v.
Oshitari remembers that his first advanced chemistry lesson in third year smells like strawberry and cyclohexane.

Gakuto gestures to the empty seat beside him and blows a gum bubble in Oshitari’s face as greeting. The teacher walks past their bench and gives him a dirty look over the top of the wobbly sphere (now inflated to dangerous proportions and obscuring two-thirds of his face), and Oshitari pulls on a rubber glove and pokes gingerly at the bubble. You’re not supposed to be eating in the Chem labs.

The deflated gum plasters itself pinkly to Gakuto’s lips;  he waits until Oshitari is reaching for test-tubes in the second drawer before leaning over to grab the squirt bottle of distilled water. When Oshitari looks up he gets hit full in the face with a stream of water that plasters his fringe to his forehead, dripping down his chin and trickling down his neck, droplets spreading damp translucence across his shirt.

Water gun. It’s super effective! Gakuto laughs until he nearly chokes himself on his gum and Oshitari knows that if Shishido were there he’d flick his hair over his shoulder and roll his eyes and mutter super lame. Instead he bangs Gakuto on the back (maybe a little harder than necessary, but it doesn’t matter as long as he doesn’t damage Gakuto permanently because they needs him for doubles) and says wryly, I suppose that was warranted.

Damn right it was, but there is no acid in Gakuto’s tone; they are back in neutral territory.

*

They line up the test tubes in the rack, seven of them, bases rounded like inverted raindrops: if you looked through the top you could see clear to the bottom, speckled marble of the benchtop covered with the carnage of past experiments, yellowish crescents marking the bases of conical flasks and an ugly splotch of dark blue here and there. There is a stain at the far right that Gakuto insists looks like a Pikachu, one ear cocked and two neat round spots of something darker where the cheeks are (possibly iodine), the tail a thin scribble spreading at the end that might’ve been a stream of iron sulphate.

Oshitari thinks (but doesn’t say, because there are potentially explosive chemicals in the vicinity) you are too obsessed with beating Jirou at Pokemon.

Today’s experiments are self-directed; they fill their test-tubes with 1.5 centimetres of different acids and alkalis and drip pH solution in one drop at a time. Oshitari’s hands are steady and his droplets precisely one drop’s worth in volume; Gakuto finds the whole process inordinately exciting and when he puts in the pH solution it dribbles down the sides in bursts, sliding down in a gradient of colour from colourless to orange to red. He waves the dropper around with wild abandon and Oshitari suppresses a wince for the surface of their lab bench.

It doesn’t matter, Atobe’s father’ll pay to re-tile the benches eventually. Gakuto snaps his rubber gloves with childish mock-menace, chews at his gum with renewed fervour so that Oshitari can hear the wet squelch of his chewing when he leans over to grab the bottle of solution out of danger from Gakuto’s enthusiastic experimentation.

The sunlight falls through the test-tubes and fragments into colours, painting flickering rainbows onto the desk, onto their white shirts, onto their worksheets. (Oshitari waits until Gakuto has turned around to wash out the dropper before doodling a flower and a pot of gold at the edge of Gakuto’s worksheet in pencil.) Their teacher nods approvingly in their direction and Gakuto daringly takes off his left glove and dips his fingers in every test tube, staining them red-orange-yellow-green-blue under Oshitari’s disapproving gaze. He wiggles them at the slight stinging feeling from the acids and Oshitari thinks suddenly of gummy worms dangling in front of a child; aligns his hand with Gakuto’s, noting the half-centimetre difference between their fingertips and feeling the soapy dampness of his fingers faintly through the rubber of the glove.

If Atobe kills you later for destroying your fingers with acid and you can’t hold a racket during practice, don’t say I didn’t warn you, he tells Gakuto, who laughs and flips a blue-tipped finger at him.

*

The bell announces the end of class, and the teacher tells everyone to wash up.

*

I liked the strong acids best, says Gakuto, so they pour that down the sink the last, watching the lazy eddy and swirl of the solution against the cool white stone, thin as water and red as blood.

They peel off their rubber gloves and toss them into the bin. Oshitari’s palms are sticky from sweat but his fingers are powdery; Gakuto yelps in disgust when he wraps a hand around his wrist. He sticks out his tongue with the gum he’s been chewing all lesson at the tip, and Oshitari stares because the gum is now the colour of the gloves they threw away, stretched thin by their hands and blanched greyish-white, and he wonders out loud, where did the colour go?

Gakuto looks at him and breathes strawberry air through his mouth (amyl acetate and fifty-eight other esters and alcohols), shrugs quick and sharp like a bubble going pop. The colours on his fingers are fading to sepia.

He holds up his hand and looks at it, squinching his eyes against the sun. Same way these did, I guess. It doesn't matter, tiptoeing to sling an arm over Oshitari's shoulders.

Oshitari supposes it really doesn't as long as Gakuto's fingers don't fall off.