Chapter 16
I had predicted the fallout with my busted ankle with almost frightening accuracy. My mother had reacted with over-the-top concern while my boss acted like I had gravely inconvenienced her with my very presence- which I might as very well have. I had chosen to come back with a busted ankle at the beginning of the work week where we had the most activities that we ran simultaneously on both sides of the building. One look at me and my awkward limp and she said, "I can't use you like this. Come back when you can actually work." I was both relieved and irritated at how she had said it. Sure, I was happy that I didn't have to be on my feet all day, but I practically had to beg to leave. Where was the sympathy? Sure, my ankle wasn't broken, but goddamn, it's not like I was milking this on purpose. Did they just expect me to swallow my pain and suffer in silence while I tried to pretend I was fine? Plus, what if it had actually been broken? Would they still expect me to go to work the next day? Nice to know that empathy was in such short supply at a healthcare facility. Thank god my driving job wasn't until the end of the week. That actually would be a nightmare to have to do with my right ankle all messed up.
Despite having 'time off' from work, I found that I couldn't relax at all. The guilt of inconveniencing everyone with my absence was getting to me, and by the third day of not going into work, even my mother was at the end of her patience. I tried to occupy my time with more productive activities like working on my latest comic page, but even that felt like I was slacking off. The only good that had come out of this was the inspiration it gave me for Arisa and Warren's relationship involving a rough sketch involving her patching up Hareraiser after injuring himself on the job. Even then, listlessness won over and I had to stop. Needing something to fidget with to calm my nerves, naturally I went to my phone.
Despite promising me details of the rest of his day, Izuku had gone silent. Perhaps he was busy with hero work and simply forgot. Or maybe I had annoyed him in some way by being too clingy. It also could have been that I had neglected to send him the photos of us in our hero costumes for almost three days after the fact, caught up in my own personal drama. Deciding now would be a good a time as any, I sent the photos to him in a way I had hoped wasn't too passive aggressive and wrote, 'Here are the photos you wanted. Sorry if they were delayed.'
Thoughts of heroes and my comic brought me back to another manic search through the internet. I don't know why I couldn't let it go like normal people, but this muse had struck me pretty hard. There was just something about his design that drove me. I tried branching out my tags this time around in the hopes that something would pull up in the search results- Japanese green hero, green hero, green lightning, kicking heroes, rabbit-themed costumes -but all they really gave me were products, companies, and other dead ends. I tried Izuku's suggestion and went on the Hero News Network, but a ton of them were tabloid articles involving who Hawks' latest girlfriend was and whether or not someone named Kamui Woods would ever tie the knot. In addition to that, I tried a different approach by going onto the anime figure store's website and search there for a kanji name that I could at least try and copy-paste into Google Translate, but the site was nearly impossible to navigate, having hundreds of pages loaded with catalogued figurines and other merchandise in no conceivable order. It was a graphic designer's worst nightmare.
Frustrated my search for my hero was hindered once more, I thought back to Izuku and out of morbid curiosity, tried him for results instead. Even with his helpful suggestion about reinterpreting the characters in his name, I had absolutely no idea how to spell Deku in Japanese, and I wasn't going to go out of my way to ask him how to spell it since I didn't have the courage to let him know that I was essentially Facebook stalking him via internet articles. Writing it in English had yielded no results either, instead pulling up dozens of results involving plant-like creatures from The Legend of Zelda franchise.
Izuku Midoriya, on the other hand, was much easier to search for, knowing the characters of his name well enough that I could spell it, though it yielded very few results. Not a ton of videos popped up for him, not even in English. However, the ones that did pointed me to quite a few video clips of the UA Sports Festival going as far back as eight years ago. Having heard the TV talk enough about it, comparing it to hosting the Olympics, I decided to click on a video with the most hits. His name was listed in the summary of the video along with other competitors. I was surprised to see that Ground Zero's name, Katsuki Bakugou, was also a contestant, though it was hard to recognize him without the black mask- that is until I heard his tell-tale shriek of "DIE!" during the video. I guess Izuku really did know him.
