[BL] Awkward In Ikebukuro

The suitcase had been trying to kill him since Naha Airport.

Eojin Aragaki had bought it secondhand from a woman in Makishi Market who’d described it as “very good condition, very strong wheels” while pointedly not making eye contact. The wheels were, it turned out, calibrated for chaos — they caught every crack in every sidewalk, veered toward every shin, and had spent the entire journey from Okinawa to Tokyo developing what felt like a personal grudge. By the time Eojin dragged it off the Yamanote Line and onto the sidewalk outside Happy Global Villa International Dormitory, Ikebukuro, the suitcase had taken out two strangers, one vending machine corner, and the back of Eojin’s right ankle three separate times.

He stood on the pavement in front of the building and breathed.

Six months, he told himself. Just six months. No one in Tokyo knows your face. No one in Ikebukuro knows your name. You are simply Eojin. A twenty-three-year-old from Okinawa here for a cultural exchange program. Nothing special. Nothing notable. No Aragaki anything.

He looked up at Happy Global Villa. It was a six-story building the approximate color of old mustard, with a hand-painted sign above the entrance that someone had attempted to make cheerful with small painted stars. Several of the stars had faded into vague blobs. One looked like it was melting. The building had the specific energy of a place where many international students had eaten instant noodles at midnight and stared at the ceiling wondering about their life choices.

Eojin felt an immediate kinship with it.

He picked up his suitcase — lifted it, because the wheels had earned no more trust — and went inside.

***

The dormitory manager, a small woman named Fujita-san who moved with the terrifying efficiency of someone who had processed hundreds of international students and been surprised by none of them, handed Eojin his key card, a laminated floor map, and a printout titled Happy Global Villa House Rules (Please Read! Very Important! Smiley Face!) without looking up from her computer.

“Room 304,” she said. “Shared kitchen, third floor. Shared bathroom, also third floor. Laundry is basement. Quiet hours after eleven, but.” She finally looked up. Her expression suggested that quiet hours after eleven were more of a philosophical concept at Happy Global Villa than an operational reality. “You understand.”

“I understand,” Eojin said.

“There is a whiteboard in the common room. People write things on it. Don’t erase other people’s things.” She paused. “Unless they are rude things. Then erase them.”

“Understood.”

“You have any medical conditions? Dietary restrictions? Allergies?”

“No,” Eojin said, which was not technically accurate but was the simplest available answer.

Fujita-san gave him a look that suggested she had heard no from many people who subsequently created significant administrative complications. Then she handed him a welcome packet and turned back to her computer.

Eojin took his key card and his laminated map and his welcome packet, picked up his suitcase, and began the journey to Room 304.

He made it to the second-floor landing before he noticed his left foot.

***

It happened the same way it always happened: a warmth, then a pressure, then the specific sensation of his shoe becoming very tight very fast. He stopped on the landing and looked down. Through the canvas of his sneaker, he could see the outline of his foot expanding — slowly, steadily, with the calm inevitability of bread dough proving.

Not now, he thought, which was always what he thought, because it was always now. His body did not schedule these things for convenient moments.

He sat down on the second-floor landing, unlaced his shoe before it split the canvas entirely, and watched his left foot swell to approximately the size of a microwave. His right foot was completely fine. It was always one or the other; symmetry was apparently not something his kaiju DNA considered important.

He sat there for a moment, sock in hand, left foot enormous and faintly radiating heat, and had a quiet conversation with himself about whether this was a metaphor for his life or just his life.

It was just his life.

He put his sock back on — it stretched — and his shoe — it did not — and tucked the shoelace around the foot as a kind of structural compromise, and continued up to the third floor carrying his shoe and his suitcase and his welcome packet and approximately forty percent more left foot than he’d started the day with.

***

Room 304 was a single — small, clean, a window facing the courtyard, a desk, a narrow bed, and a wardrobe that had clearly been built by someone whose experience with wardrobes was entirely theoretical. There was a small corkboard above the desk, empty except for one pushpin. Eojin stood in the doorway and looked at it for a moment.

Six months, he thought. Just six months.

He set his suitcase down (gently; he didn’t trust it), put his sock back on his enormous foot, and began unpacking.

He had been unpacking for approximately fifteen minutes when someone knocked.

