The Suds
by Kelly Murashige
The Saturday morning after Sheldon’s girlfriend dumped him for her barely legal coworker at the Nugget Shack, I decided to take him to the Children’s Discovery Center.
It wasn’t meant to be infantilizing. It was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek thing, like that time we went to the sing-along version of Frozen, clearly meant for children, and sang our postpubescent hearts out. We almost got thrown out of the theater, and one kid informed us, after gleefully kicking Sheldon in the shin, we were “tewwaboh sing-ohs,” but frankly, that had been half the fun.
I just thought it would be nice. A day at the Discovery Center. I hadn’t been there for something like twenty years and wasn’t sure Sheldon had ever gone at all. His parents hadn’t been the type to take him to those kinds of places. If my parents’ love language was quality time at museums and arcades, his parents’ love language was juku and Kumon.
“I wish they would be the kind of Asian your parents are,” Sheldon told me once.
I narrowed my eyes, squinting at the ceiling like a poet attempting to summon his Muse. “I don’t think I want to know what that means.”
He adjusted his grip on his favorite mechanical pencil. Yes, he has a favorite mechanical pencil. A guy can’t be named Sheldon without having a favorite mechanical pencil. “It means,” he said, “sometimes, I really hate you.”
This—I hate you—was just what I expected him to say when I pulled into the lot of the Children’s Discovery Center. Instead, he was silent. Unnervingly so. I wasn’t sure he’d looked up once since dropping into the passenger’s seat beside me. Worse yet, he hadn’t changed since the last time I’d seen him, still in the same lime-green shirt he’d been wearing when Kairi broke things off. He got that shirt from the food bank after donating an absurd number of tuna cans. When I asked about it, he only shrugged and said, “I got real tired of tuna.”
“Shel,” I said, thwacking him on the arm. I hit him harder than I meant to, but even that didn’t snap him out of his post-breakup haze. “Hey. Sheldon.”
He raised his head slowly. Pitifully. I’d never seen a more pathetic man in my life, which, given my roster of exes, was quite the accomplishment. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We made it halfway to the entrance when he started up again. The mantra. “Kairi ga kaeru.”
I closed my eyes. “Not this again.”
It was a joke. A pun, really. Kaeru ga kaeru was the Japanese learner’s way to remember both the word for “frog” and the verb “to go home.” Because Sheldon had the misfortune of dating an ephebophile named Kairi, however, he had changed it to Kairi ga kaeru. Kairi will come home.
She wasn’t going to, obviously. She’d left in the middle of the week, telling him she was going to sleep at her new boyfriend’s dorm that night so they could carpool to the Nugget Shack the next morning. There were about a million things wrong with that sentence, but Sheldon was too nice to say any of them, so he just watched her go.
“Kairi ga kaeru. Kairi ga kaeru. Kairi ga kaeru.” He said it over and over until I wanted to dump him.
“Shel,” I said, sliding my state ID out of my wallet and presenting it to the person at the front desk. “Can you please stop saying that?”
Sheldon raised his head. Good. Progress. Then he made eye contact with a woman who seemed to remind him of Kairi and started sniffling like a pig in the middle of a truffle hunt. Not-so-good. No progress.
Once inside, I led him over to what I remembered to be one of my favorite exhibits: the grocery store. Though I loathed grocery shopping as an adult—unlike the plastic food of the Discovery Center, all my produce rotted in a matter of days—I’d always liked that exhibit and especially enjoyed being the cashier.
The grocery store was smaller than I remembered. Busier, too. There were kids everywhere, flooding the aisles like ants on a sidewalk. I was afraid we were going to have to stand awkwardly to the side and try not to get ourselves arrested, but as soon as I stepped onto the tiled floor, a good ten percent of the children scattered, leaving part of an aisle and a whole checkout line free. “Wow,” I said. “Is this what it feels like to be a celebrity?”
Had Sheldon had his wits about him, he might have said, “Either that, or a playground bully.” He would know. Again, his name was Sheldon.
“Look, Shel,” I said, picking up a plastic hotdog, its left and right halves joined by a square of Velcro. “Isn’t this weird? Who cuts a hotdog in half like this?”
I looked over at him, expecting him to continue giving me the silent treatment. Instead, he said, “Kairi hated hotdogs.”
I rolled my eyes as that aggravating look of wistfulness swept over his face like a wave of poison fog.
“She said she watched a documentary about it and found out it’s made of all kinds of disgusting things,” he told me. “Plus, the animals are treated horribly, even before they’re slaughtered.”
