Summer left us with Bonnie. And with it, the winds of the inevitable three us into autumn. And in the months that followed, I had never felt more like a young boy trapped in the body of a five foot ten teenager.

It was as if I hadn't felt anything real since I was around eight.

I had never really liked the colour orange, but it was everywhere. The trees' leaves danced with the hue of not quite passionate red but not quite joyful yellow. Just orange. It was quiet. The summer season batch of tourists went home. Nobody apart from professional swimmers and fishermen were in our ocean, now. My lips were chapped, I was lonely, my hands were dry. I wanted to talk to Bonnie but I didn't want to bother her. I was a loser, she was not. She had other friends. She didn't need me troubling her in lovely Kalos. Besides, we had said goodbye.

May talked endlessly about how much she would miss her, and that she simply had to come back to Hoenn to watch more K-dramas with her, whilst we drove to the airport. Pellipers were causing a ruckus. May opened the trunk and pulled out Bonnie's small, pink suitcase. She bought it in Lilycove, to carry all the trinkets and outfits she aquired on our short but sweet journey.

"Do you know exactly where you're going?" May handed the case over.

"Yep!" Bonnie smiled timidly. She placed the case down and pulled up its handle. May said a swift goodbye and re-entered the car. Bonnie didn't look at me, she just bit her lip. She surveyed the shoes around her. "Max."

"Mhm?" I said, leaning against the overly cutesy red fiat 500 my sister drove.

She let go of the case.

Without saying a word, she threw her arms around me and engulfed me in a hug. Her head was pressing into my black shirt. Did I smell?

I patted her head like the awkward shit I am. She held onto me tightly, I could have sworn I heard a small weep from her. So little. So sweet. So much smaller than me.

She let go. I got sad.

"Look after yourself," she was one of the only people to ever say that to me, and still is to this day, "I'll miss you."

"I'll miss you too," I nodded, "And don't worry, Bo, I promise I will."

"What did you just call me?"

"Um... Bo?"

"Bo..." She pondered the sound of it, "Huh. I like that a lot." She touched my shoulder, "You should call me that all the time."

"But then it wouldn't be special." She seemed sad. "Hey," I said, "No matter what, we'll always be sleeping under the same sky."

She shook her head and laughed. She stood still. We didn't say anything for what seemed like an eternity. Then, she spoke, "Goodbye, Max."

"Goodbye, Bonnie." I said.

She walked away, and she took the summer, and the smile on my face, with her.

I got back in the car. I sat in the front passenger seat this time, because there was no eccentric French girl to keep company in the back. It felt... Empty. I twiddled my thumbs.

May started driving, "You alright?"

May, despite being a bit... Well, a lot of a Koreaboo, obsessed with her appearance and having almost as much of a nasally voice as me, was a sweet person. She was a person who cared about me. I appreciated her. She shaped me into the man I had become.

"I'm okay." Was all I said.

She gave me a look. It was a look I called the Vivi. You see, it was a look she first gave me when I was a little boy and all of a sudden I had this cute but crazy redhead tugging on the sleeves of my polo shirt, calling me adorable and wanting to battle. Ugh, Vivi. It didn't work at eight, it didn't work again at thirteen, it would never work.

Was I adorable?

Besides, May can think she was my first crush all she likes. I know the truth - my first crush was Misty. She just came our of nowhere and had firey hair and long legs and was nice to me. All she had to do was look at me and I knew what I would be wishing to Jirachi for all night long.

May didn't press me about it though, she must've thought it better to leave me to moodily stare out of the window.

It only took me around a month or two to forget about Bonnie. Well, not forget, but to remember I had other friends who I wasn't as close with but were still friends. I still thought of her and wondered where she was, what she was doing, who she was doing it with. But I didn't really care. We had said our goodbyes.

I had something else on my mind.

My sister.

When September arrived, with its hustle and bustle and shivery winds, May started acting unusual. Dad was home a lot more than usual, so I concluded that that would be the reason for it. He liked to use my sister as a sort of verbal punching bag. To let off proverbial steam by screaming at her how she's worthless and a disgrace and that he wishes she was more like me. It's funny, I've always wished I was more like her.

Dawn stopped coming over. Well, she did come over a few times, but only for about twenty minutes. Then she would leave as silent as a hunter stalking prey. She even drove a fully electric car so I couldn't hear the engine roar as she does away from the cookie-cutter, rich, suburban hellhole, all the way back to Sinnoh.

