Chapter 9: John

"What?"I ask into the phone again, barely able to hear Isamu over the teasing of my coworkers.

"Today," he repeats, sounding as frustrated as I feel. He's better at showing his emotions that way.

"Instead of working on the van?" I ask, confused as to why he'd not want to work on the van he's paying me to build.

He laughs. "You've just finished your midterms and you're dying to get back to work."

I don't respond. I'm still reeling, not finding the angle here.

"Come on, Johnny," he says softly. "You, me, Inu—who I can tell you're starting to warm up to?—"

If he means I've begun to trust her enough to not bite me while my back is turned, then he may be onto something.

"—and a bento. I made sushi."

"The Duke Gardens?" I ask, checking my watch.

"Yeah," Isamu clarifies. "Pick me up when you're done with work." Then he hangs up.

So, I pick him up when I'm done with work. The sun is starting to set earlier and earlier, and soon there won't be a sun for me except during my walk to class. For now, it shines on Isamu's hair, matching his dog's own onyx black fur as they get into my car.

"You acted so suspicious on the phone, man. It's like you'd think I'd take you to the gardens just to murder you."

I scoff. "As if you could."

Isamu looks at me, sizing me up and then leans over the center console excitedly. "Do you think you could take me in a fight?"

I hesitate. I'm a lot stockier and have maybe forty or more pounds on him, but he has military combat training.

"Ha! Absolutely, with your scrawny ass?" I lie. "You wouldn't stand a chance." He's not scrawny and I hate that I've noticed that.

"Yeah? What'd you like, play football in high school? Or nah, it had to be something that kept you from playing basketball, so wrestling?"

I smile, lips pressed hard against my crooked teeth. High school and anything before is what I consider the hardest time in my life. Baggy sweatshirts and keeping my head low, just hoping someday I'd get out of there. Out of here.

I'd go days without speaking to a single person, unwilling to make nice with teachers I argued with, starting from the first day of school and shunned by the students in my class, except for the few other outcasts I had nothing in common with. Then I'd go home, only to end my day at an empty house or a father falling over drunk.

Depression is the word that spikes up when I think of that time, but it was more like longing. Longing for it to end—but not my life, just that time of my life. Eighteen looked so far away. College seemed impossible. The John that I am now was just a pipe dream.

"Sorry, was that too hard of a question for your pea-sized brain?" Isamu asks, snapping me out of my thoughts.

I shoot him a glare, just as we park outside of the Duke Gardens. "Okay, listen. You can take me in a fight, but I have a perfectly average-sized brain with lots of wrinkles on it, so hush."

"Hush," he repeats mockingly, but I'm already out of the car.

He opens the door for Inu—where she lays on old stains on the back seat—and calls for her to get out.

The air is tacky against my skin where my camera bag presses against my chest. I adjust it to drape over my hip as I watch Isamu stretch out his thigh, where his prosthesis attaches. His knuckles dig into a place high on his leg, and I wonder if he's okay to walk around the gardens. But Isamu is grown enough to know when he can and can't do something. And from the time I've spent around my dad's buddies, almost exclusively combat vets, I know there's no actual benefit to making someone feel less than.

"There's this place in the middle where I like to sit out and read sometimes," when the weather is nicer. "We can go there. At your pace," I tack on, because my bleeding heart can't stop its concern for Isamu despite my brain's attempts to shut it off.

"Hmm. Alright, let's go." He hands Inu her leash to give himself more room to carry the bag of food.

She trots along beside us, proudly carrying it in her jaw. She's not as tough and violent as she seemed to me at first.

"Hold up, there's some glass here."

I'm surprised to discover that Isamu is right. Duke is normally a spotless campus, tended to by proud students and a private university budget. But I suppose things slip every once in a while, especially since a lot of tourists come to the gardens.

Isamu plops down on his butt in the middle of the sidewalk, Inu beside him as he rifles through one of the satchels on the side of her bag.

"Found them," he says, triumphantly holding a pair of dog shoes.

"Oh, they're so small. They're like baby boots," I coo, awed at their small size.

Isamu looks up at me, a surprised grin on his face, eyebrows so high on his forehead that they're invisible under his recently growing bangs. I give him a blank stare in response. Partly, because I can coo at baby boots if I so please, the other part, because I don't know how to react to cooing at doggy boots—it's not something I make a habit of.

"Cute," Isamu mumbles under his breath when he turns back to Inu.

