~ Episode Thirty-One ~

  Rhythms of the Soul:

  Evan’s True Feelings

  “Uaghh!!” Evan flew back against a tree trunk, cringing from the impact of tripping over his own feet. A thin whistle sounded, of steel through air. He let out a sharp gasp, eyes wide open now, and barely had enough time to dodge the Earth Sword as it thrust inches-deep into the bark behind his head.

  “Evan—!” Wood splintered on the air as the elemental weapon tore free. Shinji turned to face his bestie, bringing the Earth Sword up in a readied stance in both hands. Helpless revelation hung upon his face, despite muscles poised for another lethal strike.“—Please! You have to!”

  Evan stumbled away from him on hasty heels, the Water Trident brandished like a shield. “No way, man! You’re crazy! I’m not gonna—”

  “There’s no other choice! Do it! Or else there’ll be no one to protect her!” Shinji sprang at him on involuntary reflexes, a flea against the moonlight, only for the edge of his blade to get lodged between the Water Trident’s claw-like tines.

  “No! I’m not killing you!”

  Both weapons disengaged.

  “It’s the only way to stop the Monster!”

  A third strike came at Evan – again sloughed off with a desperate defense. “Y - you don’t know that, y’damn fool!”

  “Quick, call out 'Neptune's Barrier'! It's your Sub Elemental Crash!”

  “Neptune's--Sub Elemental Crash?!” They passed beneath a break in the arboretum treetops when Evan saw a faint outline above Shinji’s head. "Shin, man, what are you talking about?!"

  "Evan, you're just gonna have to trust me! It’s the only way you can protect yourself from my attacks!"

  But before Evan could utter a peep, a large arachnid creature appeared before him within moonlight that was otherwise unseen by an overcast sky. The creature hung on the air over Shinji, working his limbs on gnarled and jerky claws though he were marionette on invisible strings.

  This was the Kenah’dai Shinji’s Monster Dowser had led them to find here at Grover’s Mill that night. The Book of Lodoss had dubbed this Kenah’dai a Monster of Influence. The sight of it, fully realized in the lunar spotlight, was a thing of pure nightmares.

  “Watch out!!” Shinji screamed.

  Evan saw him at the last second, jerked aside to evade the attack. Bristling pain seared across his cheek where the Earth Sword’s razor edge split the flesh wide open.

  “Yaarrgghh!”

  Evan’s eyes fluttered open. Reflections from the night his first-ever Monster was Sealed wavered before a stream of glow-in-the-dark astronomy stickers. They were barely noticeable across the ceiling in the afternoon light from where he lay on his bed.

  A set of stars and constellations Evan’s parents had put up when he was younger. Not because he was interested in astronomy, but instead an attempt to keep his wandering, under-stimulated, brain in one place. An attempt to keep him out of trouble the best they could.

  “Every time you see these stickers when you fall as sleep, quiz yourself on how many you know and can remember. Make a game of it. Better yourself, each night, the best you can.”

  His mother’s words.

  “These stars’ll help you get educated. Remember, son, an educated black man may not have a lot of power, but he is a black man who stays mostly outta trouble. The least amount of reasons to let trouble to find you, the more you’ll be able to scrape quietly by, the best you can.”

  His father’s words.

  Evan frowned. Scraping quietly by wasn’t a thing that came easy to a kid who managed to get sent out into the hall almost daily for laughing at his own thoughts in the middle of class, or for forgetting to hand in homework days on end, or for falling asleep in the middle of silent reading (or worse yet, drawn out Social Studies lectures).

  But, when it came to recess, scraping quietly by was a thing Evan did best. He kept mostly to himself, obsessing over the few Game Boy games he owned (These days, it was Pokémon: Blue Version) beneath the shade of school airlocks, fenced-lined summits of sod hills, or the alleyways between portable walls. Sometimes – in a bathroom stall – if he could get away with sneaking it the whole break while Shinji was off doing lunch recycling duty.

  In fact, Shinji often sat with him at recess, reading in silence. But it hadn’t always been this way. Shinji hadn’t always been there to lean on – to scrape quietly by with.

