Scenes from Zhang Yixing Is a Girl, cont'd

[warmboys]

My Favorite Movie
Luhan/Lay
~900 words
PG
Yixing gets a tattoo. Lu Han doesn't ponder its significance.

Following up on :


(This is the second one.)

The week before graduation, Yixing walks into homeroom with the top two buttons of her uniform undone. Nothing else is out of place, from her sideswept windmill bangs to the old-fashioned starch on her collar. Lu Han looks up and sees it immediately. A small star inked into an unassuming, pale piece of skin.

“Oh my god,” Lu Han starts, and then a sputter of false starts:

“I-”

“What-”

“You really-”

Yixing pushes the second button into its buttonhole and takes her seat. She swishes her hair to face Lu Han. “Don’t make me regret this.”

“What do I have anything to do with… that?”

Everything, Lu Han wants to believe, but he isn’t as delusional as he pretends. Yixing turns her head whenever Lu Han leans in for a fake kiss, but that’s their routine, sure as slapstick. Nine months after they met Lu Han had proposed to her. It wasn’t a joke. Yixing swatted away the jade ring he’d stolen from his mother’s dresser, told him to get up, that he was making a scene. They were standing outside an ice cream shop and passing pedestrians stared openly at their matching backpacks and school uniforms. At the hole in the front of one of Yixing’s knee-high socks, which she had been forgetting for the past half year to mend. Yixing fidgeted with one of her braids and told him again to get up. “We’re in high school,” she said.

“I’m in love with you, ZYX.” Lu Han pronounced it like zee-wai-eks.

Yixing snorted into her melting cone and got vanilla froth on her upper lip. Lu Han wanted to lick it off. He was fourteen, the age of magic classroom boners. Magic because he wanted to believe he could wish them away at will.

They spent their past two summers at the beach, lying under a battered umbrella borrowed from the owner of the Korean food stand. Sand snuck into the open bag of chips they passed around, sloshed into the gaps between their teeth. Lu Han liked to dig a shallow hole with the heel of his flipflop and bury half his foot in it, with only the top half visible like a mutated hand. He wiggled his toes and said, “Hi!” in a high-pitched voice. “Hi! Hi! Hi!” until Yixing pulled her sunglasses down past her nose and fixed him with a pointed stare.

“I’m Lu Han’s foot,” Lu Han said, now wistful. “Play with me. I work so hard and no one ever pays attention to me.”

Yixing pushed her sunglasses back up and feigned ignorance. Fine grains had made their way into her knotty hair, which she had twisted into a ponytail at the top of her head. The stillness was a decoy. Five seconds passed. She grinned, as if she’d been ticking them off, and launched herself at Lu Han’s leg, holding his foot captive and tickling it with the mercilessness of a teenage girl with her best friend’s heart in her hands.

The second year saw a gentle swell rise in the front of Yixing’s modest one-piece bathing suit. At first she covered herself in a large t-shirt, but familiarity bred laziness, which bred not so much confidence as an uncomplicated negligence. Everything was sticking, so she pulled it over her head. She never pulled it back on. The days when Lu Han could look past Yixing and into the water, at the bright and uneven waves, the seagulls cawing overhead, sections of his vision distorted by sunlight, were the days he felt most like an adult.

He understood the physicality of his love, because that was obvious. Other things were more nebulous, like his fondness toward sunburns after Yixing rubbed aloe onto the red and peeling skin on his shoulder. Like how his body knew to stay still and catalogue the press of her fingers. He called her Cyclops the year no one could see more than one eye from her at a time. He called her Jay Chou in his earliest shy phase, obscured under a baseball cap.

“Stop comparing me to ugly things,” Yixing said, and flinched away from Lu Han’s proffered hand so all his fingers got was a combthrough of the blunt ends of her hair.

The tattoo is for Lu Han. The last month before their final year of high school he told her he was probably leaving. “I’ve been working on my singing.” He didn’t mention the dancing or the audition tapes or the outtakes where he looked directly into the camera and said, “This one’s for you, ZYX.” Sometimes he tacked on a “babe,” but that was too greasy for even private consumption.

An agency in Korea wanted him, and he’d probably have changed a lot before he could see her again. She nodded furiously, unusually animated, and expressed how proud she was of him. There was minimal eye contact. Lu Han waited for her to say something else, but it was all gushing and sweet, torn straight out of a heartbreak novel.

On the last day, Yixing snips the second button from her shirt and holds it on her palm. “Take this,” she says.

“I thought you were supposed to ask for mine,” Lu Han says, confused. He takes it, and it’s warm from the heat of her graduation robe.

“It’s alright. I don’t need anything from you,” Yixing says, and presses her hand over her neck, slightly hiding the star.