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IV

Life Isn't Enough

Chapter Four: Riku

IV

Mr. Yume sprang to action, seizing his wife in his arms before she fell and escorting her to a seat before picking up the phone. I had half-risen, planning to seize up the receiver, but I sat again when I saw that he had it, my heart beating painfully in my ears.

"Hello?" There was a pause as Riku's father listened to the person on the other line. He seemed to shrink before me, becoming old and tired before my eyes. One shaking hand passed over his face, fingers pressing against his temples. "I see. Very well, we'll give the photographs to the local police department and have them sent straightaway." Pause. "Yes. Thank you. Goodbye." Click.

"What is it?" I asked, unable to keep the question from bursting out any longer. "What happened?"

But Mr. Yume couldn't answer right away, since Mrs. Yume seized hold of him just then, sobbing into his shoulder. "I'll tell you in a moment, Sora," he told me, his eyes distant behind the spectacles. "Come on, Sakura, let's go upstairs."

I watched them go, dying to follow and hear what it was. It was about Riku. I knew that much. And anything that concerned Riku concerned me, so I wanted to know. I needed to know.

After an eternity of muted sobbing and words exchanged in the master bedroom, Mr. Yume finally made his way down the stairs to me. He motioned for me to sit, and then sat across from me, steepling his fingers and staring at them as though he'd never seen them before. "Sora, what I'm about to tell you isn't easy to say. But there's no real way to soften the blow, so I might as well just—"

"He's dead, isn't he?" I broke in, feeling the tears starting in my eyes. "Riku. He's dead." Why? Why him? Not Riku! Riku wouldn't…Riku couldn't…

But Mr. Yume shook his head, his eyes growing misty behind the glasses. "Not dead. Missing. He never made it to the airport."

Hearing that, I thought it was the best news he could've given me. "If he's missing they'll find him, right?" I asked, my spirits lifting. "You know Riku, he's probably just gone and jumped into someone's car. They'll find him by tomorrow, and then we'll just have to wait another day for him to fly over." I knew I was only trying to make things look better to us both, but I said it anyway.

Mr. Yume was smiling sadly, his shoulders collapsed in what seemed to be defeat. "I'm afraid it's not that simple, Sora. The police have reason to believe it was a kidnapping—they found his luggage in a dumpster a few blocks away from the airport."

I couldn't imagine it. All that tulip-decorated baggage, stained with banana peels and the general sludge of a dumpster. And off to the side, a nameless man forces Riku into a car and drives away, just like I said. Just like I shouted at him ten years ago—someone to take him away and never bring him back. Feeling a surge of guilt, I squeezed my eyes shut against the tears and rested my face on my arms. Not Riku. Please, not Riku. Anybody but Riku.

"If it's a kidnapping, they'll want one of two things. Either a ransom, or…" Mr. Yume crossed his arms over his chest, as if for protection, and looked at the wall in silence.

Or just to kill him? Was there someone who would do that? Someone who would kill Riku—Riku—just for a thrill? It was too much for my mind to comprehend. "No," I said forcefully, lifting my head up. "He's alive. Riku's alive out there, somewhere, and he's going to come home."

The sad smile returned, and Mr. Yume took my hand comfortingly. "That's what we're hoping."

IV

Kairi started crying the moment I told her, and Tidus, Wakka, and Selphie all looked somber. I heard Selphie's sniff as I held Kairi in my arms, patting her hair consolingly. "It'll be okay," I told her, forcing that grin onto my face. "He'll come back here. You know Riku—wild horses couldn't stop him."

She pulled away, wiping her eyes and smiling faintly. "Yeah. I know. I'm just so worried for him."

"Yo, we can't give up this fast, guys," Wakka broke in, punching his hand forcefully. "Riku's no pushover, and all of us know that. We gotta hold out, yah?"

"You're right," Tidus added, also looking determined. "He's still out there. We can count on Riku—he's coming home."

When I finally returned to my house, Mom had just hung up the phone and was beginning to break down. "I'm sorry, Sora," she said to me, seizing me in her embrace when I walked through the door. "I'm so sorry."

