[KinKi AU] Boy Next Door
Prompted by and partially posted on the Song challenge on love-is-kinki.
Disclaimer: This writing is fictional and has no commercial purpose. Characters are real persons belonging to themselves.
Pairing: Teen KinKi Kids
Genre: AU, school drama, first-person
Rating: G
Summary: The boy next door is a dancer.
---
[Prelude]
The first time I saw the kid, I thought he was a girl. I was dribbling a basketball around our backyard, bored without opponents, when I noticed a slender form upstairs next door, practising dance moves to a music I couldn't hear through the sealed glass.
Naturally, I looked away. My education frowns heavily upon peeking into a girl's window. But a fourteen-year-old's restraint doesn't last long, and I was soon sneaking glances.
Of course, girls normally have the discretion to draw their curtains. And girls don't casually pull their shirts off after a sweaty exercise.
The situation lost its thrill after this revelation, but the boy, now topless, still unaware, resumed his dancing, and caught my attention with some cool, slick moves. Before long I was idly dribbling the ball to his body rhythm.
I become accustomed, hence, to peer at that window everytime I'm out in the yard. He isn't always there, but when he is, it's always for dancing. I figure the room is a studio, doubtless soundproof, as the audio never reaches me. The omission bothers me after a while, the absent tunes registering static in my ears, so my mind, and later my voice, starts supplying the music.
Upbeat songs I pick up from MTV-- though not ten words make it to my lips from the sea of English, and soon abandoned completely in favor of my own made-up lyrics. Popular rock-metal hits-- though it'd annoy me in the middle of a climactic chorus when the boy simply halts from a mistake and walks briefly out of view, presumably to restart his music. Not that he's to blame. For all I know he could be playing enka while I'm matching his choreography to X Japan.
Soon enough I'm taking my father's guitar to the backyard instead of a basketball, creating whole songs instead of reproducing them. And I remain wondering what music he actually dances to.
That day I'm watching him drill a complicated step to my three-chord accompaniment, when he stops, bends down, and freezes halfway up with a towel in hand as he sees me. We can't see each other's eyes across this distance, but I know he has caught me watching, because the next minute he yanks the curtain close.
I thought it was rather rude of him, but someone who's been spying his window probably has no right to think that. The following months, I occasionally take the guitar --mine now-- to play at the backyard, but I never see that curtain open again.
I never even see him in person, against the odds as it might be, but a relief considering what happened. He probably has different school hours, and assuming a normal homework load plus the frequency of his dance practice that I know firsthand, he doesn't seem to go out much.
It comes as a mixed blessing, therefore, when I start high school the following spring, and find him executing perfect double-backflips in my own gym class.
[Verse]
The second time I noticed him, I wasn't the only one. About half the class who'd struggled as much as I did with the gym test shot him envious looks as he effortlessly executed that backflip, and proceeded to earn extra marks with double-backflips.
My mind was too busy deciding between pleasant surprise and guilty conscience to accommodate envy. I was certainly familiar with the way those limbs moved. I'd been discreetly watching them through my neighbour's window for months--- until he'd caught me looking, and shut the curtain in my face.
We weren't acquainted then, and we still aren't. We might as well never will, because there's no way it won't be hideously awkward. All this while we've managed wonderfully not to run into each other despite living on the same street. I haven't even noticed him in the classroom we've shared for five weeks now. Of course, after the gym class I'm all attention.
Some girls might have noticed him early on as he's kinda cute up close, but on the rest of us he leaves little impression. Quiet, harmless, rather a loner, likely a geek. He wears prescription glasses when reading the blackboard, which gets me hoping he doesn't know my face yet. It is some distance between our houses... And he slips out smoothly once class is over, putting that agility to good use. Unless he's on cleaning duty, when I imagine he'd labour silently and diligently in order to finish quickly and go home. We're not in the same group, so I don't actually know.
Well, if he likes to be invisible, I'm not going to put up an advertisement myself.
Except I am.
