“So? What were you working on?”
“…Here.” Juuzou hesitated as his hand hovered over the crinkled piece of paper. The smeared graphite and the eraser burns stared back as if mocking him. He rescinded his hand. “Actually, hang on, lemme rewrite this. It’s way too fucking messy—”
“Wait!” Ayu grabbed his hand. “It’s okay. You don’t have to do that. All that matters is that it’s legible, right?”
“I… I mean… I guess so.”
Juuzou slowly slid the crinkled and torn paper forwards. Ayu peered at it intently. It was obvious she couldn’t read a note of sheet music but her eyes drank up the words beneath the bars. Juuzou squirmed. Ayu turned to him, her eyes wide and innocent.
“What’s it sound like?”
Juuzou flinched; he was afraid she would ask that. He studied his own writing as his palm hugged the strings of his guitar. He swallowed back the frog taking residence in his throat. Gradually, his fingers stroked the chords and Juuzou found his voice. Somehow, the melody that was once roses and nectar now sounded like thorns and honey. It wasn’t sharp, sugared water as Juuzou initially thought. It was close, but… It wasn’t there yet. Something was missing. Or maybe his song was never all that great to start with.
Juuzou stopped the strings with his palm. He sucked in a deep breath. He glanced over at Ayu. Her eyes glossed over with sparkles of admiration and her mouth was wide open. Juuzou blinked.
“That was so good, Hanazoe!” Ayu gushed. “You’re really good at singing! Wow… That was like being in a mini concert!”
“Um… Thanks.”
“So what did you think was wrong with your song?”
“It’s just…” Juuzou ran a hand through his long bangs. “It’s not this part that’s exactly the problem. This is only the refrain and first verse; they’re fine, I guess. But I don’t have anything else. I tried writing a second verse, but… I couldn’t get it right.”
“Is that this part here?” Ayu questioned, pointing at the part of the paper covered in eraser burns.
“Yeah.”
“So what do you think is wrong with it?”
“I just… I don’t like it,” Juuzou responded flatly. “It’s not at all what I envisioned. It’s just… It’s just not fucking good enough!”
“Hanazoe…” Ayu pursed her lips. Juuzou couldn’t help but glower back at her. “Are you perhaps… A perfectionist?”
Juuzou’s eyes widened and he snapped, “No! Hell, no! Absolutely not!”
“Then why did you quit halfway through writing because your song ‘wasn’t good enough?’”
Juuzou’s grip on his guitar slackened. Ayu continued staring at him with her large, doe-like brown eyes. There wasn’t a shred of animosity behind her gaze. It was a simple question, analogous to stating something matter-of-fact. Why did he quit? Was there something he couldn’t handle about his song? No… That wasn’t the case. It wasn’t just songwriting. Even as Death Frost—and during his time with Honda and the Chasers, too—Juuzou simply…
“Listen, Juuzou,” His father’s grip on his shoulders was firm but gentle, “as you go into middle school, you’re going to face a lot of changes and challenges. But that’s okay; you can handle them all. Just remember: an A is acceptable. Anything else is not acceptable.”
“Another A+?” His father’s smile was warm observing the bright red and proud one hundred on the exam paper. “Yet another passing mark. Keep this up, Juuzou.”
“A ninety?” His father’s brow furrowed as he frowned. “It’s an acceptable score, but make sure you take care not to slip further. I want you to raise this to a perfect mark next time, okay?”
“An eighty-five!? This is the exact opposite of what I asked for! Juuzou, this isn’t acceptable in the slightest. Get it back up into the nineties. An A is what is acceptable in this household.”
“Anything else is not acceptable.”
“…Yeah. I…” Juuzou’s hand slid down his face in horrid realization. “I… I am a perfectionist. I really am.”
His parents placed him on a pillar destined to fall. But Juuzou didn’t know that. He thought that the foundation was as sturdy as his love and trust in his mother and father. When the pillar started cracking, though, his parents refused to take heed. They ignored it as they berated their son. Juuzou didn’t know what to do because he never even thought his foundation could come close to shattering in the first place. And when that pillar finally fractured from the ground up, his parents turned their backs on him. He called out for them while referencing the love and trust they once held. But they didn’t answer. Instead, they blamed him for the devastation. They built him up, but the fall was all his fault. And though the pillar was gone, the fragments remained.
