Kuypu sighed, a desolate sag against the frosted glass of the door securing the ersatz privacy of the deserted classroom to which he'd fled. And backhanded shaming tears from his eyes. Math can't possibly be this hard, he pleaded into the abandon.

    Yet he really knew whereof his difficulty arose: Joshi, the cute dark-haired boy who sat in front, teenage shirttail tugging independently free of last year's jeans as he bent his back, laboring over equations and sums. He was the Damocles' sword of Kuypu's torment. Or, more precisely, that delectable sight which untucked clothing presented: the pale and smooth descent, the cascade of skin disappearing, channeled into misted shadow by hills of fondest flesh, that made mathematics ever the more improbable.

    And so it was that Kuypu had gone from straight A's in trig to scholastic probation, his eyes crossed at the elastic threshold of his classmate's underwear, pencil trembling ineffectually over daunting exam papers. There was yelling at home now, with more than half of the winged, flesh-rending cruelties exploding in a dark, churning froth of frustration from his own mouth. The moral metastasis of guilt and shame he felt inside was a stinking cancer, a suppurating lesion of the heart that exuded a repellent cloud about his person.

    So it seemed, in the hot, dusty afternoon sunlight. He swore he could smell his own rankness.

    For Kuypu just couldn't remember the last time a friend had spoken kindly to him.

    Perhaps it wouldn't be so hard discover about myself, he indulged, if I wasn't so lonely all the time now.

    The door burst open, with a sucking sound like a tube of refrigerator biscuits twisted apart. And Fani-chan sailed into the room, rolling expansively under a good wind and ample sail, quite happily oblivious to Kuypu's groans as he lay stunned upon the deck. True to tell, she probably did not see him, afloat on years of a buoyant adolescence composed chiefly of peanut butter, mashed potatoes, and bakery goods.

    "Kiki-kun!" she admonished breathily, straining an arm that had once been long enough toward her powdered pink face, her oxblood lips. "Did you leave before the test was over?" The very thought of it seemed a shock she couldn't bear.

    Kuypu nodded, heaving himself courageously off worn oak planking, blackened with the smut of age and tracked-in snow, abraded to the grain from the callous, demanding tread of countless needy feet.

    He doubted that he'd be able to deal with Fani, her walloping, perfumed bulk belying an even more ponderous sweet-smothering nature.

    That she was the best friend he had seemed both a blessing and a curse, and sometimes gave Kuypu a muddy, clay-like feeling in his stomach, frayed splinters in his head. She had spotted him out at once - there, his first year of high school - descended with massive talons at the ready. Kuypu, the nerdboy who never dated, was her unwitting bread and meat, the Hagen-Daz of her heart, the bonbon she could savor in assured safety and eternal, possessive joy.

    And, strangely, Kuypu knew this. They were best friends, after all.

    Yet another layer of mascara, exactly the shade of summer asphalt, excavated her eyes into tunnels beneath the overhang shelf of her brow. Kuypu watched as she plunged the makeup applicator back into the helpless bottle from which she had drawn it, a casual rapier in the inert body of a vanquished foe. It reminded him of the mops that the roofers had used when tarring his parents' house last summer.

    Oh, Ki-baby!" she wailed. "Your grades! You're failing stupendously, and you walk out in the middle of mid-terms?" She flippered her arms about, a tragedienne seal. "What were you thinking?!"

    Kuypu felt his guts slip out onto the rough wooden floor. Was there no way to get her to stop? He'd certainly never found one.

    His only thought, ducking into the empty room as he'd done, had been to escape the stares, the gawping faces in the corridor. A cold sweat of anxiety, the stress of it all had suddenly become too much, as he labored over sines and cosines on the test paper until the numerals and variables had swum together. The only curves he could focus upon rested minimally encased in denim on the seat of the Joshi's desk. Kuypu's chest tightened, stomach heaved. Then he was in the hallway, books gathered clumsily to his sweater, even before he knew he'd risen; the flow of tears on his cheeks, the only sensation within his body.

    And now, sanctuary broached by the well-meaning, whale-like Fani-chan - who he still ungrudgingly acknowledged as best friend - unmanned by her planetoid presence, he was totally and completely off his guard. She whiffed the game afoot, instincts sharp and ready to pursue her prey. Kuypu received her gaze, neither cowering nor challenging, frank numbness more effective than patience.