I blinked. “Okay, well, this one is made of plastic. If we ate it, we would have a lot more problems than the ethics of eating mistreated animals. Besides, we don’t care about Kairi anymore.”
“I do.”
I inhaled deeply. “Well, you shouldn’t.”
“Well, I do.” He pressed a button on the register. The till popped out, nearly nailing him in the groin, but he didn’t even blink. “I care a lot.”
After a few seconds of yoga breathing, I ran the hotdog over the scanner, bright-red light kissing the bottom of the bun. Funny how I never found it strange, the way I could just scan hotdogs like that. “Jeez,” I said, glancing at the numbers on the display. “Ten dollars for a hotdog? Inflation is getting way out of control.”
“I can’t afford it without her,” Sheldon said.
I slid my eyes over to him. “You can’t afford a plastic hotdog?”
“The apartment.” He shuffled his feet. “You said she didn’t contribute much, and I guess she didn’t, but it was still something.”
I set the hotdog down and cleared the register. “I’ll help you find a place. If it comes down to it, you can crash on my couch for a while.”
I hoped it would not come down to it. Sheldon may have been my best friend, but he also drove me nuts. He was such a loud snorer that, when we were little, I used to think he was exaggerating. I even swatted him once, trying to get him to stop fooling around, but he batted my hand away, rolled over, and resumed honking like a Canadian goose.
“I don’t want to crash with you,” he said.
I frowned. “Oh. Okay. Rude.”
“I want to live with my girlfriend.”
More yoga breathing, accompanied by quiet, non-creepy observation of the children nearby. One girl was scanning items so fast, she was nothing but a peachy blur. “It’s over, Shel,” I said. “Move on.”
He said nothing. That’s how I knew it was bad. Had it been even slightly less bad, he would have given me the most withering look ever. One so scathing, all my organs would have turned to prune mui. Yet he just stood there. Stood there and took it, as he always had with Kairi.
Pursing my lips, I took him by the wrist. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
I took him to the pretend television station. Though I remembered it to be busy, dozens of jittery children waiting in line to get a chance to be a news anchor on actual TV, the station was practically a miniature ghost town. “Man,” I said. “I guess everyone just wants to be a YouTuber nowadays.”
Again, Sheldon said nothing.
“Come on.” I hauled him over to the camera. “Tell us what the weather has in store for us today.”
He reluctantly stepped into the frame, his shoulders slumped and his eyes lifeless. It took me a moment to realize my mistake, and by the time I did, he’d already noticed. He stared at himself on the grainy television, his entire torso missing. In his green food-bank shirt, he was nothing but a head. A head and empty arms. “This is how I feel now,” he said, his eyes on the screen but his words only for me. “This is how I feel without Kairi.”
“Like you should have worn a different color?” I guessed.
He shot me a look.
“Okay, okay.” I guided him out of the frame. “Let’s move on, then.”
As I led him away, I glanced over my shoulder, watching as the onscreen display showed a full week of heavy showers. It didn’t matter where we went or what we did; he could not, for the life of him, stop moaning about his stupid ex-girlfriend. When we reached the anatomy exhibit, as we stood in the center of a human stomach, he said, “She could have had our baby.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “You know the baby wouldn’t have been in here, right? You are aware that babies don’t grow in stomachs, aren’t you?”
He sniffled. “It would have had her eyes.”
It was then that I lost it. “Jesus Christ, Shel. What is wrong with you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe—just maybe—my longtime girlfriend broke up with me? Maybe I’m sad about that? Maybe I’m not really in the mood to go walking around a place for little kids when I’m still thinking about all the babies we’ll never have?”
I dropped my gaze to the pit of the fake stomach.
“I get it,” Sheldon said. “You didn’t like her. I did, though. I loved her. I thought I was going to marry her.”
I knew that. Knew he was as serious about her and their relationship as he’d ever been about anything, which, considering he turned in all his college applications not even a week after each portal opened, was saying a hell of a lot. I just didn’t like hearing it. Not because I wanted him for myself but because I wanted so much more for him. More than Kairi. More than me. More than he would ever believe he had earned.
“It just feels,” he continued, “like you think this is a joke. Like we’re going to one of those stupid sing-alongs again. Like this is just another fun day between two best friends and not, you know, one of the worst days of my life.”
“One of the—” I shook my head. “How is that my fault?”
“I never said it was.”
No. You just implied it.
Grabbing his hand, I pulled him out of the model stomach. The various parts of the body had been separated out, the mouth on the far left, followed by the esophagus. Backtracking, I guided him over to the heart.
