Warning: gratuitous bodily fluids and use of the word "stupid". Two instances of child swearing.

He stares at his own feet for like five whole minutes before he finally answers the question.

"Crow?" he asks, looking up at Yusei with wide, bloodshot eyes.

"I don't know, you have to tell me," Yusei replies, staring back at him with a patient smile.

Jack, intently absorbed in filling his pockets with rocks and pebbles, spares a moment to turn around and snort derisively. "Don't be stupid, Yusei, he's not asking you to guess," he says. "He doesn't have a name. He's making one up for you."

The boy looks back down at his bare feet and quietly sucks his teeth. The wet friction makes a scab on his lip crack open and bleed again.

"He has to already have a name," Yusei insists. "He's met people before, they had to call him something."

Jack rolls his eyes and sighs as dramatically as possible, his whole body deflating and slumping into itself as he exhales as audibly and deeply as his seven year old voice can. "That doesn't mean it was a name," he says, dropping to his knees to pick up a rock lying on the sidewalk.

Yusei raises his eyebrows. "I don't know what that means."

"Why not?" Jack asks, scraping dirt out of the rocks crevices with his fingernails.

"I didn't get it, just tell me."

"It's like, ugh," Jack explains as he hurls the now clean rock at a lamppost across the street. It misses by a foot, bounces off the remains of a brick wall and into the gutter. "Like how I just called you 'stupid', right? Or how that old guy this morning called me 'little boy', and when Martha calls the Bottle Man 'crazy jerkass'. That's not any of our names, but it's still being called something."

Yusei, now, is the one to roll his eyes. "Well, yeah, I already knew that. You just said it weird before so it didn't make sense."

"Yeah right, you're just stupid."

The boy's hair is so greasy and matted that when he scratches his scalp his hangnail comes away with a knot of loose strands. They don't fall away when he shakes his hand, so he pulls the hairs into his mouth with his tongue and spits them in a glob of saliva onto the sidewalk to get rid of them. He tears the hangnail off with his teeth and spits that out as well, and scratches his head again. A torrent of dead skin flakes powders his shoulders.

"Why are you always calling me stupid?" Yusei whines in mild irritation, his smile gone and his arms crossed in front of his chest.

Jack takes out another, smoother rock and wipes it as clean as possible with his thumb. He blows on it, kicking up a few particles of dust that dance in a beam of sunlight. Jack licks his lips and snatches at them, but if he caught any floating specks of anything, he can't see them in is hand. "Because you're being stupid," he replies.

"I am not! He answered the question, he didn't say he doesn't have one!"

"Yeah, because you said he had to have one already."

The rock in Jack's hand sails across the street. Making its target this time, it strikes the lamppost on a yellowing flier stuck on with packing tape, and bounces away with a hollow thunk.

The boy snorts mucus up into his sinuses and sits on the ground, once again absorbed in staring at his feet.

"I did not," Yusei claims. "I didn't say that. And anyway, he has to have a name, not just a thing people call him. Because, whatever people call you the most is your name, right?"

"No. Martha only ever calls you Yusei-chan, but that's not your name, your name is just Yusei."

"But that doesn't count!" Yusei shouts, finally annoyed enough to raise his voice. "Your name is the thing someone picked to always call you, even if that's not what you're always called. You know what I mean! And there has to be something he gets called most or is better to call him than something else."

Jack yells as well. "No, there doesn't have to!"

"Yes there does!"

"When you meet cats on the street, you don't think they have to have a name already, right?"

"This guy isn't a cat."

"No duh, I'm not stupid. But he smells really bad and he's diseased or whatever and he's like a homeless cat, and maybe nobody ever told him what his name was."

"That doesn't mean that's what happened!"

"I'm saying it could be!"

"No, you said I was stupid for thinking he could have a name at all, but you're just stupid for thinking he can't at all."

Jack throws another rock at the lamppost, which misses so completely that it hits a busted car instead. The car is crushed flat and folded in the front by some series of accidents, but apparently isn't broken enough that the rock doesn't set off an alarm. The boy on the floor covers his ears and scrunches up his face in distaste. Jack doesn't seem to mind the noise and turns back to Yusei to tell him he's the stupid one, not him.

"You're stupid!"

"I'm not stupid!"

"Well, stop calling me stupid and maybe I'll believe you!"

"You're stupid!"

"Shut the fuck up!"

The boy stands up again and glares at Yusei and Jack, who look back at him in surprise. He points at the two of them with his middle and index fingers of the same hand and takes advantage of the attention he's grabbed by yelling some more.

"Both of you are stupid. My name is Crow."

The car alarm stops wailing. Crow puts his tiny fists on his waist and looks into Yusei's face with a sneer. He snorts again, and spits a ball of mucus onto the ground near Jack's feet. Jack recoils so hard he practically leaps away, but, once he's sure he can avoid touching the spit wad, he takes a step closer to Crow and grabs him by the wrist.

"I like him, let's bring him to Martha's house."

Aren't they adorable?

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