Chapter Eleven

The sky was on fire as Tendou waited by the school entrance dressed in his new hoodie. Not many students left campus on a weeknight, but the boys' volleyball team stood ready at the gate, waiting for their final member to arrive.

He sat on the curb, drumming fingers against his jaw.

He was still high from his day-long celebration, but as the evening wore on, a seedling of doubt began to creep inside his chest. Maybe he was hoping for too much. His friends were already there, he didn't need to lay all the pressure on Hanamura to complete his evening. Though he enjoyed being the center of attention, he didn't want to put anyone out on his account, especially her.

The painting had come as a shock. He hadn't dabbled in the art scene much, but he knew it was a token of high regard to receive such a thing. It was clever too – taking old milk cartons to create a landscape from another world. He wished he had been there to witness the act. Hanamura was as interesting as the work she created. Her whole being sharpened into focus whenever she was in the throes of creativity. To have one without the other cheapened the experience. He would need to make regular visits to the studio from now on.

When he returned to the cafeteria earlier that day, Tendou found the team speculating over the canvas.

It's the size of a comforter. Where does she expect him to put this? His dorm?

I doubt the walls are big enough. Semi pulled at the edge, noticing how the fabric buckled thickly. Looks like she used all the paint in the school. This could coat an entire house.

We could put it in the club room, Yunohama offered. He was the only person still wearing his party hat. Their conversation died the moment Tendou reappeared at their table. He slid back into his chair, looking to Ushijima who waited expectantly.

Wakatoshi, he said, have you ever astral-projected and felt the whole world split in two?

Everyone at the table frowned, but the ace considered his question, settling on, Ah.

Tendou leaned forward. And when you're on the other side, you don't remember how you got there in the first place?

That's because the energy released at the source is instantaneous, said Ushijima.

Tendou ran fingers over the cuff of his sleeve, nodding.

The other boys listened to their cryptic exchange with growing confusion. What the hell are you two talking about?

Nuclear fission, said Ushijima.

Obviously, said Tendou.

It was Reon, mature and reassuring Reon, who acquired a debonair grin, holding his pudding cup like a scotch glass. All he was missing was a tuxedo and dazzling firework display to be Japan's very own Gatsby. He toasted Tendou.

You sealed the deal, didn't you?

Tendou kept his mask in place, keeping cool in front of his teammates. They were all staring at him with fresh anticipation. He let them linger in it a moment longer.

My god, man, said Yamagata impatiently. Did you do it or not?

What do you think? He said in a voice dripping with arrogance. He was flush with it.

Really? She's coming? Semi crossed his arms, looking impressed. You sure you two are just friends?

Mercifully, the bell rang, saving him from further interrogation. Anytime a girl came onto the scene, it was automatic grounds for trouble. Their last-year captain had made the mistake of tutoring with the school favorite once and suffered harassment all throughout tournament season. Things did not bode well for Tendou regarding Hanamura, but she was worth the extra public scrutiny.

At least, he hoped so. He checked his phone. Seven minutes past the hour.

The courtyard was quiet, blanketed as it was by dusk. It was still too early for the cicadas, but crickets chirped in the shadows, mingling with the pleasant, cool air. He would be okay if she didn't show up. There would be food and games and enough attention to last him the next couple of days. He could be content with that. But just as the disappointment began to set in, Semi nudged his foot, alerting him to the arrival of company.

"Hullo!"

"Hallo!"

"Ciao!"

Three figures crossed the courtyard at twilight, his favorite art geeks. They too had abandoned their school uniforms, surprising him with their unique taste in wardrobe. Asano strutted in a black pinafore, hair slick behind her ears. Izakaya, ever the prim-looking one, wore a sweater with a unicorn printed on the front. Behind them strolled Hanamura, appearing as if she had stepped out of a streetwear ad in her jean jacket and striped jogging pants. It was simple, but it suited her no-nonsense personality.

"Sorry we took so long," she said, breathless. "I hope you don't mind. I brought Reiko and Takashi with me."