The obstacle course Izuku was maneuvering across with the other contestants in the video made the one at the hero museum look like child's play- which it was, technically. He didn't have a ton of screen-time, the aerial cameramen and drones having to cover a wide range of targets to film during the race. When I did spot him though, I was glued to the screen, picking him out of the crowd like a parent searching for their kid at a softball game. It wasn't hard to pick him out in the final stretch of the race, since he was clinging onto a broken piece of machinery from the robots that had been the first obstacle to overcome and stockpiling a ton of mines that he had dug up, something no normal person in a race would do. The instant I saw the cameraman abruptly change focus towards the over-the-top explosion that followed, I was on my feet, cheering him on as he launched himself through the air like a rocket, soaring over the minefield while riding the robot shrapnel like a makeshift sled.
"Go, Izuku! Go!" I cheered as he soared into the first place towards the final stretch. However, his competitors were starting to catch up and he was losing steam. I was on the edge of my seat for every second as he took his 'sled' and slammed it into the ground in front of him, launching himself forward into safety for an extra burst of speed from the explosion while simultaneously taking out the front runners with it.
"Alyssa, what are you doing up there?" My mother finally called upstairs in an anxious tone.
"Nothing! Just some comic book research!" I shouted back. It wasn't a total lie. I did end up using Izuku for comic book research, though to most outside eyes, it probably would just appear that I was goofing off on my phone. I would probably have to get back to work soon since she would be suspecting something similar and give me work to fill up all of my free time. Saving the videos into my Watch Later feed, I went back to something else I had been eager to search for: my beginner's Japanese books. These would be the only things that would be able to put my heart at rest.
"YES!" I shouted once he sprinted across the finish line and the announcer called Izuku's name, startling myself with the volume of excitement I had displayed, like I had watched my favorite basketball team score a last-minute three pointer before I clapped my hands over my mouth. That was definitely too loud. Pausing the video after rewinding it back a few seconds, I took a few calming breaths and took multiple screenshots of him somersaulting through the air to sketch for later. What a cool action pose. I definitely had to add this to my comic at some point. Arisa couldn't really accomplish mid-air flips, so maybe Hareraiser or one of my side characters like Dee-va or M-Path...?
"What is going up here? You scared me to death!" My mother asked, having decided to make the exhausting trek upstairs. She must have been really freaked out.
"Nothing. I just got overly excited about a video," I explained with some mild embarrassment, "While I have you, have you seen my N3 Japanese kanji books? I need them for translations."
"I don't know. Anything you don't have in your room you were supposed to put in your tubs so if it's not here, it's in the storage unit," she said, but apparently she wasn't done speaking as she turned and said, "Speaking of which, I need you to drive over there. I've got a few more boxes for you to store now that we've taken down the Easter decorations and I've cleaned out the kitchen cabinets. Cheri says you can borrow her car."
"Again?" I groaned, hating that I was going to have to go on another wild goose chase and search through another box for my stuff. "You want me to drive and put away decorations with an injured foot?"
"I know you're having difficulty moving since you injured your ankle at your lightsaber class, but that doesn't give you the excuse to just lay around on your bed doing nothing." Of course, I had lied. It was too embarrassing to admit to anyone outside of my best friend Gabby that I had injured myself in such a humiliating way: by hurting myself on a kiddie ride on an impulsive detour and never actually making it to my martial arts class. "If you're not going into work, then you can work for me. Jo-Elle does everything around here for me when you're not here, so you should pull your weight and help her out."
"I'm not sitting around my bed. I'm working on my comic," I muttered hotly.
"Well, you spend all of your time up in your room. You can work downstairs as well. There's a table and everything and way more space than rather all of this junk."
"It's not... that simple," I pressed my lips together, unable to voice the many numerous reasons why my room was a more inviting art space despite downstairs giving me better tables and chairs to draw on. Logically, it should have, but any time spent around my mother, even while both of us were innocuously in separate rooms, felt oppressive to me, like I was being watched and judged for every little motion or expression.
"Then let me correct my earlier statement: you can either take everything to the storage unit or you can vacuum and dust the entire house. If you're capable enough to search for your Japanese books through all of your piles of crap, then you're capable of cleaning the house and doing the dishes- or would you rather do that instead?"
