#ichiprez

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High school reunions weren’t so glamorous when they were held only two years after graduation. Not all of them were old enough to drink, so they couldn’t use alcohol to smooth out the awkwardness of separation, and their nostalgia wasn’t strong enough to achieve the same effect. Ichinose, who discovered on his twentieth birthday that not only was he a total lightweight, he also hated the taste of alcohol, still found his hands twitching for a shot glass.

At the very least it would give him something to do—the faces around him were disconcertingly familiar, and without a distraction he was slipping back into old habits. He craned his neck and scanned the room, ostensibly looking for someone he knows, but really just waiting for the dorm manager to appear like a miracle.

This would not happen, because the dorm manager was busy doing things like managing a dorm instead of the lives of former students. Absently, Ichinose patted the pocket he’s slipped his phone into. Today was an event night, so he’d turned the alarms off. Not his alarms—the new ones that Ichinose had set, when his university schedule didn’t quite match the timings of his dorm life. The old ones lingered in his clock app, deactivated and rotting. At a real low point, Ichinose had stared at them for hours, like with enough focus he’d be able to hear the concern in the dorm manager’s voice all over again.

That was what he missed—the dorm, not high school. For all that the kids in his year look the same, they weren’t who he knew and remembered. They weren’t who he wanted. If the dorm had held a reunion, Hanzawa would be holding court at center stage, directing the crowd as if it were a symphony, and Kagiura would stand a head above the sea of people, and Hirano would be by his side, blond hair like another lighthouse. And the dorm manager would be—he’d be there. And that would be enough.

Here, though, he was completely adrift. The best he could do was manage a few lines of small talk before the questions died out—yes, school is tough, yes, he was studying, yes, he was aiming to be a lawyer, thanks for the good luck, no, he wasn’t seeing anyone, yes, they’d see each other again, maybe some time, maybe never. Some people from the dorm had been his same-year peers, but most of them had moved out in their final year, and even the conversations with them eventually peter out. He didn’t know anyone in the planning committee—if he did, he’d shake them down and ask, Why would you run an event like this? But his criticism wouldn’t hold any water, because he’d still shown up.

…So, maybe he was lonely. And desperate. He should’ve anticipated that this would only exacerbate those feelings, but Ichinose had a knack for self-inflicted agonies.

He hadn’t meant to stop visiting. He’d meant to drop by often, but visiting was a process. A whole production. A reminder that he was no longer a part of that place. And he liked his classes, and his studies—even when it was hard or boring or annoying it was a reminder of the future he was chasing—but academics took up so much time that it was hard to pull away from. When he’d lived in the dorm, the distance from his room to the dorm manager, or academic focus to socialization, had been just a few steps. Comparatively, the distance now felt insurmountable. Maybe in a few years it would change. Maybe the feeling that he was pushing his luck could disappear. Maybe he’d even stop tracing out the characters for Yanagimoto Kazuma. Maybe absence made the heart fonder. Right now, it sucked.

Vitriolically, he thought, Hanzawa Masato would have been on the planning committee. He wouldn’t do this to me—

“You've got a scary face there, Dorm Head.”

Ichinose jolted at the statement, tripping over air—but before he could take a nasty fall there was a steady, muscled arm at his chest, pulling him back upright. He inhaled, sharp and strained. Tried to regulate his breathing. Tried to still the pounding of his heart, the excessive, unbearable wanting…

When he turned around to face his savior, it was not the dorm manager, but the former president of the ping pong club who stood before him, eyeing him with malicious humor. Ichinose hadn't expected much—the dorm manager liked to call him by name—but just for a moment, in that position… he'd flickered into the past.

“Don’t sneak up on people,” he said, and then disdainfully added, “Captain.”

The president—now former, his time two years past and then some, though Ichinose couldn’t seem to remember that whenever their eyes met—smiled, gaze off-centered, and Ichinose wondered what he was looking at. If he was amused by the ruddy splotches around Ichinose’s neck, because that was how he flushed—violently. Whatever it was, it was a harbinger, he thought, recalling the horrendous boot camp he’d been put through for the sports festival, year after year.

Blithely ignoring the irritation radiating from Ichinose in waves, the president said, “I was doing a public service.”

He felt a headache coming on. More accurately, it had already come onto him, and now he was going to suffer the consequences. “Public service?”

The president inclined his head towards the crowd. “They're avoiding you because they're scared,” he explained. “See their faces?”

Ichinose dryly watched as a few squinted curiously at the two of them before moving on in benevolent apathy.

With an affected falsetto, the president squealed, “Eek! What if the dorm head busts me for breaking curfew!” Dropping back to his normal voice, he nodded, all-too-satisfied with his impression. “That’s what they’re thinking.”