    "Yeah, I left class," he stated equally. "And I'd rather not talk about it."

    Fani's eyes narrowed, inhaled by her porcine cheeks.

    Did she detect sarcasm in his tone, he wondered? Kuypu didn't think he had been cutting - at least not intentionally.

    He knew he shouldn't be giving her the benefit of the doubt again, tasted shame even as he spoke his assertion. But Fani always wanted to 'talk it out', get inside his head, to stain and mount his feelings on the microscope of the latest psych-piece she'd read in some magazine. And he just didn't think he could take it again.

    Not right now.

    She sniffed, indicatively. Kuypu could tell, from the shiny tightness of fat beneath flesh, that her balloon face hovered as yet in equilibrium, static within the attraction-field between the poles of incipient upset. Seconds would tell if she'd chose anger, to miff and snit and refuse to speak; or else to weep, drawing slowly the exquisite tooth of his debt to her, with pliers of devotion unrequited.

    And he'd be there to calm, to console her, whatever. That he knew.

    "Well!" she exhaled.

    In the silence that followed, Kuypu replayed Fani's vocalization over and over in his head. He'd couldn't tell what she'd meant. Had exasperation supplanted the terrible twins of her temper and her tears? Yet there was no relief of resolution, only the peril that persists. And his need to preserve the one friendship he still had. The closeness of the room was as palpable as the trapped feeling of inevitability.

    It was motion, air past the open of the doorway, that drew Kuypu's attention, shattered the tableau. And the worst of all possible outcomes. Joshi's shirttail, still undisciplined by jeans, flounced in his wake as he stalked by. Kuypu could not pull his eyes away, and the expression came to his face too suddenly to hide.

    Fani rotated on precision bearings, caught a glimpse of the retreating boy, just enough information to set intuition a-teeter on the narrow blade of supposition. The startling agility of her body was matched only by the probing sharpness of curiousity, the penetration of her wit. And one look at Kuypu had been certainty enough, the fleeting sharpness of pain and hope in his eyes told all.

    Almost all. How she wished she'd seen the owner of those passing jeans.

    Kuypu knew, when she caught his eye. Knew he was owned, secrets exposed, his heart a window to the world. She wouldn't have to gossip: the humiliation was complete.

    Near complete.

    "Hay, Kuypu-san," Joshi greeted, having doubled-back in the corridor. "You doing ok?"

    It was the first time Joshi had ever spoken to him.

    Kuypu nodded, dumbly.

    Buddha! How many times he'd schemed and planned, fretting out just the right thing to say, the perfect impression to make, just the right way to set up with Joshi? And the best he could do at that moment was to stand blushing, fire in his face, heart beating fast in the exhausted swing from peak to emotional peak.

    "N'kay. I kinda thought... well, like maybe you had trouble on the test." There was an unexpected acceptance in his manner, in his voice. Yet something else, a knowledge and intent that Kuypu couldn't begin to fathom.

    Fani's eyes went wide; mouth, wider still. Could this boy possibly be...? The shirt still hanging free confirmed it. And the stroboscopic waves of flush and blanche succeeding each other by turns upon Kuypu's face and hands slowed time itself, allowed her to seize the opportunity.

    Fani wasn't about to be played for the fool.

    "So," she smirked at Kuypu, "I didn't know you and Joshi were... friends." A primal brow arched meaningfully.

    Kuypu understood, a deer in her headlights. He fled Joshi's glance, darted nimbly from the shame of exposure, the crush of embarrassment. To wither beneath Fani's sweet anschluss of subtlety, was his best and brightest hope.

    Joshi padded in on whispering canvas shoes.

    "'Cause if you had," he continued, perhaps not having heard Fani's obvious taunt, "well, I had trouble, too."

    Kuypu wished it would end. Let the boy go away, he prayed. How could he ever face him again, even in fantasies?

    Fani snorted, with infinite and precise expression.

    "And - that was the last exam for today - I was thinking... maybe you'd like to come to my house, get a start on making up the grade?"

    Fani's scoff became a cough, rang like a chime in the silence.

    "C'mon on then," Joshi beckoned softly, stepping carefully and deliberately between the friends. His palm came to rest on Kuypu's shoulder, as he led the other boy to freedom.