Chapter 1
It had all begun shortly after Hiro had graduated from high school. He had relished in the fact that his big brother, with his earliest tertiary class beginning at ten o’clock, had to get up before he did. Oh, how the tables had turned. He laid in bed every morning and practically laughed Tadashi out the door.
Aside from not having to get up ridiculously early five times a week, Hiro was ecstatic about having left school for so many reasons. For one thing, being the youngest in all his classes by a clear four years didn’t exactly fill people with the overwhelming urge to talk to him. Not to mention that he was the smartest in his year group. And it definitely didn’t help that he liked to brag about it, and openly discuss theories with the teachers, and even act superior in front of his much older and stronger peers, which made things even worse for him. He’d been made fun of, pushed around, and pranked more times than he could care to remember, but it never got to him, not really.
Nevertheless, Hiro enjoyed the quiet and productive solitude of his room while children his age wasted their days trudging around a schoolyard. He had so much free time to play his games, to mess around with old parts he’d collected, to work on his own projects. He could do whatever he pleased. Everything was great.
That was, until Aunt Cass started acting weird.
Tadashi had forced Hiro on multiple occasions to offer his assistance running the bakery during the day. At first he had refused, flatly declaring that she could just build autonomous robots to make the coffee, supply freshly baked goods, and clean, which would save herself some money, time, and effort. And Hiro had thought that his suggestion was reasonable, but Tadashi had only shaken his head at him. “Unbelievable.” Hiro claimed, ego inflated, that he would even build all of those robots himself, now that he had some free time, and Tadashi could help with the programming. Tadashi just ruffled his hair and laughed. He had so many better things to be doing.
Aunt Cass herself never asked Hiro for any help. It seemed that she had found some trusted staff she could rely on enough to take over when other things needed attending to. What things, Hiro wondered, well…
It was around eleven o’clock when he heard her come upstairs. Eleven was a slow hour for the bakery; it was too early for lunch and it was too late for breakfast. Hiro was still in bed, not yet dressed, slurping on steaming strings of ramen noodles as he played on his console, one-handed. Difficult, but not impossible. He greeted her as usual, “Hey, Aunt Cass,” with no speculation whatsoever as to why she was there. She largely left her two charges alone, both being the independent and bright young men she’d raised them to be. But she came up occasionally when she needed something. But she hadn’t said what she needed yet.
She gingerly perched herself on the side of his futon bed, looking over him to watch whatever it was he was playing. Some infinite iteration of a familiar RPG that he was determined to grind through. He barely noticed her presence, but he kept up a running monologue as he played, which he tended to do regardless of whether anyone else was in the room with him or not. It mustn’t’ve made a lot of sense to her, but it was a whole ten minutes later and she was still sitting right beside him.
Eventually she spoke and it was so unexpected that Hiro jumped. “Hiro,” she said, and Hiro imagined his brother screaming at him where his manners were, and he put down the console and looked up at her. She looked really lovely today. She was wearing some really nice shade of lipstick and her hair looked silky. She smiled at him and there was a crinkle at her eyes that was just so warming. “Sorry to interrupt your game there.”
“Oh, uh, sorry, Aunt Cass.” He laughed guiltily and pushed his console away, as if that would make up for the fact that he ignored her for ten minutes. He beamed at her and opened out his hands. “Uh, soooo what’s up?”
There really mustn’t have been any huge barrage of customers downstairs because she really took her time answering him. She just seemed to stare at him, smiling. Hiro found his gaze flitting elsewhere as the silence dragged on between them. He wondered if she was OK. She was a little slow this morning.
“Hiro,” she said – so suddenly that Hiro jumped again. “I just wanted to say that I’m so… so… proud of you.”
Hiro could feel his cheeks heat up, even when he made a show of already full-well knowing just how brilliant and marvellous he was. “Thanks, Aunt Cass. Um… Wha-What are you proud of me for? Exactly?”
“Well. It’s not every day a boy prodigy graduates from high school four years before his age-group, and still manages to be at the top of his class.”
Hiro rubbed the back of his neck bashfully. “Haha… I… guess not. I’m a prodigy for now, but I guess it’s all downhill from here.” He said it as a joke, laughing to accentuate it, but it was still sort of true. He looked to his console, fingers itching to get back there and grind, but there were still no signs that Aunt Cass was leaving.
She reached up and put a hand through his bed-hair, moving it along his scalp in slow to-and-fro motions. He continued to stare at her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. He could tell she was looking at the little gap between his front teeth from where her eyes moved. “Did you have the best marks in all your classes?” she asked.
“Um, most of them, yep…”
“What about sex-ed?”
His eyes widened. It felt like his heart had just skipped a few beats. “Ssssorry…?” Did he mishear her? Even at this distance?
“Sex education, Hiro,” she said, the words rolling off her tongue so effortlessly like she was talking about something completely different. She leaned in a little more. “Were you top of the class?”
“Ummmm.” His face and ears was burning. It was so embarrassing, and he remembered back to when some of his creepier peers posed similar questions to him at school. He was a boy prodigy whose grades trumped everyone else’s, and who excelled at all areas of mathematics and hard sciences, and yet he hadn’t even finished puberty yet. He couldn’t even hear someone say the word “sex” without getting all red and flustered. It made him feel a hell of a lot younger than he liked to think he was. He hated it.
He wanted to look Aunt Cass in the eye and answer her in the straightest, most chill and unaffected tone, but he could barely manage an answer on its own. “Th-There is no uh, sex-ed in the senior year… And, I was considered too young to be in those classes back when… yeah.” He wanted that to be the end of that, but he was afraid Aunt Cass wouldn’t drop the subject. Surely she could see how uncomfortable he was…?
She suddenly looked surprised and Hiro realised that it was the first shift in her benevolent expression since she’d been there. “You’ve never had sex-ed?”
For a second there, Hiro was terrified that she was going to give him a few lessons right then and there. He’d never been more motivated to get out of bed in all his life. He threw the blankets off his legs and crawled past her, out from underneath her affectionate hand. “S-Sorry, Aunt Cass,” he cried, jumping off the bed and running to the small bathroom he shared with his brother. He paused in the doorway, hand already on the door and pulling it closed slowly. He made an effort to look apologetic. “I just remembered I said I’d meet a um, friend in town, and I still gotta shower and stuff, so… y’know…”
He stared at her, expecting her to take the hint so he didn’t have to outright ask her to leave. But she had barely moved. She had adjusted her posture so she was still facing him. She was still smiling. And Hiro couldn’t quite shake the unnerved feeling he got from her…
To hell with being polite, he decided. “Bye,” he blurted, closing the door. He stayed silent and still on the other side of that door for a few seconds before he heard her footsteps heading downstairs. It was only until then that he started up the shower and quietly yelled to his bewildered reflection in the mirror, “what the hell was that?!”
Hiro had planned on sharing this very weird experience with his brother once he came home from the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology. He had the story all mapped out in his head – he’d gone over it enough times throughout the day as he took a stroll of the city. But, he couldn’t seem to find the perfect opportunity to tell it. His brother came home late, had a late dinner with Aunt Cass, would not stop raving about all the cool robotics projects he got to see in action, and then he was out like a light by ten thirty. Unbelievable.
As Hiro settled down in his futon a few hours later that night, he supposed that it didn’t really matter. Clearly Aunt Cass had forgotten all about it, from the way she animatedly talked to him and his brother at dinner. Maybe he was supposed to forget all about it too.
Later he would wish that he had at least said something.