BLUE HAWAII sugawara koushi

five. FAMILIAL TRAUMA IS MY MIDDLE NAME

          For once, Aoki Daniel feels at peace. Not that he was ever feeling a little mayhem, but the school day felt fully fleshed out for once rather than a skeleton of what school's supposed to feel like. He learned for the first time in months and he could remember what he learned outside of the classroom. He learned so much that it was hard to focus on the music and the road at the same time.

Aoki Daniel doesn't live in the suburbs, he's a boy from the country. His mother employs the vast majority of the mountain valley in her fields and her father preaches to him. It's a constant tag team event.

Daniel's father, Aaron, has been a pastor since he graduated college with a major in theology and a minor in agriculture. He grew Miyagi's now massive church, but with great monument also came great legacy that was superimposed onto his five children. Daniel has one older brother, two older sisters, and then a younger brother, all of them devotees no matter how hard they were faking it. And make no mistake, they were all faking it to some extent, but sitting down in that fifth pew on Sundays to watch their father was non-negotiable. Attendance was mandatory on Sundays unless you were dying, it was required that you be there no matter what.

People never heard the yelling that went on inside the house when it was revealed that his older sister Mary was a lesbian and a camgirl or when his older brother suddenly dropped out of university to go into the military (the absolute horror). Everyone remained in lamb-like silence under the guise of deafness when the Aoki family experienced some notable turbulence.

There was so much yelling in a family that preached peace and serenity. There was so much yelling in a house with paper walls.

          "I'm home." He calls out, tossing his keys onto a hook and instead of landing neatly it sits on the floor. Picking it up with his toes through his sock he hangs the keys back up and shuffles into his house. His parents aren't home yet so he'll probably need to start dinner while his mother is out in the fields gathering flowers.

It was another misguided preconception that his mother was some sort of airhead country bumpkin when she was, in fact, majorly not that. Her husband may control the church, but she, on her own, employs half of the valley range in Miyagi with her agricultural landmine and exquisite business sense. She wasn't a princess dallying in the fields just to have fun, she was a queen working alongside her people, and she was adored by her people.

           "Daniel, I'm hungry." His little brother whines. Joshua's in middle school, he's the baby of the family and by default the most spoiled, everyone knows it.

           "Hey hungry. What do you want to eat?" For once, Daniel's treating his brother like a brother rather than a cretin that absorbs all the attention and hot shower water in the evening. Today, however, Daniel's in a good mood with minimal causation, the thought itself is foreign.

            "Sea urchin and octopus and sea cucumber."

Stifling a gag, the older brother sets a little cup of goldfish crackers on the table while his brother prattles down the list of all the seafood he likes. He doesn't understand how his own little brother has such a sickeningly intense fixation on seafood yet still refuse to at least pretend to eat his green leafy vegetables.

One could say the same thing about the exact theology fueling the monster that is himself, but Daniel would rather not dwell on things that make him look bad.

          "I'm home." Aoki Aaron announces as he kicks off his shoes in the entry way. He's sweating though his grey polo from going through the fields with his wife, trying to offer her his unwanted advice. He met her in university because they were both in Intro to Business Administration together, a prerequisite for the agriculture course. She passed the course in the first go while that was Aaron's second attempt. It was safe to say that they both had their own strong suits.