She could have brought the whole first-year class, her mom and dad, Coach Washijo and it still would have been alright with him. His chest filled with immediate relief.

Tendou stood, his smile slow and inviting. He enjoyed seeing its effect on her.

"Excellent," he said, greeting her companions, "I hope you all prepared yourself for a night of unbridled revelry."

Izakaya shot a panicked look at Hanamura. "You didn't say we'd be getting ourselves into trouble."

Tendou rubbed his hands together.

"A sacrificial lamb. Excellent thinking, Suzume!" He hooked an arm around Izakaya's shoulders, dragging him out onto the sidewalk. "But first – Pizza!"

And that was how the volleyball team and the art club freshmen set off into the city.

Hanamura followed his teammates, keeping an arm linked with Reiko's as they took in the evening lights. Tendou led them to his favorite spot just a few blocks away from school. The team was already familiar with the place from their hunger-induced evenings after practice. It was a small café that served pizza by the slice along with other quick snacks and beverages.

The journey was steeped in awkwardness at first. Despite their recent picnic in the park, the art freshmen didn't know the other players as well, and Tendou could appreciate that it was probably intimidating to be around students who were older than they were, never mind their height or reputation. Hanamura and Asano looked painfully out of place amid their male-dominated group. But he worked his magic, teasing out banter from everyone, even Izakaya who fought back the loudest, so that by the time they arrived at the pizzeria – everyone was much more at ease.

"Here we are," Tendou announced.

The café, decorated with patio lights, sat catty-corner to a rustic bookshop. They took the stairs down into a portico where a hostess let them in. There was a large circular booth toward the back, nestled within the overgrown tendrils of a creeper vine. They piled into it on either side. Tendou seated himself in the middle with Ushijima on his left and Hanamura on his right, but they were forced to squeeze in to accommodate everyone. Hanamura's thigh pressed against his, and his feet danced under the table.

"The last time we ate here was after the summer training camp," said Reon, grabbing a menu. "I was so hungry – I think I ate eight slices in one go."

"That's nothing compared to what Wakatoshi ate," said Tendou. "He ate ten."

"Twelve," corrected Ushijima.

Izakaya blanched. Dear God, he mouthed to Asano.

"So, several large pies then. Got it," nodded Reon as he headed for the front counter.

"Make one of those veggie please!"

"Are you vegetarian, Asano?" Shirabu asked her.

She nodded. "For three whole months! I watched a food documentary not too long ago and it still haunts me to this day," she said much to everyone's growing bewilderment. "I…I cannot unsee that which I have seen. Don't make me talk about it."

They made her talk about it.

Chuckling, Tendou turned to his right.

"What about you, Suzume? Any preference?"

"My favorite dish is pot roast," she said, folding her arms on the table. "But I'll eat anything."

"Anything?" He cut his gaze to Ushijima. "Even fermented beet greens?"

Hanamura barely hid her look of disgust as she said, "that's old people food."

Tendou smiled, vindicated. They were beginning to speak the same language.

Dinner was instantaneous – a powerful reason for choosing this particular establishment. Reon returned, his arms laden with several plates of pizza much like that of a seasoned waiter. He let the plates slide onto the table expertly before retrieving bottles of cola. But that wasn't all. There was veggie tempura, cold radish salad, and chicken kebabs on little skewers. A giant heap of rice crackers in a red wicker basket too.

The whole table fell silent.

"Bon appetit," said Tendou, indicating that they all dig in.

Izakaya politely cracked a pair of chopsticks, but learned it was a moot endeavor. The volleyball team commandeered the evening's cornucopia, swooping pizza into their mouths like pelicans swallowing fish from the ocean. Izakaya watched as the plates dwindled to crumbs, his excitement fading into disappointment. Seeing his plight, Yamagata graciously provided him with pizza and soda.

"Sorry, we're ravenous," the libero explained through a mouth full of food. "Practice ran late tonight."

"Our cooler of orange slices hardly did the trick," agreed Jin, chomping on rice crackers.

