A Firefly's Glow

Chapter Ten: Part Two

I began to flail my arms into the air.

“Oh my god, I’m sorry!” I cried anxiously, feeling my eyes grow wide. “I gave you the wrong drink!”

I watched the boy bemusedly wipe his forehead with his hand and I inferred that the agonizing moment the boy had just experienced seconds ago was his first brain freeze.

“What is that?” the boy lifted his head and peered at the blue liquid that innocently sat in the cup.

“It’s a smoothie.”

“Smoothie?”

This boy was a second year in high school. He attended a prestigious academy. He lived in an exaggeratedly large house. He had a mob of servants running around his home. And regardless of all this, this is probably the first time he’s ever heard of the word “smoothie”.

Being wrapped in silence twice in one span of ten minutes was too much silence in one day, so I attempted to soothe the tension by saying, “Do you like it?”

I silently answered my own question with an inferred answer. Being as prestigious and wealthy as he was, he probably hated it. Perhaps he was going to launch an army of his minions at me because I fed him an artificial mix of brain freezing chemicals.

I tightly shut my eyes, waiting for the boy to scream and yell in protest and that I had just poisoned him for all eternity.

But instead, what came to my ears was a soft murmur.

“I don’t hate it.”

I opened my eyes and glanced at the boy in utter confusion.

He glanced back at me with another nonchalant gaze, as if the brain freeze had immediately worn off and had left absolutely no effect.

“What?” I enunciated, raising a pondering eyebrow.

“I don’t hate it.” The boy patiently repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t hate it.”

“But if you don’t hate it, then what do you feel for it?”

“Something that’s not hate.”

I flexed my arms into the air. “If it’s not hate, then what is it?”

“You’re stupid.”

I felt my cheeks redden and my eyes began to widen. Before I could retort, he rapidly rose up onto his feet, clutching onto the plastic cup.

I had to bend my neck backwards to focus on his eyes. I could have retorted then, but I paused.

He stuffed his hand behind his back and seemed to fidget with his arm. When he unbent his arm from behind his back, it slid over my head and I reluctantly shut my eyes. I felt a light sensation slide onto my head, and I peeled the hat from my head.

Shifting the cloth and searching for whatever the boy had put on my head, I felt something smooth and cold touch my fingers and I fished it out of the cloth.

It was a small coin with the image “100” engraved into the golden copper.

When I lifted my head away from the coin, the body that had stood before me was no longer present. I rapidly swung my head across my shoulders, skimming around the space that surrounded me until I caught the boy’s figure sauntering towards the front doors.

As he slid through the opened door, I shoved the hat and the one hundred yen ($1) coin onto the table top and I stumbled after him.

Nudging myself through the door, I held out an arm towards the darkness ahead mildly crying “Wait!”