  Until the boys met almost two years prior, Evan had spent most of his academic career alone, unacknowledged by other peers wary of his skin color. Most kids in Shorebrooke had never seen a black person before, except for on TV. Most had never talked to a black person before, wanted to talk to one before.

  Especially not a black kid whose teachers often wrote him off with report card descriptions of “a class-clown”, “a distraction to his peers”. “Unfocused and lacking motivation” with “unmanageable classroom behavior”. “Unable to take direction or grasp basic concepts, despite countless explanations”.

  It wasn’t that Evan was stupid. He came from pretty bright genes, attested by his mother’s classier, high-brow, tastes. School was just hard. Staying focused was hard.

  Nobody at school took Evan seriously. Nobody at school wanted to take Evan seriously. He was the class clown, after all. A black class clown. And the more he struggled with the rigidity of academic expectation, the less anybody wanted to deal with him.

  That is, aside from the cowardly playground slurs thrown his way. The forcibly half-hearted apologies made by any kid within range of a tender-eared yard monitor. The same old one-sided lectures that followed from prickly VPs on the subject of mutual schoolyard race relations.

  But things started to change when Mother Teresa Catholic Elementary opened its doors. When droves of kids were transferred from all across town to a more central location. When a freckle-faced Japanese boy appeared at the desk sidled across Evan’s that first day of Mr. Gianni’s grade seven class.

  Shinji Izuma.

  Memories of that day made Evan grin. Made his heart flutter, sing.

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  The setting sun outside his window crept across the ceiling to stir the glow-in-the-dark astronomy stickers alight in their familiar yellow-green way.

  Evan got lost in them, lost in his thoughts of them. A stream of starlight. They were a reminder – not just of the constellations, the suburban civility his parents worked so hard to maintain.

  The stickers were also a reminder of what Evan had lost.

  Innocence lost, all in the span of a single night, only a half-month ago. The night Evan felt pain, deep pain, for the first time. Not the pain of schoolyard segregation. Not the pain of classroom humiliation. Not even the pain of parental disappointment.

  Deep pain. In the eyes of someone who’d truly liked and accepted him, just the way he was. For how he was, who he was. Someone he trusted and adored, who failed to uphold a promise to protect him.

  The pain Shinji bore when the Monster of Influence forced his sword to slash across his bestie’s cheek. The pain of causing pain, against mortal will.

  Sure, Evan may have Sealed his first Monster that night. The destruction around them may have reverted like a jerkily-rewound movie scene that night.

  But there was still a scar left behind.

  A scar from dodging a sword thrust just a little too close to home.

  A reminder. How deep pain actually went. How it changed a person, for life.

  Evan turned a gaze over to his desk – a field of unorganized school binders intermingled with unkempt video game boxes and manuals. Amidst them lay his Monster Orbs. Kuurb, the Monster of Influence. Sebastia, the Monster of Expulsion. Eldrom, the Guardian Beast of Air.

  Literal gods, trapped in colored glass balls.

  He shuddered at the sight of them. With the Mon-Orbs came a whole different kind of pain. An unfathomable kind of pain that altogether seemed to bring he and Shinji closer the more their Mon-Orbs were used. The more they Sealed other Kenah’dai together.

  It was a kind of pain that progressed over time. A pain that made Evan look at Shinji with different eyes little by little with each passing day. A pain that made him feel for Shinji in a different way.

  …Feelings he didn’t quite understand yet…

  …Feelings that exhilarated him.

  A fresh itch across his cheek sent idle fingers in search to scratch it away. A dark and sunken line across the cheekbone of a mixed Trini-Quebecois heritage.

  The scar was a reminder. A reminder of pain caused by the boy he loved. The boy who had made a subsequent vow to never cause pain to those he’d swore protection to, ever again.

  “I just – I don’t want to hurt her…”

  Something else caught Evan’s attention, this time off his dresser on the other side of the bedroom. A Valentine’s Day card from last February – One of only two Valentine’s Day cards Evan hadn’t immediately thrown in the trash after school that day.

  The card was a lone tower amidst a forest of random junk and song sheets. It called to him, and Evan pushed up out of bed to answer that call – careful to wade through the mountains of dirty laundry, valleys of strewn comic books, and rivers of Lego, towards it.