I have the misfortune of graduating from the same junior high school as our current class rep, who, as the Cultural Festival looms near, unabashedly drags me into the organizing committee. I could cite as excuse the rarity of talents in our class (untrue) or the prevalent opinion that stageplays are troublesome (mostly true), but frankly I just can't help remembering the dancing next door and thinking what a waste ---which sends me blocking his path before he could disappear after class that day.
"Hey," I say, managing something like a grimacing smile.
He overcomes his initial surprise and, clutching his sling bag, replies in a small voice, "Yes?"
All at once I re-assess my judgement of our first encounter. Perhaps he wasn't being hostile. Right now he just seems tremendously shy.
I open fire. "About the Cultural Festival..."
He waits.
"...Would you contribute a dance number?"
He blinks.
The silence gets uncomfortable. Perhaps there's no escaping that confession. "Uh, I saw you dancing... and I think it's really good."
Now he drops his gaze to the floor. Doubtless he's working it out, and maybe just too polite to kill me with a stare.
I haven't expected him to ask, "How about you?"
"Eh?"
"Are you going to play the guitar?"
I figure that's his way of saying, 'I saw you, too.' So the few times I thought I saw the curtain rustling might not be just my imagination...
I don't realize I'm gaping until he glances up, looks nervous upon catching my expression, and shuffles away.
I scramble to follow. I've only played to myself and haven't planned to perform at the festival, but that answer won't help me get him. "...Yeah, I'm playing."
He slows down. "What kind of music?"
No choice but to follow through. "Er, blues? My playing's all over the place, but some I've written down, so I guess I'll just use those."
He turns, and makes the most eye contact I've seen him make in the entire school year. "You compose?"
"Nothing impressive, really," I say, embarrassed by the admiring stare. And, since I've been wondering about it, "And you? What songs do you dance to?"
"Dance music," he says, which explains nothing, but before I can press on, he asks, "So you'll be writing the music for the dance, too?"
In retrospect, for the tiny number of words he speaks, his questions sure get me into so much trouble.
[Refrain]
"I should warn you," I said, "I don't know if I'm good enough."
My newly-recruited dancer just looked at me. "I don't know either, since you haven't let me hear."
And that's how I ended up in charge of songs for not just one dance number but the whole 30-minute play we're staging for Cultural Festival.
But why not. The class rep is ecstatic, and I get to see the studio next door from the inside, since said dancer is also my neighbour. Long story.
"Why don't you try dancing," I suggest. "I'll play to match it."
"That's not how it works," he says. "You have to come up with the song first."
"Sure it can," I insist. "That's what I've been doing."
He frowns. "How?"
I catch myself. I used to watch him dancing from my backyard and he knows this, but he's yet to know I've one-sidedly accompanied the view with my own music. "Just dance to the beat, one-two-three-four..."
"Isn't this supposed to fit into a story?" he says. "I need to know the mood of the piece."
I think for a bit, then start experimenting on my guitar. A jazzy intro, as characters trickle in-- he vehemently avoids an acting role, but he's agreed to do an anonymous solo bit and direct a group dance. A dramatic boom-- I'll get someone to bang a cooking pot or something. Then some hip-hop-- Class Rep is writing the story with a street scene in it somewhere.
I look up from the strings to find him testing a series of steps. The sight is nostalgic.
My strums gain urgency. Characters are clashing. The extras will have to stomp their feet onstage for me; a guitar alone can't do the trick. Still the dancing catches on the shift adequately, intensity rising in the turns and swings.
Resolution drains the tension but doesn't lose the speed, the notes bouncing lightly on my fingertips. He pauses to adjust, resuming several bars later. I'm glad I've used a repetitive tune that I can carry on automatic, because he's taking on a style I haven't seen, part grace, part mischief, spiriting my focus away from the chords.
I wind it down to a close. We repeat and revise both song and choreography a few times, before finally writing things down.
"I'll wait for the finished story to add the words in," I tell him.
His breath still jagged, he says, "I don't think you need words for your song."