I'd like to say, because I'm such a solitary man-whore, who has received my fair share of compliments from the grimiest gay dating app in existence, it doesn't affect me. I'd like to say that. But I can't, because Isamu definitely doesn't realize he's said it loud enough for me to hear. Which means it isn't for flattery. It isn't a throwaway compliment to get in my pants. He doesn't even know I'm gay.

It's masochistic that I've kept it to myself for so long, but the second I tell him, everything changes. I open the door to potential that I've hidden from for so long. But the thought does bounce around in my brain. Repeatedly. Exhaustingly. Until the sound of Inu stamping her foot makes me look up and I realize all at once that I'm a raging idiot.

Of course, Isamu was calling Inu cute.

Behind them, I press my closed fist into my face, hiding my self-deprecating smile. All at once, I feel like a child again, being handed hope in the form of a teacher that seems to care—until later when she snaps at me to stop zoning-out during class. In the form of a classmate who tells me they like my handwriting until they tack on "it's very feminine" at the end. How foolish of me to see something nice and not think the box would snap from my fingers the second I try to grab it.

Luckily, I'm not a child anymore. It's easier to brush off now. Easier to put behind a wall built on years of not caring.

It's easier to slip on the mask with strangers. Isamu still counts as a stranger or, at least, that's what I tell myself as I follow him into the gardens.

He looks up at the sign below the garden entrance. It says no dogs allowed.

"That's just for pets," I tell him, unsure why he's hesitant. "Inu won't have any problems."

His jaw clenches as his whole body flexes, preparing to fight a battle that I can't even see. I look behind us, at the students touring campus with their parents and the professors, still on campus because of their research, taking a quick break.

"She'll be fine, Isamu," I say, softening my voice to comfort whatever battle it is.

He looks over at me and sighs. Despite his shorter legs, I have to hustle to catch up to him.

The gardens are less exciting now that fall has set in. I miss the smell of flowers that always permeates as the vast pink and yellow flowers blossom. But the park is still nice, flower beds matching the gothic style of the campus, trees aching to bend in the wind, and cultural displays from around the world scattered across the field.

I never dreamt I'd actually make it to Duke. Sometimes I feel like I'm here by accident. All the clubs listed on my application were true, but I was always the silent one, tucked in the back corner of the student's government classroom or art club. My grades in my IB classes were high, but other students had higher. Duke wasn't in the cards for me.

Isamu, on the other hand, has probably seen the gardens a million times, as he joined his own father on campus strolls. He had the privilege of growing up in a place people dream of going their whole lives.

"Did you ever think of going to Duke?" I ask as the breeze picks up against my threadbare jacket.

He laughs. "Fuck no. I wasn't even close to having the grades for it. I, er, well I was kind of the class clown."

I can picture it. Even now, Isamu is sociable, easy to look over my spikey exterior and still look for a friend. He cares so easily, and tries so hard to put a smile on my face that I try so hard to keep off.

Isamu looks over at me, his black eyes reflecting everything back onto me, a bold mirror into myself, and says, "Secret for a secret?"

There's so much more I'm holding onto, even as I slowly unravel a million tiny things I've kept hidden from everyone, just for Isamu. I'm afraid the more I give him, the harder it will be to put them back behind walls I've spent so many years erecting. Once he puts that van in gear and disappears into the horizon, I'll be alone again.

"A secret?"

I'm not even sure what I can tell him that isn't massively exhausting just to think about.

"Or it doesn't have to be a secret. Tell me about the camera you've got there?"

I thumb at the camera bag against my hip. "Isn't that kind of a cop-out?" I ask but Isamu just shrugs, so I tell him all about the brand and the film. I tell him about the specs and how it's actually a really bad camera, but something about poor quality photos makes me feel vindicated in my hazy childhood memories.

"Worth remembering," he says, laying down on the grass beside the bag of food we've been ignoring. He stretches languidly, his shirt riding above his stomach.

His dark happy trail leading below his waist band is impossible to ignore, especially against his pale skin, but I do it anyway. Instead, I watch one of Isamu's hands thread in and out of Inu's fur, the other tugging at his ever-growing hair.

Stretched out like this, Isamu looks like something I'd want to take a picture of. His neck is smooth against the hard ridges of his veins, his muscles, his clean shave all creating shadows underneath his jaw. I am soft and rounded where Isamu's all sharp lines, and I'd need to sharpen my pencil to accurately depict its immediacy.

My fingers itch for my camera, for pencils that I normally use to paint buildings, but that's foolish because I've never taken a photo of a person. I've never drawn a person. I hate that the urge is welling up now.

