oranges

izuku wakes up to the kind of light that doesn’t belong to mornings. too clean, too white, like hospital ceilings. he’s sweaty without being hot, mouth cottony, the taste of metal that isn’t there. he lies still and counts his breaths because that’s what the internet told him is grounding. in-two-three-four, hold, out-two-three-four. his brain doesn’t listen. it keeps skipping, looping the same fifteen-second clip where someone says go take a swan dive off the roof and someone else—him—ignores him like it’s fine. the words always sound louder in the mornings, before anything else can drown them out.

he rolls onto his side and stares at the wall where he stuck the all might poster crooked on purpose, to prove something to himself about imperfection. the edge’s peeled back a little. dust curls under it like a secret.

his phone is face-down on the floor. last night he dropped it and didn’t pick it up. now he does, thumb unlocking on reflex, and it opens to a note he doesn’t remember typing.

| sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry

it goes on for longer than it should. he scrolls, then just selects all and deletes it. it makes his stomach flip when the screen blinks blank.

the apartment smells like detergent and toasted bread. his mom’s voice filters through the paper walls—soft, humming, busy. the kettle clicks off. she calls his name like a habit she has, like it makes the room safer to fill it with him.

“izuku? you up? i made miso—”

“yeah!” he calls back, voice too bright, scraping the edges of his throat. “i’m up!” he’s never told her how much effort it takes to sound that bright.

he’s already in his uniform because he slept in it. the gakuran’s wrinkled. he smooths it with both hands even though it doesn’t fix anything, then checks himself in the mirror. his eye has a tiny red thread in the white, like a crack in glass. he smiles at himself to see if it looks real. it does. it looks fine. it looks like a kid who studies too much. it doesn’t look like someone people spit at in hallways, or shove into lockers, or tell to disappear. it never does.

when he sits at the table, his mom sets down a bowl with a little flourish. “extra tofu,” she says. her hair’s pinned up with a clip that keeps slipping. there’s flour on her shoulder though she hasn’t baked anything. she kisses his forehead and then fusses with his hair and clothes anyway. “you should have woken me to iron your jacket.”

“it’s character,” izuku says, spooning soup, pretending the warmth in his hands is courage. “i read that wrinkles are in!”

she laughs and then stops, eyes soft. “you were up late again.”

“mm.” he nods, the kind of non-answer that’s a yes to everything. the soup is good. he tastes salt. he swallows. his mom talks about a sale on laundry pods; he nods at intervals. there’s comfort in being a buoy, letting her words wash up and back, bobbing in place. he grips the table so he doesn’t drift. he wishes she didn’t notice the drifting.

he almost says i love you as a goodbye, just in case. the words rise, stall, burn. instead he says, “see you tonight,” and makes it sound like a promise because today that’s all words are, little bridges to be thrown across a gap and having only hope that they hold. he doesn’t look back at her, because he knows if she’s smiling it’ll make him feel worse.

the sight of the street catches him—the bad bulb that flickers like a heartbeat, the puppy that always barks at his ankles, the old neighbor with the mail key who winks and says, “study hard, kid.” he says he will. he means it in the way of someone who’s been studying for the wrong test all year and only just realized.

outside, the sky is the cheap kind of blue that chips if looked at too hard. there’s no wind. the air sits on his shoulders like a damp towel, heavy and humid. he walks the route he can walk with his eyes closed, and sometimes does. today he keeps them open and counts cracks in the sidewalk. twelve to the end of the block. eight more past the corner store. someone’s left a crate of oranges by the door with a handwritten sign: free (please take!) the marker bled at the edges like it cried while writing. he takes one and puts it in his bag like a talisman.

school hums before he sees it. the perimeter fence, the gum freckles on the path, the scratch etched into the third gate slat where he once tripped and bled and no one saw. he angles his body small when he passes under the notice board, the way he always does. there’s a poster with a ribbon for “mental health awareness week” half torn, the ribbon hanging like a tongue. it says you matter in a font that makes it look like a joke.

