on our way to twenty-seven // kuroo x daichi

8 - FUCK

Tetsurou doesn't get along with the kids in his class.

The other boys pick on Tetsurou for all sorts of reasons. He's smart and finishes his work quickly, so they ask to copy off of him, and when he says no because he'll get in trouble, they make fun of him. They make fun of him for being the youngest in the class and say that his hair is stupid, that his name sounds funny, and that the fuzzy Pikachu keychain he has dangling from his backpack zipper is for babies, even though at least three of them have Pokémon lunchboxes themselves. More often than not, it's the same boy starting it, or at least egging the others on. James, Tetsurou knows, because it almost rhymes with pain and that's what James is. A pain. A real pain in the butt.

And the girls...well, the girls say boys have cooties, so they won't hang out with him, either.

Still, somehow, in the summer between third and fourth grade, he gets invited to James's birthday party. When Tetsurou tells his mother, she says James might be maturing. Tetsurou doesn't think so, though. James's mom probably just made him invite the whole class. There are only twenty of them, after all.

So he walks the five minutes to the beach, where one folding table holds an ice cream cake and cupcakes and another holds a host of birthday presents, all wrapped in brightly-colored paper and shiny metallic gift bags. Tetsurou adds his own small gift—a LEGO airplane, found in the toy aisle of CVS—to the table and puts his towel on the sand. Most of the boys are over on the breakwater, crawling all over the rocks like a bunch of crabs, while the girls are splashing in the ocean.

A boy named Timothy looks up and spots him. "Hey, Tetsu, you can read anything, right?" he calls.

This has to be a trap, but still, Tetsurou perks up at the fact that he's not immediately being mocked upon arrival. "Well...a lot of things."

"Can you come read this? It's a big word and none of us can read it."

"Yeah, sure." Tetsurou drops his bag next to his towel and joins the other boys on the rocks. "What's the word?"

"That one."

It's a four-letter word that looks simple enough. F-U-C-K. It must rhyme with duck, or luck. "That's easy!" Tetsurou says. "It says fuck!"

James immediately jumps off the breakwater and goes running toward his mother, Timothy hot on his heels. "Mom! Mom! Tetsu said a bad word!"

"What?" Tetsurou scrambles off the rocks and runs after him. "I didn't say a bad word!"

"Yeah, he did! He said the F-word!"

James's mother looks at Tetsurou with a frown. "It's very mean to say that word to somebody, Tetsu. Apologize to James."

"I didn't say a bad word!" Tetsurou repeats. Wait, is it a bad word after all? How was he supposed to know that? Timothy asked him to read it. Why would Timothy make him say a bad word?

James starts to cry, and Tetsurou resists the urge to stick his tongue out at him and call him a tattletale. "Tetsu," James's mother says, putting an arm around her son, "I'm going to have to call your mother and tell her what you did."

"But I—" Tetsurou sniffs, feeling hot tears sting his eyes. He tries to wipe them away before the other boys see, but they see. They always see him at his worst.

"Tetsu's gonna cry!" Timothy taunts, and Tetsurou wants to scream at him that James is crying too, very loudly, he might add, so why aren't they making fun of him? But instead, he mumbles out a "sorry," grabs his gift off the table, and runs back home as fast as his legs can take him, listening to the jeers from the other boys fade away.

Later that night, he asks his mom if he can pick an 'American' name. He doesn't know how to make the other boys stop teasing him, but he thinks that might be a start.