Kawanishi piled cold radish salad onto his pizza before folding it like a taco. His knuckles practically disappeared into his mouth as he took a bite.

Daunted, Izakaya sipped his soda.

Across the table, Tendou offered Hanamura the plate of tempura she was eyeing.

"Something happened to your hand again," she said, concerned.

He set the plate down, flexing his fingers that were still wrapped in tape.

"Ah, bit of a rotten game this afternoon," he said with a frown. "We had a scrimmage match against another college team."

Outrage colored the table, making Izakaya jump.

"Really? Against whom?" She asked.

"Dragons. Seedy, deceitful, yellow-bellied sons of–"

"Careful, Tendou," Ushijima warned him sternly. "That would be the pot calling the kettle black."

Hanamura fixed him with a pointed look, urging him for an explanation.

Tendou cringed.

"I may have sat on the bench for the majority of the game," he confessed, hunching his shoulders. "I blame it on the birthday dessert. All that sugar went straight to my head. So much so, I thought it was appropriate – in the heat of the moment, mind you – to call the rival captain a nincompoop right before he spiked."

Asano and Izakaya shared a look. "nincompoop?"

"A term we learned in English class this week," said Ushijima. "It means 'an insignificant fellow.'"

"Oh, I'm pretty sure it's worse than that." Semi tilted his chin sardonically.

"Got his fingers bent backwards in retaliation," said Reon in an equally goading voice. "That was in the first round. In the second round, they took out Shirabu."

Startled, the setter dropped his kebab on the table.

"You had to sit on the bench too?" Asano asked him.

"He took a ball to the face." Semi snickered. "Blood went everywhere! He had to shove toilet paper up his nose for an entire round!"

"They had it out for me!" He tried to preserve his dignity in front of Asano. "Their strategy from the very beginning was to attack in a deluge. The more players they got off the court, the better."

"Good God," uttered Izakaya as he eyed his homeroom classmate, horrified.

"Tanji said as much before the game," shrugged Tendou. "Their players have the same physical prowess as our Miracle Boy Wakatoshi. It was like going to battle with sticks when the other side had semi-automatic assault rifles. We didn't stand a chance."

"A coup d'état," said Hanamura.

Tendou shook his head. "No, a massacre."

The team went quiet, a dark cloud descending on their table as they all relived their recent loss. Asano and Izakaya glanced to Hanamura for guidance, but she hunched her shoulders in response. It was Ushijima who broke the gloom by saying, "but Yunohama did his first service ace today."

"That's right!" Jin grabbed the first year in a chokehold. "Most beautiful damn thing I've ever seen!"

"A goddamn ray of sunshine," agreed Kawanishi.

"Hope," concluded Yamagata.

The first year faltered, trying not to appear too pleased with himself as they all raised their glasses in a toast. "If your service ace were anything less than perfection this afternoon, Washijo would have sent us up Dead Man's Hill twice over," said Jin, raising his glass.

"To Yunohama," said Tendou.

"To Yunohama!" Everyone toasted.

"Who wants another round?" Reon asked next.

The whole table raised their hands.

. . . . . . .

"What made you decide to get into volleyball?"

Hanamura posed the question as they cut through busy traffic on their way to the arcade. By now, the sky was black with little pinpricks of silver, but the stars were obscured by the warm glow of the city. The heat from earlier in the day plummeted into a cold, wet fog, and they were all grateful to have worn extra layers. She nestled in her jean jacket, matching Tendou's long strides on the pavement.

"It's something I've always been good at," he said simply. "It comes naturally to me."

"Guess Monster." She nodded in understanding.

His mouth curved into a smirk.

"Ah, so you've figured me out, have you?" He swung in front of her, walking backwards into foot traffic. Hanamura quickly pulled him aside, preventing him from colliding into an old woman stooped over her walker. The cotton of his hoodie zapped her fingers with a small shock.

"It's just a nickname," she said as they fell into step once more. "You're not really a monster. Are you?"