"Then it'd just be background music," I argue.
"It tells the story just fine," he says.
To him, maybe. Others---
Then it hits me that he's told that same story with his choreography without me wording it. And I've sung the stories I read in the flow of his dance whose music I couldn't hear. If I can create songs without a word, he can create them without a sound.
"I'll ask Class Rep," I reply absently. "Say... have you thought of forming a band?"
[Bridge]
We don't exactly leave school together. The class is already looking at us funny without us doing that. You may have it bad in an all-boys school, but if you're in a co-ed school and you're too shy to talk to girls and you spend your breaks with the same boy once or twice or, okay, one hundred times too many, that's worse.
He takes off from class as soon as he can, while I usually take my time, but sometimes I catch up with him at the bus stop, and sometimes, I suspect, he waits up. There was one time I saw our bus arriving from across the street, and although he was already at the stop, he didn't board it. I'd be flattered, but on further observations he's just dorky enough to be so engrossed in a book that he doesn't even know he's missed the bus until I arrive to nudge him. In any case, we do end up walking together quite a lot of the time.
By now his parents are used to him walking past their own door and entering my house instead. But today he holds his gate open and waits while I nip in to my room, grab the few volumes of manga I've promised to lend him, and call out to let my mother know where I'll be the rest of the afternoon.
She hurries from the kitchen to check on me before letting me off. "Be home by dinner, okay?" she warns. "And be sure to do your homework."
I assume this is just the sort of thing mothers routinely say to keep their children in line, as she knows my grades have gotten better since I've started spending time with the neighbour's kid, a.k.a. the science whiz; and she's mostly just happy I'm no longer "cooped up alone in the backyard with that guitar all the time".
We go up to his dance studio. According to him, nobody else in his family uses the room, and since he doesn't have lessons today, we can have it to ourselves. After getting the homework out of the way, he picks up the manga, while I attack his collection of video games, which is rather an impressive one.
"I'm amazed you have time to play all these," I remark. "The way I see it, you have dance lessons half the time, you do all the homework, and you can still study for all the tests."
"There are the weekends," he says. "I don't have to do chores, either."
As may be obvious by now, his family is pretty rich to have a soundproof home studio like this, so they can clearly afford a weekly housekeeper. Most people in this neighbourhood are. My family is quite well-to-do ourselves, so I can play the guitar all I want instead of working part-time.
"How did you get into dancing, anyway?" I ask. He doesn't have dancer parents in the way I have a guitar-playing dad.
"It was one of those enrichment stuff my parents enrolled me in when I was little," he says. "I learned other things too, like piano, but I guess that didn't stick. Even with dancing I wasn't really sure, but they told me I was good, so."
"You are," I agree. "And you have the figure for it." I'm not fat myself, but I have trouble enough simply flipping my body backwards, while he only needs to jump high enough to make it seem like flying.
Currently he's lying on his stomach, supporting himself on the elbows as he reads. The posture makes the muscles on his arms stand out, a rather unexpected sight given how thin he always seems, with that really slim waist and the legs that look as if they weighed nothing-- but, now that I notice, are just as well-muscled. Must be all those dance practices.
He catches my glance and squirms. "I'm not tall enough, though," he mumbles.
I turn the topic around before the colour on his face could spread to mine. "Tell me about it. When I was in junior high basketball, I was the shortest in the club."
"They didn't let you play in matches?"
"Eh, not that bad... But it's a fact that the taller guys could score more easily than I could. Anyway, I sort of quit basketball when I started getting serious with the guitar."
A small smile appears on his face. "Oh, I'm glad you did, then."
I'm not sure how to take that. Then again, perhaps I am. "Really? You're glad I spied on you?"
"Eh?"
I turn to start the long-neglected game, not waiting for him to make the connection. As the screen lights up, I can see from the corner of my eye that he's watching.
After a while, he quietly returns to his manga.
I wait until the booming aftermath of my hadouken subsides. "You're not going to leave the curtains open anymore?"