“It’s been two years,” Ichinose scoffed. “No one’s thinking about curfew.”

The president tapped knowingly—annoyingly—at his temple. “But an elephant never forgets.”

Ichinose snorted. “What, and you’re the elephant?” He was tall. And broad-shouldered. But he was not gentle.

Without missing a beat, the president replied, “Maybe I’m more of a sacrificial lamb? You’re all glowering and intimidating in the corner, I’m all brave and tragic, and for the sake of those kids I’ve offered myself up to you…” He looked at him, expectant.

Disbelievingly, Ichinose echoed, “...Intimidating?” There was too much bullshit to address it all.

“…Yyyyes?” the president said, stretching the word out with perfect innocence.

“Obvious—it's not—no way!” Ichinose protested, heat pooling at his cheeks.

“You are, you scary smart top ranker,” the president drawled. “you're going to Todai for law, you should be sitting up on a throne somewhere, not hanging out with us peons. Isn’t that why you’re tucked away like this?” He cast his gaze around the room. “Or what, are you just too nervous to talk to anybody?”

He sure knew how to hit an opponent’s weak spot. “I’m—it’s not like that,” Ichinose says. “I’m—normal.” He winced, but still petulantly added, “And if you're talking to me, how are you any better?”

He’d called him “Captain” for petty equivalence, but it was also the name he best knew him by. It’d been shouted through the hallways, muttered in greeting, indignantly sputtered, and delivered from his lips with arrogant poise. As the president of the ping pong club, he was akin to a living idol, but during class he took notes with surprising diligence, limbs tucked neatly under his desk. In the dorm, he was friendly, but not aggressive—he had to have been, to rope in a first-year Hanzawa Masato into his club.

The president froze, face caught in comical awkwardness. “Dorm head, you're really too vicious.” To put it simply, he was just whining, Mean…

Ichinose rolled his eyes. “Captain,” he stressed, a teasing lilt to his voice, “if we’re talking vicious, what about sports festival practice?” Each year, the president had concocted a torture exercise he liked to call Ichinose’s Special Training Regimen. This entailed a series of ping pong matches in which Ichinose lost by an order of magnitude, after which the president fussed about Ichinose’s paddle grip and reaction time and serve form, mostly in service of gloating about his win. It trained no skill but the spirit of endurance.

“A toast to that,” the president said. “Why did you subject yourself to it for three years?”

At least he was self-aware. “You begged me to,” he retorted, and—out of his mouth the words took on a sudden, implicative weight.

The president turned scarlet and bloody. He raised his hand up to his face, fingers long and palm wide enough to obscure most of it, but it was no help since the back of his hand had also become the same bright red.

Ichinose's face reflexively mirrored his heat. “Why are you—”

“Jeez,” the president said. “You're kind of a bold guy, aren’t you? I should have realized.”

“...Should have?”

“Our dorm heads are spectacular, after all,” the president said. “My lovely protege, Hanzawa-kun, has that killer instinct for ping pong. Nowadays, he's even beaten me—and so the student surpasses the master!”

Ichinose briefly closed his eyes, relieved to tread familiar ground. “He was a much better dorm head, too.”

“Don't sell yourself short,” the president said. “You were a hotshot dorm head.”

“I... was?”

“Poor judgement, again,” the president chastised. “How will you ever make it as a lawyer?

His eye twitched. “I’m not a judge,” he said. “My job is to argue.”

“And you argue with me so well, don’t you?” the president affirmed with a smug grin on his face. “You’d do it all the time during ping pong.”

“…You sure remember a lot of me in high school,” Ichinose grumbled.

“What, don’t you?” the president asked. “You forgot everything already…?”

Ichinose looked past him—hard, considering the space the president took up—and into the sea of familiar, distant faces. He looked back at the president—brows furrowed, lips pursed, hair curling at the base of his neck. “No,” he said. “I think I just… remembered it different.”

The president nodded sagely. “Very Rashomon.”

It startled a laugh out of him. “Nothing that dramatic,” he said. “I just… remember the dorm better. Studying in my room, taking tests, those sorts of things. This scenery”—he gestured to the crowd—“it’s familiar, but it’s not mine.”

“Ping pong tables, competitions, chasing troublemakers… ” the president reminisced. “That’s mine—the most vivid parts of my high school life.” He fluttered his eyelashes down at Ichinose. Maybe fluttered, maybe batted, maybe just lowered, Ichinose wasn’t sure. It was an attractive sort of blinking. “But I also remember you, Ichinose. Because I’m nice.”

The president was smiling. His eyes held a seductive light. This was a harbinger, Ichinose knew—the man before him was not nice. He was sneaky, and awful, and possessed a terrible kind of charm. This was what had conned Ichinose into choosing ping pong for three years.