Tendou angled his face, peering at her over the ridge of his cheekbone now gilded in lamplight. It made her think of the brush paintings she once saw in a book, handsome faces adorned in strokes of gold-leaf: powerful and otherworldly. Demons in human form. Perhaps she had spoken too soon.

"Depends on how I'm feeling," he said, his voice laced with danger. "I can be scary, ya know."

There was an intensity in his gaze.

"Maybe we'll have ourselves a game of midnight hide-and-seek this summer," he said, enunciating the words slowly. They rippled like watered silk. "I'm good at that too."

Hanamura got the distinct impression he was suggesting a game in which he was the hunter and she the quarry. It made her heart race.

"What about you?" He asked, offhand. "What made you decide to become a painter?"

She cleared her throat, attempting to hide her flush.

"I didn't," she said. "I stumbled into it by accident." As the words left her mouth, she frowned. " In the worst way too."

"How?"

"Well," she drawled, stuffing hands inside her pockets. She played with the melon candy wrapper she kept as a memento from the café. "It's sort of a long story."

Tendou slowed his walk, eyeing her curiously.

"Oh?"

She returned his look, unsure of whether now was a good time to share that part of herself, but he was waiting expectantly.

Hanamura took a breath, training her eyes on the pallets of fruit resting outside a nearby grocery market.

"When I was six, my parents took over my grandma's antique shop," she began, "It flooded that year, so we spent the entire summer repairing the store. I can still smell the mildew," she said, crinkling her nose with a smile. "My dad put up scaffolding with giant buckets of black tar. He meant to paint the stem wall to keep the water from getting in. Have you ever played with tar?"

Tendou shook his head.

"Hmm, well to a six-year-old it looks an awful lot like soup, only black and smelly," she said, "I would sneak up onto the scaffold and ladle it whenever my parents weren't watching. I even got my sister to go along. We called it 'witches stew.'"

Hanamura was filled with bittersweet memory. It was the year she lost her grandmother, a woman with calloused hands and a sharp laugh. Fumi Hanamura was an assertive businesswoman, but kind. It was often that Hanamura and her sister were left at the store while their parents went scavenging in the countryside. Fumi never minded. She loved her granddaughters. She taught them how to count back change, how to take apart old clocks and put them back together again, but most importantly, how to enjoy large bowls of strawberry sorbet in the late afternoon sun. But that year, as the days grew longer, her light began to fade.

Soon, the safflowers will be in the field, she said one day in an unusually soft voice, they come and go so fast.

Hanamura put down the globe she had been playing with on the counter. Don't worry, Nana, they'll come back again next year. She smiled, her adolescent eyes failing to see skin as delicate as rice paper, a body so frail it might shatter into a thousand pieces. Her grandmother never saw the safflowers, and in her absence, the antique store took on a special allure for Hanamura, but especially her father.

"My dad's a carpenter," she explained to Tendou, "but he scavenges houses that are condemned or slated to be demolished. That year, he reclaimed furniture pieces – chaise lounges, kotatsu, headboards…things made from old expensive wood. He and my mom were so excited to open the shop again. They planned on everything selling in the first month." Hanamura raked fingers through her hair, agitated. "That is, until I ruined everything."

Tendou's eyes sparked with understanding. He looked as if he had a mental picture of her waving a stick with ribbons of black tar. He was half-smiling, half-cringing with the realization of what she had done.

"Oh, Suzume."

"I called it 'casting spells,'" she said, closing her eyes and shaking her head in embarrassment. "It's very difficult to remove tar once it dries. It turns into plastic, and the smell lingers for ages." She grimaced. "The furniture sat in our workshop for months, and my dad had to go through the slow process of reclaiming furniture again."

She dropped her gaze to the sidewalk.

She didn't tell him that her parents were worried. That the money they had inherited from her grandmother had gone straight into repairs with little to cover rent. She had been too young to understand the perils of small business. The antique store had always been a constant in her life, something as institutional as the neighborhood library or her school. It had never occurred to her that it could be just as easily taken away as her grandmother. Hanamura felt responsible for their predicament. Her father had to sell the family car to put groceries on the table, and for four scary months, they thought they were going to lose the shop.