He looks up. His eyes flicker briefly to the object in question --indeed very much closed-- then turn to me. "No," he says slowly. "What for? You can watch from the inside now."
It's the first time I hear a challenge in his tone, though having seen how fastidious he is about school subjects and dance matters, I shouldn't have been surprised that he's not all gullible and obliging, as his looks might suggest. In a way, this is reassuring.
"True," I say. "But that's not really what I'm asking."
Then I put the game controller down, and reach over.
[Outro]
"Why do I have to sing, too?" he grumbles.
"We're performing as a band," I say patiently. "Normally, the one who's not playing an instrument provides the main vocals."
"But I'll be dancing."
"Yeah, but you don't have to dance the entire song. We'll take turns with the verse."
He examines the score for a minute.
"Then," he says, "you'll have to dance, too."
"I'll be holding the guitar!" I protest.
"I'll take that into account when choreographing," he says dismissively.
I swear, he's such a brat sometimes.
"Okay, look, how are your chords coming along?" I've taught him the basics and lent him my dad's old guitar to practise.
"Um, still struggling with F, but others are okay, I guess."
"Right then, you'll play the guitar together with me for this song. No dancing. Okay?"
He considers this. "Okay. But you'll dance along with me for Jounetsu. That's a fast-paced one."
"With the guitar?"
"We'll record the minus one. You need to add the beats in anyway, right?"
"Yeah," I agree reluctantly. Oh well, it's our graduation performance. If I make a fool of myself, at least I'm not going to face the audience in class every day afterwards.
"Hey," his quiet voice brings me back from contemplation.
"Yes?"
"Are we going to continue the band after graduation?"
He's going to university, so I'm afraid it will tire him out if we do, but I look at his expression and know that's not the answer he's looking for. "It's your fault we have it," I say, and knock his forehead for good measure. "Don't you dare disband it."
He rubs the spot sulkily, though the smile that peeks out from behind his arm rather ruins the effect. "Or what?"
I raise an eyebrow. "I know where you live."
---
Disclaimer: This writing is fictional and has no commercial purpose. Characters are real persons belonging to themselves.
Pairing: Teen KinKi Kids
Genre: AU, school drama, first-person
Rating: G
Summary: The boy next door is a dancer.
---
[Prelude]
The first time I saw the kid, I thought he was a girl. I was dribbling a basketball around our backyard, bored without opponents, when I noticed a slender form upstairs next door, practising dance moves to a music I couldn't hear through the sealed glass.
Naturally, I looked away. My education frowns heavily upon peeking into a girl's window. But a fourteen-year-old's restraint doesn't last long, and I was soon sneaking glances.
Of course, girls normally have the discretion to draw their curtains. And girls don't casually pull their shirts off after a sweaty exercise.
The situation lost its thrill after this revelation, but the boy, now topless, still unaware, resumed his dancing, and caught my attention with some cool, slick moves. Before long I was idly dribbling the ball to his body rhythm.
I become accustomed, hence, to peer at that window everytime I'm out in the yard. He isn't always there, but when he is, it's always for dancing. I figure the room is a studio, doubtless soundproof, as the audio never reaches me. The omission bothers me after a while, the absent tunes registering static in my ears, so my mind, and later my voice, starts supplying the music.
Upbeat songs I pick up from MTV-- though not ten words make it to my lips from the sea of English, and soon abandoned completely in favor of my own made-up lyrics. Popular rock-metal hits-- though it'd annoy me in the middle of a climactic chorus when the boy simply halts from a mistake and walks briefly out of view, presumably to restart his music. Not that he's to blame. For all I know he could be playing enka while I'm matching his choreography to X Japan.
Soon enough I'm taking my father's guitar to the backyard instead of a basketball, creating whole songs instead of reproducing them. And I remain wondering what music he actually dances to.