“All right,” I said. “Time for a little heart-to-heart.”
“I hate you,” he said, the closest to normal he had sounded all day. “You know I can’t stand puns.”
I opened my mouth to ask him what, exactly, he thought Kairi ga kaeru was. Aside from utterly pathetic, anyway. Then, shifting gears, I asked, “You know why I brought you here?”
“You’re a sucker for a good state-resident discount?”
“I wanted you to get in touch with your inner child. You know, the way Kairi did.”
He sighed. “Is that supposed to be a joke about her new boyfriend? He’s eighteen.”
“Yeah, and she’s not. And look, you may have to pay rent and get a memory-foam pillow and fail to remember the last time you went to the doctor, but you’re still young. You’re still here. Why not enjoy yourself?”
He closed his eyes. “How?”
“You’re at the Discovery Center. Do it. Discover. Discover life. Discover meaning. Discover the person you can be without her.” I gestured in the direction of the grocery store. “Be an adult. Do everyday things without her. You feel sad? Well, hey. Get in line.”
I pointed to the TV station. “Come on. Give us a show. Someday, you’ll look back and realize your life with her was all B-roll. You may have your troughs and ridges, but you’re not going to let her rain on your parade all your life. You can still have sunny days.”
“I hate you,” he said again.
I smiled. “No, you don’t.”
He stared at me for a moment. Then, tightening his grip on my hand, he led me out of the heart, past the stomach, and over to the very end of the exhibit. As we clambered into the intestines, he picked up a piece of what appeared to be human waste made out of felt and stuffing and said, “This is what I think of your heart-to-heart skills.”
My laughter bounced around the bowels of the exhibit.
Upon exiting, we straightened up. “Well,” I said, brushing myself off. “That was a little demeaning.”
“What I said about your heart-to-heart skills?” he asked. “Or the fact that we just went through the digestive system?”
“Both, I guess.” I raised my eyes to him. “I mean it, you know. The stuff about sunny days. I know you’re sad. I get that. I’m sorry. That doesn’t mean your life is over, though.”
He turned his head. “It feels like it is.”
I kept my eyes on him. “I didn’t bring you here because I think you’re being a baby about the breakup. I just…I don’t know. Wanted to remind you there’s more to life than just one girl.”
He sighed. “Yeah. I know. I know. It’s just, you know, sometimes, it feels like it’s all…”
I tilted my head toward the body exhibit, letting the intestines say what we couldn’t. Not around small children, anyhow.
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“I know.” I gave him a small, wry smile. “Unfortunately, it’s part of the human process.”
Wrinkling his nose, he said, “Gross.”
“Yeah, well. When nature calls.” I jerked my chin toward the exit. “You want to go home now?”
He paused. “Not really.”
“Oh. Okay.” I thought for a moment, chewing on my surprise. I expected him to tow me out of there, demanding recompense for the emotional damage he’d taken from having to crawl through intestines with tiny children. “Well, there’s one more exhibit, if you’re interested.”
Two minutes later, we were standing in front of the bubble machine, submerging a rectangular frame in a well of suds. When it rose, the thin film gleaming, he asked, “You got a pun for this one?”
I studied the frame for a moment, intrigued by its rainbow sheen. “I don’t know, Shel. I think I’m all out of puns.”
“How about this, then?” He inhaled. “Sometimes, breakups really blow.”
I rolled my eyes as he huffed and puffed, trying in vain to produce enough air to push the bubble out of the frame. Then, shaking my head, I leaned forward and blew along with him. Together, we created the biggest, shiniest bubble I’d ever seen.
“Unfortunately,” he continued, “you can’t live in a bubble forever.”
“Sometimes,” I added, watching our sudsy creation rise, heading for its inevitable ceiling-induced death, “you have to burst someone’s bubble. It’s only then you can help them out of the suds.”
He shook his head. “You’re the worst.”
“I’m the best.”
He glanced at me, then grinned. “Fine. You’re the best.”
He hit the button, sending the frame back down into the suds. Then we took a breath, still clasping hands, and waited for it to rise again.
About the Author
Kelly Murashige is the author of the YA novel The Lost Souls of Benzaiten (Soho Teen, July 2024), which was listed as a winner of a 2025 Young Adult Favorites Award by the Children’s Book Council and a best book of 2024 by HONOLULU Magazine. Her second YA novel, The Yomigaeri Tunnel (Soho Teen, July 2025), received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was selected as Adam Silvera's Allstora Book Club Pick for July 2025.
