Puroko ran to get the ball that she had just thrown out-of-bounds. That was the rule in dodgeball. You throw it out, you get it back.
She ran to where it had landed but noticed that an older girl had picked it up first.
"Ano, gomen, demo can I have my ball back," she asked shyly.
The older girl - Puroko estimated she was about ten or eleven - smiled at her and said, "Oh, is this yours? I wondered where it came from." She tossed the cherry ball back to Puroko.
"Domo arigatou." Puroko turned to go.
"By the way, my name's Amber. Nice to meet you."
Puroko stopped. It would be rude not to introduce herself. And the girl's name was cool.
"Hi, I'm Puroko. Are you from America? Amber sounds American. Are you, huh?"
Amber blinked, surprised at Puroko's enthusiasm. "Yeah," she answered slowly. "It's� American."
Puroko bounced up and down, managing to clap her hands together and still hold onto the ball. "Sugoi! I love America! I've been there lots of times."
"That's-"
"Have you been to Hawaii? I went twice! Once I went with my whole family, and once I went with my big sister. Oh, and once I got to go and look at a volcano. And I got to swim with dolphins! Have you ever done that?"
Amber giggled, her golden eyes sparkling. "Nope. I haven't."
"You should. It's so much fun!"
"Sounds like it."
"Hey Puroko-chan!" her best friend Kono called from across the field.
"Comin'!" she responded energetically. "I gotta go," she told Amber.
"'Kay, I'll see you around then."
"Yippee!" Puroko bounded back to the game.
"Yeah, yippee," Amber echoed quietly before she disappeared in a puff of gold smoke.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Kono watched Puroko intently as she worked on her math problems. She tended to stick out her tongue when she was concentrating. "Ne, Puroko-chan? Does sticking your tongue out help you study?" he whispered, so their teacher couldn't hear.
Immediately her tongue shot back into her mouth. "Whatcha talkin' about?" she asked, as if she was unaware of doing it.
He laughed, a little too loudly, as the teacher sent them a look. They both got back to work on their worksheets.
But after a few minutes he dared to sneak a peek at her again. She was concentrating hard again, but this time her focus was just as much on keeping her tongue behind her teeth as on the word problem in front of her. He fought breaking into a smile, and lost. It was really cute.
Suddenly, he blushed and looked away, shaken by his momentary admittance that he had found her a little attractive.
Kono had recently come to the realization that of all the guys he knew, he was one of the few who still had a girl for a best friend. Or for any kind of friend. Most of the girls weren't making friends with the guys either. And realizing that, he suddenly became conscious of just how much Puroko was a girl. Not that he hadn't known before, of course. It just was that now he was hyperaware of it.
But he wasn't sure he was comfortable with the possibility that he liked her. And he really wasn't sure what she felt about him. Even if he were to someday like her as more than a friend - not that he was saying he would, of course - but if he did, he didn't know if she would like him. If she would even like boys!
"Ne, Puroko-chan?" he hissed.
"I'm tryin' to do math here," she pointed out, with just a hint of an attitude.
"Oh." Now was probably not the time to ask, he decided. He looked back at his own paper. He had done most of the problems already, just a few more to work on. It would probably be best just to think about them.
"What?" she finally asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.
"Uh, I-" Now that he had her attention, he wasn't sure what to say. "Do you, uh, I mean, I was wondering, uh, I mean�." He trailed off. Finally, he managed a weak, "Do you like boys?"
Her big blue eyes widened in innocence. "Of course. I like you, don't I, silly?"
They're teacher came over. "Kono-chan, Puroko-chan," she warned them quietly. "I don't want to have to give you a detention for talking during class."
"Gomen," they both said and went back to their worksheets again.
Kono finished all his problems and tried to figure out what to do about what Puroko had said. She had misunderstood, that much was clear. He couldn't leave it at that. "N- no," he whispered blushing. "I mean, will you like boys as more than friends� someday?"
The meaning behind his question finally dawned on her, and her cheeks began to match his in color. "I don't know," she told him awkwardly. She studied her finished worksheet in embarrassment. "It's not someday, is it." It was more of a rhetorical proclamation than a question.
"Well, it's just that, you know, you have two moms and your sister is dating a girl, so I was just wondering if you were."
But Puroko's awkwardness had been at the question of whether she liked anybody that way. She hadn't realized that this was a gender specific question, that he meant whether she was going to want a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend. She still didn't. "If I was what?" she asked, confused about what he was going on about at the risk of getting caught by the teacher.
"If you were- if you were, you know� gay?"
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