"...Fine. I'll do the car trip."
"Good. Now be careful with all of the boxes. Cheri left her car parked in the garage, and everything is already inside of it, thanks to Jo-Elle and Anna, so you don't even need to take the boxes out there. Just be sure to be careful with-"
"I know, I know. I've done this before," I sighed with a slight eye roll before muttering, "maybe if you didn't take so much, maybe we wouldn't have to keep putting it into storage..." Having not been as quiet as I thought, the pitch in my mother's voice raised as the lines between her eyebrows furrowed.
"Watch your tone, young lady. I've been getting rid of stuff every day. Meanwhile, you are hoarding everything in your room and continue to buy more things you don't need. When did you even get this?" she said, gesturing to my Ahsoka figurine from my Disney Infinity Star Wars set I had pulled out for sketch references. "Or this?" She pointed to my mystery hero's figurine that I had also pulled out for references, something that I almost instinctively went to protect like I expected my mother was going to snatch it and throw him into the trash. "For Christ's sake, Alyssa, you have boxes just littered all over your room, empty boxes that you could be using for storage! You don't even wear half of the clothes you have in your closet, and yet you keep buying all of those anime t-shirts. Have you even gone through all of your clothes?"
"Yes." In fact, I had gone through my closet several times, and every time I came up with the exact same conclusion: everything still fit and I wore all of it. Living in a country where everything was Asian sized and returns were non-existent, I was reluctant to donate any of my clothes. It was bad enough trying to find pants that fit back home. Now I had to outsource everything through online shopping, which was its own hell. Even with stores that tailored customization for mutant Quirks, I had to fully commit to wearing the item, which meant that it had to meet my high yet weirdly specific standards of comfort which was hard when you couldn't try on the article of clothing in question.
Having had this argument many times before, we both stood there in a pregnant pause before she jabbed a finger towards me. "I expect you to have gotten rid of more things and to have this whole place cleaned up. You know the rules. For everything you buy, you need to give something away. If you don't like it, you can live somewhere else. I'll not have you turning our new apartment into a pig sty." Feeling like I was six years old instead of twenty six, I grabbed my purse, keys, and the car alarm in my mother's hand and made my way towards the Nissan Versa parked outside in the designated parking spot, trying not to say something I would regret. I played whatever CD that was in the CD player in order to cool off, surprised to hear the musical stylings of Liz Callaway and David Newman ringing in my ears. It was a mix-tape I had made for Jo-Elle for one of our infamous, midwestern road trips, one that we had listened to and memorized the lyrics of when driving home from St. Louis after accidentally making a wrong turn at an intersection. Jo must have left it in the car the last time and Cheri just didn't notice she left it there. It wasn't exactly my first choice for music at the moment, but it was at least something familiar and in English. So with the furious shouts of Jim Cummings declaring his revenge on the Romanov family blasting over the speakers, I pulled out of the intersection and made my way towards downtown Takodana.
Since we lived in an apartment now, I had to actually travel to where our storage unit was. It was weird going so many places without a car, and here everything was different, from doing mandatory vehicle check ups to which side of the road you drove on. The rental car job broke that habit of mine pretty quickly, but there were still moments where I accidentally crawled into the left passenger side and waste precious time getting out and jumping into the driver's side. Thankfully, the storage unit wasn't too far away, but that was hardly comforting considering how many trips we made there in the past couple of weeks. Leave it to my mother to take enough home decorations capable of outfitting two, two-story houses and expect to cram it into a tiny mid-city Japanese apartment space and storage unit.
The instant I arrived in front of the correct door, I grabbed the Burger King pokeball key-chain out of my purse and picked the tiniest silver key that hung on the key fob and unlocked the metal door of the storage unit before pulling it up like a mini garage door. I then opened the trunk of the car and placed my hands on my hips and announced with gusto, "Alright, you bunch of boxes. You're not going to get the best of me. I'm going to tetris you in here if it kills me, and you're going to like it!" Channeling my current rage and frustration, I hauled tubs out of the car, my fury only growing with every pang my ankle made. After the third or fourth box, I was no longer trying to be organized. Now I was just trying to shove everything into any open space inside the unit.