That day I'm watching him drill a complicated step to my three-chord accompaniment, when he stops, bends down, and freezes halfway up with a towel in hand as he sees me. We can't see each other's eyes across this distance, but I know he has caught me watching, because the next minute he yanks the curtain close.
I thought it was rather rude of him, but someone who's been spying his window probably has no right to think that. The following months, I occasionally take the guitar --mine now-- to play at the backyard, but I never see that curtain open again.
I never even see him in person, against the odds as it might be, but a relief considering what happened. He probably has different school hours, and assuming a normal homework load plus the frequency of his dance practice that I know firsthand, he doesn't seem to go out much.
It comes as a mixed blessing, therefore, when I start high school the following spring, and find him executing perfect double-backflips in my own gym class.
[Verse]
The second time I noticed him, I wasn't the only one. About half the class who'd struggled as much as I did with the gym test shot him envious looks as he effortlessly executed that backflip, and proceeded to earn extra marks with double-backflips.
My mind was too busy deciding between pleasant surprise and guilty conscience to accommodate envy. I was certainly familiar with the way those limbs moved. I'd been discreetly watching them through my neighbour's window for months--- until he'd caught me looking, and shut the curtain in my face.
We weren't acquainted then, and we still aren't. We might as well never will, because there's no way it won't be hideously awkward. All this while we've managed wonderfully not to run into each other despite living on the same street. I haven't even noticed him in the classroom we've shared for five weeks now. Of course, after the gym class I'm all attention.
Some girls might have noticed him early on as he's kinda cute up close, but on the rest of us he leaves little impression. Quiet, harmless, rather a loner, likely a geek. He wears prescription glasses when reading the blackboard, which gets me hoping he doesn't know my face yet. It is some distance between our houses... And he slips out smoothly once class is over, putting that agility to good use. Unless he's on cleaning duty, when I imagine he'd labour silently and diligently in order to finish quickly and go home. We're not in the same group, so I don't actually know.
Well, if he likes to be invisible, I'm not going to put up an advertisement myself.
Except I am.
I have the misfortune of graduating from the same junior high school as our current class rep, who, as the Cultural Festival looms near, unabashedly drags me into the organizing committee. I could cite as excuse the rarity of talents in our class (untrue) or the prevalent opinion that stageplays are troublesome (mostly true), but frankly I just can't help remembering the dancing next door and thinking what a waste ---which sends me blocking his path before he could disappear after class that day.
"Hey," I say, managing something like a grimacing smile.
He overcomes his initial surprise and, clutching his sling bag, replies in a small voice, "Yes?"
All at once I re-assess my judgement of our first encounter. Perhaps he wasn't being hostile. Right now he just seems tremendously shy.
I open fire. "About the Cultural Festival..."
He waits.
"...Would you contribute a dance number?"
He blinks.
The silence gets uncomfortable. Perhaps there's no escaping that confession. "Uh, I saw you dancing... and I think it's really good."
Now he drops his gaze to the floor. Doubtless he's working it out, and maybe just too polite to kill me with a stare.
I haven't expected him to ask, "How about you?"
"Eh?"
"Are you going to play the guitar?"
I figure that's his way of saying, 'I saw you, too.' So the few times I thought I saw the curtain rustling might not be just my imagination...
I don't realize I'm gaping until he glances up, looks nervous upon catching my expression, and shuffles away.
I scramble to follow. I've only played to myself and haven't planned to perform at the festival, but that answer won't help me get him. "...Yeah, I'm playing."
He slows down. "What kind of music?"
No choice but to follow through. "Er, blues? My playing's all over the place, but some I've written down, so I guess I'll just use those."
He turns, and makes the most eye contact I've seen him make in the entire school year. "You compose?"
"Nothing impressive, really," I say, embarrassed by the admiring stare. And, since I've been wondering about it, "And you? What songs do you dance to?"
"Dance music," he says, which explains nothing, but before I can press on, he asks, "So you'll be writing the music for the dance, too?"
In retrospect, for the tiny number of words he speaks, his questions sure get me into so much trouble.