She tensed.

Silence had crept in and Tendou was regarding her with a sharp gaze. They had fallen behind the group, Asano walking alongside Shirabu, Izakaya and Yamagata a little ways further up ahead. Hanamura suppressed her guilt, not wanting to spoil the mood.

"But then a mysterious buyer showed up," she continued, quickly lightening her expression. "A man – probably in his late seventies – asked my dad about the workshop. He took one look at the tar-spackled furniture and offered to buy the entire lot. Said it was for a haunted house attraction." She shook her head with a small laugh. "I'd never seen my parents so relieved."

Tendou furrowed his brow. "He bought everything?"

"Everything!" She swept her hands wide. "He even took the creepy mannequins my dad salvaged from a clothing store. They had faces like inari masks – Mei and I were scared of them. After that, they bought me my first paints."

"And you haven't used a paintbrush ever?"

"Never," she said, enjoying the way he nudged her out of the path of a takeout cyclist. His injured hand rested on her shoulder for a moment, a reassuring weight. "Despite what I did, I remember how exciting it was to see the tar fling against the wood. It became an obsession of mine, finding objects that make paint do interesting things. My mom says I take after my dad in that regard."

"Magpie Girl," he said, echoing her jest from earlier.

Hanamura was tingly, and she was certain it had nothing to do with the soda she drank at dinner. The city was alive around them, the commotion on the streets ten times more interesting as she strolled alongside Tendou and their friends. Even the skyscrapers with their dark limousine windows had a certain charm, bathed as they were in red, yellow, and green lights. But if she were honest with herself, it was his aura that made her the giddiest.

Was it normal for friends to bump into each other as they walked? Was it okay that they moved like attracting magnets amid their circle of friends? Hanamura was suddenly self-conscious. She was monopolizing him, speaking to him as if they were the only two people in downtown Sendai. It was his birthday and he probably wanted to spend it with the others as well.

She winced, feeling she had shared too much.

Peering at him from under her lashes, she saw that his attention was trained on the others, his expression unreadable. She thought she knew him, but her attempts at getting to know him better were thwarted by his constant redirecting. It was subtle. So subtle, in fact, she found herself doing most of the talking - like now. Whenever she tried steering the conversation to him, he was quick to shift the attention onto someone else. She hadn't noticed it at first, but the more time they spent together, the more she realized the boy who caught her in the park or stopped her in the stairwell was fleeting.

Tendou was the kind of person who shared only what he wanted others to know. It left her as restless as chasing down an errant firefly. Always just out of her reach.

She clutched the candy wrapper in her pocket, grim.

Maybe this was a mystery she would never be able to solve.

She withdrew into herself, adverting her gaze to the yellow strip embedded in the sidewalk. It always unnerved her how quickly emotions could change. Just a moment ago, she was bubbling over from excitement, enamored with the night. But now the air was tinged with old sins that left her feeling displaced. Doubt began to seep into her chest.

"Come on," said Tendou, pinching her sleeve. He was staring at her in a way that dispelled her uncertainty. "There's a game inside we ought to play."

Hanamura looked up. They had stopped in front of an old movie theater that had been converted into an arcade. The marquee above the entrance twinkled with brass lights. Below, the ticket booth had been retrofitted to house a trio of automatons ushering patrons inside. The others passed through the frosted glass doors, revealing a den of color within.

Tendou turned to her, his smile bent.

"How good are you at dancing?"

Hanamura smiled back, relieved.

"You're about to find out."

A/N: Do you think Tendou and Hanamura would have gotten along as kids? I think they'd be the type to hide in clothing racks or behind furniture while their parents shopped. Little nooks below staircases and attic crawl spaces would also be prime real estate. They'd probably climb trees too. Ah - to be a kid again! :)

"Human Right" - The Strike

"Drive it like You Stole it" - Hudson Thames

Thank you so much for reading.

lavendermoonmilk