I looked up at her eyes, glimmering with the tears that I hadn't yet shed. It felt as though I'd swallowed something hollow, leaving an empty space in my chest, and a lump rose up in my throat. "It'll be okay," I said, my voice breaking. How many times had Riku spoken those words to me? How many times had I heard the very slight lilt to his voice when he said the word "okay?" "It'll…he'll come back. He's n-not dead. I-I know it." My shoulders shook and I felt two twin tears slip past my defenses, sliding down my cheeks as my face wrinkled with pain.

Mom tipped my face up to hers, wiping away one of my tears with her thumb. "That's right, Sor. You keep up your spirits. You can be a beacon of hope for everyone else, because he's coming back. Don't let them beat you down."

A dam broke then and I grabbed her tight, crying my heart and soul out into her shoulder. Riku was gone. My Riku. And, no matter what I said, I didn't know if he was still alive.

IV

I stayed holed up in my room for two days, watching the phone with an ever-present feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. My hair grew even messier, and my face was always damp and smelled of tears. I was expecting a call—hopefully from Riku, saying that he'd run off and it was all a prank and he was okay now at the airport. Then I could give him several solid blows so he'd never do it again. Or I might get the ransom call—maybe Riku would give the kidnapper my phone number, and they'd ask for a million dollars and we'd give it to them and Riku would get home safe. The other option was the call from Riku's parents to tell me they'd heard Riku was dead, but I kept that call out of my mind. He wasn't dead and he wasn't going to be dead. I refused to even think it.

Mr. Yume told his boss and traded in his vacation so he and Mrs. Yume could fly to the city in search of Riku. I wanted to come too, but they didn't really want me along and I knew Mom couldn't afford the ticket. At first I had been starry eyed, imagining myself running behind the dumpster and catching the creep single-handedly so I could sit with Riku and tell him all about it. But when I found out I couldn't go, instead I imagined the moment when Mom drove me to the airport to meet the family coming back with Riku. He'd be a little roughed up, of course, and maybe even traumatized, but I could help him through it.

So I found myself sitting on Riku's bed again, pulling absently at the same thread and thinking of him. Mr. and Mrs. Yume were rushing about and getting ready, pulling bags down the stairs and wolfing down food and occasionally halting in order to dismiss a moment of deep emotion.

I lay down on the bed, which still smelled of Riku even with the three-week separation. A few things had been thrown about in preparation of his departure, but they hadn't been cleaned up yet because Riku was responsible for his own room, according to his parents. I was tempted then to put the things away, but I didn't want to touch them. It seemed to be violating something sacred by doing so.

The blue poufy things that I still lacked a name for were lying in the corner near his desk, collapsed and dead like a deflated balloon. I could remember the day Riku brought them home, his cheeks flushed with pride at keeping up with the fashion that would last no more than a week. I told him so, of course, but he didn't listen, so they became his pride and joy for that one week before the fashion ran out and he kept them out of necessity. We found every use for the poufy openings, from parachutes to sandbags. The parachute idea failed miserably and I almost broke an arm, but the things themselves became Riku's personal carriers. He had every imaginable necessity buried somewhere under a pile of stuff in there.

That's what I remembered when I slipped off the bed and pressed the navy blue cloth to my face. Riku sitting on the paopu tree in these. Riku running down the beach and calling my name, a new trinket banging against his leg in between these and his black jeans. Riku, Riku, Riku. A dry sob escaped me and I was crying, my tears soaking the material to a darker tinge. I didn't hear it when Mrs. Yume walked in, but I felt her arms around me when she knelt next to me and we cried together. Why couldn't they just find him?

IV

But they didn't. The week ran out and I had to go to school without Riku for the first time I could remember. Of course, there had been that time he had to be out for almost a week due to chicken pox, but I made that an occasion he would never forget.

Kairi took up Riku's usual position at my side. She was a year younger than the both of us and a freshman this year, but she still managed to find me at lunch and during our electives together. "They'll get that creep," she said to me one lunch hour, stabbing her potato a bit maliciously. "They'll get him and they'll throw him in jail, and he'll get ass-raped and everything. Because Riku was a boy, and you know how they don't take well to people who harm children."

I looked up at her, my heart skipping a beat. "Was?"

