Keiyuh was a bug. He had been a prince(ss), a knight, an explorer, a Periodic athlete, and now he was a bug. He felt like one, more than any other role, because when he was a prince, a knight, an explorer, an athlete, nobody treated him as such. He didn’t try very hard to become something other than a bug, so it was partly his fault, anyway. 

But some time during his bug-like-stay, Ms. Cosby looked him right in the eye, the way she never did, and offered him a cookie. No one liked those oatmeal and carrot cookies, but he did, and he especially liked them when Ms. Cosby handed them to him. It was during one of his trips to their office, pretending to be a detective now that he’d outlived his bug status, that he’d stumbled across it.

It was tucked under several books about helping young Interlocutors manage their Elemental hearts, and it had caught his eye because of the bright neon orange seeping through the back. On the front, cut out from a newspaper, was a picture of two young, well-dressed girls–twins. He flipped it over and was met with a black-and-white picture of a boy his age–cut from another newspaper–grinning large enough to show the gap where his left canine tooth was (and she thought, I must be older because I’ve already grown those in), palms cupped around a floating rock. 

The article said something like this: the young boy was believed to be Hollow when he failed to develop his Elemental heart after his fifth birthday, and there were no signs of progress to dispute this. On his seventh birthday, however, he experienced a jarring event. He had been visiting the cliffs to look out over the ocean--and what a thoughtful boy he must be--and suffered what could have been a lethal fall when pretending to play fight his invisible friend (the article sounded very fond here, like a stranger recalling a universally adorable concept), but lo and behold, he saved himself. 

This boy has set the record for the latest manifestation of one’s Elemental heart. Dozens of doctors, psychologists, and researchers speculate that some factor had been holding him back: perhaps the trauma he’d sustained to his head or the adrenaline from the life-or-death situation had kickstarted his latent heart … 

Keiyuh dropped cookie crumbs on the newspaper, which freckled the boy’s cheeks, and colored his eyes the dull orange of a chunk of carrot. The photo came to life. The boy blinked the cookie crumbs out of his eyes, and they melted into tears. “I’m sorry,” the boy told him. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Keiyuh whispered. Or he thought. Was his mouth moving? 

“I’m sorry,” he moaned. He was beginning to blend into the walls, the musty smell, the threadbare look from the perpetual masticating of moths, the cramped hunch of his shoulders, the monochrome of his skin.  

“I didn’t mean to! I tried to stop it, I did, I did, I’m sorry, come back, please.”

Keiyuh swallowed, and the cookie stuck in his throat. “I could’ve done something,” he told the crying boy. “It wasn’t your fault.” 

(There was something off about this scene.)