“Hello?” said a voice from the other side of the door. It was a warm voice, bright and wide-open, the kind of voice that belonged to someone who had never once considered that knocking on a stranger’s door might not be welcome. “I’m in 306. I heard someone moving in. Do you want snacks? I have chips. Also dried mango. Also some of those little fish cracker things, I don’t know what they’re called but they’re really good.”

Eojin looked at the door. He looked at his enormous left foot. He looked at the door again.

“I’m fine,” he said.

A pause. “I also have green tea Kit Kats if you want something sweet.”

Another pause. Longer.

“...What kind of chips?” Eojin said.

***

The person in 306 was named Hiapo Wailea and he was, Eojin thought immediately, going to be a problem.

He was tall — broader than Eojin, warm brown skin, dark curly hair that was doing several things at once. He was wearing a t-shirt with a sunset on it and carrying a bag of snacks that seemed far too large for one person, which suggested either that he’d bought them for exactly this purpose or that he was genuinely this kind of person. He had a ukulele slung across his back, which Eojin chose not to address.

“Hey! I’m Hiapo,” he said, extending his hand. “From Hawaiʻi. Well, technically I grew up on O’ahu but my family’s from Maui originally, which—” He caught Eojin’s expression. “Sorry. I talk a lot when I’m nervous. I’m not actually nervous, I just talk a lot in general. You’re from—?”

“Okinawa,” Eojin said.

“Cool! Is this your first time in Tokyo?”

“No.”

“It’s my second time. First time I came for a week and I got completely lost in Shibuya for like three hours and a very kind grandmother helped me find the station. I bought her a coffee to say thank you and we don’t talk about what happened with the coffee.” Hiapo held out his hand again, more deliberately. “Anyway. Hi.”

Eojin looked at the hand. He shook it.

The moment their hands connected, something happened that Eojin had no framework for: the pressure in his left foot — which had been building steadily since the second-floor landing, a dull radiating heat he’d learned to think of as background noise — simply stopped. Not gradually. Not slowly. It just stopped, the way a sound stops when someone turns off the source, and then the swelling began to recede: steadily, quietly, without fanfare.

Eojin looked down.

His foot was returning to its normal size.

He looked up at Hiapo, who was smiling at him with the open, uncomplicated warmth of someone who had no idea anything had just happened, which was confirmed by the fact that he was already talking about something else entirely.

“—the chips are the seaweed salt kind, I don’t know if you like those, some people find them too intense but I think they’re great, also I found a convenience store two blocks from here that has—”

“The chips are fine,” Eojin said. His voice came out slightly flat from the effort of not visibly reacting to the fact that his foot had just deflated like a punctured balloon the moment this stranger shook his hand.

“Great!” said Hiapo. “Want to come to the common room? I think some other people are there. I’ve already met three people — there’s a guy from Germany who seems very serious but he gave me half his sandwich earlier, which I think means we’re friends, and a girl from Vietnam who’s here for a linguistics program and she—”

Eojin picked up his shoe — still unlaced, there was no graceful way to address this — and followed him down the hall.

***

The third-floor common room at Happy Global Villa contained, at this point in the afternoon: a folding table with mismatched chairs, a television mounted slightly crooked on the wall, a shared bookshelf that held a multilingual array of textbooks and three copies of the same Haruki Murakami novel, and a whiteboard on the wall by the door that said HOUSE ANNOUNCEMENTS at the top in someone’s careful handwriting.

It also contained four other residents, who were sitting around the table engaged in what appeared to be a spirited group discussion.

“—it could be gout,” said the serious German guy, who was, in fact, quite serious-looking. He had introduced himself as Benedikt. He was pointing at Eojin’s foot with the focus of a man who had taken two semesters of biology and intended to use this knowledge. “Classic presentation. Swelling, localized heat, no trauma history.”

“I don’t think it’s gout,” said Yến, the linguistics student from Vietnam, who was looking at the foot with considerably more skepticism than Benedikt. “He’s twenty-three. Gout in a twenty-three-year-old is unusual.”

“It happens.”

“Does it happen to that degree?”

Benedikt considered this. “Unusual gout,” he said, slightly less confidently.

“My uncle had something like that,” offered a third student — Priya, who was here for an architecture program and had already claimed the corner of the common room nearest the window for her drafting materials. “Just his left foot, too. The doctor said it was poor circulation.”