Isamu sits up, all at once breaking my reverie of his angles, and begins to undo the bag, pulling out the now familiar bento boxes of food.

"I think I'd like to be something worth remembering to someone," he says, pausing his organization to look out into the park, lost in his hopes.

I press the camera to my eye and let my finger hover over the shutter. Just one photo to remember him when he's gone. To remind myself exactly why it is that I keep my emotions under check. At the last minute, I turn the camera and capture a photo of a tree above us. The last photo I took was of my mother; I can't erase that.

"What type of things do you deem are worth remembering, Johnny?" he asks, turning around to hand me a pair of white chopsticks. There's a painting of a big-eyed bear in a pink tutu on them.

"Trees," I say even though I mean desolated, barren trees that reflect my barren, desolated soul. I feel embarrassed even thinking it, but Isamu has done something odd to my emotions that I buried deeply for so long.

He smiles and hands me a bento box. There are cylindrical sushi rolls, bursting with colors; pink, green, yellow. I watch him pop one into his mouth from his own box and follow suit. It's colder than I expected, and it takes me a second to commit to the second chew as I adjust to the different textures.

"I think I told you I joined the army for my citizenship but," he starts as I swallow the sushi, invading my senses with an entirely different feeling. "Did you know Afghanistan is actually breathtaking? They don't talk about it often; how beautiful it is."

I nod to show him I'm listening as I grab a second roll. This time I can appreciate the flavors—now that I know what sort of texture to expect—and I squeeze my tongue against the roof of my mouth as I try to explode the mango flavors against the savory sauce-covered fish.

Every day, Isamu brings me food, and every day, it's easier to think about the flavors than the significance of what that could mean.

"I only got stationed in two different states before being injured," he says, "and one of those was North Carolina."

"Where was the other?" I ask. If it weren't for my dad's stations that I barely remember and my internships that I never get to enjoy, I never would have traveled out of Durham.

"Georgia," he says between grains of rice. He laughs, humor splitting his face open. "But obviously, now I'm building a van to travel around and maybe that isn't really sustainable."

He looks up at me and then sticks a single chopstick into his mouth, contemplative as he searches for the words, the reason.

"I don't belong behind a desk or in my dad's world either. I've always lived this half-in-half-out life, where I'm not smart enough to amount to anything but smart enough to pass. I'm athletic enough to get us to state championships, but not tall enough to win or make it to college. I'm too Japanese to be American and too American to be Japanese." His eyes soften, the darkness there turning to liquid onyx. "I've never belonged somewhere, not really. And then suddenly I belonged to this squad, but even that was taken away.

"Sorry. That's morbid," he says with a smile. "I don't regret joining. I just meant it's hard to feel like I don't belong anywhere. But it's all good." Isamu waves a hand. "I'm figuring it out."

He closes his box of food and reaches for Inu, where she's been eating her own bowl of food—not kibble but an actual home-cooked meal. I try to find my words as I watch him pull a tennis ball from Inu's satchel bag. Speaking is not something I'm good at, and I'm just about to pull out a secret when a guy approaches.

Isamu

Inu looksup from where she'd been sniffling at the ball in my hand at the intruder. My hands curve around the ball, metaphorical haunches raised at the hostility in his gait. The breath in my lungs is already clinging tight as I scramble upwards.

"Dogs aren't allowed here," he nearly shouts when he reaches us. "My wife is scared of them, and you're going to ruin our tour of campus if you let that attack dog keep running around."

I slam my teeth around my tongue, biting it hard as my nostrils flare while I try to remember why murking civilians is frowned upon. John's warm shoulder grazing mine dings somewhere in the back of my mind, despite my entire focus on the intruder. The potential threat has my brain tunnel visioning on nothing but the guy.

The guys fists are clenched and his face is screwed up in a disgusted look that I match tenfold.

"Sir, this a service animal, and it's within his legal right for her to be here," John says calmly.

The guy looks me up and down, as if that will suddenly make my disability visible to him. I bare my teeth at him just as a woman screams somewhere in the distance. My spine shivers with the anticipation of more intruders. They're probably just behind me.

"You don't look blind."

"Hey man, why don't you fuck off," I tell him, letting my rage spread like wildfire catching on dry leaves.

John grabs my bicep and I nearly take a swing at him in my confusion. When I turn to tell him off, anger pulses in my neck, but he's not even looking at me. Instead he's staring at the ground behind me. His eyes snap back to the man, fire hot.

"Sir, you need to go. Immediately." John raises his hands between us, trying to disarm us both.