Even now, those shards were embedded deep into Juuzou’s heart. He repressed his memories—he didn’t even want to remember those times—of when he loved his parents and acted as their perfect son, but the effects of those times constantly stirred in the back of Juuzou’s mind. The reason why he ditched the Chasers during Shun’s Rebellion… The reason why he never sustained any drawn-out fights with the Lively Trio… The reason why Izayoi Akira called him a coward… The reason why he gave up halfway through writing this song… It all came down to this.
Perfectionism.
Juuzou shuddered and covered his mouth. He felt like hurling. Cold chills snaked up and down his back while his skin prickled with pins and needles. The hand clutching the neck of his guitar trembled, but Juuzou couldn’t feel his fingers. His vision blurred and he could no longer see the writing on the page. The straight edge of his desk curved and melted into his walls. Suddenly his clothes itched and itched as if filled with ants. The ceiling was too high. His throat was so, so dry. The past he thought he abandoned so long ago…
It wasn’t as far away as Juuzou wanted to believe.
A specter appeared before him. It was a young boy who stared at him with peril-fraught eyes. The child wore sweater vests and slacks with his bangs swept to the side. Juuzou’s eyes widened. Was that a younger version of his father staring back at him? No, that was… That was Juuzou. That was his younger self from middle school. But he was a mirror image of their father, right down to the very expression that said, “You can’t settle for this. Do better. Always be the best. Don’t accept anything less than perfection.”
But most of all…
Don’t you dare fail.
“Hanazoe? H-Hanazoe? Hanazoe!”
“I— What— Yeah?” Juuzou glanced at Ayu.
“Is everything alright? You suddenly went super pale. And you’re trembling really bad!”
“I— I— I… Oh, shit.” Juuzou bit his lip and buried his face in his hand. “I-I’ll be okay, Hiiragi. Just gimme a minute.”
“Here, drink some of your mugicha.”
Ayu grabbed Juuzou’s glass and handed it up to him. He pried his hand away from his face. He tried taking the cup from her but his hand shook so much the beverage slipped right through his grasp. Ayu stood up and held the rim of the glass up to Juuzou’s lips. He opened his mouth and gratefully drank gulp after gulp of cold barley tea. When Ayu lowered the cup, it was completely empty. Juuzou sighed as his breaths steadied into an even rhythm. It was like the frigid mugicha sent a shockwave through his brain that now enabled him to think clearly. He glanced at his crumpled sheet of songwriting and grimaced.
“…Thanks, Hiiragi.”
“Of course!” Ayu hesitated and bit her lip. “Was it… Was it something I said?”
“What? Oh, no. Oh, God, no! You said nothing wrong, Hiiragi!” Juuzou replied quickly. “If anything, you told me exactly what I needed to hear. I just… Nevermind.” He sighed. “What… What do I do now?”
“Actually, I brought some of my poetry notebooks.” Ayu opened her backpack.
“What? How’s that—”
Juuzou blinked. The very first page of Ayu’s notebook was covered in writing. But not just writing in plain pencil or stark black. It was also covered in red. Juuzou’s first instinct was to cringe and look away. He couldn’t stand red ink. But there was also something captivating about that web of scarlet. Juuzou’s eyes widened upon closer inspection of the page. The red ink didn’t delineate anything wrong with the writing. It didn’t point out a single mistake. “Find a different synonym” and then an accompanying list of suggestions. “Too many syllables” and then ways to make the poem shorter. “What does this even mean??” followed by several bullet points of ideas. The red revealed countless revisions and edits. When Juuzou studied Ayu’s face, there wasn’t a hint of shame in her expression. When she stroked the page, her touch was gentle and nostalgic and tender.
“In writing—any writing, really—nothing will be perfect on the first rendition,” Ayu explained. “That’s why we call it a first draft: it implies there will be more. Writing is the art of revision, of figuring out your missteps and ways to improve. Nothing needs to be perfect on the first go. That’s utterly impossible in the first place! The drafts after the first exist so you can get better and learn from your mistakes. Try writing the second verse again,” she urged. “It doesn’t have to meet your expectations. It doesn’t even have to be good. Instead of trying to come up with the best version possible, focus on just making progress. If you need help, I’m right here for you.”
