The first call
came around ten in the evening, and after the third he convinced his
mother to drive him to Kuri's apartment.
For a while he
thought of calling Kyoko, but her parents would most likely have gone
ballistic if he tried a stunt like that.
Traffic was
bad with a lot of people in their twenties driving to parties
celebrating that summer was about to end. A lot of university
students flocked the streets as well. All in all it took his mother
the better part of half an hour to get there. Eleven pm.'
It was still
warm in the air, so the shuddering couldn't be because he was
freezing. Yukio ran up the stairs and grabbed Urufu's shoulders.
“What's wrong, man?”
“She's not
here. She doesn't take calls and she doesn't reply to emails. I don't
know where she's gone. Amaya's coming. She's a police and there has
to be something she can do.”
Yukio let the
flood of words roll over him. Urufu was frantic, and he probably
didn't even know he was talking constantly.
“Man, calm
down. Mom's here and Sato-sensei is coming. We'll be fine,” he
said. Truth be told he didn't have a clue what the emergency was
about. Kuri was out, she had flipped her phone off and thus she
couldn't be reached. End of problem. Both Urufu and Kuri were grown
ups anyway. They just looked like high schoolers.
But then crap
with Urufu seldom was that easy.
Yukio looked
down the stairs. His mother stood there looking back up. She pointed
towards a line of vending machines and Yukio nodded. She vanished out
of sight, and Yukio sat down beside his friend. There wasn't much
else to do?
From outside
the railings he could hear the muted metallic thumps of cans dropping
to the bottom of a machine. Shortly afterwards his mother came up
with some canned coffee. When she looked at him Yukio just shook his
head. There wasn't anything more she could do, and she walked back
down again. A bit later a thin line of white in the dark rose above
the railings. He smelled the cigarettes she smoked whenever she felt
awkward or nervous.
Urufu remained
strangely silent throughout all this. When he was done with his first
outburst it was as if he didn't have anything more to say, and a
silent Urufu wasn't anything Yukio was prepared to handle. It was
outright unnatural.
The sound of
an engine save Yukio from his problem. He rose and leaned over the
railing. Just as he had hoped Sato-sensei opened the door and stepped
out. He saw her and his mother exchange a few words and then he heard
Urufu's guardian make her way up the stairs.
“What's
going on kids?”
Not a 'hello',
no 'how are you doing' or even a 'good to see you again'. But maybe
that was Sato-sensei when all was said and done.
“Don't know
to be honest, sensei,” he said. That wasn't entirely true, was it?
“Seems Urufu can't contact Kuri, and he's worried,” Yukio added.
This time he had told her all he had to add.
Sato-sensei
looked at him. “You're a good friend, but I don't think you have to
worry so much.” Then she smiled at him, a friendly smile but very
much the kind of smile a grown-up gives a child.
Yukio wasn't
comfortable with that, but he had involved adults because he was
uncertain what to do. “It's not that Kuri's gone I'm worried
about,” he tried to explain. “But Urufu didn't feel all that well
earlier, well you know.” More like he had gone totally under the
surface for some time, and that did worry Yukio. It was doubly
frustrating as he wasn't certain how much the adults had learned or
how much he could tell them.
“Thank you
for caring. I'll take it from here. I think you can go home with your
mother now.”
At that moment
Urufu's phone blared to life, and Yukio watched his friend
frantically dig around in his pockets for it.
Listening to
half a conversation in Swedish was bewildering. Yukio only understood
Kuri's name, or rather the unpronounceable version of it Urufu used.
His voice rose from concern and worry to anger and irritation; it
hovered on frustration, balancing on the edge between resentment and
reconciliation until the latter won and Urufu's voice sank back to
some kind of mutual understanding and promises. After that it petered
out into soft sounds Yukio didn't need to know Swedish to understand
anyway.
He watched
Urufu hang up the call, slide the phone back into the pocket where it
belonged and stretch out on the concrete outside Kuri's door. He
sagged, shrunk as worry ran off him and met the eyes of his guardian.
“I think we
can go home,” he said. “She was only working late.”
You should
have called earlier, Yukio thought. Dammit Kuri, Urufu
deserves better. “You OK with me going home, man?”
Urufu nodded
and accepted the hand Sato-sensei stretched out to him. “I'll be
fine. Thanks for being here, Yukio.”
Yukio grinned.
“You'll be there for me next time. Just go home man.”
There was no
smell of cigarettes from below, so Yukio knew his mother already sat
in the car waiting for him. He grabbed Urufu's shoulder and walked
down the stairs. Somehow he didn't think this was the last of it.
Rather a beginning of something he wasn't sure he wanted to see
through.
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