It's a lost cause though. I'm far into seething with anger, white heat filling my vision. This guy can get fucked, because he's about to need an ambulance when I'm done with him.

"That attack dog needs to go. It's dangerous," he shouts, his beer gut that I had sized up the second he came, jiggling with ferocity.

I go to shove John aside, deciding jail time is worth breaking this guy's teeth in.

It suddenly clicks as I'm still pushing past John, that Inu has been barking with desperation the entire time, subconsciously adding to my stress.

The sky is in front of me all at once. My hands grapple as I try to grab something, but with no oxygen, I can hardly get them to respond. My breath comes out in gasping pants and there's some yelling around me. Inu fights whatever is between both of us, trying to get to me.

Inu's warm body slides under my head as the yelling continues. I'm going to die here, and this prick is going to walk away without getting socked in the face.

If I'm going to die here, someone should get my dad.

"Isamu? Isamu," John shouts as he crouches above my body, hands on my cheeks.

There isn't a way to tell him I need him to get off. I need him to not touch me but I'm too busy dying to say something. I need to die not feeling crushed. But all I feel is crushed, the residual anger wrapping around my veins, constricting them and causing my muscles to clench with the unshakeable urge to fight the world. My heart is beating rapidly; I can feel it in my neck and my feet and deep in my gut. All I want is for my body to get its shit together so I can fight this guy, but my breathing is demanding more attention.

There's no option but to release the anger and try to survive. It feels like I'm dying while my lungs flair in desperation.

"Fuck, I'm calling 911," John says, reaching for his phone.

The adrenaline in my body gives me enough strength to grip at his wrist, but white spots erupt in my vision as retribution. I know I'm squeezing the hell out of him, but John doesn't need to call anyone and cause more of a scene.

Almost fainting isn't the same as cardiac arrest. There genuinely isn't a reason for a doctor, as long as everyone stops yelling long enough for my heart to remember how to beat.

John lets his phone drop and attempts to edge his hand under my head, between Inu and I, but I let out a choking, animalistic wail, wasting precious, necessary oxygen, and thrash at him until he backs up.

I squeeze my eyes tight and try to remove myself from everything, breathing as deeply as I can. My lungs choke wetly and hot tears of strain run down my nose and lips, making everything that much worse.

Now that everything has gone silent, my brain is too loud.

Hazy memories of Afghanistan flood my senses. Smith driving the Humvee through cities and deserts alike. Monroe meters away from me as we rucked across deadzones. Bullets engraving themselves into the wall, inches next to my face as Alvarez—third tour—cracked jokes to calm us down.

Doc.

Doc.

Doc and my fucking leg.

The screaming. Doc's, mine, everyone outside who was hit by the IED directly. Then the firefight as our position was given away while I lay butchered.

I'm not sure how much time passes with me reliving this memory. Judging on the draining light, well over an hour, but eventually the pain in my skull ebbs, and the sweat on my skin registers as it begins to cool. Soon, I'll be shivering so hard it'll be like a jackhammer; a mix of my cooled sweat and PTSD.

Closing my eyes again, I squeeze my fingers and toes, slowly moving up across my limbs, until I'm finally able to move my arm all the way to rub Inu's coarse fur from where she's still laying under my head. John is still hovering nearby, concerned eyes and hands clenched against his knees, with equal fervor as my still clenching heart.

I finally begin to sit, world spinning with nausea. The guy from earlier is gone. But John's still here.

"Are you—is there anything I can do?"

I shake my head and then nod, raising my hand silently in a request for his assistance in lifting me. John stands quickly and grabs me under the shoulder to help me up. It makes my stomach roll with discomfort to be touched right now, my skin aflame with paranoia and bullet spray.

There's still a ball and a bowl on the floor, along with a discarded meal.

"Get it," I tell Inu in a scratchy voice, pointing at the stuff.

John stands quietly beside me as Inu retrieves all the dropped objects. Once everything is back in my bag, I throw it on my back and begin to walk away.

"Where are you going?" John asks, his feet crunching on the leaves to catch up.

"Somewhere else," I grunt out.

"Can I give you a ride?" he asks, to which I don't even bother responding—there's too much noise in my head. Or the absence of noise. I can't tell the difference. "Isamu, can I please give you a ride somewhere?"

I finally turn back to him.

"I'm fine." I walk away again before thinking better and looking back to John. "Don't tell Gonzales," I tell him.

He grimaces, eyebrows still drawn down in worry. "I already did. I'm so sorry," he says, pressing fists into his eyes. "I didn't know what I was supposed to do. He told your dad who called your doctor."