[Refrain]
"I should warn you," I said, "I don't know if I'm good enough."
My newly-recruited dancer just looked at me. "I don't know either, since you haven't let me hear."
And that's how I ended up in charge of songs for not just one dance number but the whole 30-minute play we're staging for Cultural Festival.
But why not. The class rep is ecstatic, and I get to see the studio next door from the inside, since said dancer is also my neighbour. Long story.
"Why don't you try dancing," I suggest. "I'll play to match it."
"That's not how it works," he says. "You have to come up with the song first."
"Sure it can," I insist. "That's what I've been doing."
He frowns. "How?"
I catch myself. I used to watch him dancing from my backyard and he knows this, but he's yet to know I've one-sidedly accompanied the view with my own music. "Just dance to the beat, one-two-three-four..."
"Isn't this supposed to fit into a story?" he says. "I need to know the mood of the piece."
I think for a bit, then start experimenting on my guitar. A jazzy intro, as characters trickle in-- he vehemently avoids an acting role, but he's agreed to do an anonymous solo bit and direct a group dance. A dramatic boom-- I'll get someone to bang a cooking pot or something. Then some hip-hop-- Class Rep is writing the story with a street scene in it somewhere.
I look up from the strings to find him testing a series of steps. The sight is nostalgic.
My strums gain urgency. Characters are clashing. The extras will have to stomp their feet onstage for me; a guitar alone can't do the trick. Still the dancing catches on the shift adequately, intensity rising in the turns and swings.
Resolution drains the tension but doesn't lose the speed, the notes bouncing lightly on my fingertips. He pauses to adjust, resuming several bars later. I'm glad I've used a repetitive tune that I can carry on automatic, because he's taking on a style I haven't seen, part grace, part mischief, spiriting my focus away from the chords.
I wind it down to a close. We repeat and revise both song and choreography a few times, before finally writing things down.
"I'll wait for the finished story to add the words in," I tell him.
His breath still jagged, he says, "I don't think you need words for your song."
"Then it'd just be background music," I argue.
"It tells the story just fine," he says.
To him, maybe. Others---
Then it hits me that he's told that same story with his choreography without me wording it. And I've sung the stories I read in the flow of his dance whose music I couldn't hear. If I can create songs without a word, he can create them without a sound.
"I'll ask Class Rep," I reply absently. "Say... have you thought of forming a band?"
[Bridge]
We don't exactly leave school together. The class is already looking at us funny without us doing that. You may have it bad in an all-boys school, but if you're in a co-ed school and you're too shy to talk to girls and you spend your breaks with the same boy once or twice or, okay, one hundred times too many, that's worse.
He takes off from class as soon as he can, while I usually take my time, but sometimes I catch up with him at the bus stop, and sometimes, I suspect, he waits up. There was one time I saw our bus arriving from across the street, and although he was already at the stop, he didn't board it. I'd be flattered, but on further observations he's just dorky enough to be so engrossed in a book that he doesn't even know he's missed the bus until I arrive to nudge him. In any case, we do end up walking together quite a lot of the time.
By now his parents are used to him walking past their own door and entering my house instead. But today he holds his gate open and waits while I nip in to my room, grab the few volumes of manga I've promised to lend him, and call out to let my mother know where I'll be the rest of the afternoon.
She hurries from the kitchen to check on me before letting me off. "Be home by dinner, okay?" she warns. "And be sure to do your homework."
I assume this is just the sort of thing mothers routinely say to keep their children in line, as she knows my grades have gotten better since I've started spending time with the neighbour's kid, a.k.a. the science whiz; and she's mostly just happy I'm no longer "cooped up alone in the backyard with that guitar all the time".
We go up to his dance studio. According to him, nobody else in his family uses the room, and since he doesn't have lessons today, we can have it to ourselves. After getting the homework out of the way, he picks up the manga, while I attack his collection of video games, which is rather an impressive one.
"I'm amazed you have time to play all these," I remark. "The way I see it, you have dance lessons half the time, you do all the homework, and you can still study for all the tests."