If they don't like how it was stored, they can come out here and do it themselves, I thought with a huff as I pushed the last box in with satisfaction. Sweat was now dripping down my back, but I still had work to do. Going over the last place in my most recent memory of going to the storage unit, I finally came across a familiar corner of boxes and began searching for the ones I had labeled personally. Most of the long silver tubs were mine, filled to the brim with miscellaneous objects from my childhood, but I had fewer tubs than anyone in my family in storage, keeping most of my possessions in my room. Feeling a bit nostalgic, I broke open one box that held a lot of childhood keepsakes and began going through them.
Beanie babies, Barbies, and old baby clothes my mother had refused to let me give away littered the bottom of one box and half a dozen bibs and baby bonnets with dozens of Breyer horses in the other. A rubber duck umbrella with a wooden duck head as a handle sat at the bottom with the hand-made baby blankets along with a matching raincoat that was much too small for me now. After undoing the snap that held the rubber-like fabric together, I opened the umbrella up and experimentally spun it over my head. This actually could be useful now, I thought, thinking of how my last umbrella had rusted through most of the joints and had to be tossed. Plus it would be less likely to confuse with all of the other complimentary umbrellas that sat in umbrella cases inside many buildings that people could borrow at their leisure, which were mostly black and all looked the same.
Snapping a picture, I posted it to my Instagram page and Facebook under the hashtag 'childhood nostalgia' before giving it another spin. The umbrella had always reminded me of Mary Poppin's parrot cane, and I often used it in many of my little adventures and skits I had put on as a kid. It was nice that of all the things my mother could have thrown out, this had been what she had decided to keep.
"Dancing bears, painted wings, things I almost remember..." I sang almost instinctively, twirling around as if in a grand ballroom waltz while tenderly minding my bad foot. It didn't hurt as much as it used to, able to take the experimental pressure of my dance steps as my voice reverberated off of the walls like I had stepped on a reverb pedal. Caught up in the climactic swell of the music of my mind and the nostalgia of emulating Disney princesses as they danced- tall prince charming and all -that the mix-tape had brought out of me, my foot knocked sharply into the side of an oblong black case, causing the object inside to cry out in a cacophony of sound, the notes of G, D, A, and E groaning simultaneously in disharmony as I was thrown off-balance and toppled over into an open bin. I hissed in pain after hearing the sickening crunch of material underneath me as I struggled to get up, the sharp stabs and smell of dust and ozone letting me know that it had been the Christmas greenery that had broken my fall.
I guess it really is bad luck to open an umbrella indoors, I thought as I gingerly picked myself up out of the fake pine shrubbery. Cuts and lacerations ran all the way up my arms and back, but upon closer inspection, there was no real lasting damage that would require stitches, save for another hole and a torn sleeve on my black Kingdom Hearts t-shirt. Eying the much sharper looking objects nearby from broken down headboards and metal toolboxes that I could have potentially landed on after tripping in a close quarters storage unit- never had I been more grateful for my mother's obsession with Christmas greenery than I did in that moment -I chalked it up to my dumb luck saving me again and moved on.
My gaze went towards the object in question that had caused my fall with some irritation, finding little surprise at all that it had been a violin case that had tripped me. Though wistful of the decades of playing music, I was not sorry to see the bulky case sitting out here instead of inside my room. When my father had bought the top of the line violin case for Christmas to replace the old one that held together by duct tape and sheer tenacity, it was obvious that he never factored in the violin case's weight or bulkiness into the equation. The case was obnoxious to store and exhausting to carry long distances, something I had discovered during my college years and the long walks to the music building from my dorm. Still, it did its job well. The case had protected the violin to the point where the strings inside barely sounded out of tune, something I discovered after undoing the Velcro snaps and zippers of the case and giving the strings a slight strum with the pad of my thumb. Lifting the violin up like a guitar, I plucked a few notes and began adjusting the tuning pegs, listening for the pure pitch of sound that resonated with the other strings once they were in-tune. Rather than pick up the bow to play, I plucked a few joyful bars from the song I had been humming and then placed it back into the case and snapped it shut. That part of my life was over now, and if I decided to bring it back to the house, even for nostalgic reasons, I would be battered with requests to play it from my mother, my self-proclaimed number one fan. As humbling as it was, the violin was something I couldn't just impulsively play around her. My nature just wouldn't allow it. I had to give her a full concert with songs only she liked and play for longer than five minutes, something that I could no longer manage without feeling like it was a chore.