I stopped coming home to the sound of Korean dramas and laughter. Or to the sound of anything all. If there was noise, it was just screaming. "You dress like a dyke, no man will ever want you. You've gained weight, I swear to god if I have to pay to get all of that fucking pasta sucked out of your fat legs, May-" and such.

I stopped seeing my best friend because she went home. My other best friend lived here, but I stopped seeing her, too.

It started slowly, she began spending less and less time outside or in the lounge with the family. Until by November, the only times I saw her were when she was a swift dark figure darting briefly into the corridor to use the bathroom or when she would silently cook some pasta or pour some cereal and retreat back into the safety of her bedroom. I didn't know what was going on. May was the bubbly, happy one. I was the cynical one. Nothing seemed to add up.

It was a Thursday. I had woken up to go pee. The clock said it was around 1am. I was already wearing pants and I threw on a shirt just in case anybody was still up and saw me. On my way back from the bathroom, I heard a soft sound coming from the bedroom door next to mine. I pressed my ear against the door. It was black. No lights on. May was weeping.

I knocked gently on the door, the night where Bonnie woke me up because she didn't know how to deal with her panic attack, crossing my mind. But this wasn't a panic attack, it was something else. Something we both had struggled with. Something we inherited from our parents.

It clicked in my mind - May had become depressed, again.

"May?" I whispered, knocking softly at the door, "Can I come in?"

"Max?" She seized her sobbing, "Sure."

I quietly entered and turned on a floor lamp. She was wearing the same oversized black shirt and pyjamas shorts she had been wearing for days. "What's wrong?" I said, sitting beside her on the bed.

"I..." She started crying heavily again, "It's all too much. I can't live like this anymore."

"What is?" It was in this state, when she sat with no contacts in, just her glasses on, with no makeup, that I looked most like my sister. But still, I wasn't stupid. I knew I was the ugly sibling. The same wide nose could look pretty on May, not on me. Because May was good-looking. I wasn't.

When May was fourteen, I was eleven. We had to rush her to the hospital and pump her stomach. You can imagine why.

That night, my sister almost died.

I wasn't going to let that happen again.

"I'm hiding something from you, from Mum," she bit her lip, "from Dad. But I have feeling you all already know."

"I don't understand." I choked.

"You're gonna hate me if I tell you," she sounded so sure it was sadistic, "You'll think I'm disgusting and awful. You'll never want to see me again."

"May," my heart had snapped in two. I was on the verge of tears, "No I won't, you could murder a man and I'd help you hide the body. You've always been there for me. You're not just my big sister, you're my best friend. I say I hate you a lot because I'm just cynical like that. But it's not true," I grabbed her cold hand, "I love you."

"Max, I'm in love with Dawn." She squeezed my hand tightly, "I'm sorry."

"What are you so sorry for?" There was a tint of rage in my voice, "You're in love with a woman, you like girls. Big fucking deal." I looked her dead in the eye, "I've known since you were a kid, I could see the way you looked at them. Girls. I found your private magazines. I call you lesbo and dyke to tease you but you call me a virgin and chubby. We do it because we're brother and sister and we love eachother."

She smiled, "You're right." She shuffled over and hugged me. I hugged her back. I needed my sister alive to live. She was essential. "I love you, Little M. Even if you're not so little anymore." She stopped hugging me and sat with her head on my shoulder. She was exactly six inches shorter than me. She resented it.

"Hey," I said, "You ever wish you could just go back? To when dad didn't cheat?"

"Yeah," she agreed, "All the time." She lamented, "Those were the days." She waited for a few moments before deciding to confide a secret in me that nobody knew apart from her and her girlfriend, "Dawn and me really love eachother." She paused for me to say something but I didn't. I just had this really big, goofy smile on my face. "This time next year, we want to run away to Alola and get married." Here in Japan, women couldn't marry other women and gay couples didn't have the right to adoption.

I swallowed. "I'll miss you a lot," I stroked her hair, "You're my big sis. But I'll be happy if I know you are. I don't want to lose you. I wanna be an uncle someday."

"Aw, Max," she pecked me on the cheek. I grumbled at her and rubbed my face with the bottom of my palm, "You're the best. You'll be a great uncle." She yawned, "Anyway, thanks, you did your job as my baby brother. You cheered me up. Now fuck off. I'm tired."

"You were the one crying at 1am." I got up and walked away.

As I got to the door, she said, "Max."

"Yeah?" I turned around to face her.

She giggled as she slid under her covers, "You're gonna die a virgin, you fucking nerd."

I chuckled and slammed the door. But before I did I made sure to say a final, "Eat shit, die."