"There are the weekends," he says. "I don't have to do chores, either."
As may be obvious by now, his family is pretty rich to have a soundproof home studio like this, so they can clearly afford a weekly housekeeper. Most people in this neighbourhood are. My family is quite well-to-do ourselves, so I can play the guitar all I want instead of working part-time.
"How did you get into dancing, anyway?" I ask. He doesn't have dancer parents in the way I have a guitar-playing dad.
"It was one of those enrichment stuff my parents enrolled me in when I was little," he says. "I learned other things too, like piano, but I guess that didn't stick. Even with dancing I wasn't really sure, but they told me I was good, so."
"You are," I agree. "And you have the figure for it." I'm not fat myself, but I have trouble enough simply flipping my body backwards, while he only needs to jump high enough to make it seem like flying.
Currently he's lying on his stomach, supporting himself on the elbows as he reads. The posture makes the muscles on his arms stand out, a rather unexpected sight given how thin he always seems, with that really slim waist and the legs that look as if they weighed nothing-- but, now that I notice, are just as well-muscled. Must be all those dance practices.
He catches my glance and squirms. "I'm not tall enough, though," he mumbles.
I turn the topic around before the colour on his face could spread to mine. "Tell me about it. When I was in junior high basketball, I was the shortest in the club."
"They didn't let you play in matches?"
"Eh, not that bad... But it's a fact that the taller guys could score more easily than I could. Anyway, I sort of quit basketball when I started getting serious with the guitar."
A small smile appears on his face. "Oh, I'm glad you did, then."
I'm not sure how to take that. Then again, perhaps I am. "Really? You're glad I spied on you?"
"Eh?"
I turn to start the long-neglected game, not waiting for him to make the connection. As the screen lights up, I can see from the corner of my eye that he's watching.
After a while, he quietly returns to his manga.
I wait until the booming aftermath of my hadouken subsides. "You're not going to leave the curtains open anymore?"
He looks up. His eyes flicker briefly to the object in question --indeed very much closed-- then turn to me. "No," he says slowly. "What for? You can watch from the inside now."
It's the first time I hear a challenge in his tone, though having seen how fastidious he is about school subjects and dance matters, I shouldn't have been surprised that he's not all gullible and obliging, as his looks might suggest. In a way, this is reassuring.
"True," I say. "But that's not really what I'm asking."
Then I put the game controller down, and reach over.
[Outro]
"Why do I have to sing, too?" he grumbles.
"We're performing as a band," I say patiently. "Normally, the one who's not playing an instrument provides the main vocals."
"But I'll be dancing."
"Yeah, but you don't have to dance the entire song. We'll take turns with the verse."
He examines the score for a minute.
"Then," he says, "you'll have to dance, too."
"I'll be holding the guitar!" I protest.
"I'll take that into account when choreographing," he says dismissively.
I swear, he's such a brat sometimes.
"Okay, look, how are your chords coming along?" I've taught him the basics and lent him my dad's old guitar to practise.
"Um, still struggling with F, but others are okay, I guess."
"Right then, you'll play the guitar together with me for this song. No dancing. Okay?"
He considers this. "Okay. But you'll dance along with me for Jounetsu. That's a fast-paced one."
"With the guitar?"
"We'll record the minus one. You need to add the beats in anyway, right?"
"Yeah," I agree reluctantly. Oh well, it's our graduation performance. If I make a fool of myself, at least I'm not going to face the audience in class every day afterwards.
"Hey," his quiet voice brings me back from contemplation.
"Yes?"
"Are we going to continue the band after graduation?"
He's going to university, so I'm afraid it will tire him out if we do, but I look at his expression and know that's not the answer he's looking for. "It's your fault we have it," I say, and knock his forehead for good measure. "Don't you dare disband it."
He rubs the spot sulkily, though the smile that peeks out from behind his arm rather ruins the effect. "Or what?"
I raise an eyebrow. "I know where you live."
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