She blinked at me for a moment. "I mean 'is,' Sora. He's only a boy."

"He's not dead," I repeated. It was a mantra I'd started telling myself whenever I fell into doubt, because I knew he wasn't. He couldn't be.

There was pain in her violet eyes, and she sighed with sad patience. "Sora—"

"He's not!" I slammed the fork down on the tray and left, storming across the lunchroom to put it away. I didn't see the hurt look she shot me, but I didn't worry much about it, the doors swinging shut behind me as I left for class.

Class just happened to be Creative Writing, which I attended without Kairi, and I sat in the back with the empty seat that Riku was supposed to occupy. Ms. Nakamura was flipping through her materials just as the bell rang, but she stopped abruptly and turned her milky brown eyes on all of us. "It was my intention to begin the study on plot development and character analysis, but I believe we have a far more interesting detail among us. Fiction hinges primarily on emotion, on the sort of feeling you want to convey to your readers. And there is no better way to express that emotion through words than to first experience it yourself." She took a step forward and gestured. "Sora Hikari, would you stand please?"

Feeling a strange numbness in my mind, I did so, keeping one hand on the desk for support. "Yes ma'am?"

"I understand that you have recently lost a friend of yours, a very close friend, and I'm very sorry to hear that."

I nodded stiffly. "Only I haven't lost him, Ms. Nakamura. He's only missing, and we're going to find him." There was a sort of flame in my voice now when I discussed Riku.

She cast me a sad gaze over the top of her miniscule spectacles, reminding me a bit of Mr. Yume. "Yes, I know. This incident must be very taxing for you. I would suggest that, maybe once you've had a chance to absorb what's happened completely, you may want to write about it. I'm sure you'll find it to be a very cathartic experience."

But what would I write? Was I just supposed to say how much I missed Riku, how worried I was, how much I wanted him to be found? Because that's all I felt. "But he's not—"

By now she'd made it to my desk and set one hand on my shoulder, making me feel suddenly as though I wanted to cry. "I would like you to see me after class, Sora," she told me in a lower tone, her eyes still soft and comforting. "I know this is hard. Very hard." And I understood, seeing the tears that threatened to come to her eyes. Mrs. Nakamura had had this happen too, perhaps once upon a time so long ago.

"Now, class," she continued, marching to the front again and waving about her pointer authoritatively, "the use of emotion isn't just the acknowledgment of an emotion's existence. You cannot simply say, 'He was sad,' or 'He was bored.' Make your reader feel the sadness or the boredom. If he's bored, make him so bored he's ready to beat his brains out with a rock. If he's sad, make the readers feel that sadness as if they were the ones in his situation."

While I knew she'd probably done it for the best, Ms. Nakamura hadn't made things much better. I felt singled out, the sole reciever of this treatment, in the stead of the more unified feel of a class address. But all the same, she had introduced herself as someone I could go to. Someone who understood what this was like, even if she could never comprehend the relationship I had with Riku.

I met her at her desk afterwards, feeling slightly apprehensive. I wanted school to hurry up and end so I could go home and check to see whether I'd missed any calls pertaining to Riku, or if Mr. Yume had emailed me to tell me they'd found him.

"I know that the next few weeks, or years, even, will be difficult," Ms. Nakamura continued, taking off her spectacles and casting me a level gaze. He's not dead, I thought. He's not dead and she doesn't know but that doesn't matter because he's not dead, no matter what everyone else thinks. "So, if you ever feel overwhelmed, or that you need to step out of class, I want you to let me know, because I understand and I can help. And here…" She pulled out a notebook, one that looked somewhat older and more tattered than most of the others on the shelf. "The journey to become a writer is one not of developing skill, but of self-discovery. This notebook lent me solace many years ago, and I'm hoping it just might do the same for you."

It sat there lifelessly in my hands, a dead weight that felt leathery like an old man's face. "What do I do with it?" I asked, holding it awkwardly as though I didn't know how.

"Write in it," she replied, her eyes growing intense. "Write everything you feel. Then come back to it later, and you'll understand yourself that much better."

I still wasn't sure I understood, but I nodded as if I did and put it in my bag with the rest. "Thank you, ma'am," I said quickly, and rushed out of class.