someone laughs near the bike rack. a group of boys clump there, big as corners. he keeps his head down, his bag strap tight across his chest like a seatbelt. he makes it three steps before the back of his knee gets kicked just right and he stumbles, catching himself on the cold metal of a locker. the clang echoes. it’s not funny; they laugh anyway. one of them mutters something under his breath, low enough that izuku can’t hear all the words, but loud enough that he knows it’s about him.

and then—

“watch it, midoriya.”

he mutters, “sorry,” like it’s his name. his cheeks burn. no one meets his eyes. they never do unless they’re about to spit something out.

katsuki’s voice isn’t in that group, not this time. it’s its own gravity, and when it shows up it can be felt in the teeth. izuku hears it later, second period, when the door slams and a teacher says his surname too formally and there’s that scoff, that crackle of a fuse lit for fun. he doesn’t turn. he doesn’t have to. everything in him leans toward the sound the way plants lean toward light and fires. it’s the closest thing to familiarity he gets anymore.

math washes over him like radio static. he writes numbers and then crosses them out in neat lines. the pencil leaves grooves where the words should be. swan dive isn’t numbers; it has a shape though. he draws lines in the margin he’ll tell himself are problem-solving later.

at lunch he ends up where he always does when his brain is a peeled wire—on the stairwell that dead-ends at a locked door marked roof access: authorized personnel only. the sign has a corner torn away. someone once scrawled lol fag under authorized and a teacher scrubbed at it until the letters bled and disappeared. there’s a print of a palm on the paint like a fossil.

he sits three steps from the top, where the light is thin and the air tastes like concrete. he unwraps a sandwich, doesn’t eat it. the oranges are heavy in his bag. he rolls one between his hands until it leaves a dent in his palm. upstairs, above the locked door, there’s a breeze he can’t feel and a space he can’t see and an edge he can imagine perfectly. he imagines it too well and his knees go watery and he has to bite the inside of his cheek to stay in his body.

“you’re in my spot,” someone says.

he flinches like he’s been touched. when he looks up, katsuki’s there, one hand still on the railing, shoulders hunched like he came up two stairs at a time and didn’t expect traffic. the light throws a hard line across his jaw. he looks like annoyance carved into a statue. he also looks like a person—loose thread on his sleeve, a red mark on his knuckle where he must’ve scraped it, the kind of tired teens hide by being louder.

izuku freezes halfway up, one knee lifted, ridiculous. his face heats. “oh. i—sorry. you can have it.” he sits back down on a lower step without thinking, because of course he does. of course he makes himself smaller.

for a second, neither of them talks. there’s the sound of kids in the hallway below, a distant whistle from the field, the tick-tick of something behind the wall cooling. izuku can feel katsuki on the step above him without looking: the scrape of his shoe, the exhale through his nose, the way the air tightens like it’s waiting for a storm.

he spends the rest of lunch noticing everything except the way katsuki breathes. the fact the sign’s corner tears like paper towel. the hum of the light. how the orange, when he finally peels it, sprays a mist that stings the tiny cut on his thumb, and how the smell is so bright it hurts. he places three segments on the step above him without looking. they sit there for exactly four seconds before they’re gone. he doesn’t look then either.

when the bell rings, katsuki stands first. his knee bumps izuku’s shoulder as he steps past. it’s nothing. it’s the whole day.

izuku doesn’t go to his next class. he wanders the outer hall where the windows face the gym. his reflection walks alongside him like a person he doesn’t know how to greet. he tries out a smile at it; it slides off. the gym doors are propped with a cone. inside, someone whistles again and a ball slaps wood. he thinks of physics, of arcs, of the clean beauty of a parabola. he thinks about trajectory. he thinks about how most things, once set in motion, keep going until they’re stopped. he thinks about what counts as a stopper. he wonders if words can be stoppers, if one sentence can end something the way a fall can.

the counselor’s office has a poster about “identify your feelings!” with cartoon faces. sad looks like a potato with eyebrows. he stands outside it long enough for his shoulders to cramp and then keeps walking. inside, he hears muffled voices and a chair scraping. no one is calling his name. no one has ever called him in.

