Taro hated being kept up at night, but it was all that much worse when it was his own thoughts that were preventing him from resting like he wanted to.  Too many things kept him up, too much responsibility for a then-fourteen-year-old boy to carry. 

 Having been under the sheet on his bed and staring at the celiing for what he felt had been hours, and without even the faintest hope that he might be able to drift off, he turned to glance at the beaten up old digital clock that sat on his bedside table.  3:42.  He huffed a little bit before sitting up where he was and pulling his legs and torso out from under the sheet.  He had been laying down for what, at least four hours?  Oh well.

Having figured that he wasn’t going to sleep at all if he hadn’t gotten to it already, the boy rubbed at his eyes a moment and stood up before exiting his bedroom and beginning his way down to the main area of the house.

He reached the foot of the steps quickly and quietly, every step carefully controlled so not to wake his mother or any of his four siblings, but froze dead in his tracks when he heard a noise coming from the kitchen.  In that moment he could have sworn his heart had stopped, but nonetheless he continued toward the kitchen, grabbing the aluminum baseball bat that was propped up against a nearby bookshelf for good measure.  Still, no amount of self defense was able to prepare him for the sight that he was greeted with upon peeking around the kitchen door.

The first thing that he noticed as he got closer and finally leaned in to look was the smell, sweaty and rotten and suffocating as if someone hadn’t bathed after going out several times.  And the man’s scruffy appearance was definitely in line with that.  His back was turned toward Taro, but the boy had no doubt in mind that the short, stocky Vietnamese man sitting with his bare feet on the table with his father.  And... what was he doing?  Taro couldn’t quite tell, but was something... burning?  It smelled strange... like melting plastic or something.  

When he saw the smoke drifting up from the pipe between his father’s fingers was about the time that it clicked in his mind that he should get out of there.  However, just as he went to turn away, Taro heard the scraping of a chair on the kitchen floor and froze dead in his tracks.  His heart rate picked up as he heard quiet footsteps on the kitchen floor and he was so startled when he felt a hand grab forcefully onto his ponytail that he nearly dropped the aluminum bat.  “You don’t breathe a word of this to your mother,” he heard his father whisper in his native tongue.  Taro tried to gulp his fear down as this was whispered into his ear, but he could barely breathe between the stench of burning plastic and the overwhelming scent of sweat.  However, he managed a very shaky nod as an answer.