Something To Remember Me By

chapter 3 (year 15).....

The Monopoly board nearly went flying as Ino's knees bumped the coffee table violently. She stood up with a screech, and everybody jumped.

"You cheated!"

Shikamaru sighed, thumbing through his money, multicolored paper wings flapping away. "I didn't cheat, woman, I'm just good at this game," he told her, in a way that let Naruto know she'd been told it many times before. Ino just stomped her foot. She had been mad earlier, too, because the extreme heat of that summer was making her hair frizz up.

"A summer like no other," is what the weather man had said, and it was shaping up to be just so. Oceanview was experiencing higher temperatures than it'd felt in the last ten years, and it's citizens were baking. There was at least one fan in every room, and all of Naruto's friends had yelled at him when he unplugged one to charge his phone.

It died that day, which it rarely did. When it powered back on, Iruka was there, in several texts that increased in anxiety. The first was general worry. By the last, it seemed that Iruka was under the impression Naruto had been kidnapped, or murdered, or kidnapped then murdered. Naruto had only been phone-less for a few hours.

"It's the heat," he said, to his dad over the phone. He smiled, because he sounded like a citizen of Oceanview. That's what everyone said around there: it's the heat. Running late, or being mean, or slamming your fingers in the car door; it was all because of this damn heat.

"I swear you cheated. Stand up! Are you hiding money under your legs?" Shikamaru fixed her with a lazy glare. He couldn't be bothered to. Sakura stood up instead and patted Ino's shoulders, coaxing her back to her spot on the couch It was one that dipped right in the middle deeply. Like a shallow grave, Shikamaru told him the first time he sat there. Naruto just didn't like it because it smelled like mothballs.

Everything in Sakura's house was either brand new or very old. He leaned back in the armchair he was curled up on; the ceiling fan was free of dust and whirred quietly. The ceiling above it had a long crack that Sakura said her dad was going to fix, but it'd been two years since then.

Naruto lifted the collar of his shirt up, hoping to get some cool air on his chest. This paper money could probably stick right onto his skin. He didn't mind the weather nearly as much as the rest of his friends, but it was getting beyond hot. The feeling of sweat trickling down his back, or sunburns, were the worst part. There wasn't a single living thing on Earth that would enjoy time spent in a furnace.

He groaned, pushing his blonde hair off his face. "It doesn't maaattteeerrrr. Can we just go outside? I'm dying." To his right, Choji nodded, face blotchy. He didn't complain about the heat, or about anything usually, but Naruto knew he'd rather be wading in cool water.

"Yeah, we should probably stop playing this game anyway. Shikamaru always wins." Shikamaru could only shrug; it was true. Ino stomped out the door, but she wasn't really mad. It was that way, with friends. You could tease and be teased and not be mad.

Naruto hadn't experienced that with people his age before Sakura and her bunch, but after his first year of high school, life had gotten easier. Nobody cared as much, what Naruto looked like or the scores he got. Nobody cared that he tapped his feet.

(He wasn't sure at first if he liked that part of high school. Before, his classmates looked at him and didn't like what they saw. In high school, nobody looked at him at all.)

Just because his quirks were ignored by his peers didn't mean he was a teacher's pet by any means. When Naruto looked at one page for too long, the words started to crawl, heave themselves across the page, until it was one big writhing mess. Then, he'd start moving. Chewing pencils to the bone or shaking his legs. His teacher would look up from their desk at him, body working, and glare. He couldn't help it.