Page 121

He blinked. Blinked again. The same thick darkness. A damp cloth pressed tight against his eyes, sealed to his skin with sweat and dried tears. His body vibrated against something hard—metal, humming with an engine underneath. He struggled to sit himself up when his head immediately hit an upper surface and landed back down on his side. He didn’t dare try to sit up again. The space was tight as the engine humming in his ear.

The trunk of a car.

He tried to move his hands. Couldn’t. His wrists were bound behind him so tight the friction had burned the skin raw. His ankles, the same. The gag tasted like dirt and old sweat. And underneath it, something chemical, bitter, coated his tongue.

His body felt wrong. Heavy in a way that wasn’t just pain. His thoughts moved like they were underwater, surfacing and sinking on a rhythm he couldn’t control. His ribs ached—deep, grinding. The kind of hurt that radiated outward with every bump of the road. He didn’t know how bad the damage was. He just knew that every bump sent it flaring through his whole torso.

He might as well be on his way to death.

The thought should have terrified him. Instead, it sat in his chest like something he’d been expecting. He had failed. Like he always did. He couldn’t warn Alex. Couldn’t reach Robin. Couldn’t do the one thing he’d set out to do: find out what happened to the person who had saved him first.

The engine rumbled beneath his cheek, steady and low. The chemical heaviness tugged at his thoughts, pulling them sideways, and the vibration loosened something in his skull—a door he’d been holding shut for months. Behind it, sunlight. A schoolyard. Dirt under his fingernails.

He was drawing Snorlax.

The dirt patch behind the portable classrooms was the only place the other kids didn’t bother him. He worked from memory. The game cartridge was back in Taiwan, and A-yi would scold him if he asked for a new one. He was almost finished with the belly when a shadow fell over his drawing.

“Is that Snorlax?”

Jun looked up. A boy from his class—the popular one, the one everyone wanted to play with—stood over him with a soccer ball on his hip, grinning. Sweat glistened in his dark hair like dew on grass. He kept talking as if Jun could understand every word. Jun couldn’t. He could only stare. Nod slightly. Stare again.

The boy held out his hand. “I’m Ritsuki.”

“Zhang Junming,” Jun said.

The boy’s mouth opened, trying the sounds.

Jun helped him, saying it slower. “Jun—Ming.”

The other boys shouted from the field. One of them threw an arm around Ritsuki’s shoulder and pulled him away. Jun watched them go, the familiar wave of being left behind already settling over him. He looked back at his unfinished Snorlax.

“Jun!”

He looked up. Ritsuki had stopped. He was smiling wide and certain, like the sun itself had decided to pay attention to him, and he tossed the soccer ball.

Jun caught it with both hands.

The other boys looked surprised. Even Jun was surprised. But Ritsuki just jerked his head towards the field. “Let’s go!”

Jun stood up. He tossed the ball back. “Okay. Ruki.”

The first person that gave him a special nickname was his mother. Ruki was the second. And in return, Jun gave him one of his own.

The car hit a bump. Jun’s skull knocked against the trunk floor and the schoolyard dissolved. The chemical taste surged on his tongue. His thoughts tried to sharpen before the heaviness dragged him back under.

Jun couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t together. Every recess. Every weekend. Ruki’s house, Jun’s house, the spaces in between.

When Jun had gone back to Taiwan for a year in middle school, they’d stayed up past midnight on Skype calls so long that A-yi would unplug the router. When he came back for high school, it was like no time had passed. Jazz concerts, soccer matches, science fairs, late-night drives. Their circle grew from two to seven, and Jun thought nothing could break it.

Until graduation.

Ruki’s white shirt billowing behind him as he stood on the edge of the science building roof.

Jun never learned the full story. Nobody talked about it afterward. Not Alex, not Yoona, not Ruki himself. It became a silence they all agreed to carry. And Ruki smiled through it. Smiled so well that Jun let himself believe he was okay. Maybe that was the real failure. Not that he didn’t see it, but that he chose not to look.

The car turned. Jun’s body slid, shoulder grinding against the trunk wall. The pain where Luis had kicked him and the spot Covey had injured when he’d thrown him into the wall ignited. His vision went white behind the blindfold. The drugged haze swallowed his scream before it reached the gag.

When the pain dulled, he was on a wooden floor. The smell of pizza surrounded him.