Juuzou sucked in a breath and picked up his pencil. The words of the second verse stared back up at him like polka dots in a sea of monochrome. His brain itched at the sight of the incorrect syllables and inefficient word choices. But he had to ignore it all. Juuzou pressed the tip of his pencil onto a fresh, new line. Continuing where he left off was not as easy as it seemed. He bit his lip trying to find new phrases to reiterate the themes of his song without sounding repetitive.
“Hey, Hiiragi?”
“Yes?”
“I want… I kinda want to use the word ‘dark’ again here, but… I already used it in this line. See? Do you have any suggestions for what else I could use?”
“Hmm…” Ayu peered at Juuzou’s writing. “Well, you used a lot of English in the refrain and the first draft. So if you wanted to mix it up, you could try ‘dark’ in English instead. Oh, wait, that’d throw off the syllable count, wouldn’t it? Why not try ‘black?’ It’s basically a synonym and has the right number of syllables.”
“Yeah, but— No.” Juuzou exhaled. “I’ll go with that for now. Thanks.”
“If you’re still not satisfied, you can try experimenting with repetition in later drafts,” Ayu added. “It might add an interesting new rhythm.”
“Huh… I didn’t think about that. I’ll consider it.”
In the corner of the page, Juuzou wrote “consider using repetition.” Dark night. Dark roses. Dark thorns. He could see what Ayu was talking about; it would make the second verse distinct from the first. Or… He could use repetition for the third verse instead. Juuzou pressed forward with his original idea. The order of the verses didn’t matter right now. He could mix it up if he wanted to splice lyrics to go into other verses. Hell, he could change the whole damn melody if he so desired. Juuzou never realized he had this much freedom while songwriting. Unlike tests, where every answer was final, nothing here was set in stone. Sure, it was written down on the page, but it wasn’t permanent. Things could shift. They could move and flow and drift as if swimming through water.
The words once stuck in honey lifted from the paper. Juuzou hummed to himself as his pencil moved across the page. The thorns withered as the roses bloomed. Even in the summer sun, black was stark against the sky.
“I did it…”
Juuzou’s pencil stopped and he gasped in amazement. The second verse of his song stared back at him on the crinkled, torn, dirty sheet of paper. He still didn’t have a bridge or a complete melody and it wasn’t perfect—far from it—but it was something. The bare bones of a song stared back up at Juuzou. Not just any song; his song. He wrote this. This was his doing. He hadn’t stuck out something this difficult in a long time. His perfectionism and fear of failure simply wouldn’t let him.
“Congrats, Hanazoe!” Ayu cheered.
“Thanks… I never… I didn’t… I never thought…”
“You want to change, don’t you?” Ayu pointed out.
“Y-Yeah… I do. I want to change,” Juuzou declared.
“Then this is your first step forward,” Ayu proclaimed. “If you want to change, I don’t think it’s possible to do that without falling down a few times. There will be missteps. There’s gonna be mistakes. But that’s all okay. Every time you fall, there is nothing stopping you from rising back up. And when you don’t have the strength to stand on your own,” Ayu smiled brightly, “I’ll be there to help you rise again.”
“Hiiragi…”
Juuzou didn’t want to go back to who he was in the past. That subservient boy was gone. He changed back then and now he needed to change again. He didn’t ask to become who he was now—Juuzou never originally wanted this—but at the same time… There were parts of him he wanted to stay the same. Juuzou didn’t want to give up his music or his sense of style. He liked his piercings! And he still badly wanted to attend an Asian Kung-Fu Generation concert. But his perfectionism and his loathing and his fear of failure… Every flaw and ugly part of himself that resulted from his fall… Juuzou wanted to be free. After clinging to the past for so long, it was time to let it go. That wasn’t going to be easy; he knew it wasn’t and Ayu did too.
But this time… This time Juuzou had someone helping him pick up the pieces of his broken self. He wasn’t doing it solo anymore. He could try new things. He could fall. He could branch out. He could trip. The important part was that he got back on his feet. Before, those were all things Juuzou simply wouldn’t do. The future was unknown and that was scary, but… It was also just as exciting, if not more so. Juuzou could finally see that now with Ayu by his side.