Beating Heart Baby by Lio Min

Author:Lio Min
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

* * *

After Cola leaves, the rest of Sleeping Forest goes out for karaoke, so it’s just me and Sayo in the apartment. My sister wordlessly opens the fridge, cracks open two beers, and passes one to me before taking a seat on a couch. I sit down on the other end, twirling the bottle between my palms.

Sayo takes a swig, and then, action. “Suwa, what exactly happened at that audition?”

I take a sip. “Cola wanted to put me through. I withdrew. I lied to you, and everyone else.”

“Does this have something to do with San—”

“Don’t say his name.” The words fly out of my mouth before I can stop them. I have the split-second thought, So this is how he feels all the time.

Sayo clicks her tongue. “Does this have something to do with … him?”

I run my finger over the opening of the bottle. “Sayo, do you remember the internet friend I had when I was a kid? The one who liked that anime Mugen Glider as much as I did?”

“Mugen … the one I fished out of the dumpster? Man, that was a weird show. And yeah, I remember your lil’ friend. What about him?”

We’re on our third beers by the time I finish talking. About Mugen Glider, @bubblegum-crises, Canti, and then the boy who’d appeared in my life like a geyser, obliterating everything and everyone that’d come before. I’m speaking sloppily by the time I finish, hiccupping between sentences. “So, that’s the whole sad story. I met him, I pretended I found him but didn’t actually think I’d found him, and then. Boom.” I carefully place my bottle on the floor.

Sayo pinches the bridge of her nose. “Lemme get this straight. When he confirmed it, you dumped him, then ran as far as you could from him, even though it meant turning down Cola Carter?”

Why does everything sound so crude when she lays it out like that? “Sayo, it wasn’t that simple.” I close my eyes and immediately submerge into the memory of that New Year’s Eve: the instant he spilled his secret, which I’d been keeping, too, in my own way, by denying the possibility of its existence. The uncertainty on his face that’d instantly given way to a hopefulness that shimmered like heat lines drifting up from sunbaked pavement. He’d acted like he’d been dealt a hand of Brights in a game of Go Stop. Like he’d looked up on a whim and caught a meteor shower on a cloudless night. Like he’d been waiting for this moment his entire life.

I hadn’t been able to face it. “It” being his actual face and the idea that after all this time I’d spent reimagining and reshaping my body, my life, I’d actually been retracing my steps, returning to the version of myself I’d tried so desperately to erase and outgrow. And just like I did during our first breakup, I’d panicked and made what I prayed would be a clean cut, to finally leave who I was behind.

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