Crybaby

FML Pt. 2

Here's something they don't tell you about being a vagrant. It's lonely. My parents never showed me physical affection, but that was no surprise. But at least they were still there, at least I knew that there were people who knew that I existed. When I lived under their watch, I could at least convince myself that they cared for me, like one would care for an ugly house plant per say. You'd forget to water it, forget to put it in a place with a lot of sun, and it'd fuck with your aesthetic but some small part of you understood that you held some sort of responsibility towards it - so you'd never end up throwing it out. At least that's the way I thought my parents looked at me, that is  until I K.O.ed my mom of course.

When you're a random dirty kid on the streets, nobody cares. Nobody looks at you, nobody thinks about you, you're invisible, you're all alone. It's a different type of feeling, knowing that even if you died the world would go on. That in the grand scheme of things, you held no significance to anybody, not a single person. It made me angry. It hurt me. Made me envious.

My first few months on the street I slept in a small neighborhood park. But it was difficult, seeing all the happy families walking about, the pinching of one's nose as somebody got a whiff of my unwashed body, or even worse, the pitiful stare from a old lady, or a businessman, or another kid. They never did anything though, no hero ever helped me either. It's not like there was lack of heroes in the city, in fact, you'd at least bump into one per day.

They weren't there to help you however. They'd catch you stealing, or make a comment about your hygiene wasn't good for pubic safety, ask you if you paid your bus fare when it was obvious you would have no money for it. I was okay for a while, I was young, more forgivable. The older kids and the adults, they had it worse. No, the thing about me that put me into the most danger was the fact that I was girl. Young. Moldable, impressionable. 

Easy.

Baths were dangerous. They'd leave you smelling fresh, your hair clean, your face uncovered and examinable. I am not kidding when I say that my stinkiest years were from 6-10 years old.

When I was nine, I made a friend. He was a year older than me, with a name that I don't remember anymore. I gave him a piece of molded bread after I had seen him being beat up by a local gang, and the rest was history. We were close; we scavenged together, fought together, ran away together. We would cover for each other: while one talked to the hero, the other would sneak behind them and steal from various aisles. 

I never told him about my quirk, and he never told me about his. I wouldn't let him touch me, and he never questioned it. He'd always wear long sleeves, even during the hot and humid Japanese summer, and I would never tease him about it. We were friends. We had inside jokes, we understood each other's body language, in fact we made up our own language. The days when we weren't so hungry, we'd sneak up to the top of some random building, and invent the various words in our languages. We had some stupid rules, such as if we say turn right we turn left, and if we say turn left we turn right. We were only allowed to use the primary colors, so a yellow banana would become a blue-green banana. I was happy, genuinely. For once in my life, I had a friend, somebody that I could trust, somebody to keep me company.

One day, I went on an errand on my own. He had stayed in the whatever hole-in-the-wall (literally) place that we were camping in for the week. He complained about a stomach ache, so I had walked a bit farther into the city to get his favorite drink - strawberry milk. When I came back to our hiding spot, however, he wasn't alone.

Next to him stood a big man, his clothes too clean for the filth that was our temporary home. His rings, one on each finger, were obviously too small, the pudge of his fingers sticking out from their edges. I would've almost laughed out loud, if I weren't so afraid. I don't really remember what I said, or if I had said anything at all. I remember what my friend said however.