“Poor circulation in one foot?” Yến said.

“One very unlucky foot,” Priya said.

Eojin stood in the doorway of the common room, his left foot now entirely back to normal size, his shoe still in his hand, and processed the fact that he had been in Happy Global Villa for less than forty-five minutes and had already become a medical discussion.

“I’m fine,” he said.

Everyone looked at him with the specific expression of people who had just been talking about him and were now recalibrating.

“We were worried,” Yến said, which was genuine enough that Eojin found he couldn’t be annoyed at her.

“It happens sometimes,” he said. “It’s not serious.”

Benedikt picked up a marker and turned to the whiteboard. Eojin watched with a sense of impending something as Benedikt wrote, in neat block letters at the bottom of the whiteboard:

EOJIN (304): POSSIBLE GOUT? FURTHER OBSERVATION NEEDED.

“For medical tracking purposes,” Benedikt explained, apparently finding this reasonable.

“Please erase that,” Eojin said.

“Fujita-san said not to erase other people’s things.”

“She said not to erase things unless they were rude things.”

Benedikt considered. “Medical information is not rude.”

Eojin stared at the whiteboard. Hiapo, sitting down at the table and tearing open his bag of seaweed salt chips with the easy comfort of someone who had already adopted this common room as his own, looked up at Eojin with a expression that was trying not to be amused and failing.

“I’ll add a question mark,” Benedikt offered.

Eojin sat down. He was going to be here for six months. He could survive a whiteboard.

***

That night, Eojin sat on his narrow bed with his laptop open and tried to do the orientation reading for his exchange program and mostly failed.

The foot thing had resolved completely — both feet normal, no heat, no pressure — which should have been a relief and was, technically, but was also strange. The pressure had been building for three weeks. It didn’t just stop like that. It had stopped once before, briefly, when his father had pressed both hands to Eojin’s back in their kitchen in Okinawa and said something under his breath in a dialect so old Eojin couldn’t parse it, and that had lasted about six hours. This had lasted all afternoon and showed no signs of returning.

He was thinking about this — not productively, just circling it — when the thunderstorm arrived.

It came with no warning. The forecast had said clear skies. The sky had been clear skies. And then, at nine-forty-seven in the evening, thunder cracked directly overhead, and rain hit the window in a sudden hard sheet, and the lights in the building flickered once.

Eojin looked up from his laptop.

From somewhere down the hall — 306, he registered automatically — he heard Hiapo’s voice. Not words. Just a sound: low and stricken, the particular noise of someone who had just read something that had gutted them.

The manga, Eojin thought, which was not a sentence he had expected to think tonight.

He’d seen it in Hiapo’s room during the five seconds the door had been open — a stack of volumes on the desk, covers facing forward, which meant Hiapo was not the type of person who felt the need to conceal what he was reading. The covers were very dramatic. People on them were crying or almost kissing or both simultaneously.

Another crack of thunder. The rain intensified.

Eojin reached up and touched his jaw, where a cluster of scales had been bothering him on and off for the past two weeks — small, iridescent, slightly raised, showing up in the mirror at inconvenient moments and then fading before he could document them. He pressed his fingers to the skin.

Nothing. Smooth. Normal.

He pressed again, harder, as if they might be hiding. They weren’t. They were simply gone.

He sat with this for a moment: the storm outside, the sound of someone down the hall being emotionally devastated by fiction, both feet normal, no scales, no pressure, no heat. His body, for the first time in recent memory, just. Quiet.

It was such an unfamiliar sensation that it took him a minute to recognize it as fine.

He was fine.

He didn’t know why.

He closed his laptop, lay back on the narrow bed, and stared at the ceiling while rain hammered the window. Down the hall, the sound from Room 306 had progressed from stricken to something that might have been quiet crying, which meant the manga had escalated. The thunder had not let up.

Eojin thought: I’ve been here nine hours and my body has behaved better than it has in three months, and the only variable I can identify is the person in Room 306 who showed up with snacks and a ukulele and shook my hand.

He thought: I’m not going to think about that.

He thought: I am absolutely going to think about that.

He turned over, pulled his blanket up, and closed his eyes.

The rain continued. Somewhere down the hall, a page turned.

His body stayed quiet.

He did not sleep for a very long time.

***

End of Chapter One