Not wanting to wander down this boulevard of broken dreams, I opened the next box and began pawing through more piles of stuffed animals, baby clothes, and Girl Scout uniforms, but one thing stood juxtaposed against the Blake time capsule. Tucked away between half a dozen Webkinz and baby blankets was a more modern object, only a few years old since I had obtained it, sitting in there due to the long shape of the tub and large quantity of soft items to protect it: a lightsaber with a thirty two inch saber and hourglass shaped hilt. The handle had dozens of nicks and scratches on it, more scars than I had accumulated with my other saber during my entire sword fighting career. My first lightsaber, an accidental keepsake from one of my former masters that I had borrowed while I waited for my ordered lightsaber to come. Feeling nostalgic for the past and a tad homesick, I let my thoughts wander and thought about how Ian was doing and wondered if he had set up the sister lightsaber school like he had planned on doing before his girlfriend had gotten her Masters. He had moved away to Tacoma without telling most of the students about his departure, which had been a shock since I was fond of him and eager to share the news that he would be getting his lightsaber back and be able to show off my new one. Experimentally, I pressed the button on the hilt and the saber ignited a pure emerald green. It still worked, after all these years.
Thinking back to my earlier conversations with Izuku, I decided that rather than pack it away again, I would take it with me. The saber had been given to me until I had received my own saber, so I saw no harm in letting Izuku borrow it, should he decide to take me up on my offer to join my nerdy sword-fighting class. I didn't expect he would, having not heard back from him in awhile, but it was better to be safe than sorry. After digging through the second or third box of my stuff, I decided to take a small break. Going back into my phone to catch my breath, I went to my Watch Later playlist and clicked one of UA Sport Festival videos- this one had appeared at the top of the search bar. It involved a one-on-one match in the semi finals against a kid with two-tone hair and ice powers. Walls of ice hurdled across the field, only to get blown away from Izuku's end in a massive gust of air. Was he flicking them away with his fingers?
My cheers of excitement turned quickly to horror as I cringed when the camera closed in on Izuku as he stood against his opponent, his left arm broken and coated in ice and his entire right hand coated in dark purple bruises that could only mean severe bone damage. God, no wonder he knew how to treat an injured foot! This fight made my injury look like a paper-cut. It was like watching a bad car wreck. You didn't want to see the damage but there was that morbid curiosity that made you stay until the end and- oh god, please stop breaking yourself, Izuku! I couldn't bare to watch any longer and skipped to the end of the video to see the results where his opponent, someone called Todoroki, had been declared the winner due to Izuku being thrown out of bounds.
After watching Izuku crumple onto the ground after being thrown back into the stadium wall like a rag-doll, I avoided looking at the rest of the sports festival videos tagged with his name all together, even if they were the years that followed, unable to take another video of watching Izuku destroy himself. I was morbidly curious, sure, but I wasn't so masochistic that I'd put myself through that again. It wasn't like watching America's Funniest Videos where you could watch a guy get hit in the crotch, find it hilarious, and move on with your life. This had actually been just straight-up painful to watch.
Still though, Izuku pushed himself so hard, you could see the determination in his eyes, and he had done it with broken bones no less. And here I was, whining about working on a sprained ankle. A twinge of guilt flooded through me, thinking back on how I had left things with my mother by acting like a spoiled child. Had she'd been more capable, she wouldn't have bothered to ask me or my sister to help her haul boxes to the storage unit and done it herself, like the strong, self-sufficient independent woman that she was. But that was no longer the case, only having my ungrateful ass and my sister to help her. I sent her a quick apology text and locked my phone. Motivated to try again, I reasoned that if I couldn't find my books in one hour, I would try again next time, and began going through another box.
Author's Note: References today are the Deku race from The Legend of Zelda franchise and Don Bluth's Anastasia.