after school, the sky goes from cheap blue to a flat white like paper unable to be written on. he stands at the base of the stairwell and looks up. three flights to the locked door, four to the roof if it were open, five to—he stops counting. his palm feels the ghost of the orange dent. the smell of his mom’s soup sneaks back up his throat. he swallows. he pulls his phone out because that’s what he always does when he doesn’t know what else to do: he writes things down and pretends that means he’s done something.

| hey

he deletes it.

| can we talk

deletes that too. his pulse is loud in his ears. he stares at the empty bubble and it stares back. his thumb hovers like a hummingbird.

he doesn’t send a message to katsuki. he isn’t even sure if he’s blocked. he sends it to himself, in the notes app, the place where he stores other people’s words when they’re too heavy to hold in his hands.

| roof after last bell. bring the part of you that isn’t mean.

he laughs, a bark that bounces off the wall and comes back lighter. he hates that it makes him feel better for a second. he hates that he can still feel better at all. it wasn’t even funny.

someone jostles his shoulder on their way down the stairs and says, “move, loser,” and he does, and then he’s alone again.

the day drains. lockers slam and then go quiet. the hallway smell shifts from people to cleaner. somewhere outside a motorcycle revs, impatient. izuku leans his head back against the cool cinderblock and closes his eyes. the light above him hums in a key his bones recognize. he pictures the roof as a threshold meant to be stepped over barefoot. he pictures wind. he pictures not having to hold the weight of his name up anymore. pictures faces in the crowd looking up at where he used to be, not because they miss him but because they can’t look away.

his phone buzzes once. a spam text about a sale. he puts it on do not disturb and slides it into his pocket like he’s tucking a child into bed.

the door marked roof access looks like it’s never been opened and also like it’s been opened a thousand times. he puts his hand flat against it and feels nothing, and then everything, and then nothing again. he stands there until his hand stops shaking.

when he finally walks away, it’s not because he changed his mind. it’s because there’s still daylight left, and he has learned to be patient when it matters. he’ll need a different kind of light. the kind that makes the edge look softer than it is.

he heads home a different route than usual, one with fewer windows to catch his reflection in. he stops at the corner store with the oranges and buys a bottle of water with the last of his change. the clerk nods without looking up; the bell over the door tings like a tiny celebration he didn’t earn.

in his room, he does his homework with the careful neatness of someone packing a bag for a trip. he folds his uniform over the chair, showers too hot, and watches steam muscle its way into the bathroom mirror until his face is an outline and then nothing. he draws a smiley in the fog and it drips down slow like it’s melting.

his mom knocks when it’s late, just her knuckles and his name. “you okay?”

“yeah!” he replies, and it sounds so normal he could cry from the effort of it. “goodnight, mom.”

he lies in bed in the same position he woke up in, only this time there’s no light pretending to be a hospital ceiling. there’s the ceiling he knows—the hairline crack that looks like a river on a map, the tiny moth wing stuck near the fixture. he counts his breaths again. in-two-three-four, hold, out-two-three-four. he imagines the hold as a place someone could stay if they were clever. he imagines his lungs as doors that open and close and open and close and then, at some point, don’t. he wonders how many more nights he’ll have to keep opening them.

when sleep takes him, it does it gently, like picking up a child who has fallen asleep on the couch and carrying him somewhere softer.

he dreams of stairs.

he stirs half an hour after falling asleep, heart tripping like it missed a step. the sky outside is iron. somewhere, quietly, rain thinks about happening and then decides not to.

tomorrow, people will say they knew. tomorrow, people will say they had no idea. both will be true. tonight, izuku lies very still and lets the not-rain press in around the windows, and inside him a line has already been drawn, chalk on a playground, and he is on one side of it looking at the other.

he reaches for his phone in the dark and types a new note with his thumb clumsy from sleep.

| kacchan. after school. the roof.

this time, he doesn’t delete it. he doesn’t send it, either. he just leaves it open, the glow of it lighting his jaw and the inside of his wrist, and sets the phone face-down on the floor again like a promise he doesn’t have to keep to anyone but himself.