  He plucked it up off the dresser, running a thumb over the rough texture of the cardstock. The front of it was striped with white and yellow glitter paper. Slapped in the middle of the cover was a cartoon sun wearing heart-shaped shades.

  He opened the card on a dopy grin and read:

  Have a sunny, funny day, my Valentine!

  Evan couldn’t help but giggle like an idiot at the blurb. The joke was stupid, but it cracked him up like nothing else every time he read it. Just the way it made him feel every time he read it.

  The greeting was so cute. So playful, innocent.

  So her, through and through.

  His gaze dipped to read where a more natural greeting glowed off the cardstock in swooping, hand-written, red-inked curves.

  Happy Valentine’s Day, Evan!

  Luv, Eri Seruma

  The sight of her girlish printing made his heart sigh, every time.

  Admittedly, Evan didn’t know much about Eri on a personal level – mostly just the prophetic junk Shinji had drilled into his memory. But even before Evan knew Eri was the Child of Destiny, he couldn’t help but feel drawn to her. Like he’d always known her.

  And now, with the revelation that she loved video games as much as he did, Evan only wanted to get to know her more.

  He remembered the first day he saw Eri. It was the first day of classes at their brand new school. She was alone under a tree, in wait for the morning bell to ring while most other kids were busy reacquainting over post-summer break gossip.

  He’d meant to go up to her that first day, let her know she wasn’t alone that first day. But shyness for cute girls with impossibly-natural red eyes, and the whispers of past dealings with other wary white kids, had stopped him dead.

  A regret that hung in Evan’s heart, every day since.

  It came as a surprise when Shinji revealed he’d known Eri Seruma from childhood, and even more so that Shinji refused to strike up old ties with her. Long lost nothing, they’d been besties forever until she’d moved away.

  But these days, everything Shinji spouted off about having no interest in her sounded like an excuse. Like he was trying to hide from something – prophetic duties, or not –mostly from himself.

  That part made sense to Evan, in a way, and he chocked it up to fear. Shinji was afraid of her. Afraid of who she really was. Afraid of what she really was.

  But to Evan, that stuff didn’t matter. Eri may have been the center of an invisible war between gods and mortals – so what? She was still a person with her own quirks and likes and tastes.

  Hell, maybe it was a good idea to give her the Fire Hammer, after all. Now that Eri was involved in Monster Sealing, allowed to fight the Black King’s army alongside the Star Warriors, she seemed to be a little more outspoken these days.

  Today, the fight against Grandar was evidence of that. She’d taken the initiative, the full reins, of devising a plan to save Shinji – against his orders.

  Evan grinned. That shit was awesome.

  Clearly, Shinji’s friendship was important to her. Something she aimed to strike up old ties with. Something she desired to protect.

  True friendship was a commodity worth more than all the Pokémon trading cards in existence. This was something Evan understood, first-hand.

  Building these kinds of friendships couldn’t be rushed, either. It was a friendship he and Shinji shared. And despite any shyness to chat her up in normal conversation, it was a kind of friendship Evan hoped, in time, to share with Eri, too.

  He adored that cute little track star more than anything else in the world.

  “Hey, Evan! – Spaghetti!!”

  Deep down, he prayed the feeling was mutual.

  But Evan’s grin died. There was still the issue of her identity.

  Her real identity – the truth.

  Shinji, too afraid to hurt an old bestie.

  Evan, too afraid to step up and take the full reins, himself.

  And now they were at odds over her. What to do about her. Today was the last straw. More so than the encounters with Cloria and Zorfus.

  With a sigh, he set the Valentine’s Day card back on his dresser.

  She almost got stolen by Grandar, ‘cause of me. Letting her go off alone, like Shinji did with Kyupo. Damn, he’s right. I am a hypocrite.

  Pain raked across his heart.

  This is what Sufocus wants. All us pissed at each other. Just like how the first Star Warriors crapped the bed, breaking the Star of the Elements, or whatever. That’s what caused this whole mess in the first place.

  Just then, a digitized rendition of Campenella played throughout the house. His mother’s unmistakable-hasty heel clacks followed – across the foyer downstairs, to answer the door.

  “Oh! Why, hello! – Evan, sweetie! You got a visitor!”

  Evan blinked, surprised by the announcement.

  Then instantly dreaded it.