister to him just like she had been a terrible big sister to Mukai. She had let Fukuda just come in and take Mukai away from them and….and his orders had come from dad. She did not outrank dad. She could not just tell Fukuda to tell dad 'no, sorry, don't feel like it' because she wasn't dad.
Sho was just being mean.
She was…she felt like being mean back. She felt like…like getting up and taking that sock back and telling him that he needed to start being nicer to her or she would start being meaner to him. That she would start showing him what it was like to have the person you loved most in the entire world treating you like that. She could…she was a lot stronger than he was. Her powers were. She was second in the whole world only to dad. If she wanted to she could have-
No.
She gets up. She gets out of bed because she needs to move. She needs to move even though she knows that these thoughts are coming from her own brain and she knows that she can't escape her own brain. She tries, though, she gets up and leaves the room. Sho asks her where she's going. She doesn't say anything. She can't say anything. She knows that if she says something, if she tries to say something, then something mean will come out and she will end up hurting her little brother's feelings and even though he can be such a jerk sometimes she still loves him so much and…
And when you loved someone you knew that the best thing to do, sometimes, was to let them go.
Well she was the one who was going but the sentiment still stood. She felt better the minute she stepped out into the hallway. The house was the same as all of the others. She didn't need to turn on the lights to find the space near the door that they had turned into a genkan. She didn't need to turn on the light to slip her feet into her shoes and put on her hoodie. She felt the pocket. Good. Still there.
She knew that dad said that it was a nasty habit but she really needed a cigarette.
Nobody lived anywhere near them. Not every house was occupied all the time. They were more like hotel rooms than houses. People stayed and left all the time. All the houses were exactly the same. The one bedrooms were all the same and the two bedrooms and the three bedrooms and so on. Just a sea of houses in the middle of nowhere….and Mob was grateful for this. Nobody was around to see what she was doing.
Dad was asleep and Sho…well he was smart enough not to wake dad up for anything. Even this.
She held her cigarette between her teeth and lit it. Minegishi said that she wasn't supposed to be smoking and if she was going to smoke then she had at least better stop chewing on the filter. Mob didn't see what was so wrong with what she was doing. Any part of it. They were her lungs and if she wanted to smoke she could and they were her cigarettes and if she wanted to bite down on the filter she could. She was sick of not getting a say in her life. Everyone was always telling her what to do…because she was a kid.
Even though dad had promoted her.
Even if she did rank the same as mom had she was still ten. She would be ten until next May. Then she would be elven. Then twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and then on and on and on until she really was an adult for real…even though she had no idea how it would be any different. She would be taller, probably, and she would dress like mom did and wear makeup like she did and then she would have her own kids to take care of and stuff.
Maybe then she could decide some stuff for herself.
But in the fact that her whole life had been planned out for her…didn't that mean that she didn't have any choices at all. She didn't even get a choice in what she wanted to be when she grew up. People used to ask her when she was little…and nobody asked her that anymore. There was no point to it. Dad had already decided for her. There were no choices left. She was what she was and she did what she was told to do…even if it hurt. Sho had no idea how much it hurt to just watch Fukuda walk out that door with Mukai. He didn't know how hard it had been when dad had been gone…
Mean thoughts to have.
So she stopped having them. That was a choice that she could make. She could choose to be nice…even though that wasn't a real choice because she hated to be mean. Mom would not have wanted her to be mean…and she had no idea why it even mattered what mom thought because she had run away and…and those were more mean thoughts. She chose to stop having mean thoughts. That was something she had some control over, her own thoughts, and also…also this. She knew that this was bad for her but it was her choice to make.
And she got to make so few choices in her life.
So she made this one. She chose to smoke and she chose to leave the room rather than say something mean and then after this she would choose to…she didn't know yet. Smoke some more? Go back to bed? Take the baby sock from Sho's hands while he was asleep like he had done to her? She wanted…she chose to be nice and she chose to let Sho keep it. He loved Mukai too and he deserved to have something to remember her by.
He deserved to keep her little baby sock.