Inu presses her nose into my hand, and I figure that I should probably breathe through the anger unless I actually want to go into cardiac arrest tonight.

Sighing, I start walking back to John's car. I feel like I'm in a fugue state, empty flower beds and undressing trees passing by me without notice. I'm just a zombie guided by aching limb, followed closely by a grim reaper and a man who hasn't left.

My brain is distancing me from everything that was today, and I reach with slow, unfeeling fingers for the handle of John's car. I look down at Inu who is waiting for her command and urge her up.

"Do you want to put on music?" John asks.

I look over tiredly and stare down at the cassette player in the car. It only strikes me now that we've never listened to music while he drives, only the sound of my own blabbering to fill the space between us.

"It's kind of an old car." John opens the center console, tucking his large shoulders in so I can get a full view of the tapes stuffed in there. "I've actually had to jimmy-rig a bunch of it for it to still run," he tells me with an awkward laugh. "But there's blues, you probably don't like that. Oh! There's some rap and, uh, I think I have Lana Del Rey. She's in right now, right?"

I don't think I've ever seen John try this hard to have a conversation and as we pull off campus, I see him bite his fist in discomfort.

"Uh, my favorites have star stickers. Just makes them easier to see while I'm driving," he says by way of explanation.

I start to pull one into my lap and run my fingers over the cracked plastic case. David Bowie. I can't say I ever pegged John as a Bowie fanatic, but there's a whole two stars on it. Tucking it under my leg, I grab the next starred tape, Billie Holiday—which is a name I recognize, but don't know.

"My mom was really into jazz," John says as I grab another cassette tape. "She even went as far as naming me after it." He bites his fist again.

I don't know any jazz singers named John, but it's a common enough name that I'm sure there are a lot. The new cassette is a Mitski one, and I save "hipster" under a tab of things I know about John.

The drive isn't long and we're pulling up to my apartment by the time I'm holding a Frank Ocean cassette.

John gets out of the car and then gets back in when he realizes I haven't moved.

"You know cassettes are kind of like photos in a way. Because they both work off film," he explains. "But these are the only ones I have. My dad has an old record player that we normally listen to music on. It, uhm, I've never told him, but it actually isn't the original one we had when my mom was alive. This one time, he got so drunk that when he came home, he tripped over it, and it broke—wasn't the first time he'd knocked it over. I exchanged some lunch money for the same model so he wouldn't feel bad about it."

"Seems like a lot of lunch money," I mumble down at the cassettes.

John's quiet for a second, trying to understand what I said, before finally laughing—it sounds too loud for this car. For him. "Just a year's worth, but I had been saving it under my mattress just in case. I was on voucher lunch, so it's not like it really mattered.

"Sorry, that sounds really sad. It wasn't actually that bad. My childhood was kind of fun because I had a lot of freedom. I used to spend hours at the basketball court when I'd get days off from the garage, and even a few times I'd take the bus to the mall—they still had FYE stores back then." John looks over at me and clears his throat.

"I'd walk home because sometimes there was this woman on the block playing music, just on her guitar. I'd always kind of wanted her to stop and talk to me. You know how it is when you're a kid, just wanting to be the center of attention."

If I could feel my body, if there wasn't a solid rock freezing my lips shut, I'd tell John I pay attention to him. It's all I do. Even now, in this haze of burnt ground, I pay attention.

"Anyway, one time instead of her on that corner, there was a protest. Michael Brown had just been shot in Ferguson. I'd heard about it, but something about seeing people protesting kind of rewired my brain.

"Sorry." John's eyes widen. "I'm horrible at talking. Now you probably know why I don't do it. Do you want to, uh—" he looks up at the roof, eyes frantic. "We could talk about Bob Marley?"

I get out of the car and hear John mumble behind me.

"Get busy," I tell Inu, voice quiet against the world.

Pulling a poop bag from my backpack, my hands begin to self-realize, sensitive against every touch. Everything feels like it's coming to me from beyond a screen. I'm in here, unfeeling, and everything is out there... not part of existence. Unreal and unworthy.

I can't even tell if I'm real.

I take a step forward toward my apartment and then another back, still reeling with something that tastes more like terror than anger. Gonzales is probably upstairs waiting for an explanation.

John is still standing beside the car, so I open the door to the apartment and wave him off. As soon as he's gone, I step back out.

Sometimes, there's no other option but calling in evac.

"Dad," I say into the phone clutched in my hand, voice wavering with the exhaustion I haven't let myself feel.

I smash the bag of shit against the concrete. It doesn't make me feel any better.