32

To sum it all up, Saturday ended without any particular incident. Kinda weird to say that given the state of being a kidnapping victim, but at the very least, I was provided a proper lunch and dinner, so my life wasn’t in immediate danger.

All my cut wounds from the first day had healed up. U didn’t seem to have any extracurricular activities, or at least never went out aside from the singular shopping trip I had imposed upon her. From what I could tell, she spent all her time at home, watching TV and playing video games.

Video games… as I heard the electronic sounds ring from the living room, the one thing I knew was that U was making sure to save her game.

Come to think of it, video games were the start of it all… what exactly did I do on Saturdays and Sundays as a kid? Saturdays weren’t a full day off, but I only had half-days in school, so I must’ve done something, but I can’t remember at all.

In fact, I’ve forgotten how I spent my weekends as a college student. It’s hard to believe how quickly memories can change. I’m losing confidence in my memory as I write this sentence. I spent a lot of time writing something approaching novels, but not to the degree that I do now, and that can’t have been all I did. Surely, I spent time like a regular person, goofing off and doing whatever…

But what did I actually do?

And didn’t U have friends to go and do things with?

I suppose it’s possible she had no friends, given her unique personality… no wait, she had been walking to school with a friend the first day I saw her. They were playing different games, and didn’t seem all that close, but at least she had someone to walk to school with.

Which meant that because I was there in her home, U couldn’t afford to go out and play with friends, much less invite them over… She had to spend her time thinking about caring for me, like I was some kind of needy pet.

But taking care of an entire human being is just too much for an elementary schooler. In one way or another, U was going to hit her limit.

And my decade younger self was also reaching his own limits, though I was slow to catch on at the time. It was starting to become more obvious with a full belly.

But full or not, I couldn’t just stay imprisoned forever… I was enrolled in university, and I had something of a duty to attend my classes, if not to the same level of duty as U. I had my routines.

I couldn’t stay there forever, sinking into the comforting pull of Stockholm syndrome.

But we should have both realized our own realities. For U, imprisoning me wasn’t going to solve anything. For me, staying as U‘s prisoner wasn’t going to help her in any way.

We needed some kind of trigger to end the kidnapping and clear away the drama. We just needed the right opportunity to admit that there was no point, it was all over, and it was time to give up. Then we could each forgive each other… maybe. It’s not like I can ever know what she was feeling then… But if she really had been shoved into such a corner, then I, as the older one in the house, should have been the first to notice.

But I just sat there, thinking that U was playing her video games without a care in the world. I was the one without a care in the world.

But whether or not U realized what she needed, we found our trigger, and we got our timing. It came from a practical necessity, much like using the restroom, or the food, or the sleep. All of those were just natural parts of life exacerbated by the confinement, so I guess you could say the kidnapping was doomed from the beginning.

No matter what level of cooperation a kidnapper receives from their victim, there’s always a chance that the kidnapping will fail. That’s reflected well enough in the very low success rates of kidnappings in general, which are almost as low as success rates for hijacking.

But a kidnapping would never have worked when all it had to go on was an elementary schooler’s immature judgement. It had always been doomed. We were just pretending not to notice.

So, what was the trigger for failure? What finally made us throw up our hands and admit there was no point, it was all over, and it was time to give up? Well, it happened the next day, Sunday, while we ate dinner.

It started with a comment from U.

“You smell.”